Michelle Obama Is Only Democrat Beating Trump in New Post-Debate Poll – And It’s by A LOT
Michelle Obama Is Only Democrat Beating Trump in New Post-Debate Poll – And It’s by A LOT
Former First Lady Michelle Obama is the only Democrat running ahead of former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical matchup, according to a new poll.
EDIT: I am wrong about the sample size. Yes, the sample is a little small, but not too far off. They're registered voters rather than likely voters, which is not quite as good, but, again, no terrible.
The poll surveyed 892 registered voters and has a margin of error of 3.2%.
As FiveThirtyEight would say, that's a bad use of polling. That's a very small sample size, and there's no indication that it's representative in any meaningful way.
Even more important, Obama has said she has no interest in being the president; she's not willing to run.
98It is most certainly not a small sample size. It's what allows for a margin of error of ±3.5%* at the 95% confidence level. Here's a graph of the margin of error vs sample size for 95% confidence interval.
With an 11 point margin, there's a clear separation of the upper limit bar for Trump and lower limit bar for Obama. For a single poll, assuming the rest of it was well designed and executed, this is an important spread. And the reasons are obvious if you look at the report. She's able to get 10% more Democratic support and 20% more independent voter support.
Ipsos is a high quality polling company. They don't make rookie mistakes like sample size. There may be other reasons beyond my reasoning that make this a bad use of polling, but sample size is not it.
* The source incorrectly reported the margin of error for the full survey, both registered and unregistered participants.
26Anyone that doesn't want to be President should automatically win. If you want it, you should be locked in a cold, dark room until the election is over. And maybe slapped a few times for good measure.
11Can we draft her? Can we run a candidate against their will? I'm just kidding. Idk there's a lot of crazy shit happening.
5It’s kind of possible, yes. Basically it would have to be a coordinated effort at the convention to elect her as the party’s candidate. That makes it incredibly unlikely. Also, the person elected at the convention still has to accept it.
Since she was FLOTUS, she hasn’t shown much interest in participating in the dirty politics of governing. Instead, she quickly said she wanted to focus on social issues. That made me kind of sad because she’s incredibly intelligent and I think she would be a talented political leader. She just doesn’t seem interested in that.
2
She has zero interest in the gig and, other than being first lady, has absolutely zero qualifications... but then... neither did Trump.
Whatever happened to the "Draft Oprah" movement?
49Fuck Oprah. She's an out of touch Billionaire who's commitment to junk science set Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil loose on the world and gave Jenny McArthy a platform for her anti-vax autism bullshit. She's absolutely not who we want running for president.
80She’s far more qualified than Trump but according to her husband’s book she didn’t even want to be First Lady. And as much as I don’t hold what I view as Barry’s presidential shortcomings against her, we have had far too many political family dynasty’s in this country. Let’s not have another
15family dynasties* in this country
5Yup, but I take it as a good indication just how desperate the electorate is for someone who is just generally seen as a good, competent person.
3
has absolutely zero qualifications
This is completely false.
11While I do not believe she ahoukd run, unlike Trump, she is qualified. She has degrees from Princeton and Harvard and is an attorney. And more importantly, she is wicked smart.
6That was also an AstroTurf campaign to outrage white voters.
1
Please stop dragging her into this.
She'd never want to be President. I'd argue we wouldn't like her very much if she was the kind of person that did.
45She’d never want to be President.
Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, that would make her the best candidate. But in real life, perhaps not so much.
21
I like Obama but this is a shit article for wankers.
41A spouse of a former president running against Trump? That can't possibly go wrong.
39That would be one hell of a thing.
21I can see the "actually we still havent had a woman president" "jokes" from here (through time)
12
Shocking, have to doubt
18I'm also wary of any poll that shows such a strong showing for Kamala Harris. Not saying it's wrong, it legitimately looks like it's got a lot of good data, but every other poll I've seen has been fairly unfavorable to the idea of her running against Trump.
15Well it does seem that more people would vote for trump against her as well as more people vote for her. So maybe it's legit?
3Yeah this just looks like a name recognition poll. Kamala's chances of beating trump aren't any better than Biden's.
3
Just stop with this GOP-astroturf "replace Biden" campaign.
17I've been slamming Russian/tankie "both are bad" commenters for a while here; check my comment history before you judge my response here:
I don't know about a campaign but the sentiment is hardly astroturfed. A lot of leftist (not liberal or tankie, actual leftist) pundits and influencers think Biden is a bad look for normies and certainly doesn't energize voters. This includes people from all varieties, who are not always in agreement otherwise; like Emma Vigeland from Majority Report (and probably more people from that show), Hasan Piker, Vaush, Cenk from TYT... Whatever you may think about any or all of them, they're all in agreement on Biden being replaced.
These people are hardly part of an echo chamber, they regularly come at odds with one another, and none of them are part of an astroturf, and definitely not from GOP.
Note that all of these people would still advocate for voting Biden as long as he's the candidate. But their concern is about voter turnout after his horrible performance in that debate. This is a country who elected W. Bush, because they'd like to have a beer with him. How they look and come off unfortunately matters, sometimes more than the content of their messages and even accomplishments.
13This is what many don’t understand. JFK won his election because he was handsome and Nixon tanked that debate he was sick. This is a similar scenario in that Biden looks like shit and everyone can tell except Biden. He needs to accept that his age has caught up to him.
5I am always skeptical when I hear leftists echoing the same talking points as far right hacks. These are folks I would expect to be in unison on this point. They are ideologues. That's fine, that's their job.
Ideologically, the points are well taken. I too wish for a more progressive president. I'm not excited about Biden, either. I can live through four more years of Biden if that's what's to come.
Beating Trump is most important.
I'm of the firm belief that Biden can do that (he's already done it once), and that he is the best situated to do it. That's based on the conventional wisdom. Yes, it's the same conventional wisdom that lost the election for Hillary in 2016, but also won it for Biden in 2020. Biden's campaign apparatus is in place and switched on. He's on the ballot. He's got the backing. To try and change that now seems insurmountable.
-4
In polling there's a piece of wisdom that journalists don't listen to. Ignore the outlier polls. If there's multiple polls saying one thing and one poll saying something else then there's far more likely to be something wrong with the one outlier. But clickbait machine goes brrrrt.
https://am11.mediaite.com/med/cnt/uploads/2024/07/Screen-Shot-2024-07-02-at-5.06.44-PM.jpg
Okay looks like Clickbait Machine goes brrrt for a different reason here. The upshot is that many respondents skipped the follow on questions. So assuming any amount of campaigning is competently done then the 12% Don't know/skip category is likely to shrink closer to the 4% of the Biden-Trump match up. Then you can see that 40% of the respondents just answered Trump no matter what. In fact the Democrats percentage goes down nearly in lockstep with, Don't Know/Skipped. So, in my opinion, there's a really good chance the Democrats could actually pick up most of that column for Beshear or Pritzker.
13Are there raw results published anywhere? The most recent IPSOS I can find is from May 2024 and based on this, it seems Biden and Trump are unchanged at 40% each between surveys.EDIT, nevermind the July 2024 raw survey is here
5Nothing against Michelle, but I highly doubt she wants to run for POTUS.
2Time to put in Big Mike, coach!
2
