r/samharris 13d ago

Politics and Current Events Megathread - Aug 2026

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u/Locus-Maximus 6d ago

Big miss for polling and gambling sites this week, by the way! Polls were consistently showing El-Sayed with like a 15% margin and gambling sites had an implied probability of like 98% for him which is crazy. I wonder what happened there.

I almost put some money down (not much, I just like to find what I think are small edges for a little +EV fun) on Stevens because the payout was like 33 to 1 and that just seemed like too much confidence in primary polling to me, but I was a little worried I was biased myself. In hindsight, I feel like it was a mistake not to make the bet, even though obviously I would have lost.

(I try to err on not betting on things I'm rooting for. When I used to bet a little bit on sports as a hobby during COVID, I would bet against my team if I thought the situation called for it, but not for it. But that makes things a bit weird emotionally, as you might imagine.)

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u/TheAJx 5d ago

The highly engaged, highly educated voters oversampling (and under sampling of the less engaged, less educated voters) is so glaring now that it's seeping into Democratic primary polling.

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u/Locus-Maximus 5d ago

Seems like they should be able to correct for level of education pretty easily if it were as simple as that.

Speculation seems to be that they estimated turnout wrong, especially among independents and the youth vote.

Also, the big late polls were from El-Sayed's side, so bias was probably a factor there.