UPDATED: Just A Bit About Polling

Well, not exactly about polling, but about electoral statistics and models for predicting results.

This is a topic I have absolutely no qualifications to discuss. But, yesterday I read a looong article by Sean Trende, who does have those qualifications: As Goes Washington, So Goes the Nation? I would never have dreamed of trying to summarize the article, but Don Surber has done it for us. Trende's point is basically that if you examine primary election voting patterns in Washington state over a period of years, those patterns tend to be pretty predictive for national elections.

So, this morning Surber digests the Trende article, and adds a bit that I wasn't aware of: that the "jungle primary" system was invented in the Dem Jim Crow South to disenfranchise Republicans in general and blacks in particular. Here's that summary, from his Highlights of the News:

ITEM 5: Sean Trende wrote, "As Goes Washington, So Goes the Nation? As early as 2010, I’d noticed that Washington state’s primary predicts November national outcomes fairly well. The idea is this: Washington has a primary where all the candidates run on a single ballot, with the top two advancing to the general election. The specifics have changed over time – in particular, the primary is held in August now rather than in September – but regardless, that unique format gives us a bit of a dry run as to how voting will go in the fall (California has a similar system, but its primary is held much earlier)."

This is the jungle primary that Democrats in the Confederate states created to disenfranchise Republicans and black people. Liberals have adopted it in recent decades.

He wrote, "The data for 2020 was genuinely surprising. I had expected that it would look like 2018, when Democrats won about 62% of the vote overall in the September primary. Instead, the Democrats’ performance this year was slightly worse than it was in 2016: They won about 55.2% of the vote in 2020 versus 56% in 2016."

Trende saw the 2010 Republican tsunami 6 months before it happened.

And as a bonus:

ITEM 6: A reader wrote, "Do you think it is just a coincidence that the number of people who believe that they are better off now than they were 4 years ago is the same percentage that think Trump will win? Hmmm."

That would be 56%. Double that Hmmm.

Finally, here's something to share with "woke" friends and relatives. It's an interesting insight into the liberal mindset. There's just gotta be more people thinking along this line. It's 47 minutes long. She gets to her "conversion story" beginning around the 25 minute mark:

UPDATE: John Hinderaker, in the first paragraphs of a longer blog, addresses the issues raised in ITEM 6, above, but at greater length:

When a president runs for re-election, a fundamental question is whether voters think their circumstances have gotten better during the past four years. Gallup asked this question a few days ago, and 56% of respondents say they and their families are better off today than they were four years ago.

That is a remarkable finding. Approaching the end of President Reagan’s first term, only 44% said they were better off. At the end of Obama’s first term, the figure was 45%. A president running in an environment where a solid majority have gotten better off during his first term should be cruising to an easy re-election, especially when Gallup also finds that voters are more likely to say they agree with Trump than with Biden on the issues.

And yet the polls tell us that Joe Biden is pulling away toward a possible landslide, while the Democrats may be poised to take control over the Senate. How can this be?

The answer could be that "this" doesn't be. That the mainstream polls really are biased, just like the ones that told that Hillary was, I forget exactly, 95% likely to win--right up to the last moment before the election was declared for Trump. Voter suppression gaslighting? Maybe.