President Donald Trump questioned the honesty of the election Monday morning, pointing to early-vote totals and declaring that voting machines were “far more important than the voter.”
In a Truth Social post displayed at 10:07 a.m., Trump wrote: “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???”
He went on to claim that some early voting “dumps” were so large that “it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote.”
“It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!” Trump wrote, signing the message “President DJT.”
The post did not identify a specific state, race, voting-machine system or alleged incident. Trump did not provide evidence in the message to support his suggestion that the election was dishonest.
The statement also did not announce a legal challenge or name any election official accused of wrongdoing.
Have you seen a bigger sore loser in your life? Last week he’s saying that the polls have no idea what they’re talking about. Now the election was stolen again because how can the polls have been so off…
This is an extraordinary display of objective critical thinking!
A super genius indeed!
When he wins the polls can be worn when he looses they can’t be and also they weren’t so wrong
I know I shouldn’t give any critical response to a thing Trump said, because we really aren’t playing the same game. But for whatever reason, there are those who listen to him, so I’ll address them.
There are two main points, the polls weren’t that off, and polls have implicit bias to the past.
First off, the Times/Siena poll released on November 3rd, which is a gold standard poll, pretty much matches what happened. They were off about 0-5% for most states, with a mean error of about 2.5%. This is well within the margins of error, and so the polls were reliable.
Second, there’s a lot of selection bias when making a poll. You are more likely to get responses from some groups than others. Or some groups may have more turnout than other groups. Therefore, you have to guess which group a particular sample falls into, and then weight that group accordingly.
However, it’s difficult to get those weights just right. What you do is, is take the numbers and say, if the last vote had these numbers what would the result be. Or in other words, you take the last voting session data and adjust the weights to force those polls to be accurate, and then you reuse the weights.
However, then isn’t now. So say, if you polled a group that had 50% turnout, there no guarantee that it will stay 50%. Of course, part of the polling is to figure out those shifts, but some error, will always creep in.
Therefore, polls will always be biased towards historical trends, and don’t react well if there is a fundamental shift in voter mentality. Like, say of example, voters who see a president who does his best at every turn, to only do what’s good for himself at the expense of anyone else.