I remember. The polls were accurate. The pundits were not. People were shocked because they didn't want to believe that there are really that many loathsome morons around, not because they looked at what polls said.
Here are the main polls for that race on the eve of the election. What they actually said was that the race was close to a tossup, with Clinton perhaps very slightly favoured to win.
Here and here are favourability ratings. As you can see, Trump's are substantially less negative.
For a laugh (and cry), you can have a look at which countries are above the US in terms of life expectancy. It includes the likes of Maldives, Costa Rica, Panama and Oman.
EVs already attained mass adoption. In Norway almost all new cars are EVs. Several countries are not far behind. Most countries are more suitable for EVs than Norway.
The hydro power helps, sure. But Norway is big, cold, and sparsely populated.
Discard the Brownshirts, their collaborators, and the Putin fluffers, and you probably won't have many choices left.
The RCP website is full of garbage partisan puff pieces. But a poll average is just a poll average. It was super close in the 2022 midterms.
I don't know how anyone could've missed that Trump is moron, but if voters are indeed only now catching on, there's no sign of it yet in polling.
Actually, we're not a long way off from that. Hydrogen production facilities utilizing (excess) renewable electricity output are under construction as we speak. For example, a large project in Kazakhstan (which has large stretches of windy, sunny and empty steppes) is aiming to be online in 2030 with 30 GW of production going towards green hydrogen.
All cars were new cars once. If a majority of new cars are EVs, then it is only a matter of time before most used cars are as well.
It's not (just) a matter of money. Even in China a third of new vehicles are EVs, and Estonia is much richer than China.
I wasn't saying favourability ratings should be used to predict elections. For that you have polls (in which Trump has a substantial but not decisive lead). I was just responding to the comment about who is more unpopular.
I think that people who respond to pollsters overwhelmingly know that Trump was president before, and clearly it doesn't bother them what a train wreck that presidency was. It's not clear to me how they would suddenly start realizing that closer to election day.
Actually, many of those countries don't have systems similar to Medicare for All. Netherlands, supposedly second in this list, has a mostly privatized system with mandatory insurance, so does Switzerland. France and Germany have semi-public and private health insurance companies. The US has bigger (and different) problems than merely the existence of health insurance companies.
The Wlz (which replaced the AWBZ) covers only a minority of total health care costs. Expenses were €29 bln in 2023. "Mostly privatized" is accurate.
Both the Netherlands and Switzerland have universal health care systems and negligible rates of lack of insurance. My point is just that private health insurance isn't the (only) problem, as these counterexamples show.
$500 billion is a sizable chunk of that $6.3 trillion, and it's still only a 25% tax rate, and then only the "ultra-rich."
If one considers something more reasonable, like a 70% tax of income over $100,000, then you're talking about more substantial amounts to really start catching up to top economies.
The polling wasn't off in 2016, it was actually super accurate and missed the result by only one point.
Trump isn't popular, but he doesn't need to be, he just needs to be less unpopular than Biden, and right now polling is suggesting that he is exactly that.