• AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    Hey, first of all sorry for being a nitpicky statistics nerd. I hope this doesn’t come off as debate pervertry, pedantry and the like, but i want to clarify a few things.

    Their core point is that Harris didn’t lose the swing states because of absent former Biden voters, but because Trump mobilized voters that didn’t vote for him in 2020. Harris lost 79,000 voters there, Trump won 810,000. The Biden 2020 voters who didn’t go to the polls because of Gaza wouldn’t have been enough to change that result, because while Harris lost a lot of these throughout the country, she barely lost any in the battleground states. Beating Trump’s mobilization of new voters there would have required successful mobilization of people who didn’t vote Biden in 2020.

    And these people are simply not represented in the dataset. People who usually don’t vote would have been interesting, first time voters would have been interesting, people who could have voted for the first time but didn’t go to the polls would have been interesting and the latter two in particular might have been won over by a convincing anti-genocide stance. Maybe enough to flip the election, the tendency shown by the results of this survey and the opinion of young people on Gaza absolutely make that a plausible assumption. That’s were i disagree with the person you’re replying to, we can’t rule out this issue was decisive. But they’re correct that this survery doesn’t prove that it was, because it looks entirely at people who voted Biden and didn’t vote Harris.