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Comment by paledot | Hacker News Reader

The polls didn't mess up, the election did. Gerrymandering and vote suppression has been eating at the heart of American democracy for decades. Your survey of "likely voters" now needs to take into account the probability that a respondent will show up to a polling station to find broken voting machines, that their ID is no longer acceptable, or that their mail-in ballot will be "lost" in the postal system.

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Except there is pretty much zero evidence of this. Turnout is at historic highs. Lines in places like Atlanta were 10 minutes. The story about USPS ballots being delayed turned out not to be really true.

Also, Trump gained ground among demographics (compared to 2016) that would have been most affected by voter suppression, and lost ground among white men.

Yeah, the Democratic overoptimization for targeting the intelligentsia and (petit and haut) bourgeoisie and failure to adequately speak to the working class (in 2016, the pundits made this about the white working class, but the problem is broader) probably ought to be the stratefic lesson of both the 2016 and 2020 elections.

> The story about USPS ballots being delayed turned out not to be really true.

Oh, really?

CNBC: Postal Service data shows poor mail-in ballot delivery rate in key swing states, judge suggests Postmaster General DeJoy might have to testify.

From: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/2020-presidential-election-p...

--- KEY POINTS

The Postal Service on Election Day failed to deliver a significant percentage of mail-in ballots to several states that could determine who wins the presidential contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, data filed with a federal court suggested Wednesday.

The states seeing relatively poor levels of mail deliveries of ballots include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin, all of which have yet to declare victors in their tallies for Trump and Biden.

The states affected include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan was furious at Postal officials for failing to inform him Tuesday of their failure to do sweeps at mail facilities for ballots by a mid-afternoon deadline.

There's also the matter of the electoral college. Regardless of your opinions on its merits as an electoral system, mathematically it acts to amplify tiny vote differences into large electoral vote differences, making it harder to predict EVs.

It looks like the FiveThirtyEight popular vote forecast will end up and few points off of the final count, but it will be within the confidence interval.

Wasn't there a record turnout?

Turnout numbers are a proxy for political passion, not the absence or presence of suppression. It could just as easily be said that this year's record turnout would have been higher, were it not for the presence of efforts nakedly aimed at suppressing the vote.

Shouldn't exit polling be immune to most of these problems?

Exit polling trades those problems for other problems. :) And, in this year, when such a huge number of votes weren't cast in-person at the polls, exit polls -- e.g., polling voters after they cast their in-person vote -- were definitionally pretty muddled.

Right, but if anything that would overrepresent Republican performance among exit polls, no? Unless there were methodology issues with their random exit sampling or voters did not accurately disclose their votes.

I guess all this depends on the disparate sorts of polling data that was available and how it was all weighted. Gelman et al published their model so it's worth digging into.

This is very likely true.

There are other complex factors, too. I keep seeing polling/forecast methodology explainers mention calibration to historical data so that if the same method was applied to historical elections then it would have been accurate. But Trump is a way different candidate than any other Republican (or Democrat); he is appealing for reasons that other politicians aren’t. It may be that no historically calibrated forecasting methodology will be accurate when you have a Trump.

That does not make sense considering the national vote estimates of RV (as high as 11+ Biden) was also way off.

It doesn’t seem like any of this happened this time.

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