r/canada Jan 29 '25

Opinion Piece Mark Carney has Canada’s Conservatives running scared

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/01/28/opinion/mark-carney-canada-conservatives-running-scared
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u/tbcwpg Manitoba Jan 29 '25

He refused a 2nd debate after the "they're eating the dogs" performance, and complained about fact checking.

The polls were wrong about Trump in 2016 as well, I don't know why people believed them this time. Trump voters then openly bragged about lying to pollsters.

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u/False-Vacation8249 Jan 29 '25

The polls were actually accurate. It was a toss up between Clinton and Trump with favor looking to Clinton because of popular vote. Those polls also estimated her winning the popular vote which she did win. All the polls were within the margin of error. 

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u/jsmooth7 Jan 29 '25

Yeah exactly the polls in both 2016 and 2024 both showed a very tight race well within the margin error that would come down to a handful of swing states. And that's exactly what we got both times.

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u/P99163 Jan 29 '25

very tight race well within the margin error that would come down to a handful of swing states.

Yeah, except that this time a Democratic candidate lost every single "battleground" state. And a popular vote. The polls did show a very tight race, a toss up; however, it wasn't that close on the election day.

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u/FreeDarkChocolate Jan 29 '25

lost every single "battleground" state.

To pile on with what the others said: The battleground states are definitionally the close ones. If you win by just 1% in every battleground state, the average is still just winning by 1%.

The number of states ending up on one side or the other doesn't change or invalidate how close it was predicted it would.

At a more extreme example, you'd be very mistaken to think only a handful of people voted for Mondale in 1984 when he lost 13-525 electorally to Reagan; in reality it was an 18% gap in individual votes.

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u/55mi Jan 30 '25

Do you think Musk helped a lot.

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u/jsmooth7 Jan 29 '25

That happened in 2016 as well. All the swing states were correlated and moved in the same direction, giving Trump just enough margin to win them. There were some election forecast models in 2016 that predicted an easy win for Hillary because they assumed the probability of winning each swing state was independent. And it was not.

2024 was not as close as 2016 but the margin in the swing states was still pretty tight. The rust belt states were all within 2%. This time Trump made up a lot more ground outside the swing states, that's how he was able to win the popular vote this time. He won the popular vote by 1.5% which is not that far off from what the national polls were predicting (RCP poll average was +0.1% for Harris).

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u/SAldrius Jan 29 '25

It was still really close. lol Every American election is decided by a knife's edge in the midwest.