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

1) you are correct
2) what they want doesn't matter.

If Trump doesn't win this one... he'll just file papers for 2024 and begin campaigning immediately.

Nah. You're failing to reckon with his incredible emotional fragility and his overwhelming laziness. Once he loses, he won't explode in rage; he'll sink into a black depression. He'll immediately put it out of his mind, though, exactly the way he put it out of his mind every time Pelosi and/or Schumer rolled him over the last four years. The one thing he's absolutely not gonna do is put up a big foot-stomping fight over the "unfair" election, especially not once it becomes clear that the Republican Party's not gonna charge forward with him. I'll be kind of surprised if he even finishes out his term. He might just resign and let Pence run the country for two months, or spend the whole lame duck period on the phone with various Fox News shows. If there was a way to declare bankruptcy and run away, like he's done so many times before, he'd 100% do that. Frankly, I think the only thing keeping him here, rather than jumping on a plane with a gym bag full of cash, will be the fact that, thanks to his fuckups, no other country is currently accepting Americans.

The one thing he's absolutely not gonna do is put up a big foot-stomping fight over the "unfair" election

i'm gonna go ahead and predict the exact opposite of this!

i mean, i hate to say it, but 538 gives trump a 12% chance right now, in the 2020 election. if it's 12% on election eve, and he wins, that wouldn't mean that 538's model is "wrong". (though everyone would treat it that way, that's for sure)

a good portion of that 12% chance is the fact that theoretically something could happen that will shake up this race in the final week. if election day was today he'd probably be at what, 4% or so? I don't even know where that 4% would come from. the polling in every swing state would have to be off by a historic margin.

I wonder if their model takes early voting into consideration - I've seen them say you can't really draw any solid conclusions from that, but if things do significantly tighten, you still have 1/3rd of the votes already cast at a time when Biden was +10 nationally.

for reference, here's one of 538's simulation outcomes that falls in that 12%:

https://i.imgur.com/yBsQERx.png

Trump: “Do you think Sleepy Joe could have made this deal, Bibi, Sleepy Joe?”

Israeli PM Netanyahu: "Uh ... well ... Mr. President, one thing I can tell you is we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America." pic.twitter.com/LU02tEOXtK

— The Recount (@therecount) October 23, 2020

I wonder if their model takes early voting into consideration - I've seen them say you can't really draw any solid conclusions from that, but if things do significantly tighten, you still have 1/3rd of the votes already cast at a time when Biden was +10 nationally.

― frogbs, Friday, October 23, 2020 12:48 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the only input is the polls (plus economic fundamentals), but the polls do ask people if they've already voted and weight those respondents as much more likely voters (infinitely likely) compared to someone who hasn't voted yet.

Karl that map is a weird outcome... New Mexico was +8 for Clinton in 2016 and now they're going to vote Trump even though the national polls are basically +8 for Biden?

it's one outcome of their simulation, so yep

i mean, you can do that with any map showing trump winning. the odds are certainly stacked against him

those are potential outcomes, unlikely but within a specific range of error.

xp

NM is the only state on that map that the seems like a *very* long shot for trump. there are more plausible maps: e.g. just repeat of 2016. the point is he could win. he probably won't. (and early voting tells us nothing about this.)

one scenario involves a kaiju eating 5 states worth of citizens

Kaiju OTM

If there was a way to declare bankruptcy and run away, like he's done so many times before, he'd 100% do that.

agreed.

Anyway, back to cats. My guys, who are obsequiously affectionate during the winter months, just disappear outdoors the second it looks like the nights might be getting shorter, and then that's it. They spend all of spring and summer and a lot of autumn out there, though mostly they just lie under a bench in the garden all day, being affectionate with each other until they piss each other off. But they hate being indoors, until they have to be indoors, and then they love it, all the radiators and soft furnishings and shit. I've been on deadline for much of the last fortnight and they just creep in in the early hours, eat three pouches of food in one sitting and then just go straight out again.

listen to blazey the fox, it knows its shit
https://i.imgur.com/SsaZspw.jpg

If Trump doesn't win this one... he'll just file papers for 2024 and begin campaigning immediately.

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, October 23, 2020 11:33 AM

He might start (though I doubt it) but I don't think he's got 4 more years of life in that flesh-suit.

I guess they're being systematic, but I'm trying to grok a polling error that lets (compared to 2016) New Mexico swing +9 Trump but Pennsylvania go +2 Biden. This must be them factoring in some unknown event between now and Election Day... maybe Trump does a surprise executive order moving the WIPP from Carlsbad NM to Centralia PA?

Our cat is an indoor/outdoor cat. Which is to say, he spends most of his time inside sleeping (especially as he gets older), but he spends enough time outside that we don't really know where he goes to the bathroom. The reason he's an indoor/outdoor cat is that when he was just an indoor cat, for several months when he was younger, he would get out basically every single time we opened the door, several times a day, so eventually we just threw our hands up and let him out. And he's happy as can be. The first winter at our current house was the winter of the polar vortex, and he did vanish for about a week. But then one day he just showed up again, perfectly healthy, fed, fully intact, and we figured if can survive that he's more than OK outside the rest of the time. Some cats like going outside, some cats fear it. Our cat (who was born on a farm, fwiw) likes it, even if these days it's just to sleep and watch the world go by. And yeah, poop and pee somewhere when we are not looking.

How did New Mexico become such a relatively reliable blue state?

538 gives trump a 3 out of 100 chance of winning in NM right now.

i would recommend just reading the "Which polls are influencing the forecast for New Mexico?" and "How do we get from polls to forecasted vote share?" sections here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/new-mexico/

Whoa...Schumer just forced the Senate into a rare closed door session. No cameras. No press. Doors being locked as I type. A last ditch effort to convince Republicans to not send the Senate into this death spiral of power politics.

Long shot to succeed, but why not?Stay tuned.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 23, 2020

xp it's the land of enchantment. conservatives don't like that, so they moved to scottsdale

that weird 538 map is not gonna happen, but if it did it would mean pollster assumptions about hispanic turnout and voting in the southwest were somehow extremely wrong

i didn't mean to focus on that specific map so much, i was just pulling a random one from the 12% of simulations that end with a trump victory. almost all of the scenarios where trump wins have NM going blue, fwiw, i just happened to pick one where NM went red

e.g.

https://i.imgur.com/5OCbetF.png

if the vote were held today, what are the odds that WI and PA go red? my thing right now is if we can go 11 days without some seismic shift in the race, Biden wins, right?

xp:

Things are fucking terrible right now, to the point where "2020, am I right?" is a meme.

this was also true in 2016

what are the odds that WI and PA go red

14% and 13%, respectively

odds of both of those happening? .14 * .13 = .018, or 1.8% chance

that's not how probability works. those are not independent events.

My early voting muttering more or less on track, Election Project has the numbers at almost 52.5 million for the day already. 55 million very likely by tomorrow morning if not sooner.

xpost How about this independent event?

https://assets3.thrillist.com/v1/image/1730363/1200x630

xp

i mean, that's true! so is there a way to deduce the probability of both WI and PA going red, based on the individual probabilities of .13 and .14? or would you need to go back to the full 50 state simulations and just see what % of them included both WI and PA going red?

nate silver just cooked up some time wasting simulations to answer that very question

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

re: "notindependent events."

In a recent 538 podcast they talked about that - that it's easier to imagine roughly similar states moving (or not moving) in the same direction. So if the numbers show a trend in both WI and MN, it's likelier that they're related - but you wouldn't do the same for Iowa and, say, Hawaii.

Personally (speaking as a Virginian here) I want to see more cracks in the ex-"solid south." NC, I'll be very happy. GA, ecstatic. Not daring to say anything about TX because that would approach miraculous.

If WI goes red, 62% chance of PA going red

I don't know how they're doing the math, I'm sure it's complicated, but on this new 538 tool you can see the colors of the states shift as you experiment with different outcomes:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

In the absence of any other data/simulation:
If WI is red, PA goes to 62% Trump.
If PA is red, WI goes to 64% Trump.

So yea, I'd say the probability is pretty interrelated.

or, like symsymsym said.

xp I am no statistician but I assume caek's statement merely reflects that a situation where WI goes for Trump increases the likelihood that PA also goes for Trump and vice versa. In other words, they are independent but connected.

getting bent out of shape about cats being outdoors is so Nextdoor

Or maybe a better way to say it is that under a scenario where one state went for Trump it is likely those same events would impact the probability in the other state as well?

Thanks to these two continuing conversations I can think of nothing but Pennsylvania feral cats polling birds as to whether they should be eaten.

I'm allergic to ever living with a litterbox again so I have no skin in the game but concern about cats needlessly going outdoors to needlessly kill is entirely reasonable. It's not a neutral thing when wildlife is murdered en masse and cats will live longer/healthier lives indoors anyway.

To bring the political and the cat into conjunction, my wife an I once went to a local town meeting and while waiting for the topic we were there for to come up on the agenda, the town board began discussing an apparently ongoing feral cat problem and the language of the ordinance to address it. The town attorney kept outlining the changes to town ordinance using the phrases like "insert clause (x) before clause (y)" etc. and in the context of the feral cat discussion caused my wife to hear this as claws and she started giggling, quietly at first, then both of us, then louder, then literally crying, to the point where people in the packed meeting kept turning around to look at the two of us morons laughing uncontrollably.

i love this conversation.

apparently domestic cats are not really the problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/interactive-assets/nggraphics/ngm-1910-CatsVsBirds-chart/build-2019-09-04_11-29-43/ngm-assets/img/ngm-1910-CatsVsBirds-chart_ai2html-mobile.jpg

On the other hand, cats are absolutely essential to pest control, since, unlike dogs, they don't eat mouse/rat poop, just the innards, and therefore are not vectors for spreading the worst rodent borne diseases.

There was a fascinating, horrific story I read in a WWII book once. During the siege of Leningrad, people resorted to eating their pets. After they went through all the pets, they famously resorted to cannibalism, but at the same time, the bodies just kept piling up, since there was no place to put them. After a while the rats started showing up in huge numbers to feed on the corpses, further spreading disease and generally causing havoc, to the extent that after the siege was lifted they actually had to ship train cars of cats to repopulate the city to get rid of the rats.

Another intriguing use of killer cats is services that essentially rent out feral cats. The cats are captured, tagged, cared for, and, most importantly if counterintuitively, fed. Then when someone has a pest problem they rent the cats, which then hunt not for food (they've been fed) but for fun/pleasure, and when they do that they are likely to kill *more* mice, since they are not doing it for sustenance, just for sport. And then the service comes back and the cats return to their cages to be brought back to HQ.

I know it's just human nature but I always find it funny how people spend so much time trying to read the tea leaves of polls when we'll just have the actual election results soon.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-map/?cid=abcnews

― Wayne Grotski (symsymsym), Friday, October 23, 2020 12:36 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

if trump wins both TX and GA his odds rise to 26%. makes me nervous!!!

I know it's just human nature but I always find it funny how people spend so much time trying to read the tea leaves of polls when we'll just have the actual election results soon.

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Friday, October 23, 2020 1:10 PM

Hating surprises is good and correct.