I’ve charted above the data from 538 showing what their model in 2016 and 2020 projected or projects for Trump.

In 2016 his probability in the model moved a lot – from as low as 12% ti as high as 48%, and ended up on 29% (and of course he won).

At this stage in 2016 he was seen at only 13% to win and today in 2020 he is at 28%, so you could argue their model has his twice as well placed as in 2016.

However I think the better argument is Trump is more of a known quantity now, and we just are not going to see the same volatility as in 2016. I doubt their model will ever have him below 20% or over say 40%. But time will tell.

The post-convention polls will be interesting but Nate Silver said the model has been designed not to give too much credence to them as any bounce from a convention tends to disappear within a week or two.

Stuff reports:

Parliament’s health select committee has rebuffed a request from National Party health spokesman Dr Shane Reti to summon Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield to answer questions about the latest Covid-19 incursion.

Reti wrote to the committee’s chairwoman, Labour MP Louisa Wall, asking the group to reconvene to question Bloomfield about the response to the most recent outbreak.

But Wall rebuffed the request, saying she had consulted with other MPs from the coalition parties who decided against it.

“Following your request, I consulted with government colleagues on the committee and have established that there is not a majority in favour of requesting Dr Bloomfield to appear before the committee,” Wall said.

There’s been a major failure between the Government and Ministry of Health with regards to testing frontline staff, and the Government won’t allow the DG of Health to be questioned at a select committee about this.

A very effective ad by Kimberly Klacik who is standing for the GOP in the 7th District in Maryland. She has no chance of winning the seat (it vote over 70% Democratic) but the ad has got lots of attention.

The Herald reports:

The Labour Party has posted an ad on Facebook featuring a visit by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to ESR and the national contact tracing centre, with a brief appearance by director general of health Ashley Bloomfield.

Act leader David Seymour described it is scandalous and that no public servants should be used to help political parties to campaign.

But a spokeswoman for Ardern said the advert did not break any rules, despite the decision later being taken to take the advert down for a re-edit.

“To even think it might be okay to go and use a Government department to shoot a political ad is just extraordinary,” Seymour said.

“One of the hallmarks of a democracy is you don’t get to use the power of Government for your own re-election.”

Wasn’t it the PM who said one shouldn’t politicise the Covid-19 response, and then goes and uses footage of the DG of Health in a campaign ad!

A reader who has first hand experience at the border has e-mailed me to share their strong support for National’s policy of having one agency in charge of the border, and has provided the following as to why this is necessary:

National’s new policy to delegate or create an agency to be in charge of the border is exactly what is needed right now. Here is a list of all the various agencies doing various different facets of border control, with insufficient overall leadership or governance from any single body. It’s no surprise that the virus has reemerged! 

1. The local DHB – in charge of the health response for their area. They provide nursing staff, wellbeing staff (they are generally hiring out-of-work air hostesses for this) and conduct testing. Each DHB has different testing labs and reporting methods. Further to this, each DHB has different roles and responsibilities depending on where in the country the facility is. Auckland has three different DHBs (Counties-Manakau DHB being the lead agency for the airport and some of the hotels, Auckland DHB for some of the other hotels, and Waitemata DHB for any staff coming from West Auckland or North of the Harbour Bridge) and has allocated various staff to be under the Auckland Regional Isolation and Quarantine Coordination Centre. Canterbury DHB has not submitted itself to the regional coordination centre and there is a unique dual-leadership structure in place there. And then Wellington, Hamilton and Rotorua have different arrangements again. 

2. NZDF – not actually in charge of anything, despite the assertion that ‘the troops have been sent in’ and Air Commodore Webb is sorting things out. Up until now, NZDF has simply been responsible for providing personnel to each hotel (was 4 personnel, now ramped up to 19), and a number of people to each regional coordination centre. No legislation has been used to give them any powers, for example the hotels have not been declared defence areas under the Defence Act 1990 which would give them substantial powers, including the ability to detain people trying to enter unlawfully. The military staff at each facility have been responsible for the logistics of accommodating the guests for 14 days. As just announced by the government, the NZDF commitment is going to increase substantially. The impact on normal training by the biggest military deployment since East Timor has not been articulated by the government. 

3. MBIE – was going to be ‘taking over’ in September or October, who knows what the progress of this is. Has only been involved in higher level stuff up until now despite supposedly being the lead agency and meant to be doing more from October, but they did have a hand in security arrangements. Their CEO is now in charge overall of the ‘All of Government Response’ – such as it is. 

4. Ministry of Health. From the get go, overwhelmed with mutiple operational tasks to do everything required of them. Probably quite predictable because they are not an operational ministry, they are a policy body. It’d be like getting the Ministry of Justice to do policing, or the Ministry of Defence to do combat operations! 

5. Private hotels – limited to providing the rooms, food and laundry. Contracted directly by the Ministry of Health in Wellington (skipping the regional coordination centres and local DHBs which causes significant friction). 

6. AVSEC – given a role to play early on in the piece because they had nothing else to do. They were responsible for two things – first was to capture all data on incoming travellers because customs / immigration and airlines would not share that info. So travellers would fill out an info sheet (manually, inevitably with errors), this would get scanned and then sent to a data entry team, who would enter it into an excel spreadsheet (again, manually, inevitably with errors) and then email it out to a gigantic distribution list. Massive privacy issues here, this has been tightened up somewhat, but it was a very wierd system. The second thing AvSec would do would be to provide 3 or 4 staff to each hotel as security. They are now withdrawing from this task. 

7. Private security companies. Variously contracted to do various things by each individual hotel, or by the DHB, or by MBIE. Basically to supplement AvSec, with varying standards of professionalism and competence. Now being replaced by NZDF.

8. Airlines. Air NZ would be contracted to charter flights between Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington up to two or three times a day. Multiple international flights into Auckland could not be mixed into a single ‘domestic transfer’ to another city, so sometimes there’d be only 20 or 30 people on an entire charter – costing about $30k a pop. They also needed a charter to return to Auckland at the end of their 14 days – huge costs!

9. Airport companies. Another link in the chain. 

10. Customs, immigration, MPI. Usual checks at the border for direct international flights – different in each region, so has resulted in various ad hoc arrangements depending on which airport is being used. 

11. Civil Defence – the initial response in March was done by Civil Defence, so some coordination centres are still using their IT systems, others are using NZDF or MoH or DHB or Avsec or MBIE – with the usual problems of trying to communicate between government departments each with their own IT systems, and privacy / security issues. 

12. Ministers reaching down for very low-level matters. There’s a fine line between checking up to make sure things are being done properly, and being distracted into micromanagement. 

13. NZ Police. Ended up being ordered to provide an officer to each hotel to sit there and do nothing. (A better solution might have been to have them on quick standby rather than have a few dozen cops at any one time sitting down at each hotel just in case something happened). More worrying was the lack of information about who was coming in until after they were there – criminals have been staying in hotels with no one being aware of their potential risk. 

14. Bus companies. Unsure who liaises with them to ensure testing is happening.  

15. Various other local authorities. Iwi own the Rotorua facilities, and needed to be engaged at various points. Local councils have a stake if neighbouring land is being used (for example for exercise yards)., Fire and Emergency NZ needed to be involved due to the unique considerations for evacuations, and no doubt there are others who have a finger in the pie. 

This government’s ad hoc approach of letting all these players and bodies do their own thing without any lead agency with the authority and responsibility to coordinate everything is not viable for long-term security. Appointing or creating a new agency to be in charge won’t cost much, but will go a long way to tie in all these different efforts. 

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous posts I described how the polls were wrong in 2016; what can be said about the accuracy of polls in 2020; the possibility of “shy Trumpers” distorting poll results and the “enthusiasm gap”.

Despite winning the popular vote by a 2.1 percent margin in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump through failure to win the individual states she needed in the Electoral College. Trump’s supporters are encouraged by this to hope that he can, once again, win the election, even if he gets fewer votes than Joe Biden (as polls are currently suggesting). There is good reason for their optimism in this regard.

But first, some background:

In 2016, Clinton won states worth 232 Electoral College votes. She needed 270 – 38 more than she actually got. The three closest states on Trump’s side were Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20) and Wisconsin (10) – together worth 46 votes. Trump won Wisconsin by 0.76%. Ergo, with a popular vote margin of 2.1% already, Clinton needed a margin of 2.9% of the popular vote to carry those three sates and thus the Electoral College.  

This was the fifth time in US history that a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the election (the others were in 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000). 2016 was not the most extreme example. The loser on all five occasions was a Democrat* and it is not surprising that Democrats wish the College abolished, or failing that, circumvented.

However, the tilt in the College does not always go that direction. In five of the last ten presidential elections it has actually favoured the Democrat candidate – most recently in 2012. The degree of tilt has usually been small. In six of those ten elections the tilt has been less than one percent. Only twice has it been greater than two percent, and the 2.9 percent tilt in 2016 was the highest in at least 40 years.

Will there again be a Trump-favouring tilt? Probably yes.  It has been a consistent feature of the polls that whatever the ups and downs of support for Trump or Biden, the polling margins in the key battleground states that Biden must win to take the election have been less favourable to him than in national polls.

The Economist’s election model gives Trump just a 4% chance of winning a plurality of the popular vote, but a 15% chance of winning the election, for precisely this reason. 

For example, on July 8, fivethirtyeight.com had Biden ahead nationally by 9.6%. But ahead in Pennsylvania by only 7.6% (that being the tipping point state on that day). If you subtracted 9.6% from Biden’s position in each state so that the national vote were a dead heat, Trump would win four of Biden’s must-win states and romp home in the Electoral College.  (Incidentally, that is not a sound method of prediction because of elasticity issues, but it is good enough to illustrate the point.)

With only a handful of polls in individual states, the averages there tend to bounce around a lot. So the size of the tilt has been erratic, and the identity of the tipping point state keeps changing. Sometimes it is Pennsylvania, sometimes Wisconsin, sometimes Florida, sometimes Arizona.

That said, five weeks later, on August 15, the result was effectively identical: Pennsylvania the tipping point state, with Biden holding a polling lead there exactly 2.0% less than his lead nationally.

It should be noted that fivethirtyeight.com claims that historical attempts to predict the degree and direction of tilt before each election have been notably unsuccessful. They were certainly unsuccessful in 2016. The final polls at that time picked New Hampshire to be the tipping point state, and picked that the vote there would exactly match that of the nation as a whole, so there would be no tilt in the Electoral College. 

In 2000, polls gave George W Bush a handy margin, triggering speculation that he might win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College. In the event, he did the opposite.

It is quite possible that the tilt in favour of Trump will be even bigger than it was in 2016. Political analyst Larry Sabato said in January he believes that Biden could get double the popular vote margin Clinton got, and still lose.

It is also possible it will reverse direction and favour Biden. But irregular observations of the state poll differentials so far are pretty consistent in suggesting a Trump tilt of about 2% – less than in 2016, but still among the highest in recent history.

* Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party existed in 1824. The loser of that year – Andrew Jackson, who had won a plurality of the popular vote – helped found the Democratic Party in response to the “corrupt bargain” that cost him the election. He went on to win in 1828 and 1832.  

Stuff reports:

High-profile insolvency practitioner and Stuff columnist Damien Grant is battling for his career, after having his application for a licence rejected because of 26-year-old fraud convictions.

From September 1, a new regulatory regime means all insolvency practitioners must be licenced by an accredited body.

Those who are not chartered accountants, such as Grant, must apply to the Restructuring, Insolvency and Turnaround Association of NZ (RITANZ) to be allowed to continue practising.

But, it is understood, Grant’s application was first rejected in June. He was then granted a review, at which it was rejected again on character grounds, because of his historical convictions.

Grant has credit card convictions from the late 1980s and a fraud conviction from when he was 26 in 1994, for his part in a share-dealing scam. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and served 16.

A requirement of the new licensing regime is that an applicant is a “fit and proper” person.

Grant has operated his business, Waterstone Insolvency, since 2006 but will not be able to continue as an insolvency practitioner without the licence. 

The decision by the Restructuring, Insolvency and Turnaround Association of NZ appears to be all about stopping competition, not historical convictions.

Grant’s convictions are from 26 years ago. He has done his time. He is very open about his past. I suspect 95% or more of his clients know about them, and they correctly deem it historical. He has been operating for 14 years without issue.

The real issue is that, as I understand it, Waterstone’s charges for their insolvency work are often significantly less than some of the big players, and the licensing regime is really a way to try and get rid of a competitor. They will deny this of course, but I can’t seriously buy that a conviction from 26 years ago makes someone unfit to do insolvency work.

Grant is seeking a judicial review. I hope he wins.

Lots of stories about Biden’s speech, with most Fox News commentators calling it very good.

My favourite part is just after ten minutes when he speaks to all those who have lost someone. It reminded me of when John Key spoke on the West Coast and addressed the kids who had lost a Dad at Pike River, and he reassured them that they will one day be happy and have good lives.

Newshub reports:

Millions of bees have starved to death after COVID-19 checkpoints in and out of Auckland caused a delay in beekeepers accessing their hives.

Wetex Kang of Waitakaruru Honey Limited says around 2.5 million bees died after workers were unable to travel from Waikato to Auckland to feed the bees.

Kang, who is based in Auckland, says many of his business’ 2000 beehives are scattered across the North Island, as are the staff who care for them.

He says although his beekeepers, who are based in Waikato, managed to access the hives in the first few days after alert level 3 was declared in Auckland, that changed after checkpoints became stricter.

After trying unsuccessfully to get to their hives located near Helensville numerous times over the weekend they eventually got through on Monday morning, but by then it was too late.

“We finally got to the bees and they were all dead,” Kang told Newshub.

He said 47 hives – adding up to approximately 2.5 million bees – had starved to death.

That’s appalling. The Greens are normally a strong voice on animal welfare issues. Are they calling for changes so this doesn’t happen again.

More proof that the Government inflexibility is having dire and real consequences.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous posts I described how the polls were wrong in 2016;  what can be said about the accuracy of polls in 2020; and whether polls are being distorted by a “shy Trumper” effect. 

There is of course, a lot more in the polls than just the headline numbers of how many are voting for who. There are other factors which may provide clues to deeper currents or to hidden truths. Two often-cited factors here are the related issues of relative enthusiasm and how many of the polls’ respondents will actually vote.

For example, a national survey, conducted in early June by SSRS for CNN, found that 7 in 10 Trump voters are voting to re-elect him primarily because they support him. But only 37% of Biden voters plan to cast a pro-Biden vote. Sixty percent are simply anti-Trump.

YouGov has similar results. They report 68% of Trump voters being “enthusiastic” about Trump. Only 31% say the same about Biden. That might result in more Trump voters being motivated to actually get out and vote than Biden voters.

The candidate who has led on enthusiasm (or a closely related question) has won every presidential election since 1988 (when Michael Dukakis had the more enthusiastic supporters, but lost to George H Bush).

But seizing on that as a predictive factor may be confusing cause and effect. Ultimately, a candidate is elected because he or she is more popular than their opponent. The very things which make them popular also make their supporters enthusiastic. And popularity creates enthusiasm: people like winners and will be less enthusiastic about their party’s candidate if it looks like they are going to lose.

What we see in 2020 is an unusual situation, where popularity and enthusiasm are out of sync.  But an enthusiasm gap is normal when an incumbent president is being challenged. Trump has had four years to unite his party behind him and fire up his base. Biden has barely had four months.  As the divisions of the primaries fade into the past and the general election looms, there is every chance that the “enthusiasm gap” will narrow.

It is also not clear that the huge enthusiasm among Biden’s supporters to eject Trump from his office is any less powerful than enthusiasm for Biden himself. There has probably never been an election in which so many voters were so powerfully fired up against one of the candidates.

Michael Tesler, at Fivethirtyeight, says the enthusiasm gap is mostly a myth. That’s because “while Biden voters may not be all that excited about voting for Biden, they’re very enthusiastic about voting against Trump. And that gives Biden a pretty strong edge, because Trump supporters don’t despise Biden the way they despised Hillary Clinton in 2016.” In fact, according to his research, when you combine the favourable ratings and the unfavourable for each candidate to get net ratings, it is Biden who has a huge advantage.

He goes on: “What’s especially notable here is that Biden’s net enthusiasm rating is near zero, which is similar to most major-party presidential candidates’ ratings from 1980 to 2012. Trump’s current score of around -20, on the other hand, has only one historical comparison other than his own campaign four years ago: Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Research by Abramowitz and McCoy suggests (sadly) that hatred is a more powerful political motivator than liking.

To some extent, tepid enthusiasm can also be the flipside of broad support. Biden has the latter, because he does not polarise people as much as Trump, and doesn’t repel them. Bernie Sanders’ supports were very enthusiastic, but he still got trounced, because Biden was more broadly acceptable. Political columnist Ed Kilgore observes: “Any ‘enthusiasm’ beyond that which is necessary to get a voter to the polls is pretty much wasted … you don’t get extra votes for being psyched out of your skull about your candidate.”

The question of enthusiasm feeds directly into the issue of the general adult population vs registered voters vs likely voters. Historically, those who support Republicans have been more reliable in getting registered and then actually voting than those who support Democrats.

To capture that effect, a good pollster will want to focus on likely voters, since the support of those who don’t vote doesn’t count.  But even the potential voters themselves cannot reliably say how likely they are to vote when an election is far away. So while LV polls are best, they only develop that value as the polling day nears.

Fivethirtyeight elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich observes: “Likely-voter polls tend to be a few points better for Republicans than registered-voter polls, and … we don’t have a ton of these polls right now.”

Two of the factors underlying that trend are the higher voting rates of Americans who are older, and those who are wealthier. Historically, these have been Republican-leaning groups. But Trump has changed that: polls have shown that old voting allegiances are inverting. Low-education blue-collar workers have flocked to Trump. But wealthier white-collar suburbanites are flocking the other way. For the first time in twenty years the Democrat is beating the Republican among older voters, while youth support has weakened. That might make Biden’s present support less vulnerable to the shift in polling towards those most likely to vote.

The third big factor in voting likelihood is colour – and Trump’s support remains overwhelmingly white.  But recent events, and Trump’s reaction to them, could well reduce the turnout gap. It would not be at all surprising if Black Americans were to feel extra-motivated this year.

Curiously, however, CNN analyst Harry Enten reports  that recent events seem to have made no difference to the level of Black support for Trump. While that is small – Biden leads here 83-8, that is slightly smaller than Clinton’s lead in 2016 polls, and was unchanged from the position three months before.

This brings us to another point: turnout. In 2016 this was 55.7% – very low by New Zealand standards, but not by US ones. It was the second-highest turnout in 50 years.

In November 2018, the BBC reported: “Preliminary figures for nationwide turnout in the 2018 mid-term elections are in, and they’ve reached a mark not seen in more than a century. Across the US, 49.2% of the voting age public cast ballots. In 2014 that number was 37%, and the average over the last few decades has hovered around 40%.” Final figures put the turnout at 50.3%.

The Atlantic reports that “…strategists in both parties and academic experts are now bracing for what Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior, recently called a voter turnout storm of a century in 2020.’.”

That suggests (probably thanks to Trump himself) that the chances of people with an opinion simply staying home on November 3 might be a little less than it has been in the past. 

In summary, there are plenty of reasons to imagine that current polling might be underestimating support for Trump. But none of those reasons are certainties. The track record of polling in the US is actually very good: even in 2016 the polls were far closer to the results than they are given credit for and there has also been no consistent anti-Republican bias.

Polls in 2020 might be wrong. Indeed, mathematics alone predicts that they will be! But they are unlikely to be dramatically wrong. That means that Trump will almost certainly need to close the present gap in order to get re-elected.  The final post in this series will examine Trump’s potential advantage in the Electoral College – which could effectively reduce that gap.

Stuff reports:

A poster on a Christchurch shop depicting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern alongside Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and another with her carrying a gun and have caused “outrage”.

One Christchurch resident, who declined to be named, called police on Wednesday morning after coming across two posters on the shop windows at Motorcycle Imports Direct on Tuam St.

In one of the posters seen by Stuff, Ardern’s face had been photoshopped onto an image of a police officer wearing a hijab holding a semi-automatic rifle. The words referred to New Zealand being a “police state”.

Another poster depicted Hitler, Ardern, Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler and Health Minister Chris Hipkins.

The posters, as described, are deeply offensive, puerile and even vile. Those responsible for them should bear the reputational consequences of making them or promoting them.

But the posters have nothing to do with the Police, and the person who complained to them about to the Police ironically makes the case for one of the posters – a Police state is one in which the Police decide on what type of political posters can be shown.

Just because people find something offensive doesn’t mean it is illegal. I find communism offensive, but I don’t think posters of Che Guevara should be banned and people arrested for having them.

Again the posters are offensive, puerile and vile. But the consequences for promoting them should be reputational not legal.

The number of dead in the US has now reached 176,000 and shows no sign of slowing down. This is very unlike other countries that have high death rates. In the last month the increase in the number of deaths has been:

• US 24.5%
• Sweden 3.0%
• Belgium 1.5%
• Italy 1.1%
• France 0.9%
• Spain 0.8%

Every other first world country has managed to slow the rate of infection and death. The US is in a league of its own.

I think it is inevitable the US will reach 250,000.

Newshub reports:

Health Minister Chris Hipkins admits he hasn’t read the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 testing strategy.

It comes after Newshub revealed on Wednesday the Government was told testing all border workers was “not thought to be viable” – advice sitting in plain sight in the Ministry of Health’s official testing strategy. 

Newshub asked Hipkins on Thursday if he had read the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 testing strategy and he admitted he hadn’t. 

He’s the Minister of Health during a pandemic and he hasn’t read his own Ministry’s testing strategy!

He said he had only read the Government’s testing strategy.

“I’ve read the Government’s testing strategy,” he said. “I haven’t seen the information that the Ministry of Health has prepared.” 

And now he says that the Ministry of Health’s testing strategy is somehow different to the Government’s testing strategy. A new level of Mickey Mouse. How can the Government have a different testing strategy to the Ministry of Health that implements it?

National has released its plans for secure borders in the fight against Covid-19. Their main points are:

• Establishing a dedicated NZ Border Protection Agency which would oversee the work done by Customs, Immigration, Av Sec, MPI and more
• Requiring inbound travellers to provide evidence of a negative Covid-19 test before arrival in NZ
• Pre-boarding thermal imaging and again at points of entry
• Compulsory contact tracing for border workers and other frontline staff
• Rapid deployment of a bluetooth contact tracing system
• A test on demand system with a maximum 60 minute wait

Some of this stuff should have occurred months ago such as thermal imaging at airports. People have a choice about voting for the status qup or voting for a more secure border.

A guest post by Stephen Russell:

In my previous posts I described how the polls were wrong in 2016; what can be said about the accuracy of polls in 2020. This post addresses the specific issue of “shy Trumpers”. 

As Biden’s reported polling lead grew in June, Trump enthusiasts suggested that Trump voters’ reluctance to declare their choice to someone in the face of the storm of criticism carried by the mainstream media is distorting the results. This is sometimes called a social desirability bias. It would typically take the form of Trump voters being more likely to decline participation in the poll, or equivocating about their real choice. Since the average response rate for polls in the US these days is only around 33%, clearly not all non-responders are Trump voters. But they might be over-represented.

A Monmouth University poll of Pennsylvania voters published on July 15 included a question on this issue. It found that, remarkably, “most voters (57%) believe there are a number of so-called secret voters in their communities who support Trump but won’t tell anyone about it.” And despite that poll giving Biden a 13-point lead in the state, most voters believed (by 46% to 45%) that Trump will win the state.

So the shy Trumper theory is not unreasonable. Anecdotal evidence certainly proves that such voters exist. And there are many historical examples of the effect worldwide – or at least cases where this effect is widely believed to account for a difference between polls and results.  It is, or course, hard to prove either way.

It is not a new theory either. Research Group Morning Consult found in December 2015 (the pre-primary period) that Trump polled six percent better in an internet poll than in a live caller poll. The post-election AAPOR analysis found evidence of this and cited it as a factor in the discrepancy between polls and the result. But the AAPOR also claimed that some tests for this effect failed to find evidence. 

Pollsters are not blind to the danger. Bradley Honan of Democratic pollster Honan Strategy Group addresses the issue directly here, and explains how pollsters can compensate for it. It is also addressed in a July 22 Fivethirtyeight podcast here – though the participants in that discussion largely dismiss the idea.

Philip Bump, of the Washington Post, wrote about the issue in mid-May, and observed that if the theory held water there would – as in the Morning Consult research – be a divergence between the results of live-calling polls and online polls. But, he claims, “There’s no significant difference between the two methodologies in general election polls conducted this year.”

Unfortunately for Bump, his own data (presented in a very revealing graph) partly undermines his claim.  At the start of the year, the online polls were actually more favourable to Biden. Since then, both methodologies have seen Biden grow his lead. But it has grown more in live-caller polls and at the time Bump wrote those were giving him results about two percent better than online polls. Growing shyness among Trump voters?

Trafalgar Group pollster Robert Cahaly rejects the idea that pollsters have learned their lesson, and says that he has noticed a significant upsurge in shy-Trumpers in his polling. Trafalgar Group is a Republican polling organisation and according to Fivethirtyeight, has a small pro-Republican bias (compared to actual election results). It gained big kudos for correctly picking Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania (though by bigger margins than actually eventuated).

Cahaly insists that people are more hesitant to tell pollsters who they’re voting for today than they were in 2016 because we live in a society in which “people get penalized for their opinions.” Trafalgar has various mechanisms to tease out real preferences from the shy – although he is reluctant to give specifics.  “I can tell you looking internally I think there is a significant amount of people for Trump” in the undecided or third-party category, he said.

As a result, Trafalgar’s state polls are producing the most Trump-friendly results of any public pollster – about 5% better than the average. But even this is not enough to call the election for Trump. Trafalgar’s July 5 Pennsylvania poll for example, gave Biden a 5% lead, likewise in Minnesota on July 27. Trafalgar reported a tie in Florida on July 2 and a Trump lead of 1.4% in Arizona on August 10, the only poll to give Trump a lead there since June. But neither of those two states are must-wins for Biden. Cahally said on June 29 that the general election was “too close to call”.

Cahaly is not the only one to think the social desirability effect is in play: Politico reports a number of other pollsters thinking on similar lines.

“I would say that most, if not all, of the concerns that we expressed still hold — some to a lesser degree,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of research at the Pew Research Center and lead author of the polling industry’s post-2016 autopsy. “But I think some of the fundamental, structural challenges that came to a head in 2016 are still in place in 2020.”

With all that said, the fact is that the final 2016 poll averages were only 1 to 1.5% wrong in picking the national popular vote. That suggests that the pollsters did, for the most part, know what they were doing. And probably still do.

Also, it is hard to reconcile a large shy-Trump effect with results of congressional generic ballot polls and Senate polls. These have been giving results that are often  worse for Republicans than the presidential ballot polls, despite not involving Trump himself. 

Despite this, some Trump enthusiasts, reacting to polls showing Biden ahead, claim that many pollsters are in fact not trying to get an accurate read of voter sentiment and are manufacturing propaganda. Trump himself has insisted that he is not losing, and denounced the polls as “fake”. 

But all the polls have him behind Biden – even those conducted by Republican pollsters, and those with a consistent record of over-predicting the Republican vote. The last published poll to put him ahead nationally was in February. And unless this is an entirely new phenomenon, that does not jibe with the fact that – overall – there has been no consistent historical polling bias in favour of either party.

As recently as 2018, Gubernatorial and Senate polls in the three weeks before the vote significantly overestimated Republican support (House polls were a lot better); and in 2012 an average of polls in the week before the election had Barrack Obama winning by 1.2 percentage points. He actually beat Mitt Romney by 3.9 points – a much bigger error than 2016.

Some say that polls are growing less and less accurate and point to some high profile failures, but a study by Will Jennings, University of Southampton and Christopher Wlezien, University of Texas at Austin, of 26,000 polls from 338 elections in 45 countries since 1942 found “…recent performance of polls has not been outside the ordinary, and that if anything polling errors are getting smaller not bigger.”

NOTE: The next post in this series will consider the “enthusiasm gap”.

Tino Caer writes at Medium:

A couple of days ago, the city of Las Vegas gave Elon Musk’s Boring Company the green light to begin the expansion of their underground highway system called “The Loop.” Musk and his team have ambitious plans for The Loop. Not only does Musk see it as the future of urban commuting, but he also believes that it will serve as the stepping stone for his other project, Hyperloop. …

Vehicles will be able to travel at a maximum speed of 150mph. That is over double the current maximum speed of most train systems, which travel at a measly 65mph. So in an ideal world, you will be arriving at your destination in half the time of the subway.

More importantly, vehicles will not have to stop at each station. Since all passengers in one car will be heading to the same destination, it will not have to make unnecessary stops along the way. This helps make an already quicker commute even quicker. Subways that have to stop almost every couple of blocks will not be able to compete with such a system.

That will be amazing. A 240 km/hr trip with no stopping between pickup and destination.

Derek Cheng writes:

How can lightning strike twice over Government failures at the border?

Yesterday the value of mandatory testing of border-facing workers was underlined by the positive result of the maintenance worker at Rydges Hotel.

Who knows how many people he might have infected – and how many they might have infected – if he hadn’t been tested?

A narrow escape, by good luck rather than good management.

This all has a horrible sense of déjà vu.

Daily health checks were also not done properly on two Covid-infected sisters, one of whom had symptoms. A thorough check might have seen their application for early leave rejected. Instead they were allowed to drive to Wellington.

In all of these cases, communities were unnecessarily put at risk.

So why is there – still – a giant chasm between what the Government says is happening and what the ministry is doing?

I think people are understanding that one can be very skillful at certain things such as holding press conferences, but very bad at other things such as implementation.

PM Jacinda Ardern repeatedly gave the impression this was being done, including last Thursday when she said workers at the Jet Park Hotel were being tested once a week, while other workers were tested on “a slightly longer rotation”.

Those comments have since been exposed as completely untrue.

And in fact Ministers signed off on a strategy which said it was not possible to regularly test frontline workers, yet they announced they would be in contradiction of their own strategy.

If border-facing workers had been regularly tested, it may well have made a difference or even prevented the enormous price that the country, and Auckland in particular, is now paying.

The 1st lockdown was not really preventable, but the second one very likely was preventable.

Barry Soper writes:

Hats off to Andrew Borrowdale. Who is he, you may well ask? He’s a Wellington lawyer – in fact he used to write laws for Parliament.

He was so agitated about the lack of legal grunt behind the country being locked down on March 26 that he took a case to the High Court to challenge it – and today he won.

Borrowdale didn’t argue about the wisdom of people staying at home, but he did argue about the Government’s right to order them to do so.

His view was reinforced by a Crown Law Office opinion, that he didn’t see before mounting his challenge, circulated to interested parties. The police top brass saw it and warned its officers that if they arrested people for being out and about during the first nine days of the lockdown they could be skating on thin ice.

The court ruling has surely thawed the ice, and those who were arrested by the cops in the first nine days could now have a case for wrongful arrest.

The High Court bench of three justices found that for the first nine days of the lockdown the Government’s requirement that Kiwis stay at home was justified – but unlawful.

Yes the Government made a series of announcements that were illegal. Will any heads roll for this? Of course not.

The level of incompetence here is quite staggering because the Government had all the powers it needed to enforce a lockdown. The Court ruled that the law allowed the Government to implement a lockdown.

The problem is none of the geniuses in Government thought for the first nine days that they should do anything more than hold press conferences and make press releases about what they wanted New Zealanders to do. They didn’t even bother to get a legal order backing up their statements.

If what they did on Day 9, they had done on Day 1, then everything would have been fine. But somehow the Attorney-General and others never thought about the need to actually follow the law as set down under the Acts of Parliament that specifically existed for a situation like this.

When the legality was initially questioned by Newstalk ZB and the Herald, Attorney-General David Parker took to Facebook for the best part of an hour, telling us what they’d done had the full backing of Crown Law (an opinion that was never released).

Parker said there were plenty of commentators poring over every comment being made by the Prime Minister, the Director-General of Health and himself, but he insisted they were right. It turns out they were wrong.

Responding to the court’s decision today, Parker conceded the new law should have been written earlier.

Perhaps it would have helped if they actually knew what they were doing before they acted unlawfully.

Parker did a propaganda rant on Facebook rather than actually ensure the law was being followed.

A really interesting article at Politico on Obama and Biden. Basically it looks at how Obama was somewhat reluctant of a Biden candidacy, but also very much about how they have very different political styles.

There is a lot of focus on how Biden can be so, well, unfocused. But also about his ability to negotiate:

Aides recall that Obama and Biden took almost polar-opposite approaches to policymaking, Obama always seeking data forthe most logical or efficient outcome, while Biden told stories about how a bill would affect the working-class guy in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. When a deal was finally made, Obama would bemoan the compromises, while Biden would celebrate the points of agreement.

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Republicans who negotiated with the administration often came away finding Obama condescending and relying on Biden to understand their concerns.

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.”

A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.” The person added that Biden “may not be sitting down talking about Thucydides but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a high level of political intelligence.”

I’ve read many articles that have said much the same – Obama was too lecturing to the Republicans to get an agreement, but Biden could.

Things are even more polarised today, so if Biden does win and the GOP retain the Senate, will be fascinating to see what they can agree on.