My election eve polling review

You've heard predictions from the well-informed and even-handed experts; now it's my turn

Like all the best models, mine relies on copious airplane glue in poorly ventilated spaces

First things first: this is going to be a deadlock, nail-biter of an election; all the polls say so.

OK, maybe not all the polls. There was that Iowa poll that showed Kamala ahead by four…in Iowa. That turned some heads, because it’s an article of faith that real Iowans hate Democrats and their socialist big-gummint, handouts as much as they love ethanol subsidies. And the fact that half Iowa’s population finds themselves reclassified as “breed sows” is unlikely to change that. Women, amirite?

Then there are the numerous Republican polls, which ask prospective voters culled from NRA membership lists to choose between:

1. Are you gonna’ vote for Trump

2. Or are we gonna’ have a problem?

These have come in for some serious criticism— from other Republican pollsters because their methodology involves talking to actual people, which tends to skew their results towards reality.

That’s why we should pay particular attention to those reputable pollsters who follow a more data driven approach which consists of watching what Nate Silver does and following that. Nate Silver, as you may recall, is the gold standard of polling due to his uncanny ability to forecast results in any election featuring Barack Obama. Any pollster will tell you that there is safety in numbers—even if those numbers fail to reflect reality, because you can always claim the other guys started it. This years’ polling uses a weighting schema in all ways superior to the one that underestimated Trump’s support in 2016, overestimated Biden’s in 2020 or predicted a Senate ‘red wave’ in 2022. Those were all one-time errors. This time’s for real.

Of course, the peculiarities of this election cycle requires still other adjustments to the polling model. For example, for the Trump campaign’s singleminded focus on personality disordered young men presents unique challenges. On the one hand, this cohort is less likely to complete telephone polls, or high school. On the other hand, many of those who do participate, are congenitally incapable of hearing questions from a female-sounding voice. Those who can hear questions in higher vocal registers still struggle to hear a woman asking “are you planning to…” without reflexively answering “yeah, sure, OK. No problem” and immediately forgetting what they just agreed to. In response, pollsters have found different ways of measuring young male political sentiment in a given geographical area, including:

• Number of “pissing Calvin” stickers on pickup truck windows

• Proportion of hostile, antisocial male dating profiles

• Census counts of adult male children living at home, cross-referenced against per-capita gun sales

All of the aforementioned polling methods promise more certainty than they deliver. That’s where my forecast model is different. In the interest of managing expectations, mine promises zero reliability and will likely deliver even less. Its methodology differs from major pollsters too. While theirs samples a cohort of self-identified likely voters and weights the results to eliminate likely areas of bias, mine is far simpler in that it dispenses with any sample, however small and thereby eliminates everything but areas of bias.

Instead, my methodology relies on what I call “The Four-Factor Dusty Springfield Method” which entails:

1. Wishin’

2. and hopin’

3. and thinkin’

4. and prayin’

And it says that Kamala has got this.

Oh Good God, please let it be so.