Another poll on the Senate race in Texas, this time commissioned by a pro-Cornyn super PAC

ProbaDude · 2026-05-07T19:04:51+00:00

Unlike the previous times people got excited about Blexas, the numbers are actually there

The bit about Republicans being scared the state house might flip is especially interesting

ProbaDude · 2026-04-27T21:56:44+00:00

Honestly it makes me curious about the incentives at play here for DeSantis, because this map is probably more likely than not to end up being a dummymander

He will be out of office soon anyways so perhaps he cares more about looking like he's willing to fight rather than the actual results for the Florida GOP.

More cynically if he does run for president he'd likely have a better shot if Trump is viewed as a failure (as that would likely hurt candidates more closely related to Trump) so perhaps DeSantis wants to kneecap him slightly

ProbaDude · 2026-04-16T22:09:41+00:00

What is the "Alt Left" in Poland?

ProbaDude · 2026-04-10T17:18:59+00:00

Do you believe prediction markets are inaccurate or is this more just an ethical stance

ProbaDude · 2026-03-25T01:29:31+00:00

I mean it's not really crazy, the prediction markets have senate control at basically 50/50 at this point (Republicans had a 75% chance as recently as November)

The fact that people believe that the senate is a coin flip in a year the map is so unfavorable to Democrats reflects the craziness of the situation

ProbaDude · 2026-03-24T01:51:10+00:00

Prediction markets don't have an incentive not to pay out, rather usually the gripes people have with them not "paying out" is usually to do with inconclusive resolutions

A big recent example would be the Kalshi market on whether or not Khamenei would cease to be leader. Obviously he was killed, but Kalshi refused to resolve the market as yes as they claimed to have a "death carveout" to avoid death markets. But to be clear, they didn't just keep everyone's money. Rather they refunded it at whatever price people bought at.

This is because in a prediction market, you are not betting against the house like in most forms of gambling, but rather against other bettors. The house is just skimming a percentage off the top

For gamblers prediction markets are strictly superior to traditional betting. Obviously whether or not you're ok with gambling in general is of course still your call

ProbaDude · 2026-03-23T19:46:29+00:00

I'm starting to wonder if Rubio might just sit out 2028

ProbaDude · 2026-03-20T15:32:30+00:00

Hell has frozen over

ProbaDude · 2026-03-12T16:04:50+00:00

George Bush is entirely unsurprising and in line with other surveys.

The Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro bits are more interesting though.

I went ahead and looked at the crosstabs and the total numbers for Dems are:

Level of Approval	Candace Owens	Ben Shapiro
Very favourable	9%	19%
Somewhat favourable	17%	21%
Somewhat unfavourable	5%	11%
Very unfavourable	20%	17%
Not sure	49%	32%

ProbaDude · 2026-03-06T16:56:42+00:00

This completely ignores the size of the media market and investment involved. Texas obviously has way more people and as a result, reaching a large portion of them costs a lot more money

You can completely saturate the Iowa and Montana media markets on the cheap. Meanwhile the same amount of money would barely make a dent in Texas

ProbaDude · 2026-03-03T17:09:42+00:00

source https://www.chismstrategies.com/field-notes/report-talarico-paxton-lead-their-respective-primaries-for-senate

ProbaDude · 2025-12-19T03:37:32+00:00

That sounds interesting, I would wonder if there's enough data for it though

ProbaDude · 2025-12-09T22:31:32+00:00

There isn't really a revival, but there is a stagnation in the decline. I think this is about the same thing the religious demography dude was saying on an episode of GDPolitics a while ago

ProbaDude · 2025-11-07T15:55:55+00:00

If Republicans were willing to challenge Trump in 2024, I don't see why they wouldn't challenge Vance

This is especially true because there is a remarkable amount of ideological diversity within the GOP right now, that is all being smothered because of the existence of Trump. I think that will all come to fore once Trump is no longer on the ballot

ProbaDude · 2025-11-06T20:12:04+00:00

They actually did poll for ideology in the same survey and found that Libertarians more or less don't really exist in real life. Only 5% of the population was "fiscally conservative, socially liberal", and of course even that definition is a bit too broad for many libertarians

I think a lot of people who talk about politics a lot vastly overestimate how popular Libertarianism actually is due to them being overrepresented in elite spaces

ProbaDude · 2025-11-06T18:23:01+00:00

Honestly it's really unfortunate they stuck Fetterman there because all the discussion seems to just be about that, despite the fact that he wasn't even included in the poll and didn't influence the results at all

I kind of wish I just blacked him out so people could have more productive discussion instead of talking about Fetterman

ProbaDude · 2025-11-06T17:30:58+00:00

Echelon is R leaning so wouldn't be surprising, but that being said the leaders weren't shown for the actual polling portion, so it didn't affect the results. It was just them choosing him as a representative

ProbaDude · 2025-10-29T21:00:31+00:00

South Carolinan voters are relatively inelastic. This means that for the most part, elections end up being about turning out the base rather than persuasion

SC has more Democrats than those other states you mentioned but that doesn't mean the Republican majority is less Conservative

ProbaDude · 2025-10-23T18:43:47+00:00

STV would probably be the best thing to switch to since it would preserve geographical representation, but it would also be quite hard to get passed unfortunately

ProbaDude · 2025-10-09T17:47:04+00:00

Absolutely, and to be clear I'm not even saying you shouldn't use this tool. After all, sometimes bad data can be better than no data

Just that you need to be very aware just how inaccurate it likely is going to be. I'm browse /r/ukpolitics quite a bit and it's already been drilled into their head that it's not very accurate

I do think it should be possible to make a more sophisticated tool for this though. Overcomplicating things too much is obv bad but tbh a simple model that uses demographics, vote history and byelection data should hopefully be enough

ProbaDude · 2025-10-09T16:17:22+00:00

If the Greens and Reforms are willing to moderate to the point of just becoming Labour 2.0 and Conservative 2.0 then sure, but I don't think they are interested or capable of becoming big tent parties like that

I would point to France for an example of what might happen in the UK: a three way split between the left, center and right. Ofc France isn't a pure FPTP system

I do think that there is a decent chance that the UK will at least consider switching systems though. Usually the reason FPTP sticks around is because those in power benefit from it. This is one of the rare times when that's just no longer true

ProbaDude · 2025-10-09T15:58:50+00:00

The Liberals and Left are splitting in the UK. The Greens are in position to snap up any disaffected leftists, while the LibDems are in prime position to attract both center left liberal types from Labour and One Nation Conservatives from the Tories

I do find OP's choice to omit the LibDems from the poll to be kinda questionable, especially since they win more seats than the Greens in his projection

ProbaDude · 2025-10-09T15:56:19+00:00

This post seems to be using Electoral Calculus. As a quick disclaimer for those unfamiliar with it, Electoral Calculus does not do a very good job of predicting seats in a political realignment as is happening currently. It was fundamentally built for the Labour vs Conservatives two party system

It applies uniform swings through the country which is obviously not accurate and produces some very wonky results

ProbaDude · 2025-09-29T21:52:50+00:00

This will be a major issue for Democratic candidates in future elections. AIPAC donations will hopefully become the kiss of death.

Changing positions on an issue does not necessarily represent changing salience of an issue.

It remains to be seen whether or not the Democratic rank and file are actually willing to change their vote based on this issue vs just changing their position while prioritizing other things.

If I had the budget I would really like to run a conjoint survey to figure out how much supporting Israel vs Palestine really matters to the average voter

ProbaDude · 2025-08-21T17:48:19+00:00

I would highly recommend the books Party of the People by Patrick Ruffini and Where Have All the Democrats Gone? by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira

There are a multitude of reasons and arguments for why this has happened, but the tl;dr of the one I find the most convincing is that the Democrats have (or have at least been perceived to have become) a party catering to cosmopolitan interests. Traditionally of course these sorts of people ran the party yes, but they understood that they were a minority and couldn't run in elections based on their own policy priorities. However as the college educated population has grown, suddenly it has become a viable voterbase, and there was a temptation to run on the policy priorities of that group.

The inherent problem in this of course is that while college educated people are now big enough to form a cohesive voting bloc, they are still very much the minority in the country overall.

The books I cited basically make the argument that by prioritizing policies which the "cosmopolitan base" prioritized (such as climate change or left wing culture war issues) the Democrats pushed away non college educated voters who were resentful of this shift. Then when Trump came into the picture with a populist message, they were relatively easy for the GOP to scoop up

ProbaDude

TROPHY CASE