It's hard for the polls to tell us much right now

Sorry to keep y'all waiting. I wrote a longish Facebook post yesterday, and it took a lot out of me, because I was using my new keyboard with built-in weights. (It's kind of like those treadmill desks, makes it easy to get your reps in while you're working.) The post is about why the polls really and truly cannot tell us much about who's going to win when our recent presidential elections have come down to relatively small numbers of votes in a handful of states:

It's very hard for pollsters to get good information about voters at such a granular level. If you're a pollster, you know Wisconsin matters. But there are 6 million people in Wisconsin. In 2020, Biden won here by 20,000 votes. How do you predict what a third of a percent of a state's population is going to do? Even if you focus on registered voters, there are still 3.5 million of those. How do you predict what half a percent of your sample is going to do? Especially when they're scattered across the state and even outside it? On top of that, you can register to vote *at the polls* on Election Day in Wisconsin, and both parties will be working to register new voters up until those polls close. So if you just focused on registered voters, thousands of people will be voting who weren't in your sample.

There's just too much to account for. If you're a pollster, there just is no reliable, economical way to survey a large enough sample of Wisconsinites to determine what a fraction of a percentage of them will do.

The whole thing is here if you're interested.

Good to Know

At a Trump rally last night in Georgia, right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson openly fantasized about giving Kamala Harris a "vigorous spanking," which was creepy. Much has been made of the sexual overtones of the former Fox News host's speech, but I think the bigger deal is that he revealed the metaphor driving so much anger among conservative men. As Carlson put it, there's a sense among these guys that feminism, diversity, tolerance—it's all nonsense that Dad was willing to indulge for a while, but it's gone on too long. Now Dad expects you to knock it off and put him in charge of everything again. I have more to say about that, but do you think that's off-base?

This is an upsetting story about how an AI chatbot urged a teenager to kill himself. There are many good reasons to be opposed to AI (it's expensive, it's bad for the environment, it's built on copyright violations, and it doesn't work are some big ones), but this is also a good reason to be aware of how your kids are using the internet. It's stupidly easy for the human brain to get emotionally attached to a piece of software, if the piece of software sounds just like a real person to us. We can tell the difference intellectually, but feelings usually trump intellect.

And it looks like Elon Musk is not giving away $1 million prizes anymore? Earlier this week, we talked about Musk's convoluted scheme to drive voting for Trump in swing states, which included awarded a big daily cash prize to a voter chosen at random. He gave away two such prizes and hasn't given away any others. The Department of Justice warned him he might be violating election laws, and that seems to have spooked him. [Correction, October 25: Nope, he didn't stop after all.]

The Fun Part

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