r/politics • u/Murky-Site7468 • 6d ago

'Chill The F**k Out': John Fetterman Urges Democrats To Stick With Joe Biden | The Pennsylvania senator reminded panicked Democrats on Friday that he too had a bad debate once, yet he went on to win his Senate seat.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-debate-john-fetterman_n_667ea850e4b0415858d6a2f1
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u/wiifan55 6d ago

About 20% of voters say they have not picked a candidate in this year's presidential race, are leaning toward third-party options or might not vote at all in the Nov. 5 election, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/undecided-voters-await-biden-trump-debate-with-eye-economy-border-age-2024-06-20/

About 10% of swing state voters remain undecided, according to an April 2 poll from the Wall Street Journal. The poll, conducted between March 17 and 24, questioned 4,200 registered voters, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article287347900.html#storylink=cpy

Is your position that people are just lying on polls and aren't actually undecided? And do you have any data whatsoever to show undecided voters are fickle? Wouldn't the fact that they still identify as undecided after all of this time demonstrate the exact opposite of fickleness?

I understand the general premise of your position. I just don't think it's supported by anything other than your own subjective feelings about undecided voters and what their motivations must be.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

I'm not sure I understand how your take away from my stating I would like to see fundraising numbers and post-debate polling over the next few weeks instead of posting a knee-jerk reaction on the Internet eighteen hours after the debate is me being motivated by feelings, but OK, I guess.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

It looks like your last comment to me was removed (you may have deleted it, iono), so I couldn't respond in time, but I'll leave this here in any case.

I didn't walk anything back. From your own quotes from your own links: 10% of swing state voters (as of April) are undecided, and 20% of those, if we're going to cross-reference those two percentages (pairing them together as you did, I'm assuming you find that acceptable) are leaning toward third-party or might not vote at all, (those being pre-debate numbers mind). Let's say they're all telling the truth, or think they are. That's 2% of people. Can that make a difference in an election? Of course. Is it within a margin error? Again, yes. And that does beg the question of how much the results of the debate will actually matter in terms of moving the needle, especially considering of those undecideds, many didn't watch the debate (because literally only 48m people out of an electorate of 230m people watched the debate, showing a decrease in voter engagement across all groups by a substantial margin).

All of that is to say I don't think it is in any way "obtuse" to say that there is very little to be extrapolated regarding the state of a race four months out from the debate with what we have right now, especially amongst a rather fickle subset of people, other than to say it's too early to make assumptions about campaign viability, especially frantic ones, which is literally what I have been saying the whole time.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

I didn't walk anything back. From your own quotes from your own links: 10% of swing state voters (as of April) are undecided, and 20% of those, if we're going to cross-reference those two percentages (pairing them together as you did, I'm assuming you find that acceptable) are leaning toward third-party or might not vote at all, (those being pre-debate numbers mind). Let's say they're all telling the truth, or think they are. That's 2% of people.

Nah, this is faulty logic. 20% of all voters are undecided, and 10% of voters in swing states are undecided according to these polls. It's not 20% of 10% are undecided in swing states. They're independent polls measuring different things. My point was just to highlight that the pool of undecided voters is not small, as you previously suggested.

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u/builttopostthis6 6d ago

That's fair; I absolutely misread the first quote as "20% of voters that say they have not picked a candidate," which fundamentally changes the nature of that sentence and thus my extrapolation; that's my fault.

However, if you take the Reuters (20%) poll by itself, the logical move would be to compare that percentage of undecided voters to previous elections. This 538 analysis from 2019 references a study of the swing voter base at that point of around 30%, according to their measurement, of which they postulate about half (14%) are actually not legitimate undecided voters, but were undecided voters in name only.

Obviously we can't extrapolate too much from that, but we could say that there are fewer swing voters now than there were in the last election, and infer that therefore, there being less overall, there are less "real" undecideds now, and thus their votes will have less effect on this election. Which, again, I feel is probably a good cause for less panic.

Anyway, I'm tired and I'm going home. So yeah, again, have a good weekend.

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u/wiifan55 6d ago

Fair enough. Have a good weekend too!