"Will you shut up, man?" US Politics October 2020

https://editorial.designtaxi.com/editorial-images/news-KFCDoubleDown240518/KFC-Double-Down-Three-Flavors-1.png

I'm just trying to do what Tombot said!

My halfassed take on the james/peters thing:

- peters is kind of an empty void - i moved back to michigan 3 years ago and honestly don't know what he even looks like, where he's from - nothing at all.

- there hasn't been a republican senator in the state for 20 years and I don't he's ever really had any sort of serious opponent, nor has he really had to do a whole lot to keep his position. He actually sent mailers out last spring that were basically like "hey I'm your senator, remember me? don't let me lose this fall"

- a lot of the people who haven't gone full nutjob dislike trump as a person but still love everything he's done so voting for someone who do those things without being a raging asshole is great for them. I see lots of james signs in yards without trump signs; almost every peters sign i see is sharing a yard with a biden one.

- i believe a lot of people who love or at least are indifferent to racist policies and actions see voting for james as a way to say "see? i can't be racist because I voted for the black guy"

c/o Ned:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a significant lead in the pivotal states of Michigan and Wisconsin, with President Trump so far failing to retain the overwhelming advantage he enjoyed among white voters there in 2016, according to surveys from The New York Times and Siena College on Monday.

Over all, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by eight percentage points in Michigan, 48 percent to 40 percent, among likely voters. His lead in Wisconsin was slightly larger, 51 percent to 41 percent.

The new results, along with recent Times/Siena surveys from elsewhere in the Northern battlegrounds, suggest that the president has not yet managed to reassemble his winning coalition across the region. He faces modest but significant defections among white and independent voters, while facing a groundswell of opposition from those who voted for a minor-party candidate or didn’t vote at all in 2016.

And:

While Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 lent him an aura of political invincibility, an Upshot analysis of more than 5,000 respondents to Times/Siena results surveys in the Northern battleground states suggests that his winning coalition was always a fragile one. The president’s margin of victory was extremely narrow, and he failed to reach 50 percent of the vote in each of the decisive states. He also did so against an unusually unpopular opponent, Mrs. Clinton.

roffle:

The surveys began after Mr. Trump was released from the hospital, and there was no immediate indication that his political standing recovered along with his health. Most voters in Wisconsin and Michigan expected that the president would recover quickly from the illness, echoing findings from Times/Siena surveys fielded while he was hospitalized. The president did not appear poised to benefit from the public’s sympathy; by at least a two-to-one margin in both states, voters said the president did not take adequate precautions to protect against the coronavirus.

Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 lent him an aura of political invincibility

I read this and instantly thought, "oh, these quotes must be from a NYT article".

Re climate change in the public discourse, Carl Sagan (who figured out the greenhouse effect) warned about fossil fuel CO2 changing the climate on national television in 1980.
https://www.scu.edu/environmental-ethics/environmental-activists-heroes-and-martyrs/carl-sagan.html

sorry to be a nitpicker today, but sagan wrote about it in Cosmos, but the greenhouse effect as a topic of study goes back to at least 1859

sorry - to correct myself there, Sagan didn’t figure out the greenhouse effect, apparently that was Arrhenius in the late 19th century. I think Sagan made a model of the atmosphere of Venus which demonstrated how the effect led to its current state.

thanks KM, I knew as soon as I wrote it that I was getting it wrong.

I was surprised watching The Naked Gun 2 1/2 a couple of months ago that its plot hinged on climate change / renewable energy. 1991

Hector Sa-vahge!

iirc, the Rio de Janeiro Climate conference was in 1991, which was the very first international effort to address greenhouse gases and the climate. Naturally, it was torpedoed by the USA.

has not yet managed to reassemble his winning coalition

I am as worried as anyone about avoiding wishcasting and about the likelihood of legal shenanigans and/or malarkey.

HOWEVER, I am starting to feel like we can retire the constant repetitions of "It's still early" / "lots can happen." If Trump hasn't "reassembled" his coalition by now, he's not going to.

All year we've had to temper our projections with "it's still early" / "lots can happen" / "at this point in 2016 it felt like Hillary had it in the bag" obligatory caveats.

It is NOT early. Hundreds of thousands of people have voted. Almost everyone has their mind made up; almost no one is still persuadable. The dynamic is unlikely to change - and even if it were to change, it may not make a salient difference.

At this point it seems safe to say that Trump will obviously have lost the national popular vote. Further, that the contest to determine the final electoral vote will take place in the courts. That will involve the "usual suspect" states - Pennsylvania, Florida, maybe Ohio.

And it will entirely hinge on how many mail-in ballots the Trump campaign can successfully get disqualified.

Note - this will not be a matter of "wait till all the votes are counted." Everyone knows by now that the majority of mail-in ballots will be Democratic ones. The Trump camp's only hope will be to get as many of them thrown out as possible.

Hundreds of thousands of people have voted.

An understatement. It's about ten million now:

https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html

And those numbers are about to ramp up heavily this week with the widespread start of early voting in a number of states.

If Florida gets called on Tuesday night, which is likely, and gets called for Biden, Trump has lost. He might want to exercise that litigious muscle for its own sake.

Also, much of the messaging re GOP fuckery with mail-in votes has to do with last minute voting. The Democratic message in response has been to emphasize getting things in much earlier.

Florida's already counting ballots. Mine got counted on Wednesday, two days after receipt.

"Climate change didn’t really become a public issue until 1988" was brought up to dismiss any notion that transitioning away from fossil fuels might have been considered for any reason prior to that.

I don't think it would be catastrophizing to imagine that even if it's a landslide for Biden on Tuesday night, Trump is still going to try to sue over something. There is just no way he will be gracious loser, no matter how uncontroversial the results end up being. It'll be entirely on brand for him to whine and throw the DOJ, his personal law office, at the problem.

Zing artifacts, sorry.

Hi it was me.

Yes, I deleted a longer post there citing Boring, MD bcz I didn't want to appear to call you out when everyone else is fixating on the date (due to me quoting that line)! The context about Reagan was well-taken in itself, but seemed more connected to the Republican Party (as then moulded in his image) attitude of "fuck doing anything positive for its own sake," rather than international borders.

Then I wrote this even longer post:

double-down.jpg

I'm honestly just trying to track what the argument is:

1973: continuing to trade for an environment- and health-damaging fuel is necessary to maintain the borders of current nation-states, therefore its known damaging effects from pollution (ie before public scientific consensus is reached on global warming) are no reason to switch to less damaging energy sources. The oil lobby has no connection (or at least not a significant one) to any of this, even though an American Petroleum Institute conference hosted a scientific paper warning of climate change from the greenhouse effect in 1959

1980: scientific consensus about climate change is set, starts to work its way into public discourse

1980-86: Iran-Iraq war takes place

1988: the NYT runs a front page story about the US Senate being told about the greenhouse effect

1990-91: Gulf War Episode 1: A New Hope

1992-03: up to 1,400 civilians killed in Iraq by American, French and British bombing raids

93 'til Infinity 2003-ongoing: multiple wars over petroleum in Iraq and Africa


--

Even if it's stipulated that these wars should have happened, and that maintaining and/or increasing a reliance on fossil fuels was urgent in order to encourage them, I don't see that the date of Mr Hansen's address to the Senate had any direct effect on them in 1988, so it probably wouldn't have had any greater effect if it, or a comparable address, would have taken place earlier.



(also stipulated that I am infuriating people by not instinctively understanding what the thesis is re: national security! but the only reason I asked is because I don't know)

its amusing that no outlets (besides maybe 538?) are running any "how can Trump come back?" pieces...I'm guessing because most people who watch/read the news don't wanna hear it, and the FOX crowd thinks the polls are fake anyway. Trump is such a uniquely unlikeable political figure - he's the only President in history to never have net positive approval at ANY point in his term, and as far as I can see there's really nothing he's done that's gathered any sort of majority support. the ONLY way his numbers go up is when he manages to stay out of the news for 4-5 days at a time. perhaps actually getting a big stimulus done would give him a boost but no way do Congressional Rs help him there. meanwhile, he's at the point where every single day in which something dramatic does not happen is a huge blow to his chances. and, well, this seems to be his strategy:

So Biden is coughing and hacking and playing “fingers” with his mask, all over the place, and the Fake News doesn’t want to even think about discussing it. “Journalism” has reached the all time low in history. Sadly, Lamestream knows this and doesn’t even care!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 12, 2020

he ONLY way his numbers go up is when he manages to stay out of the news for 4-5 days at a time.

And he won't stay out: he instructed his campaign staff to put him on the road every day until Nov. 3.

The staffer's theory about killing himself seems at least unconsciously plausible: if he dies on the campaign trail, then he doesn't "lose," and any number of constituent lives are acceptable collateral.

there's a good chance of another "health event" on the campaign trail, right?

Boring - when I look back on the 20th century I remember some following works of enviro- and enviro-adjacent alarm-bell-ringing:

1. The Population Bomb, Ehrlich, 1968. Influential but also, perversely, somewhat counterproductive. My (hazy) memory of public perception was that there were catastrophic predictions of imminent resource shortages. When those shortages failed to happen (or failed to come to public attention), people wrote off the whole premise as being Chicken Littleism.

2. Diet for a New America, Robbins, 1987. The messages about how much land and water were going into meat production - and the unsustainability thereof - were either a wake-up call, or yet more Chicken Little alarmism, depending on your point of view.

3. Who Will Feed China, Brown, 1995, noted that as people move up the economic ladder they "eat higher on the food chain," which brings us back to Robbins; the general thrust was that feeding the Chinese people would soon become impossible.

I was working in environmental journalism at the time, and "climate" was still a ways away as a central concern for most people.

But everyone had heard DIRE PREDICTIONS about the polar ice caps and overpopulation and resource scarcity. "By the year 2000, X"; "By the year 2020; Y" were common (though poorly understood) phrases in yr typical Time magazine story.

And the predictions had mostly not come true (in common public perception, anyway). So lots of people developed a carapace of indifference. If Paul Ehrlich had said the planet would be uninhabitable in 30 years (or whatever), and here we are 30 years on and it hasn't come to pass, than why is anyone taking these doomsayers seriously?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

for anyone wondering, like me, if their state counts mailed ballots early or if they're forced to wait until election day, this is a handy breakdown.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/vopp-table-16-when-absentee-mail-ballot-processing-and-counting-can-begin.aspx

(IL has to wait until 7pm on election day, which sucks, but i suppose we'll still be able to call it for biden on election night)

I was looking at the RCP (with toss-ups) map, and Biden looks good, though not exactly primed for the blowout I was hoping for. He's got 226 EV pretty much locked up. If he wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan--where he has 6.0+ leads in all--that gets him to 282. Nevada, where he's also up 6, would put him at 288. The other toss-ups are close. He'll probably win some, but I guess he could conceivably lose all of them. But that 288 looks fairly solid.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/2020_elections_electoral_college_map.html

frogbs I think you mean “completing the second half of the President’s annual physical”

(Usual disclaimer: in a non-rigged election.)

Some xposts to YMP: that's what I was saying way above. Of course the public mind wasn't there, but there's been some warning of what we now call anthropogenic climate destabilization for more than four decades.

So the important thing is to watch Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Arizona...if Biden takes any of those it's pretty much over

Whoa.

Texas added almost 300,000 more voters in 2 weeks just before the registration deadline. We're up 16.9 million voters.

That is 1.8 million more voters than 2016 in Texas
https://t.co/httCD4aWTj

— Jeremy Wallace (@JeremySWallace) October 12, 2020

Which 3 counties have added the most voters since 2016?
Harris -238,698
Bexar -136,889
Travis - 126,155

That is a half million more voters in three VERY blue counties than in 2016.

— Jeremy Wallace (@JeremySWallace) October 12, 2020

FWIW, ExxonMobil was aware of climate change in 1977 (x-posts)

Texas added almost 300,000 more voters in 2 weeks just before the registration deadline.

It beggars belief to think that such a jump comes from a ton of would-be Republicans rushing to get their chance to vote for the status quo.

16.9 million voters queueing at 3 ballot drop boxes

the ballot drop box thing is bad, but there's still three weeks of early voting, which you can do anywhere... I'm going in the morning.

Most people in Texas couldn't get an absentee ballot to put in the drop box anyway - you have to be over 65 or be out of the area for election day and the entirety of early voting.

Fun little Lincoln Project reminder thread:

How it started. How it ended.

We were so "naive how racism was so imbedded in the party." Lincoln Project pic.twitter.com/ZSNoPyU6uJ

— Nadine van der Velde 🕊(she/her) (@nadinevdVelde) October 12, 2020

Yeah Texas (despite the drop-box problem) will know early.

I would not bet on TX or SC flipping this time, but it is pretty heartening that they are even getting talked about.

However, to permit myself a fantasy scenario... As has been noted, calling Texas for Biden would mean an epic blowout, and an early night. It would make PA / FL / OH suddenly irrelevant, for perhaps the first time in our lives.

this is admittedly pretty funny, but will it get ol' joe into a spot of trouble?

Donald Trump is running TV ads taking Dr. Fauci out of context and without his permission.

So, here’s a message from the President in his own words. pic.twitter.com/WCYbIfrQLR

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 12, 2020

Nah.

Lincoln Project still getting it better

I have read Lincoln Project's ads are done by FuckJerry (at least that's what Vic Berger is claiming; they apparently also ripped him off, but the one ad I watched where he claimed that didn't seem like a rip off). I do think the LP ads are good. But that Biden ad is great.

dems going to be lining up to gargle LP ass n balls

your outlook is refreshing

dems going to be lining up to gargle LP ass n balls

― A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Chooglin (will)

you have a problem with gargling ass and balls, sailor?

I mean it’s not as funky fresh as ‘Iran’s going to murder Trump to make Biden look bad’

you tell me