this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
134 points (89.9% liked)

News

23387 readers
3369 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Some California House Democrats don’t want the process to replace the president on the ticket to seem like a Kamala Harris coronation.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Drusas@kbin.run 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does. Nobody has ever been a big fan of Kamala Harris. She's not popular based on actions or personality, she's a cop, she's a woman, and she's not white.

If the intention is to truly get someone who will win more reliably than Biden, it's going to have to be another old white guy. Or at least a white guy.

It sucks, but that's where we are.

[–] whostosay@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I agree it's not Harris, but to say we need yet another unrelatable motherfucker to replace this already old unrelatable motherfucker is not correct.

[–] Drusas@kbin.run 1 points 4 months ago

I'm not saying it's what we need. I'm saying it's what would actually succeed. And I agree it's a problem.

[–] tal 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Kamala Harris has less chance of winning than Biden does.

These guys tried to quantify it based on the limited poll information that we have available:

https://abcnews.go.com/538/kamala-harris-stronger-candidate-biden/story?id=111656941

Let’s get one caveat out of the way: We don’t have that many public polls testing Harris against Trump. From April 1 through July 2, just over a dozen polls asked about this alternative matchup. But we do have polls from all the major swing states, thanks largely to tracking from Morning Consult, and we have enough national surveys to calculate a Harris-versus-Trump national polling average — and thus to forecast how she would perform in states without any polls.

For the most part, national polls have shown Harris doing about the same as Biden in head-to-head polls against Trump. In a March Fox News poll for example, Trump led Harris by 6 points and Biden by 5 points (well within the survey’s margin of error). And as recently as June 28, a Data for Progress poll showed the president and vice president each losing to Trump by 3 points (also within the margin of error). That said, a June 28-30 CNN/SSRS poll found Harris losing to Trump by only 2 points while Biden was trailing by 6. This was also within the margin of error but was nonetheless a bigger gap and could mark the beginning of a shift for Harris.

When we plug all these polls into a polls-only version of the 538 forecasting model — which jettisons the economic and political priors our full model uses, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates — Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100. On a state-by-state level, Biden looks stronger than Harris in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Harris’s odds are higher than Biden’s in Nevada.

Harris also does slightly better than Biden in our forecast of the national popular vote. The model forecasts that Trump would outpace Harris nationally by 1.5 points, while he would outrun Biden by 2.1 points. However, this could be an artifact of our model not having any Harris-versus-Trump polls that include independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who tends to take slightly more votes away from Democrats than Republicans when included in a poll.

However, Harris’s popular-vote edge is almost entirely negated by the bigger Electoral College bias against her. In our polls-only forecast pairing Biden against Trump, the Democratic candidate needs to win the popular vote by just 1.1 points to win the presidency. That’s thanks to Biden doing better in Pennsylvania, the likeliest tipping-point state in our model. Harris, by contrast, would need to win the popular vote by 3.5-4 points to win Pennsylvania and, with it, the Electoral College.

However, whether Harris would truly be a stronger candidate than Biden also depends on information besides the polls. In our full forecast model — which includes a variety of non-polling economic and political variables, which we call the “fundamentals” — Harris does much worse than Biden across the board. Whereas Biden has a 48-in-100 chance to win the Electoral College, Harris has only a 31-in-100 chance.

This is thanks in large part to the boost our model confers on Biden as the incumbent president, which is worth an extra point for Biden over Harris in our fundamentals-only forecast of the national popular vote. However, one factor our model does not consider is whether presidents’ approval rating and economic growth impact incumbents running for reelection more than non-incumbents running from the same party, and that may actually push Harris’s numbers over Biden’s. In other words, your mileage may vary depending on how much you believe that Biden should get a boost because he’s the sitting president. There is no objectively correct answer here; one of the reasons election forecasting is hard is that it requires judgment calls like these.

[–] girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, I think the only way out of this hole is going Harris-Sanders. I think a lot more would jump on board then.

[–] tal 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

In my other comment responding to this parent comment, I linked to an article where Five Thirty Eight was doing statistical analysis on Harris's potential performance: and they said that both Harris and Biden were hurt by being insufficiently moderate and doing poorly with moderates. But even aside from that, my expectation is that if the Democratic Party picks a candidate with the explicit goal of winning the general election, it's most-likely going to be, if anything and given the freedom to do so, shifting more-centrist from where things are today, not further to the left. The primary system will tend to pick candidates that are further from the center than would be an optimal choice from a strategic voting standpoint, since you want a candidate that will win (which includes appealing to swing voters), not the most-favored candidate by voters who vote in the party primary.

I would assume that the party would further optimize to win in the Electoral College, so from a party-chosen candidate, I'd expect to see someone that would disproportionately look like what a swing voter in a swing state would want. You'd want someone that would look good to someone who is undecided between the Republican and Democratic ticket in Michigan or Wisconsin, say. A purple voter in a purple state.

[–] aodhsishaj@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

I wouldn't put too much stock in 538, they've been wrong more often than right since Obama

[–] MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 months ago

Nothing you said above was incorrect as far as I know, but it sure as fuck was depressing.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

She's polling better than Biden

[–] Drusas@kbin.run 1 points 4 months ago

Among whom, though?

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago

Random dude picked from the street would poll better than him