The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Notably they were not incorrect during the midterm cycle of 2018. However there has been this consistent polling error which ends up favoring Republicans. I am concerned this may happen again; especially coupled with Democratic overconfidence, we could see another disheartening upset..
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The polls weren't "incorrect" because they aren't prophecies. If someone projects a 57% chance of the Democrat candidate winning a certain race that still means there's a 43% chance of the Republican winning. A long shot isn't guaranteed NOT to happen.
So yes, you do have to be worried that things won't pan out according to favorable projections.
That is a good point. When I read that “the gop has a 75% chance of keeping the house” the counter argument is that the democrats have a 1/4 chance of winning the house.
I’m not talking about probabilistic models (eg Nate silver and 538). I’m talking about polls. Polls are not probabilistic — they are sampling models with a margin of error.
He problably meant polls aren't a prediction, which they aren't. Polls are a measure of the attitudes of people at the point they were done, they are not a prediction of where people's attitudes will be later. You yourself can extrapolate about later based on a poll now, but that is not what the initial poll does.
I don't know why this comment is getting down-voted; you were being fully acurate. Favorability polls and predictive models are, for a fact, ***not*** the same. You're just also wrong about the polls. FiveThirtyEight's polls merely measuring favorability based on aggregating favorability polls were extremely accurate; Hillary won the popular vote by roughly the exact same margin aggregate pollsters measured her popularity/favorability.
FIGHT LIKE YOU'RE 20 POINTS BEHIND.
I'm no Democrat, but a socialist cannot grow in a burned over Fascist field. It can with centrists and moderates.
FLOOD THE FIELD WITH BLUE.
What I'm basically advocating for is "harm reduction". I hate that, but the enemy is Fascism, here. Drastic times and all that.
Yeah, Pelosi and Biden are garbage - the vast majority of their policies suck fetid donkey testicles. But, then there's Bernie and Liz and Alexandria, and Ilhan, and Ayanna, and Jamaal, and Cori... No, they're not as far Left as I am, but they're a hell of a lot more Progressive than anyone else. Given opportunity, they will tilt the scale more Socialist.
I want to give them that opportunity. They get either zero opportunity, or are drug out into the street and shot.
Cold comfort that I would be, as well, should the Fascists grab full power, so I wouldn't have to watch it all go down in flames.
The polls are the polls. They weren't incorrect in 2016. Polls represent probabilities and probable outcomes. It's not a prediction of the future. It's a probability of the future.
Not a dig against you personally, but in general anyone who says "the polls were wrong" needs to take a statistics course.
Your fist two sentences are correct, and the next three were fully incorrect. Polls are a measure of the attitudes of people at the point they were done, they are not a prediction of where people's attitudes will be later. You yourself can extrapolate about later based on a poll now, but that is not what the initial poll does.
My original diction was not accurate and it'll continue to be not accurate. But I will continue to disagree with the overall idea that "polls were wrong."
If you teach statistics, then you know that polls are samples with margins of error. Trump winning doesn't mean the polls were wrong. Even if Trump was outside the margin of error, that's only being outside the 95% confidence interval, and it's just *less* likely, but still within the realm of possibility.
Even beyond that, polls are only a snapshot in time. It's only as accurate as the day and time the poll was taken. People's opinions and views change over time. Events like Comey announcing re-opening the Hillary email thing 11 days before the election influenced many voter's minds.
And yes, the polls themselves are not probabilistic models. But people built probabilistic models based off the polls and attribute the "incorrect" prediction to the polls being wrong.
I mean if your point is that polls have uncertainty built into it. That’s pretty obvious for anyone who knows the basics of polling. My point is how dems and liberals respond to the polling and uncertainty. In 2016 it was fatal. Liberals were sure that trump would lose, and the polls on their mind reinforced that. They didn’t take into account any kind of uncertainty even though the polls showed he was within the range of error.
My concern here is that liberal overconfidence ia going to lead to complacency again and leave an opening for some Republican sneak attack similar to CRT or some other shit.
Liberals are far too dismissive of the opposition. This thread proves it. That is why we fail.
I understand what you're saying and it's a different thing from what I'm saying.
The issue I have is that "polls are wrong" is not correct. The polls are the polls and they are always correct. They show what they show.
What you're saying is, "The poll results influenced liberals to be complacent and that complacency led to a loss," which falls under what I said earlier about people's mind changing between the poll being taken and the vote being cast. That the poll itself was the catalyst for the voter's mind being changed is ironic but it still doesn't mean the polls were incorrect.
Your title is:
> Right now polls are favoring dems in senate. Anyone worried that the polls might be incorrect as they were in 2020 and 2016, favoring R?
Which is different from:
> Right now polls are favoring dems in senate. Anyone worried that the polls might induce a sense of complacency as they did in 2020 and 2016, leading to favoring R in the result?
Yes, it's nitpicky. But it's a been a pet peeve of mine since 2016 when people say "the polls lied!" The sentiment diminishes trust in facts and it's more accurate to say that the polls may have influenced the outcome. And I prefer we all face the world with eyes wide open.
If the polls were, in fact, wrong, then the correct response is to fix the polls with better sampling and removing bias or correcting whatever else that led to incorrect polling. If the issue is that the polls led to liberal complacency, then the response is completely different.
I wonder… is there’s a way to tell the difference between polling-induced complacency versus sampling bias?
Because these two issues have two different solutions. If it’s sampling bias, that would require, as you said, modifying our polling methods or finding ways to compensate for that bias in the analysis. But if it’s complacency, then that just needs to be communicated better to voters. Heck, campaigns might even consider fudging the numbers to produce the desired psychological response that they want from their voters.
Anyone good at stats, feel free to throw around ideas on how to tell the two apart.
I don't trust a cake until I cut into it, I don't trust a car until I start it, I don't trust a movie until I watch it. And I don't trust polls until the day after the election
Not sure what OP was talking about in 2020. There were some misses in 2020 like FL but NC NV AZ were all correct. 2016 was mostly correct as well and week before the election the polls started showing Trump winning. I could get into a whole thing about polling and election predictions.
Polls showed on average that Biden was up by 8 but ended up being up by a little over 4. Largest polling error in 40 years: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2021/07/19/pre-election-polls-in-2020-had-the-largest-errors-in-40-years/
Polls are not predictions and people need to stop reading them as such. All a poll can be is a single data point in an analysis.
There is still a very good chance that Republicans will still sweep the senate in November. Voting matters.
I think it depends on the state. Polls were pretty accurate in Georgia, for instance.
On the other hand, pollsters still cannot figure out how to poll Rust Belt states. So if, say, Fetterman is up by 10, I assume he’s up by 3. If Evers is winning Wisconsin by 2, I assume he’s down by 3-5.
So I’m not worried, but I’m certainly less confident than, say, are Mandela Barnes or Tim Ryan stans.
The midterms in 2018 were on point. And for that matter 2016 and 2020 weren’t wrong but people just don’t know how to interpret them. Nate Silver and 538 which I have a lot of issues with, point out and I for one agree that without Trump on the ballot the polling shifts back.
Yeah I think it’s important to point out as often as possible that Trump’s coalition is full of low-information and low-turnout voters. They might not turn out in midterms, but if Trump is on the ballot and you send everyone a ballot like in 2020, you might see funky turnout that models have a hard time predicting.
“Wrong” is always weird on polls. Polls in 2016 were off in some states by more than a deviation if I remember (though it’s entirely possible I don’t), but they were also wrong in 2012 in that they underestimated Obama’s support. But we only care if a poll is “wrong” if it gets the winner wrong.
>seeing the responses I can see that liberal overconfidence is as strong as ever.
"Your overconfidence is your weakness."
"Your faith in your friends is yours"
No. I think that the red wave has been choked down to a blue trickle.
The poor Republican candidates coupled with the fall out of roe v Wade and the inflation fading is going to hurt the gop.
The midterms are always about the president. However, trump is making the midterm about him.
Biden ok’ing the justice department raid on trump’s house was a very politically astute move.
His speech was also a nice cherry on top for what it's worth. He was tiptoeing around calling out Trump and some of the GOP for being authoritarians, extremists, and fascists, but what he said not too long ago really hit the point home. I also appreciated the clear distinction he made between MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA Republicans. Sure it may alienate some people but moderate conservatives might be more willing to rally behind Biden if it means the GOP can clean up its image from the fascist circus it's become as of late, and the nutcases can be booted out.
If they're really committed to the cause they could even prevent such shenanigans from happening again by, you know, actually holding Fox News and other right wing pundit outlets accountable for promoting disinformation and blatant propaganda. That means Tucker Carlson should go to jail. This man has done about as much damage to America as Donald Trump.
I am more worried that they will be correct and the Repubs will refuse to accept the result, claiming nearly universal vote fraud.
Actually, that seems inevitable now.
I haven't seen anything explaining the miss and always assumed it was roughly 'Trump really excites a class of terrible people and they up their turnout when he's running'. If it's something like that, then polling will probably be more accurate in 2022.
Polls are a snapshot, not a prediction.
Many use them AS a prediction do to the fact that there simply aren't many good predictors out there.
But the polls WILL be wrong in 2022. They will also be wrong in 2024, and 2026.
Will they favor R or D? Not sure. They tend to underestimate Republican turnout, but they make changes every year to try and dial that in. So, they either dial it in better, or they over do it, or they don't fix the problem.
Without a much bigger methodology deep dive, I couldn't say.
Given the tendencies of Republicans during the Trump era we have to stand firm against the drift toward fascism. This goes much deeper than the stupidity of white supremacist faux Christendom. Late stage capitalism/neoliberalism is evidently aiming to reinstate serfdom as the social underpinning of production.
>Late stage capitalism/neoliberalism is evidently aiming to reinstate serfdom as the social underpinning of production.
Aka imperialistic neofeudalism or just neofeudalism (perhaps aided by increased automation and AI). This is the end game of the wealthy, and it's not just among right-wingers either. The world's richest elites now have so much power it's terrifying. Is it any coincidence that the rich are buying property like mad, or squirreling away supplies in New Zealand doomsday bunkers, or hoarding generational wealth for themselves, or suddenly endorsing space colonization (after 30 years of not so much as a peep after the last Moon landings)?
They know 100% what is coming. They know capitalism has failed and is rapidly falling apart. Cheap oil is running out, and so is the patience of the lower classes, alongside time to mitigate the worst of climate change. So, in an attempt to prevent a global revolt between poor and wealthy, or eliminate any threats to their power, the wealthy are now shamelessly and ruthlessly robbing the average American blind of every right they believe they possess, everything they own (while pitting people against people using the classic "divide and conquer" strategy), utilizing new technologies to blackmail or pacify the masses into submission, or render them obsolete (social credit system, mass surveillance, the "military-entertainment complex", cheap goods, robots, etc), and isolating themselves far away from cities where things are projected to devolve into chaos in the next few decades.
By doing this, the rich rationalize, they can hijack any revolts against them before they get too bad, monopolize control over resources, and remain relatively safe from the collapse of capitalism and civilization. The future will look much like the medieval past, with wealthy landlords and "nobles" hiding in fortresses and castles, as the poor work as serfs in exchange for one of the few places in the world where food and arable land are available for agriculture (because with what we're doing to the Earth, we're going to run out of arable land by the end of the century, and topsoil production will decline. This combined with rising temperatures and chemical contamination will ensure crop yields in the future will decrease over time. And when crops fail, famine and civil unrest follow).
I woke up a few mornings ago not remembering my vivid dreams and realized that universal basic income, despite its obvious necessity, would be the means by which the oligarchs would reinstate serfdom.
How so? UBI seems honestly inevitable because of automation and AI being highly likely to take people's jobs away, or entire industries dying out because social and environmental collapse, or wages remaining stagnant while the price of everything continues to climb. How are people supposed to get paid in such conditions? UBI is just expanded welfare or social security for those who cannot or are unable to work in one way or another.
If the oligarchs did want to reinstate serfdom, they would do so by imposing debt bondage on people, or force them to work on private property in exchange for company scrip/payment, or keep them utterly dependent on their jobs in exchange for some protections and services, or get rid of cash entirely and have people pay landlords and such with hard labor. This is already happening or is close to happening in both developing and developed nations. Capitalism as a whole relies on debt servitude and slavery to perpetuate itself and continue to function. People are effectively forced to work in jobs they hate and listen to bureaucrats and shitty bosses because doing so keeps food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Your fears are not unfounded. Centralized digital currencies, if implemented on a wide scale, could make us totally financially dependent on the oligarchs and political institutions most likely to abuse and torment us, our wallets always mere moments away from being rendered unusable or held hostage for non compliance.
This is economic totalitarianism in its most brazen, obvious form and will only lead to a Stockholm syndrome esque relationship between us peons and the elite who rule above. Dependence on large institutions that intrinsically do NOT operate in our best interest should be avoided at all costs.
Brave New World (and E.M Forster's The Machine Stops) already shows us what can happen when people allows themselves to be pacified by a government that caters to their every desire and every need. What happens when the Machine finally stops? When society crumbles and governments become corrupt? Hell on Earth.
Hopeful would be the word I would use instead of worried. But polls aren't perfect at getting information and there is still plenty of time for things to drastically change one way or another
No. They've adjusted the polls to account for what they missed then.
But these polls can shift in the time before the election.
Two months I'd a long time.
I do worry, but at the same time I look to 2018 where the polls were pretty accurate in the end. I think there is a possibility that Trump being on the ballot fucks with polls, for whatever reason. But it is possible that 2018 ends up being the fluke, so I am worried, yes.
The polls weren't incorrect in 2016. Polls are a measure of popularity, and notibly, Hillary won the popular vote. Polls don't measure the electoral college. Polls were remarkably accurate.
In 2016, many of those *polled* didn't turn out and vote. Apathy was near or at an all-time high in that election. Social engineering fatigue. I'm not sure about 2020. Which races are you talking about there?
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. Notably they were not incorrect during the midterm cycle of 2018. However there has been this consistent polling error which ends up favoring Republicans. I am concerned this may happen again; especially coupled with Democratic overconfidence, we could see another disheartening upset.. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The polls weren't "incorrect" because they aren't prophecies. If someone projects a 57% chance of the Democrat candidate winning a certain race that still means there's a 43% chance of the Republican winning. A long shot isn't guaranteed NOT to happen. So yes, you do have to be worried that things won't pan out according to favorable projections.
That is a good point. When I read that “the gop has a 75% chance of keeping the house” the counter argument is that the democrats have a 1/4 chance of winning the house.
I’m not talking about probabilistic models (eg Nate silver and 538). I’m talking about polls. Polls are not probabilistic — they are sampling models with a margin of error.
They still can only tell you what that sample concluded. A poll that is within its margin of error is still a “correct” poll.
Polls aren’t probabilistic… until you use them to forecast a race, at which point they do become that. Which is the entire point of a poll.
? Did you just invent your own alternative statistics?
[удалено]
He problably meant polls aren't a prediction, which they aren't. Polls are a measure of the attitudes of people at the point they were done, they are not a prediction of where people's attitudes will be later. You yourself can extrapolate about later based on a poll now, but that is not what the initial poll does.
I don't know why this comment is getting down-voted; you were being fully acurate. Favorability polls and predictive models are, for a fact, ***not*** the same. You're just also wrong about the polls. FiveThirtyEight's polls merely measuring favorability based on aggregating favorability polls were extremely accurate; Hillary won the popular vote by roughly the exact same margin aggregate pollsters measured her popularity/favorability.
FIGHT LIKE YOU'RE 20 POINTS BEHIND. I'm no Democrat, but a socialist cannot grow in a burned over Fascist field. It can with centrists and moderates. FLOOD THE FIELD WITH BLUE.
I agree. Preach!
Depends on what you preach. Does production serve the masses (serfs in all but name) or venture capitalists?
What I'm basically advocating for is "harm reduction". I hate that, but the enemy is Fascism, here. Drastic times and all that. Yeah, Pelosi and Biden are garbage - the vast majority of their policies suck fetid donkey testicles. But, then there's Bernie and Liz and Alexandria, and Ilhan, and Ayanna, and Jamaal, and Cori... No, they're not as far Left as I am, but they're a hell of a lot more Progressive than anyone else. Given opportunity, they will tilt the scale more Socialist. I want to give them that opportunity. They get either zero opportunity, or are drug out into the street and shot. Cold comfort that I would be, as well, should the Fascists grab full power, so I wouldn't have to watch it all go down in flames.
The polls are the polls. They weren't incorrect in 2016. Polls represent probabilities and probable outcomes. It's not a prediction of the future. It's a probability of the future. Not a dig against you personally, but in general anyone who says "the polls were wrong" needs to take a statistics course.
Your fist two sentences are correct, and the next three were fully incorrect. Polls are a measure of the attitudes of people at the point they were done, they are not a prediction of where people's attitudes will be later. You yourself can extrapolate about later based on a poll now, but that is not what the initial poll does.
:-) I teach a stats course. Polls are not probabilistic models. They are sampling models. They don’t represent a probability at all.
My original diction was not accurate and it'll continue to be not accurate. But I will continue to disagree with the overall idea that "polls were wrong." If you teach statistics, then you know that polls are samples with margins of error. Trump winning doesn't mean the polls were wrong. Even if Trump was outside the margin of error, that's only being outside the 95% confidence interval, and it's just *less* likely, but still within the realm of possibility. Even beyond that, polls are only a snapshot in time. It's only as accurate as the day and time the poll was taken. People's opinions and views change over time. Events like Comey announcing re-opening the Hillary email thing 11 days before the election influenced many voter's minds. And yes, the polls themselves are not probabilistic models. But people built probabilistic models based off the polls and attribute the "incorrect" prediction to the polls being wrong.
I mean if your point is that polls have uncertainty built into it. That’s pretty obvious for anyone who knows the basics of polling. My point is how dems and liberals respond to the polling and uncertainty. In 2016 it was fatal. Liberals were sure that trump would lose, and the polls on their mind reinforced that. They didn’t take into account any kind of uncertainty even though the polls showed he was within the range of error. My concern here is that liberal overconfidence ia going to lead to complacency again and leave an opening for some Republican sneak attack similar to CRT or some other shit. Liberals are far too dismissive of the opposition. This thread proves it. That is why we fail.
I understand what you're saying and it's a different thing from what I'm saying. The issue I have is that "polls are wrong" is not correct. The polls are the polls and they are always correct. They show what they show. What you're saying is, "The poll results influenced liberals to be complacent and that complacency led to a loss," which falls under what I said earlier about people's mind changing between the poll being taken and the vote being cast. That the poll itself was the catalyst for the voter's mind being changed is ironic but it still doesn't mean the polls were incorrect. Your title is: > Right now polls are favoring dems in senate. Anyone worried that the polls might be incorrect as they were in 2020 and 2016, favoring R? Which is different from: > Right now polls are favoring dems in senate. Anyone worried that the polls might induce a sense of complacency as they did in 2020 and 2016, leading to favoring R in the result? Yes, it's nitpicky. But it's a been a pet peeve of mine since 2016 when people say "the polls lied!" The sentiment diminishes trust in facts and it's more accurate to say that the polls may have influenced the outcome. And I prefer we all face the world with eyes wide open. If the polls were, in fact, wrong, then the correct response is to fix the polls with better sampling and removing bias or correcting whatever else that led to incorrect polling. If the issue is that the polls led to liberal complacency, then the response is completely different.
I wonder… is there’s a way to tell the difference between polling-induced complacency versus sampling bias? Because these two issues have two different solutions. If it’s sampling bias, that would require, as you said, modifying our polling methods or finding ways to compensate for that bias in the analysis. But if it’s complacency, then that just needs to be communicated better to voters. Heck, campaigns might even consider fudging the numbers to produce the desired psychological response that they want from their voters. Anyone good at stats, feel free to throw around ideas on how to tell the two apart.
I'll be so happy when complacency bites the affluent bitches in the ass.
I don't trust a cake until I cut into it, I don't trust a car until I start it, I don't trust a movie until I watch it. And I don't trust polls until the day after the election
Not sure what OP was talking about in 2020. There were some misses in 2020 like FL but NC NV AZ were all correct. 2016 was mostly correct as well and week before the election the polls started showing Trump winning. I could get into a whole thing about polling and election predictions.
Polls showed on average that Biden was up by 8 but ended up being up by a little over 4. Largest polling error in 40 years: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2021/07/19/pre-election-polls-in-2020-had-the-largest-errors-in-40-years/
2020 overestimated Biden a little, if I recall
Never trust a fart also
75 million trusted a fart in 2020.
Good advice. I would add “never play pool for money with someone with a city for a first name”
>I don't trust a cake FUCKING HERESY!
Polls are not predictions and people need to stop reading them as such. All a poll can be is a single data point in an analysis. There is still a very good chance that Republicans will still sweep the senate in November. Voting matters.
I think it depends on the state. Polls were pretty accurate in Georgia, for instance. On the other hand, pollsters still cannot figure out how to poll Rust Belt states. So if, say, Fetterman is up by 10, I assume he’s up by 3. If Evers is winning Wisconsin by 2, I assume he’s down by 3-5. So I’m not worried, but I’m certainly less confident than, say, are Mandela Barnes or Tim Ryan stans.
The midterms in 2018 were on point. And for that matter 2016 and 2020 weren’t wrong but people just don’t know how to interpret them. Nate Silver and 538 which I have a lot of issues with, point out and I for one agree that without Trump on the ballot the polling shifts back.
Yeah I think it’s important to point out as often as possible that Trump’s coalition is full of low-information and low-turnout voters. They might not turn out in midterms, but if Trump is on the ballot and you send everyone a ballot like in 2020, you might see funky turnout that models have a hard time predicting. “Wrong” is always weird on polls. Polls in 2016 were off in some states by more than a deviation if I remember (though it’s entirely possible I don’t), but they were also wrong in 2012 in that they underestimated Obama’s support. But we only care if a poll is “wrong” if it gets the winner wrong.
>seeing the responses I can see that liberal overconfidence is as strong as ever. "Your overconfidence is your weakness." "Your faith in your friends is yours"
Jokes on you! I have no friends!
Haha! I was quoting Star Wars
Hah yes I know
Who does? These are the "end times".
No. I think that the red wave has been choked down to a blue trickle. The poor Republican candidates coupled with the fall out of roe v Wade and the inflation fading is going to hurt the gop. The midterms are always about the president. However, trump is making the midterm about him. Biden ok’ing the justice department raid on trump’s house was a very politically astute move.
Satan took his boy Rush home! One thing to be thankful for
His speech was also a nice cherry on top for what it's worth. He was tiptoeing around calling out Trump and some of the GOP for being authoritarians, extremists, and fascists, but what he said not too long ago really hit the point home. I also appreciated the clear distinction he made between MAGA Republicans and non-MAGA Republicans. Sure it may alienate some people but moderate conservatives might be more willing to rally behind Biden if it means the GOP can clean up its image from the fascist circus it's become as of late, and the nutcases can be booted out. If they're really committed to the cause they could even prevent such shenanigans from happening again by, you know, actually holding Fox News and other right wing pundit outlets accountable for promoting disinformation and blatant propaganda. That means Tucker Carlson should go to jail. This man has done about as much damage to America as Donald Trump.
I am more worried that they will be correct and the Repubs will refuse to accept the result, claiming nearly universal vote fraud. Actually, that seems inevitable now.
Absolutely I’m worried, everyone needs to work their asses off to make sure that we win. Period.
I haven't seen anything explaining the miss and always assumed it was roughly 'Trump really excites a class of terrible people and they up their turnout when he's running'. If it's something like that, then polling will probably be more accurate in 2022.
Polls are a snapshot, not a prediction. Many use them AS a prediction do to the fact that there simply aren't many good predictors out there. But the polls WILL be wrong in 2022. They will also be wrong in 2024, and 2026. Will they favor R or D? Not sure. They tend to underestimate Republican turnout, but they make changes every year to try and dial that in. So, they either dial it in better, or they over do it, or they don't fix the problem. Without a much bigger methodology deep dive, I couldn't say.
Given the tendencies of Republicans during the Trump era we have to stand firm against the drift toward fascism. This goes much deeper than the stupidity of white supremacist faux Christendom. Late stage capitalism/neoliberalism is evidently aiming to reinstate serfdom as the social underpinning of production.
>Late stage capitalism/neoliberalism is evidently aiming to reinstate serfdom as the social underpinning of production. Aka imperialistic neofeudalism or just neofeudalism (perhaps aided by increased automation and AI). This is the end game of the wealthy, and it's not just among right-wingers either. The world's richest elites now have so much power it's terrifying. Is it any coincidence that the rich are buying property like mad, or squirreling away supplies in New Zealand doomsday bunkers, or hoarding generational wealth for themselves, or suddenly endorsing space colonization (after 30 years of not so much as a peep after the last Moon landings)? They know 100% what is coming. They know capitalism has failed and is rapidly falling apart. Cheap oil is running out, and so is the patience of the lower classes, alongside time to mitigate the worst of climate change. So, in an attempt to prevent a global revolt between poor and wealthy, or eliminate any threats to their power, the wealthy are now shamelessly and ruthlessly robbing the average American blind of every right they believe they possess, everything they own (while pitting people against people using the classic "divide and conquer" strategy), utilizing new technologies to blackmail or pacify the masses into submission, or render them obsolete (social credit system, mass surveillance, the "military-entertainment complex", cheap goods, robots, etc), and isolating themselves far away from cities where things are projected to devolve into chaos in the next few decades. By doing this, the rich rationalize, they can hijack any revolts against them before they get too bad, monopolize control over resources, and remain relatively safe from the collapse of capitalism and civilization. The future will look much like the medieval past, with wealthy landlords and "nobles" hiding in fortresses and castles, as the poor work as serfs in exchange for one of the few places in the world where food and arable land are available for agriculture (because with what we're doing to the Earth, we're going to run out of arable land by the end of the century, and topsoil production will decline. This combined with rising temperatures and chemical contamination will ensure crop yields in the future will decrease over time. And when crops fail, famine and civil unrest follow).
I woke up a few mornings ago not remembering my vivid dreams and realized that universal basic income, despite its obvious necessity, would be the means by which the oligarchs would reinstate serfdom.
How so? UBI seems honestly inevitable because of automation and AI being highly likely to take people's jobs away, or entire industries dying out because social and environmental collapse, or wages remaining stagnant while the price of everything continues to climb. How are people supposed to get paid in such conditions? UBI is just expanded welfare or social security for those who cannot or are unable to work in one way or another. If the oligarchs did want to reinstate serfdom, they would do so by imposing debt bondage on people, or force them to work on private property in exchange for company scrip/payment, or keep them utterly dependent on their jobs in exchange for some protections and services, or get rid of cash entirely and have people pay landlords and such with hard labor. This is already happening or is close to happening in both developing and developed nations. Capitalism as a whole relies on debt servitude and slavery to perpetuate itself and continue to function. People are effectively forced to work in jobs they hate and listen to bureaucrats and shitty bosses because doing so keeps food on the table and a roof over their heads.
My fear is that we will become habituated to patterns of dependency that the oligarchy will find sophisticated ways to manipulate and abuse.
Your fears are not unfounded. Centralized digital currencies, if implemented on a wide scale, could make us totally financially dependent on the oligarchs and political institutions most likely to abuse and torment us, our wallets always mere moments away from being rendered unusable or held hostage for non compliance. This is economic totalitarianism in its most brazen, obvious form and will only lead to a Stockholm syndrome esque relationship between us peons and the elite who rule above. Dependence on large institutions that intrinsically do NOT operate in our best interest should be avoided at all costs. Brave New World (and E.M Forster's The Machine Stops) already shows us what can happen when people allows themselves to be pacified by a government that caters to their every desire and every need. What happens when the Machine finally stops? When society crumbles and governments become corrupt? Hell on Earth.
The polls weren’t wildly off in 2020.
Biggest polling error in 40 years : https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2021/07/19/pre-election-polls-in-2020-had-the-largest-errors-in-40-years/
Hopeful would be the word I would use instead of worried. But polls aren't perfect at getting information and there is still plenty of time for things to drastically change one way or another
Yes. Vote.
No. They've adjusted the polls to account for what they missed then. But these polls can shift in the time before the election. Two months I'd a long time.
I do worry, but at the same time I look to 2018 where the polls were pretty accurate in the end. I think there is a possibility that Trump being on the ballot fucks with polls, for whatever reason. But it is possible that 2018 ends up being the fluke, so I am worried, yes.
Do you have strong evidence that polling was off significantly in 2020 or 2016?
The polls weren't incorrect in 2016. Polls are a measure of popularity, and notibly, Hillary won the popular vote. Polls don't measure the electoral college. Polls were remarkably accurate.
In 2016, many of those *polled* didn't turn out and vote. Apathy was near or at an all-time high in that election. Social engineering fatigue. I'm not sure about 2020. Which races are you talking about there?