Current polling suggests Democrats' odds of taking the House are about 85%. Their odds of taking the Senate: 50%. The latter is a vast improvement over the odds as little as a year ago, when this was considered to be essentially impossible.
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@lauren I won't be surprised if the Democrats manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
@jjdavis They are trying with some of these far Left candidates, but sentiment is so strongly anti-Trump now that they may fail to lose this time.
@LabSpokane @jjdavis Individual polls can be very wrong, but over time the integration of polls conducted in statistically valid ways tend to be remarkably accurate. All the data coming through now represent such large numbers (in terms of polling differentials) that they are vastly outside the margin of error. There's a popular myth that polls are crap. That's just not true in the general case, though as I said, some are. There's a whole subfield of statistics that defines this stuff in a quite rigorous way.
@lauren @LabSpokane @jjdavis Sure polls can be valid. Statisticians don't have to lie. But in the modern era, such numbers are generated for profit. As with the rest of the infotainment industry, such exercises are not intended to arrive at reliable fact or factual the truth, but simply to satisfy the sponsors. After this commercial break, more on numbers!
@phaedral @LabSpokane @jjdavis You'll note I said statistically valid polls. BTW, as you may know, the seminal work on this topic is "How to Lie with Statistics" (1954). Still in print!
Does someone matched those polls with disenfranchisement data? Texas recently (according to Democracy Docket channel) removed over 1.2m voters. If fascists succeed at this pace in other states, odds re Senate are not at 50% but 50% minus percentage fascists will be able to cancel.
@ohir Registered voter polls are common.
