Contra

As a typical rural scandinavian by upbringing, “optimism” comes hard for me.

This election is no exception.

Same as the last one, really. Those who were listening to the NARN on election night 2016 may recall that when I saw Wisconsin drop in the hoop for the President, I was briefly speechless, and my head started swimming. Being speechless is a bad thing on talk radio – so I said the only thing I could think of: “I think someone slipped LSD in the cucumber water, here at the Radisson Blu”.

Such was the cognitive dissonance.

Anyway – call it being of Norwegian descent; call it the political fatalism that comes from being a conservative in a moldy blue city for 35 years; call it whatever you want. I see the evidence of the enthusiam gap in Trump’s favor – but am sort of wired, by this point, to think that whatever the transiet passions of suburban soccer moms don’t screw up, the Democrat fraud machine will.

And that bothers me a lot more this year than it did four years ago, because as awful a president as Killary would have been, she was a known-ish quantitiy. If you liked Slick Willy with a dose of hectoring harpy on top, you could deal with her.

Slow Joe? He’s nothing but a delivery system for The Squad, via their competent aunt Kamala.

But it’s a lost cause. The polls prove it! NPR keeps saying so.

Well, most of the polling.

Trafalgar was the canary in the coalmine four years ago, and they remain resolutely contrarian this go-around as well.

Trafalgar tries to avoid so-called weighting to get the partisan mix of respondents right. A traditional pollster might want to get, say, 35 percent Republicans to have a balanced survey, but he comes up short because Republicans are less likely to respond. If only, say, 22 percent of Republicans answer, they are given additional weight to make up for the shortfall.

“The better you do at getting an even sample,” according to Cahaly, “the less weighting you have to do.”

One problem with weighting is that Republicans “who don’t like Trump can’t wait to answer a poll,” he says. “So immediately, within the 22 percent, they’ve probably overrepresented it, the anti-Trump Republicans, the Never Trumper types. Well, when you weight that up from 22 to 35, now you have skewed an already bad representation sample. So that’s kind of inherently how they can be so off.”

The whole thing is worth a read.

We shall see.

One thought on “Contra

  1. I heard Cahaly on Glen Beck’s show yesterday. He’s definitely got a more believable poll than all of the left wing biased versions.

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