In a wide sense yes. But more importantly, polls are usually total garbage, with methodology and weighting that skews them to the point of uselessness. We've seen it several times before- Polls gave Hillary Clinton a 99% chance to win and overwhelming landslide victory for example.
Everything from 'polling cells vs land lines', 'rural vs urban', 'likely voters vs likely to skip', recency bias, polling people who live in non-battleground states, etc

I think even if you're a Democrat, you can see that Trump will win 100% if Dems aren't able to cheat. From Trump being shot and that picture of Trump pumping his fist looking like it's from the George Washington era, to Biden dropping out. Nothing is going in the Dems way.

The primary flaw in the NYT's 2016 model (Hillary 99% to win) was that it viewed state outcomes as independent events. Obviously they're not, and an accurate model needs to account for the fact that if Trump wins Ohio, he also has correspondingly better odds of winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Polls on the whole have not been bad. They tend to underestimate Trump's support, but whether that's a methodological flaw or an aspect of the "silent Trump voter" is anyone's guess.

For too long the Dems have positioned themselves as the opposite of Trump, and now you're hard pressed to actually name what their platform actually is. Obama was a master orator and promised change, and energized the masses. Biden basically won because Trump go blindsided by the Covid train and absorbed the fault as the incumbent (of course the media and Dems piled on) and because he framed himself as an extension of Obama.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if they actually would of made an effort to find a young energizing candidate like 1.5-2 years ago and started pumping his/her stock, they would have the edge this cycle. Instead the dumbasses doubled down and lied about Biden. Yes, lied, because most honest people saw his visible decline way before the debate. They need to take a break from the smear tactics, and sell hope/vision or whatever. Stop trying to tear down your opponent through various underhanded means, instead put out a vision.

You could say the exact same about Republicans btw, not saying it's a good thing just saying it's both sides doing it

Turnout variations between states aren't that dramatic. Nor is the overweighting of small rural states in the Electoral College.
What primarily drives the Trump-era edge of Republicans in the EC is the winner take all system in which Democrats are not rewarded with extra electoral votes if they win deep-blue coastal states like California or New York by stalinesque margins.

An interesting way to illustrate this was done in the NYT. In 2019, they looked at the results from the 2016 presidential election on the most granular level available, the level of voting precincts (generally a few blocks of houses):



The finding was that while Hillary received almost 3 million more votes than Trump, a majority of Americans lived in precincts won by Trump.
The red bars in this chart add up higher than the blue bars, but the center of mass of this chart lies in the blue region.




The tldr with regard to 2024 is that Trump most definitely still enjoys a significant advantage in the electoral college; if the national popular vote is tied, Trump should be a 60:40 to 75:25 favorite.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 24 2024 03:51pm

Democrats were more likely to voluntarily self-isolate or stay at home during their free time, and their voters are skewed toward office jobs which lend themselves to work-from-home. Therefore, pollsters calling random voters were more likely to reach Democrats than Republicans. Hence, the covid-era circumstances introduced partisan bias into the response rates and thus the polls. That's the reason why pollsters, thinking they had learned their lesson from 2016, ended up underestimating Trump yet again in 2020.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 24 2024 03:51pm

Not just covid. The Floyd protests and the 'summer of BLM' also significantly hurt Trump. And helped Democrats supercharging the black vote.
A major case of police violence and subsequent race riots is always disastrous for a Republican incumbent. This was further exacerbated in 2020 because the BLM craze caused Corporate America, Big Tech and the MSM to drop any pretense of partisan neutrality once and for all and explicitly align themselves with woke policies. Dito for squishy white suburbanites who were on the fence about Trump and then had another reason to break against him.

these people should not be allowed to vote if they hold any student loan debt above say $5,000.

i live amongst a few of them and they are the most insufferable wishy-washy people ever. literal over-educated quasi-parasites who somehow don’t get the irony that they’re so educated but cannot pay a bill they’re contractually obliged to.