I don't really know, sorry. My memory is that 2023 already pretty bad for incumbent parties (e.g. the right-wing ruling party in Poland lost power), but I'm not sure.

Fair enough, I guess? For context, I wrote this for my own blog and then decided I might as well cross-post to LW. In doing so, I actually softened the language of that section a little bit. But maybe I should've softened it more, I'm not sure.

[Edit: in response to your comment, I've further softened the language.]

Yeah, if you were to use the neighbor method, the correct way to do so would involve post-processing, like you said. My guess, though, is that you would get essentially no value from it even if you did that, and that the information you get from normal polls would prrtty much screen off any information you'd get from the neighbor method.

I think this just comes down to me having a narrower definition of a city.

If you ask people who their neighbors are voting for, they will make their best guess about who their neighbors are voting for. Occasionally their best guess will be to assume that their neighbors will vote the same way that they're voting, but usually not. Trump voters in blue areas will mostly answer "Harris" to this question, and Harris voters in red areas will mostly answer "Trump".

Ah, I think I see. Would it be fair to rephrase your question as: if we "re-rolled the dice" a week before the election, how likely was Trump to win?

My answer is probably between 90% and 95%. Basically the way Trump loses is to lose some of his supporters or have way more late deciders decide on Harris. That probably happens if Trump says something egregiously stupid or offensive (on the level of the Access Hollywood tape), or if some really bad news story about him comes out, but not otherwise.

It's a little hard to know what you mean by that. Do you mean something like: given the information known at the time, but allowing myself the hindsight of noticing facts about that information that I may have missed, what should I have thought the probability was?

If so, I think my answer isn't too different from what I believed before the election (essentially 50/50). Though I welcome takes to the contrary.

I'm not sure (see footnote 7), but I think it's quite likely, basically because:

• It's a simpler explanation than the one you give (so the bar for evidence should probably be lower).
• We know from polling data that Hispanic voters -- who are disproportionately foreign-born -- shifted a lot toward Trump.
• The biggest shifts happened in places like Queens, NY, which has many immigrants but (I think?) not very much anti-immigrant sentiment.

That said, I'm not that confident and I wouldn't be shocked if your explanation is correct. Here are some thoughts on how you could try to differentiate between them:

• You could look on the precinct-level rather than the county-level. Some precincts will be very high-% foreign-born (above 50%). If those precincts shifted more than surrounding precincts, that would be evidence in favor of my hypothesis. If they shifted less, that would be evidence in favor of yours.
• If someone did a poll with the questions "How did you vote in 2020", "How did you vote in 2024", and "Were you born in the U.S.", that could more directly answer the question.

An interesting thing about this proposal is that it would make every state besides CA, TX, OK, and LA pretty much irrelevant for the outcome of the presidential election. E.g. in this election, whichever candidate won CATXOKLA would have enough electoral votes to win the election, even if the other candidate won every swing state.

...which of course would be unfair to the non-CATXOKLA states, but like, not any more unfair than the current system?

Yeah, that's right -- see this section for the full statements.