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Originally Posted by topleybird
Then again I'm an idiot and am probably interpreting these poll results all wrong
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you aren't, but you are also assuming that enthusiasm towards the candidate is going to make a difference in November, which is kind of unknown. the Republicans are more enthusiastic about Trump than Democrats were about any of the candidates. but it's also hard to measure when the GOP is already united behind one person and the Democratic race just ended yesterday.
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Originally Posted by Nate Silver
I don’t think enthusiasm is a terribly meaningful indicator above and beyond what is already reflected in polls.
Sanders’s voters were more enthusiastic than Biden’s in the primaries. But he’s actually tended to underperform his polls. Sometimes higher enthusiasm means you have a narrower base, and the other candidate has more room to turn out undecideds, etc.
An important qualification to all of this is that most of the polls so far are conducted among registered voters when really we want to see likely voter polls, which won’t really be reliable for another several months......
.....I think if anything people tend to overlearn the lessons of the most recent election. A lot of the templates that people applied from the 2016 primaries to the 2020 primaries led to completely wrong predictions, like vastly understating Biden’s chances.
The fact that Democrats are worried about an enthusiasm gap because of 2016 could easily help Biden because it will scare Democrats into voting.
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...asm-for-biden/
They also point out in this analysis that the number of Sanders voters who say they will vote for Trump or stay home is actually on par with the number of voters who do that in any election when their candidate doesn't win. Sanders doesn't have an especially rebellious base in that sense. Their likelihood to stay home or protest vote is about normal.