Dems’ blue wave isn’t nearly as in the bag as some think, so says pollsters
Democrats are currently leading Republicans in the RealClearPolling generic congressional average
A blue wave may not be as certain as some polls have predicted, experts warn ahead of Election Day, noting forecasts may be skewed because Trump supporters are notoriously difficult to reach, according to a report.
While current polls paint a positive picture for Democrats ahead of the midterms this November 3 — some pollsters are questioning whether that number may be inflated due to supporters of President Donald Trump being difficult to reach by pollsters, Axios reported.
Polls previously underestimated Trump’s support during the presidential races in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Even though midterm polling is typically more accurate, some still underestimated Republican support in 2022, Scott Keeter, senior survey adviser at Pew Research Center, told Axios.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/democratic-blue-wave-midtern-election-polls-b3064868.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
136 replies
Cool story, go vote.
That's the moral of the story here. We each control one vote and this is arguably our most important vote in history.
Seems like every vote is the most important vote of my life. I'm getting tired of it.
What's that emoji for when a comment makes you laugh then it hits and you kinda get a tear but are also mad at the system but also are tired?
Yes. Every vote IS the most important one because it’s the one happening right now and is going to affect things in the very near future. I’m getting tired of dirty dishes but I still do them.
These aren't dirty dishes. I'm tired of this system. I'm tired of the people running it. I'm tired of having the political beliefs leave other people the fuck alone, and that's a hard concept for other people to follow. I'm just tired, and I don't need people to tell me what I already know. But thanks for checking in.
Me too.
In a universe where Donald can win two elections literally anything is possible. His supporters would vote for a wet fart if it was directed at a minority.
No matter what happens, 46+% will not believe it.
Well, that's because they can't read, are too poorly educated to obtain a proper job to afford communication utilities, and/or stubborn. Majority of them are just pedophile criminal racists and enjoy their leaders being the same.
Trump supporters are also less likely to show up for a midterm, but they conveniently left that truth out of their clickbait.
I'll take it if it scares more people to go out and vote. Never assume anything is in the bag
I'm not assuming we'll win but I also don't believe that fearmongering works well on Dem voters. I saw a study a while back that showed that Dem and independent voters respond much more strongly to positive messaging than negative messaging. So I really don't buy that scaring and stressing people out works.
Probably why we see so much "Democrats in disarray" messaging being pushed.
Also, all the trying to drive a wedge into the coalition by constantly talking about trans and how Democrats are "throwing them under the bus" and are "transphobic", etc. This is why the cons constantly pivot to talking about "men in women's sports" bullshit, too.
It's all to drive down the vote for Democrats and blunt the force of the blue wave.
I'm fine with a multiprong assault for this, fearmongering to get those that works on to show up, while the candidates themselves provide positive messaging, doesnt seem like those have to be mutually exclusive
What I hate is that some voters seemingly want to vote with the winning "team". It's just as idiotic as it sounds, but I do think some people don't want to vote Democratic if they hear they might not win.
While that might be true, I'm concerned that a lot of them are cowards, too cowardly to admit to pollsters that they're still gonna vote for Republicans, too cowardly to even research what Democrats and independents are offering, and too cowardly to ever break their routine of showing up to vote for Republicans every time.
Their poopy leader has strongly rigged the election seven ways from Sunday.
If the narrative becomes too one sided it might discourage flakey voters. One reason why every election cycle has to be life and death
It's the shy voter effect. When politicians are unpopular, people don't like to admit to supporting them. In most historical cases, this correlates with low turnout, so the effects on polling tend to cancel out. When Trump has been on the ballot, this correlation hasn't held up the same way, and polling has slightly underestimated MAGA turnout.
Basically it depends on how "real" you think Trump's unpopularity actually is. Are these people done with him, or just annoyed enough not to talk to pollsters?
Calling the majority of any large sample size pedophiles is quite the stretch.
Except for when that sample comes from a massive group of pedophiles.
Wow 38-39M Trump supporting pedophiles not even including all the others! Impressive but seems completely unrealistic.
Leave it to Democrats to fuck up a cost of living mid term with high gas prices and a president in the low 30s approval rating.
This should be the biggest blow out this century.
Oligarchs are the source of the problem. Citizens United means more money supporting the fascists, and control of almost every media outlet means outright fascist propaganda on the "conservative' networks, and minimized support for progressives on the "liberal" networks.
Establishment Democrats still give us better returns on human rights compared to the fascists, but they do bow to their oligarchal masters pretty well, yes.
The point is that progressives definitely do not have a majority in the US, much less the supermajority needed to squash fascism.
It's up to us to deal with our oligarchs and go from there.
propaganda works on uneducated people
Nobody is immune. You're being constantly bombarded and you're not catching all of it.
there’s no such thing as immune to ideas
there is definitely an inverse correlation between education and voting against your own interests though
Sure, I just want to point out to readers that thoughts like "well it can't happen to ME" or "they can't mean ME because I have a degree" is wrong. Education will not shield a person, propaganda doesn't work exclusively on the uneducated. It was meant more as a cautionary addition to your comment than a retort.
that is fair
It should, but we are surrounded with deeply stupid people stewing in a shit-ton of conservative propaganda.
The current DNC chair is gonna run a fair presidential primary in less than two years...
No matter what happens the neoliberals will say midterms could have been better and Martin needs to resign. Because neoliberals have no chance in hell of winning a fair primary.
And if we get a progressive in 2028 into the White House, they pick the next DNC chair in 2029.
We're on the cusp of some real FDR shit, but neoliberals (as always) will do anything including helping Republicans to stop it.
You've been saying this so often and for so long that I'm really curious to see how you're going to try and spin it when the DNC fucks over progressives like they always do. Ken Martin is like the second coming of Jesus to you for some reason.
I bet you've never once looked up a bill and checked out the votes to see how Republicans blocked so many of them because the Democrats didn't have enough of a voting majority.
Do you know why the Public Option was removed from the Affordable Care Act? Because Democrats needed 60 votes, and there were only 58 Democrats elected to the Senate, with 2 Independents voting with them.. 60 exactly - this gave extraordinary power to any Democrat who was against the public option (Joe Lieberman and 5 others). If 6 or more extra Democrats had been elected, the Lieberman 6 votes would have had no power. Or if just 6 Republicans out of the 40 had voted with the Democrats. Ha.
And in the end, I always see people blaming the Democrats, not the Republicans. Because nobody looks at the actual bills and how they are gutted or defeated because the people won't elect enough Dems to counter the Rep opposition. Shrug.
None of that is news to anyone paying attention. Obviously Republicans are terrible but if you're going to hold Democrats up as our saviors then they need to actually save the day once in a while.
Republicans have faced the same exact power imbalance you described many times over the years and yet they have no trouble getting their legislative agenda passed. Why is that? Answer that question honestly and you'll know exactly why people blame Democrats for shit Republicans do.
Because they vote party lines as a monolith and the Dems don't, which is what the person you're replying to said but you're too both sides ignorant to hear it. You're specifically stating right here that you don't understand how legislation works or the government is intended to function at a fundamental level. Your opinion on things you're currently ignorant about is about as valuable as an asshole on an elbow.
Progressive policies aren’t popular in the states.
Liberal ones are.
I guess that must be why progressive candidates pushed out a bunch of liberal incumbents in the primaries.
Oh shit it's almost like voting in the fucking primaries actually fucking works despite the lemmy narrative.
Yeah in New York and California.
Can you give me the top 5 most popular liberal policies?
Progressive taxation. Affordable Universal Healthcare. Public Infrastructure and Education. Reproductive rights for women. Voting rights. Providing a social safety net. Climate change. Regulating industrial pollution. Firearms regulation. Need any more?
The differences are in implementation, not in goals.
Take affordable universal health care for instance. The progressive position is Medicare for All. The Liberal position is taxing and regulating health insurance companies to force them to cover everyone, and force everyone to buy health insurance.
Got introduced legislation to back up your assertions here or we just making shit the fuck up?
And can you name some progressive policies That are being pushed but people aren't receptive to?
Depends on how you define "pushed" and "people". There aren't really enough progressive politicians to push any policies, and there are plenty of policies that have some support, but not widespread support. Granted, they're typically policies that would provide widespread benefit, but have been so twisted by propaganda that the people vote against their own interests.
"Free" healthcare and college are good examples, where people are unreceptive because they overestimate the cost and underestimate the cost of the present system.
Which doesn't mean those policies aren't popular. They've simply been propagandized to be "fairy tales". The opposition can't argue over the policy itself because the policy is popular so they have to argue around it. That's where you get these arguments that something is too expensive to implement or it's going to get exploited by "the wrong people" and such. But it doesn't make those policies unpopular. El-sayed is a great example because he runs on progressive policies and is very popular in his state. If the policies by nature were unpopular he wouldn't be a popular candidate. Nobody gave a shit that Mike Rogers kept saying El-Sayeds policies are too expensive because El-Sayed cuts through that bullshit to keep people focused on what the policy actually is.
And if we go back to those popular "liberal" policies at least half of them are also progressive policies and some of them I wouldn't even consider liberal, such as "Public Infrastructure and Education". Modern American liberalism is against state socialism and state controlled public use of anything is technically state socialism. Liberals have simply adopted parts of progressive policies because they're so popular not adopting them would be stupid.
Popularity isn't about anything other than the proportion of people in favor. If the majority of people believe the empty arguments around the policy, it will be unpopular.
The trickiest part of politics is dealing with the fact that people are mostly uninformed and uninterested, and grappling with the foolishness of the average citizen.
Affordable lol. Yeah a very popular word. Without that word Universal Healthcare just tanks with the people doesn't it? Gotta have it.
People love it when the things they need to live are... with in reach [pause for massive applause]
Or even maybe... realistically obtainable for most? [pause for wild deafening screams of adoration]
Turnout is all that matters, and polls anticipate turnout/motivation.
Always be voting for lesser evil! Rural people get luxury gay space communism voting lines. Seniors/evangelicals always turn out. You better believe that evangelicals hold their nose when they vote for Trump, but Armageddon and Israel worship is part of their programming. If you be voting, then your opinions will matter in the future. If not, then you will be safely ignored, because lemme nazis will remind you the only time politics matter to you, that DNC is shit.
Seniors now have -21 net approval of Trump down 24 from Oct 24. They may vote against him.
Rural voters overall have -20 net approval. Down 40 from Oct 24. Rural Republicans still net positive, but 26% disapprove of Trump, and 60% disapprove of Iran war related energy costs. There will be some flips from former, and more abstains from latter.
Show the fuck up. Protest DNC the next day, and organize next primaries or 3rd party.
I don’t think the polls are accounting for all the Republican and Trump voters that simply won’t show up this year. I’ve talked to many that voted for Trump who said to me they ain’t either voting ever again or not this time around.
If they tell the pollsters the same thing, their "likely voter" models pick that up. This is by far record low net approval rates for a President heading to mid terms. Senate needed to stop shenaremovedns.
Did your reply really get censored for saying shenanigans? Someone needs to turn down the auto mod. It's set to the hyper aggressive setting.
I possibly misspelled with 2 g s . Your version is clockwork oranging my eyes successfully.
WHOOPS
Yeah but they're fucking liars by nature or they wouldn't have voted for Trump in the first place.
They also are emotional insecure people that hate being wrong so who knows
There are still way too many people who thing republicans are decent people. Maybe it's because your mother or father is a republican, but that doesn't make republicans good it makes your parents horrible.
I know, I talk to a few people who say their parents are "true conservatives" that voted Republican but hate donnie and didn't vote for him (allegedly).
SMH. What the fuck even is a "true conservative"? Just sounds like No True Scotsman stuff.
Cunts. Its an euphemism for cunts.
I live in rural Ohio, the number of signs that are proudly Republican is too damn high.
I’m always amazed, it’ll just be some guys name and then “REPUBLICAN” and that’s the whole sign, like it’s a good thing.
Someone can be an omnicidal bigot, and still be nice to dogs and old ladies. They can even sometimes be nice to people who don't look, sound, or think like they do.
Republicans probably define "decent" as "opposing communism, non-whites, atheism, and Islam".
Democrats probable define "decent" as "not being a bigot".
Greens probably define "decent" as "opposing omnicide, factory farming, genocide, authoritarianism, and capitalism".
I was there in 2016. Ain't nothing in the bag.
Half the country in 2016:
Probably more than half, I wager a good number of people who voted for Trump in 2016 genuinely didn't expect him to win
The polling has been very predictive when DJT isn't on the ballot. That said, I'm not buying the rat poison.
I hope that it is a big blue wave and this corrupt lunatic will have a congress with a spine but I am getting 2016 Clinton hubris vibes.
Democrats aren't winning shit. Regardless of the actual legit results, you can bet your ass that the Republicans won't concede power.
Bet your ass they will.
Republicans depend on the "good cop" to "save the day" by taking office and "fixing" things by rolling the gains back a bit (but not reverse anything).
... just as Democrats depend on Republicans to blame for their "failures" (like when they pretend to try and raise minimum wage).
You must be new to US politics. It's a tag team. Watch and see.
Yep. Clear as day. We're all on the outside. No idea how no one sees it.
You might be correct.
RepubliCrats anyways. Democratic Party is a branch of the Republican party today.
The only thing Clinton and Harris taught me was that Dems (and boomers) dislike them some highly qualified, educated women.
I will vote dem predominantly going forward (bus analogy and all that) but damn, like folding pocket aces. The opponent makes it even more cutting.
Right now Dem leaders are crunching the numbers, figuring out how many bribe checks they can cash and still win 51% of the vote, or 50.00001%, even better. Their best political strategists are ON IT. Just like in the last election. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Not a single. effing. thing.
49.99999%. You can raise more money by almost winning, and that's what the consultants are incentivised to do.
Payday is before and during elections. Not after
Payday is every day. they don't stop receiving "donations". Ever.
https://youtu.be/sI0vtqxoG1k?t=95
::: spoiler video content Lex Luthor beats up The Question, while explaining: "President? Do you know how much power I'd have to give up to be President?" :::
Hey! It's hard work for them make sure that we have a tight margin so that we can always be JUST SHY of whatever the working class wants.
JUST VOTE "BLUE" HARDER
Republicans just really wanna use slurs and dont like seeing queer people in public. They're quiet right now while the gas prices are high but they're still gonna vote ref again.
The last two DNC picks who lost seemed like they had it in the bag. They also talked about Trump more than they did their own policy.
They're running the same strategy again.
Yup. Centrists who bitch about "blue no matter who" are wasting their breath. The actual leftists still hold their nose and vote blue anyway. But the things that progressives point out, and that centrists refuse to change, are what cause the centrists to lose their elections. Centrists will bitch about online leftists condemning genocide support, but it wasn't the progressives that caused Kamala to lose. It was mostly moderate and conservative Muslim voters who simply refused to vote for a genocide supporter.
No shit. The Dems, as usual, have failed to give the working class a reason to vote for them. They only ever give reasons to vote against their opponent. This strategy fundamentally fails to motivate anybody who isn’t already plugged into politics.
Well when you've been trained that voting anything but Republican means you've turned your back to God...
Also a whole lot of men view voting Democratic the same way they view eating plant-based foods. They think it'll turn them into women or something.
It's awfully telling that that's a scary thing for them. They don't want to be sentenced to being treated the way that they treat women. They don't want to be "inferior" people. It's also why they're so transphobic. They can't understand why anybody would ever want to give up being a man to become a woman, so they must be getting something out of it, like probably an unfair advantage in sports or to look at women in locker rooms or something. They're incapable of really empathizing with anybody whose life experience is different from theirs, even just with people who are still white and cis and hetero, but are women. So non-white and/or non-cis and/or non-hetero just absolutely does not compute. They think that their simple, privileged, suburban or rural experience is what 95% of the country is.
The fear of being similar to a woman drives so much of the manosphere. Looking back on things like Gamergate, it's very easy to see how many angry young men there were - driven to complete frothing rage because of a woman journalist? I mean, what the fuck are we even doing here?
But I do think some of it is pretty easy to see - lots of fragile men who no longer do "real jobs", if they have regular employment at all, and in many cases, they have less education than their female peers. Also, women are not as dependent on them, financially, and so the dating scene seems out of balance to the historic "norm" they think it should be.
So they resort to all this stupid performative nonsense - and it really is nonsense - performative meat-eating, preparation of meat (smokers, barbeques, grills, etc.) and talking about "protein" all the time is one of the strongest indicators of just how stupid things have become. It serves as a fantastic proxy for a lot of it, if you ask me. Of course, it tends to cluster with other stupid behaviors like driving enormous vehicles modified to "roll coal" on other drivers, bikers, pedestrians, etc. Oh, and of course, performative gun ownership and voting Republican...
This is supposed to be masculine? Do they know the most petite, fragile and girly of women can do all these things, too?
Vote as though your life depends on it, because it fucking does!
The only people saying it's "in the bad" are other pollsters. The pollsters should just figure it out between themselves and leave us to do a Democracy.
It's not the pollsters...
It's people writing opinion pieces about polls.
Like always tho, it's important to remember a billionaire can pay for 100 polls and publish the 1 that agrees with them.
Like, from the article the polls and question are already counting Republican responses more, and at least one of the pollsters is a "Republican pollster:
And he flat out said "our only hope is this isn't real"
The only thing Republicans love more than being victims is being winners, if they think Dems are going to win state races, they'll invent reasons not to vote. Otherwise they'd have to vote and lose, they'd rather not "play".
They can win a majority but it won't do much, and then people will get mad they didn't fix everything they don't like and swing back to maga in '28. The road to Idiocracy is paved with repeating bad choices.
Lol. It never is.
Wtf is so confusing to everyone else though? Your wife beating neighbor isn't suddenly going to see the light. That person gets just as many rights as the rest of us.
The system is broken. The US cannot stand as a singular country anymore. The world is always going to fight and it's not always going to be our responsibility to police it. I don't want to be Team America World Police. Let this place gooooooooo. Let these territories make laws that better fit their societies instead of playing two sides of the same coin for eternity.
all those in PA remember one thing. If you vote for Frank Pastella and the rest of the republicans, you vote to let Pastella rape your kids. Vote no to Republikkkans like Frank Pastella to keep their dicks outside of your children's bodies.
I voted (whether or not it will "get lost" before arriving or somehow be invalid is yet to be seen), and everyone else who can should as well; I don't care what any pollsters are saying.
There should be a website about politicians, their history, their policies, what they actually voted for versus their stance. The democratic party has proven they're one side of the same coin, but there are still people out there trying to make a change.
Charles Crist is a prime example of being a Repulicrat and a Democran.
There is. It's called Track AIPAC But now AIPAC is changing a lot of their funding sources. I'm sure much more goes to our resident foreign paid agents through crypto too
I'll check it out; ironically I have to write a paper for class on special interest groups and yeah that's one of the two I picked.
Wish there was a government Wikipedia that lets you click through a represenative's/senator's committee assignments by person, that but backwards, see a person's voting history in an easy chart, dig around in issues, and who donated what to which candidate.
ballotpedia is pretty reliable but not quite as detailed as you're looking for
Well put. I didn't even think of the
bribesdonations. It's a lengthy process to research preliminaries.Voting record isn't as useful as you'd think. They tend to vote for policy they don't like when they don't have the numbers to stop it. Purely so they can take credit for a popular thing they fought against.
Tell me about. It's always fun to hear "70% voted in favor for this amendment, we will find a way to overrule this."
But a record (and a voting populace using that record) would also disincentivise such voting behavior, would it not?
Nope, you have it the wrong way around. They want to appear to be on the "right" side even when they've done everything they can to fight it. A clear record of how they voted (which is a good thing for plenty of other reasons) is just more incentive to vote the popular way when they can't win.
Democrat old guard will fight it tooth and nail. Vote early so you can hide MAGA momma's car keys on election day or unhook MAGA dad's car battery (and disconnect and hide the terminal wires too). Or just relax that day if you're fortunate enough to not have those types in your life.
My optimism for the midterms are bigger than the sun, and smaller than a grain of rice at the same time.
It's the Eff Off crowd. "🖕" MAGA.
It never is I wish this shit would stop because it makes people complacent and is actual bullshit. Also paired with the fact I’ve heard this before and it has been an absolute disaster. Don’t listen to the media just vote Dem so we don’t all get gassed in fucking ovens and if you think that is hyperbole you’re a fucking idiot.
Well I just checked and apparently we're gonna solve our problems this time by not voting just like last time...ya know because "both sides".
i think the real story is there will be a blue wave, or there won't be. 50:50 split here
We'll certainly have a stronger blue turnout than normal and likely a somewhat lesser red turnout than normal.
I think the idea of a wave is kinda of nebulous. We have a solid chance, but certainly no sure thing.
House will be strong dem, senate is a toss up, Republicans were still looking like they were going to keep it but they just keep sucking more and now may lose it too.
Even Kentucky might see a dem senator, Texas, where else, Alaska, many places that haven't seen one in a while.
But we would see them if we had true populists and norporate dems. But we don't. The only populists in the dem party are minorities from the big cities somehow.
I fear we're going to see another historical percentage of people abstain from voting.
Despite the way online conversation goes, we haven't really seen historically low voter participation rates. In fact, looking at the data for recent years we have actually seen fairly consistently higher percentage than historic rates by a little bit.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Most of the democrats suck so hard, people are only voting against the republicans, not for them.
Then with the cheating. Just as my man Abdul El Sayed or whatever said, we have to win by large margins to overcome that. That's what we've been saying for the last ten years though, and the establishment democrats have learned nothing. Or more accurately have learned that they can continue to fail upwards for personal benefit while the country burns.
Funny. That used to be the younger generations bc cellphones and not picking up in general. Now it's the older generations with their copper landlines?
Don't worry they'll find a way to blow it.
Especially after the cheating.
If this is the best they can come up with to spread FUD, I'm still feeling pretty good.
While probably true, referencing Trump's support in the years he was up for presidential election as a reason is pretty misleading as he's not on the ballot. Sure, in a sense his policies are, but its still not the same thing.
The only reason voters are voting blue is because the other person on the ballot is republican, either that, or the democrat is a dsa candidate
You are only going to make me vote harder.
The turdpublicans will just try to cheat anyways.
Elon is just gonna rig it like last time anyway
Say the line, Bart.
What will happen if it falls?
White liberals will kick the can down the road, allow MAGA to further steamroll their institutions, refuse to fight back, keep doing bullshit little parades every four months, and insist (while on their way to the camps) that all they REALLY need to do is just VOTE harder in 2028, because direct action is just SO UNCOUTH.
I been saying it. Republicans hold all the cards. They will hold onto both houses and maybe pick up a few seats.
If not, they'll just refuse to seat any Democrats, and take over that way. Either case, we're fucked.
I have a feeling the voting intention and numbers lean quite strongly blue, but the election will be subverted somehow or as you say, Democrats won’t be seated.
The left are going to ride the optimistic polls right into another "surprising" defeat because they'll convince each other they don't have to bother getting off their fat asses and going out to vote.
It's the slacktivist way.
Centrists will piss away their races fruitlessly trying to pander to Republicans. They'll blame their losses on progressives. They'll slander the progressives saying they didn't vote hard enough, even though the progressives vote harder than anyone. Centrists will never look in the mirror and ask themselves, "wait, if I throw minority groups under the bus, do I even deserve to win?"
I'm just so disillusioned with the Dems, I don't really care anymore. It's literal nazi's vs corporate sellouts. They can all get fucked.
Who could have predicted neoliberal ghouls whispering "at least I'm not the other guy" into voters ears like wormtongue would lead to Luke warm results!?