#6 Regime Change: new data shows Trump beating Biden and beating AOC & Kamala more easily - plus DeSantis matchups

Another crazy election cycle with added craziness of AI deployed (maybe by China & Russia as well as both campaigns) & crazy reporting about AI

Unda fert nec regitur [you can ride a wave but not make one]… State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power. Bismarck

The world revolves around the inventors of new values, it revolves invisibly. But the people and fame revolve around actors… Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great, far from the marketplace and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt… [T]he democratisation of Europe is an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants. Nieztsche

After the midterms, a small team did some research to figure out some dynamics for the 2024 Presidential campaign, primaries and general.

We built a model (with many times more data than normal polls) to predict who would win the electoral college in different matchups. We explored attitudes to possible Presidential candidates. We explored crucial issues like the cost of living, health, abortion, crime and Ukraine. We tested some ideas for how a Presidential campaign could best launch — what are the most important waves to ride and avoid, how on crucial issues do you navigate between your core vote and the crucial swing voters in crucial states? We ran focus groups in crucial states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. These included a) Obama>Trump voters (a fascinating group), b) no vote 2016 > Biden 2020, c) no vote 2016 > Trump 2020 voters, d) hardcore MAGA voters, e) non-MAGA-GOP voters. All data was collected before the Trump-arrest story got going seriously. His position with GOP voters has improved since we collected data. (We also experimented with what we called ‘synthetic focus groups’ and ‘synthetic polling’, i.e running focus groups and polls with ‘synthetic’ voters inside Large Language Models, see below.)

We made more effort than is made in normal polls to ensure we had an accurate sample of low-education, low-trust voters who do not pay much attention to normal news (exploring factors like attitude to vaccination and trust in media). Since 2016 a failure to sample these voters properly has been an important factor in the failure of many pollsters, connected with the failure to appreciate the importance of graduates shifting left on many issues. E.g In 2015-16 in Britain and America many pollsters did not weight by education. An important reason why we and Trump won is that we and Jared Kushner built better data science operations and therefore understood crucial voters (and turnout models) better than the old parties or the old media. With both Brexit and Trump, polling errors reinforced Insiders’ other errors. Despite the stakes, public polling in 2020 in America was also badly wrong but it got less attention than 2016 because Biden won.

Below are some data and a little analysis. I’ll add to it over the next few days then make it public after feedback.

Media organisations are free to use this data provided you make clear where it came from and link to this blog. (I can’t explain why I did this nor will I publish everything or the underlying data.)

The sooner Insiders wake up to the possibilities for much worse chaos over technology and politics in 2023-24 than the aftermath of 2016 — when we had widespread misinformation about misinformation believed by Insiders to this day — the better. Better for politics and better for AI which could easily be subject to extremely misguided regulation amid panic — e.g beneficial applications (cancer, drugs etc) being slowed by rules that do nothing to stop bad actors. I am pessimistic but, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’…

There’s no going back. And there’s good news — the HR-pundit complex will get decimated, many of the worst voices in the old media will soon cry out then fall silent.

As Marc Andreessen says, don’t expect any sort of ‘going back to normal’ — now is as normal as it’s ever going to be, it’s going to get weirder and weirder.

Ye, voice of the AI renegades…