2020 US Election (Part 3)

[Bugfatty300]

Birthplace of the USA has a "rotten history" says anti-American despot.

 

[Arwon]

Or just leave it empty for a week and don't bother with any cleaning.

Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time

That might help with the virus but would you trust that mob to be otherwise clean?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Sure. Biden did not cooperate in the Obama administration. like most VPs he was a spectator with a good seat. In 47 years of Washington, he has nothing of note to his name. He is a boot licking toady who was a reliable party vote. At no point in his career is there any sign of a decision maker, which makes him incompetent to do the job as Chief Executive.

No one can reasonable argue that Trump is incompetent, because the results are too impressive. QED

Awwwww, you said QED. You used it wrong, but hey. QED doesn't mean "Which need to be repeated a little more wordy".

Thanks one J. That non argument did indeed amuse me

edit: Follow up question, you think the Trump rallies were worth 30.000 infections and 700 deaths from the corona virus?

 

[Kyriakos]

Hopefully something will change for the better now. I am not particularly optimistic, but we will see.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Hopefully something will change for the better now. I am not particularly optimistic, but we will see.

I recognize this sentiment. That was when America used to have a president.

Ah ... good times.

 

[Kyriakos]

I recognize this sentiment. That was when America used to have a president.

Ah ... good times.

I am more interested in the foreign policy of the US, since I don't live there. Although it will be hard to balance the toxic relations between gop and dem as well. I think gop kept their majority on one legislative body and increased their share on the other? Anyway, Biden is less clownish than Trump and will be a return to how things get expressed by the potus; I wonder if the essence of US policy will change, though.

 

[Traitorfish]

Depends if the Communists leave once voted out.

It has happened though. Moldova, not sure if they have got to rule anywhere else via ballot box. As the largest party not coalition as smaller party.

Nepal have a democratically-elected Communist government. Like most South Asian Communist Parties, it is in practice a pretty broad tent from social democrats to old school communists, although in this case the Maoist wing of the party has a lot of clout due to their role in the Civil War which toppled the monarchy.

 

[Zardnaar]

Nepal have a democratically-elected Communist government. Like most South Asian Communist Parties, it is in practice a pretty broad tent from social democrats to old school communists, although in this case the Maoist wing of the party has a lot of clout due to their role in the Civil War which toppled the monarchy.

Have they been in and out of power?

 

[Traitorfish]

Have they been in and out of power?

Yes: they won the 2008 and 2017 elections, but lost the 2013 elections to the Nepali Congress (like their namesake, the Indian National Congress, a vaguely centre-left nationalist party).

 

[sherbz]

I thought this was interesting. Rupert Murdoch phoned Trump after the election and told him that he had lost and should concede. Trump refused. And it seems that after that Murdoch spoke to other leading GOP members to undermine him, which was when you saw the likes of Mitch McConnell come out and refute many of Trumps baseless claims. Article here:

https://inews.co.uk/us-election-202...rump-republican-party-us-election-2020-751720

 

[Drakle]

I thought this was interesting. Rupert Murdoch phoned Trump after the election and told him that he had lost and should concede. Trump refused. And it seems that after that Murdoch spoke to other leading GOP members to undermine him, which was when you saw the likes of Mitch McConnell come out and refute many of Trumps baseless claims. Article here:

https://inews.co.uk/us-election-202...rump-republican-party-us-election-2020-751720

They clearly want to dump Trump and focus on slaughtering down-ballot Democrats in 2022.

Hopefully, the Trump people spark a real civil war in the GOP. The GOP cultivated their base into craziness, and were then were shocked when crazy overtook the primary, instead of the boring squares and the mask on people. Now their leader is effectively Mitch McConnell.


Anyway, more polling takes from Nate Silver.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1325060091050127361

Gonna preface this by again reminding you that I'm not a pollster and instead my job is to assess how accurate polls are and build models of what the errors look like. So as someone who spends a lot of time on this, I'd say media coverage on this topic has been crappy so far.

The main issue is "you should wait for all votes to be counted to judge the accuracy of polls" may sounds like lame excuse-making from pollsters, but actually that's pretty damn important as vote counts have changed dramatically and are still changing in many states.

We also know very little about the whys. Why was polling bad in the Midwest (except in Minnesota?) but pretty good in the Southwest? Why did it work in New England but there was a big miss in Florida? This will take a while to unpack, and a lot of initial takes won't age well.

This is just a hypothesis but I wonder if it isn't just a question that response rates were higher for people who worked from home / were looking for work. Vs People who were in the economy, working jobs and to extent something was missed it was something happening with latter

Something like this is plausible, for instance: different patterns of who was at home or working from home because of COVID, which probably correlates with political preferences in all sorts of weird ways.

Personally, given a lot of state-by-state and region-by-region variation, I suspect it will turn out to reflect a combination of several different factors. The same goes (polls aside) for vote shifts from 2016 to 2020. This is a WEIRD, CRAZY map! https://nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-president.html…

I'm not sure if we will ever know fully.

 

[amadeus]

Minnesotans are hardwired to vote for Democrats for President after being twice screwed out of having one of their own in the White House, the second time 49-1. And the four Super Bowls.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Biden is now up by 7.2k in GA.

Also this:

'm never super comfortable with granting too much credence to oratory skills for politicians. I want my politicians to be an effective administrators - for that, what's important is thoughtful and precise writing and the ability to deal with others, not oration.

A big part of a leader's ability to lead and deal with others is his or hers power of persuasion, which is where the speeches come in. That said, yeah I agree in principal with you but at the same time it's still bloody nice to have a guy who can give a speech without callouts to fascists and fistfuls of lies.

 

[Farm Boy]

He has no idea...Gimme a break. Ash is the most balanced. I mean kids just use aluminum, which BTW has a sweet sound when its solid (fancy carbon composite has a dull sickly sound) but I love the old school, wood... especially for giving the kids FUNGO... but I usually use whats on hand, which means metal.

There's that crack to a bat that is just not replicated. But... after having watched enough little league games, that rich tink from an aluminum bat when one of them really gets a hold of all of it, yeah, that's a nice sound.

 

[sherbz]

They clearly want to dump Trump and focus on slaughtering down-ballot Democrats in 2022.

Hopefully, the Trump people spark a real civil war in the GOP. The GOP cultivated their base into craziness, and were then were shocked when crazy overtook the primary, instead of the boring squares and the mask on people. Now their leader is effectively Mitch McConnell.

Yes, i can see this being a thing in the near future too. Kind of resembles how arab leaders galvanise their populations against the heretical west and then appear shocked when groups like ISIS come along.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Fox is reporting that the latch batch of vote counts in Philly included late-received ballots. The state has been keeping those ballots segregated pending a potential SCOTUS ruling on what to do with them. They won't change the outcome though as they've been following the same trends as all the other mail-ins: i.e. a Biden blowout. Still, including the numbers gives Trump something to whine about and claim as fraud.

I think the 2022 Democrats need to focus on winning the rural vote and pushing for a high turnout. Given they probably won't succeed on the turnout front, they've got to find a way to reach rural voters on the issues they care about without pushing the social issues too far as that seems to really alienate them.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

From 538 on how states are called:

Anyway, I want to be clear that the following point just comes from research I’ve done on my own, although I think it’s consistent with the behavior we’ve seen from the decision desks so far. It comes from this AP explainer on when they call races:

In several states, recounts are mandated if the margin between the top two candidates falls inside a set range established by law. AP will not call a race if the margin is within such a mandatory recount range — or if it could fall into that range as final votes are counted.

In some states, recounts may be requested if the margin falls inside of a set range. In others, candidates can request a recount regardless of the margin between the top two candidates. In these states, AP will not call a race if the margin between the top two candidates is 0.5 percentage points or less, or if the margin could fall inside that range once all ballots cast are counted.

AP may call the race if the trailing candidate confirms they will not seek a recount or if the candidate publicly concedes the election.

Emphasis mine. The AP will not call a race if the margin falls within the mandatory recount range or if it could fall into that range as votes are counted. That’s pertinent in Pennsylvania, for instance, where the recount threshold is 0.5 percent. Currently, Biden leads by 0.43 percentage points in Pennsylvania as additional mail ballots are counted. That’s going to keep growing — probably to around 1 percent — as additional ballots are counted.

Of course this does fail the sniff test in that the AP has called Wisconsin (which is in the recount range of <0.5%) even if they call it a 'projected win' or whatever fig leaf they throw on it. Still, calling any more states will put Biden over the top and given there is a non-zero chance that results may shift in all of the remaining states, everyone is being super duper cautious. Of course almost every piece of evidence shows that any remaining shifts in GA, PA and NV will be heavily in Biden's favor, so the caution I feel is no longer warranted.

I also repeat my earlier sentiment that at some point they are inadvertently playing into Trump's narrative by withholding calls; it begins to cast doubt on the credibility of the outcome in the vein of Florida 2000 by holding back on making obvious calls for days and weeks.

And if AP sticks hard and fast to their 0.5% threshold, we won't have a result potentially for months if recounts are requested.

 

[Hrothbern]

Fox is reporting that the latch batch of vote counts in Philly included late-received ballots. The state has been keeping those ballots segregated pending a potential SCOTUS ruling on what to do with them. They won't change the outcome though as they've been following the same trends as all the other mail-ins: i.e. a Biden blowout. Still, including the numbers gives Trump something to whine about and claim as fraud.

I think the 2022 Democrats need to focus on winning the rural vote and pushing for a high turnout. Given they probably won't succeed on the turnout front, they've got to find a way to reach rural voters on the issues they care about without pushing the social issues too far as that seems to really alienate them.

The Dems will have to win over time the votes of people from which they receive now the thick middle finger
Or ditch that strategy and leave them to the GOP and focus on another voter profile now part of the GOP.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Unfortunately, the congressional map is so heavily gerrymandered and the structure of the EC and the Senate are so right-leaning by default that they really have no choice but to go after those rural votes. I read an article that it is possible for the GOP to control the Senate with states equaling a population of only 17 million compared to 300+ million total people in the US.

 

[amadeus]

Also this:
View attachment 574571

I had to look up the gentleman on the left, not having ever seen him. Rather than political consultant, he has that air about him of the local TV morning show host, either co-host or weather guy.

Turn off the sound and watch this video starting from 4:20. Twenty seconds is enough. The facial hear helps, otherwise the look doesn't do it for me. Same with the bowtie, that's something few can pull off successfully. Tucker Carlson looks a lot better since he ditched it.