IA-Selzer: Grassley +12

[MT Treasurer]

Best guess is Grassley +13, a "surprising" and "late" shift just like in 2016 and 2020. This stunt has become very predictable.

Close enough!

Alright. Back to Safe R.

lmao this was always Safe R

[MT Treasurer]

Best guess is Grassley +13, a "surprising" and "late" shift just like in 2016 and 2020. This stunt has become very predictable.

Close enough!

Alright. Back to Safe R.

lmao this was always Safe R

I moved my rating in response to the shock Selzer poll from about a month ago. Now Grassley is over 50 again, I adjusted accordingly.

This honestly reads like satire. Assuming it isn’t, maybe you should reconsider your overall approach rather than just letting poll margins dictate your predictions (esp. in cases in which said polls show rosy results for your party, which is of course most of the time) without paying attention to fundamentals such as state lean/trend and state demographics.

[MT Treasurer]

Look, fundamentals are important, but Selzer is Selzer.

"Look, fundamentals are important, but prestigious authority figures are prestigious authority figures. Who needs critical thinking when Nate Silver, Ann Selzer, and Jon Ralston can do the thinking for me?"

[MT Treasurer]

I trust Selzer over my priors about how a race is going to go. Maybe that was unwise. I have a history of overestimating more often than underestimating Ds here. I had Iowa as a Clinton state and expected Biden to make it closer. I in fact was among those who doubted her last poll in 2020, only for it to blow up in my face. I learned my lesson then...

The lesson you learned: Selzer is infallible. (a. Authority figure is even more prestigious and worthy of respect than I thought. b. Iowa's political lean is whatever that authority figure projects it is.)

The lesson you should have learned: One gold standard after another is going out of business, and while Selzer was relatively accurate in 2020, her approach isn’t immune to the same party coalition & societal changes which have made reliable polling an increasingly difficult and near-impossible endeavor. (I will keep an eye on her polls, but I won’t let them dictate my prediction — no polling is infallible, and polls are only one of many indicators to consider.)

Your "prestigious authority figures" line is just hamfisted. I do not place absolute trust in the likes of Ralston or Silver, actually...I think Ralston might be underestimating the importance of changes to the NV voting regime this time around, but that's the topic for another thread.

I’ve just noticed that this obsessive need to defer to and blindly trust 'established' and 'respectable' authorities of any kind is a very big problem on your side of the aisle, and it’s one the right doesn’t have, or certainly not to this extent. You (I mean "you" as a collective) have invested all these conventional models, traditional indicators (polls, special elections, etc.), and respected pundits/pollsters with so much authority that you’re no longer able to think independently. That is a big problem in any situation, but it’s particularly unhelpful when you’re trying to predict the outcome of an election, since the indicators you and the respected sources are relying on are increasingly flawed.

Am I going to predict Murray +1 and Welch +7 just because that’s what Trafalgar released? No. Do I care that some on the right consider Trafalgar a gold standard? No.