Should we trust the decision of Biden's campaign more?

[ProgressiveModerate]

In 2020 for instance, in hindsight it seems like both campaigns had a better understanding of the true electoral picture than most pundits ever did. This could be seen in a state like Nevada which got relatively a lot of spending in 2020 even as most pundits wrote it off as likely D - the state ended only voting for Biden by 2% and swung right from 2016. It seems like both Biden and Trump teams knew it was in play.

In a recent 2024 thread, I saw some people complain about the Biden campaign spending money in Florida and Texas - but why don't we just trust the campaign knows what they're doing and is doing this because they believe it'll be a good investment, likely based on a lot of data and research that isn't available to us. It might not even be to win the state Presidentially but rather to try and win some other downballot races - we saw something similar where both campaigns spent a decent amount on Maine media markets for the Senate race.

Why do we - random folks on a political forum mostly with no real political experience act like we know better?

[ProgressiveModerate]

One small update; Becca Siegel someone high up in the Biden campaign claimed this was the Biden’s campaigns final 2020 forecast in key states which is honestly eerily accurate. The x-axis is Biden’s share of the 2 party vote.

Notice the large variance in the variance of the distributions - apparently this is due to some states like GA and AZ having more helpful voter info stats than WI which it sounds like has almost nothing. Was a really interesting talk, and like how she said it’s not about what states can we win or do we need to win, but what states increase our odds of winning the most?

[ProgressiveModerate]

One small update; Becca Siegel someone high up in the Biden campaign claimed this was the Biden’s campaigns final 2020 forecast in key states which is honestly eerily accurate. The x-axis is Biden’s share of the 2 party vote.

Notice the large variance in the variance of the distributions - apparently this is due to some states like GA and AZ having more helpful voter info stats than WI which it sounds like has almost nothing. Was a really interesting talk, and like how she said it’s not about what states can we win or do we need to win, but what states increase our odds of winning the most?

What’s the height of the mean here?

Basically it’s the likelihood of a given outcome. In CO, their models were pretty “confident” about Biden getting 57% in a head-to-head with Trump. In Iowa, their models weren’t as “confident” and thus the likelihoods of given outcomes were seen as less predictable while expecting a range of about 42-48% for Biden in a head-to-head.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these graphs also tell you not only by how much you expect Biden to get, but also what his odds of winning are. Add up all the area under the curve on each side of 50% to get the odds for each candidate. They were basically 100% sure that Biden would win Colorado, they saw Arizona and Georgia as basically pure toss-ups, and they saw Ohio as very much a long shot.

Given that I’m assuming these graphs were from a Bayesian statistics-based simulation, “confidence” isn’t really an appropriate word.

Yep good explainer. I would area under all these curves should be equal and represents all the possible outcomes. What strikes me though is the huge differences in variation - in particular the WI variation strikes me as quite extreme still having a notable tail for cases where Biden got under 40% of the vote or over 60% of the vote neither of which ever seemed realistic.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I assume they're running Biden again because they plugged all the other possible candidates into their big election simulating supercomputer and determined he had the best chance of winning, despite the difficulties. Campaigns obviously have much better data than pollsters. I don't know what it is but my imagination is pretty wild - the full raw data on all votes in all precincts, party members, donors, primary ballot requests for each party from every person voting - that persons friend's and family connections and their propensity to vote. Could get pretty detailed.

Or.... if you really want to get tinfoily they WANT him to lose. Maybe their simulations show the economy collapsing in a year or two and it is unstoppable at this point, and they don't want a democrat in the White House to take the blame, so they're trying to throw the election while keeping it close without doing too much damage downticket.

Both assumptions are predicated on the notion that these are intelligent people making sane rational choices.

After 2022 it seems really silly for a party to purposely try to lose the Presidency in hopes of better cycles in the future.

[ProgressiveModerate]

I genuinely wonder if one underrated problem for the Trump campaigns (and Republicans in general) is lack of Republican-leaning smart people actually effectively manage and direct a campaign, and even for those that do exist they have less power because of Trump's own ego telling his campaign to invest in Virginia or something.

Is Dems just having a larger, high quality pool of smart people to choose from to help on the campaign an underrated advantage?

[ProgressiveModerate]

I genuinely wonder if one underrated problem for the Trump campaigns (and Republicans in general) is lack of Republican-leaning smart people actually effectively manage and direct a campaign, and even for those that do exist they have less power because of Trump's own ego telling his campaign to invest in Virginia or something.

Is Dems just having a larger, high quality pool of smart people to choose from to help on the campaign an underrated advantage?

This is also exactly correct. Recent Democratic Presidential campaigns have benefited massively from having more smarter people available. In addition to having smarter and more capable people actually working directly on the campaigns themselves, especially in the final months of a campaign, Democratic Presidential campaigns have had uniquely skilled people who would never actually work directly on a campaign from tech companies like google and facebook as well as top of the line academics from universities with very particular specialized knowledge and abilities help out and consult as volunteers. It is also much easier for the Democratic party and progressive groups to form pipelines and connections with academia, which are active in promoting and sharing research outside of the context of an active campaign.

Agreed, but the marginal benefit of having intelligent people probably begins to wane after a certain point jsut because there's only so much one can realistically do and generally the smart people create some type of marginally beneficial efficiency: not multiplying productivity/effectiveness by a factor of 100.