Is the "oh god" nerves?
Hoping the Iowa report gives you some reassurance. It does me. Watched hours of video clips about it and if there's any pollster who is the one, it's her. And she squares the circle for me about interpreting the early votes, which looked more positive than the polls.
It's all about the ground game here, and the Dems are incredibly good at this bit.
I'm disregarding most polls from here. All along they've seemed manufactured to produce clustering. No amount of new information changed them. I used to assume they are scientific, but the organisations doing them have a lot of latitude to make the result they expect. They don't like to produce outlier results. So I don't think they are a particularly strong measure. Think Wisconsin at the last election, which was Biden +15% or something, and ended up a razor thin win.
They get things very wrong in any direction because they put their thumbs on the scale. In this election, they are using multipliers to improve Trump's numbers in order to combat their worry that they undercounted his support in the last two elections. This particular pollster, Ann Selzer, was not fooled in both of the last elections: Trump v Clinton and Biden. She actually identified Trump's overperformance in both. This time, she says it's going the other way. The wind is behind Kamala. Particularly among retired people (especially women) who are reliable voters and among independents. I believe her. She's really VERY good at what she does.
I also believe in the number of people contributing to Kamala and attending her rallies, their relative enthusiasm, the vast number of volunteers, the feedback from the campaign which has access to the door-knocking stats. The evidence of my senses. And now the Iowa poll found the people I thought ought to exist and seemed to in the early voting totals. Very encouraging. Including Ann Selzer's data, the entire picture becomes coherent.
I'm going into the election more confident than I have been in weeks.
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