Sunday once more … [DOT 25/08/24]

25/8/24 bryanlsplinter 34

I’m in here pinch-hitting for RIP once again. So on the one hand, this will not be the extended post we’ve all come to know and love (except Butcher). On the other hand, you’re stuck with me. Let’s get to it, people.

Dammit, he’s talking about polls again.

Forget the polls! Here’s why….

In a recent The Atlantic article, “The Asterisk on Kamala Harris’s Poll Numbers,” Ronald Brownstein delves into the challenges pollsters face in capturing the true sentiments of the electorate, particularly after significant misses in the 2016 and 2020 elections. These misses led pollsters to overhaul their methods in attempts to better account for the hidden support that buoyed Donald Trump, especially among white, non-college-educated voters and rural areas.

After Trump’s unexpected 2016 win, pollsters began weighting their samples more heavily toward these underrepresented demographics. Brownstein explains that “polling firms shifted their weighting schemes to ensure that they were not missing the hidden enthusiasm among Trump’s base.” Despite these adjustments, polling errors in 2020 worsened in many battleground states, with Trump again outperforming predictions by even greater margins. Pollsters acknowledged that even with corrections, they were still struggling to fully capture Trump’s support, particularly due to so-called “anti-establishment response bias”—the distrust of institutions, including pollsters themselves, among Trump supporters. This has made these voters less likely to engage with surveys or provide accurate responses.

Sounds bad, huh? Not so fast.

The main takeaway here is that pollsters have adjusted their methods to try to adjust for the failures of 2016 and 2020, but only in one direction: towards Trump. Oddly enough, there is no evidence that they have tried to adjust their methods to the rampant polling errors since 2021, starting with the dramatic failure of the Republicans to match 2022 mid-term polling indicating an electoral bloodbath. 

Okay, so I’m not great at the quote function. Let’s get in a bit more practice.

I’m not gonna say I told you so but … oh, hell, I’m so going to say I told you so. There ain’t no undecided voters. Anyone claiming to be one is a Trumper.

Exposing CNN Misinformation: CNN “Undecided Voter” was a Trump Supporter all along…

The video shows that 6 out of 8 “undecided” voters broke for Harris after she gave her acceptance speech at the finale of the DNC Convention.  One person remained undecided, persisting that she will not vote this election cycle.  

The ninth guy, however, insisted he would not be voting for Harris.  In fact, he said that after seeing Harris’ acceptance speech he would be voting for Trump.  The “new” Trump voter said things like he did not want to vote for “the backup,” and Trump being “more aggressive” was more appealing to him.

CNN only said the man’s first name: Bryant.  

Meiselas and MeidasTouch figured out who Bryant is — his full name is Bryant Rosado.

And guess what?  Rosado is, and has been for years, a Trumper…

Holy crap, I’m terrible at this. But I press onward.

Okay, just … no.

I switched to a flip phone and dramatically improved my well-being

The boys of summer.

How a gay beach oasis flourished in Michigan’s Bible Belt

A half-million people live in the danger zone?

Europe’s most dangerous volcano rumbles, and Italians weigh the risk

Tossing in some sprots. This is bullshit.

As denials pile up, NFL settlement ignores ‘critical’ tests

Turtle content … WUT

Man caught on camera appearing to hold, pull turtle in Waikiki

I better see a damn arrest.

Okay, that’s it for me. I’m going to tinker with these quotes and see if I can fix the formatting, but let’s be honest, it’s Saturday night and I bin drinkin. So, yeah, pretty sure they’re gonna be wonky. But that’s kind of charming, right? Right?

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

34 Comments

  1. 1. I knew a gay guy who grew up in Saugatuck and when he was a teenager his father came out as gay. There must be something in the water.

    2. What does Tinseltown think of Cheryl Hines’s wacky husband endorsing Donald Trump?

    “Mrs. Doubtfire” screenwriter Randi Mayem Singer said Hines “and her low rent Kennedy can both f–k all the way off.”

     

    • It’s too bad her wormbrained hubby ran because he was funded by ratfuckers for Trump trying to draw Dem voters too stupid to realize he’s a 3rd generation Kennedy. Otherwise her “noble” words are as empty as her marriage vows.

      If wormbrain is true to form then he’s probably cheating on Ms Hines too while psychologically torturing/gaslighting her.

  2. Low Rent Vic Mackey should be treated the same way as he treated the turtle aka chained up and dunked head first into the water. Jail is really too good for him (yeah yeah, no cruel and unusual punishment) but it takes a real psycho to fuck with wildlife like that.

    Fucking idiot tourists.

    • Full disclosure — I have touched (TOUCHED) sea turtles in the wild. You’re not supposed to but when they swim right up to you, I mean, who can resist? But this really pissed me off. Where’s Hawaii Five-Oh when you need them?

      • Unfortunately, HPD doesn’t care enough about turtles to do anything.  Now, many locals will use any excuse to kick the ass of a dumb tourist but in Waikiki, not too many locals anymore.

        • If “Hawaii 5-0” is an accurate guide to Hawaiian life, you won’t find many Hawaiians lounging around the pool or sipping cocktails in the nightclub at the fabulous Ilikai hotel in Waikiki. Your room might be broken into, a body might be found floating face down in this landscaped hot tub-like area, and you might be held at gunpoint, but neither you nor any of the perps will be Hawaiian. They will be from LA or Chicago. Why Chicago I don’t know. I guess the bad guys are as desperate to escape Chicago winters as everyone else.

          • I don’t want to burst your bubble but that show is not a documentary & the Ilikai is pretty run down these days.  It is now a combo of local residences, timeshare units, and a few hotel rooms.  I stayed there a year ago because of the ease of getting the hell out of Waikiki from there but wouldn’t recommend it.  It also has a tiny shit pool with no cocktails & no gardens.  It is close to the Hilton Hawaiian Village which has beautiful gardens but anything in Waikiki is fake Hawaii.

  5. As far as that CNN focus group, if you’ve ever been involved in focus groups for work, you get a real eye opening about how the companies running them operate. One of the big issues is that people who sign up for them are skewed even worse than polling.

    Being on a focus group is a time commitment and people get some kind of compensation, and that really drives the type of person involved. The companies which collect names try to compensate with screening, but there’s a problem in how the more screening you do, the more you skew toward people determined to participate.

    If all you’re doing is running a focus group on food, it’s not such a big deal. It’s pretty easy for people to honestly say they think mystery chip A is too salty but nicely crispy. But if you’re talking about voters, that’s a different thing.

    And in addition to the screening process, the leaders can pretty easily throw results one way or the other if they want to please a client or potentially drive a result toward “need more testing.”

    One thing I think reporters do all the time is run to GOP consultants for lists of supposedly undecided voters they can interview. Or worse, former Democrats who say they switched to voting Trump. Consultants deliver the results they want, which is how reporters are regularly quoting GOP loyalists who are masquerading as Democrats.

    The worst recent case was the woman who was convicted for suing Wendy’s after she stuck a human finger in a cup of chili, but it’s a running problem, and the press really needs to come clean about how crooked their practices are for supposedly taking the pulse of the people. They’re responding to deadlines by cutting corners and dressing up their opinions by supposedly objective reporting techniques.

    • Speaking of twisted focus groups, at the NY Times Patrick Healy, author of the infamous “Clinton Cackle” article, has brought onboard Frank Luntz again. Luntz was Newt Gingruch’s PR guy whose focus groups led to the Contract With America, and was doing PR for the Trump White House in 2020. None of that is mentioned as this time he’s conducted a supposedly unbiased session about voters concerns about Harris.

    • What’s happening with insurers and therapists is true for a lot of specialties, and you can tell when someone is either uninformed or ideologically captured when they act like it’s somehow a free market issue.

      They essentialy handwave away issues like insurers and limited regulation, and try to pin the whole thing on abstract supply and demand issues.

      • Very true.  My wife says that the average wait to see many specialists in our area is 4 months.  She has patients with cancer and other life or death issues that she has to send to the ER to get treated because no specialist will see them in a timely manner.  The system is beyond broken with no easy fixes coming.

        • One of the grosser things in the recent round of “fact” checks was the claim that Democrats were making up Trump’s opposition to Obamacare and all of its limited care requirements.

          Nevermind that blowing it up was at the top of his priorities in 2017, his appointees who attacked regulations, that he’s been badmouthing it for years, or that Project 2025 devotes page after page to destroying it and going even further to wipe out care mandates and regulations.

          He read a line once that was put in front of him that he didn’t want to, and that makes the Democrats wrong as far as factcheckers are concerned.

          What’s nuts is how so many right wingers who benefit to a limited extent from Obamacare and genuinely deserve more help will channel talking points from the right wing press about the health care system. It’s an example of how people in need who feel bad about their situations can be exploited by real ghouls.

          None of it is logical, but the right has become very skilled at finding people who need help and are resentful and convincing them that the smart thing is hurting themselves.

  7. Yeah, fuck that dude who messed with the turtle. I understand being surprised by one being close to you – last time I was in Hawaii, a friend was wading in knee deep water and gasped when they realized the “big rock” a few feet away was a turtle, but then that friend quickly and carefully stepped several feet away from the turtle (and then used the zoom lens of the camera to get a picture). It’s not hard to leave animals alone.

    I repeat – it’s not hard to leave animals alone. I was at a national park last week and these dumbfucks had climbed the rail on a mountain overlook to lure chipmunks close with food. Leave the animals alone, assholes.

  8. Poll accuracy questions crack me up, because most polls are just nonrepresentative bullshit.

    Even if you’re trying to get a good range of responses, most of gen x, millennials, and gen z would rather pull out their own eyelashes than talk to a stranger on the phone. And anyone with a smidgeon of technical literacy sees those bullshit “polls” in facebook or other websites and goes FUCK NOPE.

    Just based on demographics of who will respond, you’re going to skew towards Trump fans.

    • There are ways to make them more accurate like physically going to places and talking to voters face to face with well trained interviewers.

      But all of that costs money, and outlets would rather have bad weekly polls than accurate ones less frequently.

Leave a Reply