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

Again, usual caveats, etc., but the Lincoln Project people put up two big billboards in Times Square not for votes (it's New York City) but to pick a fight with Ivanka and Jared. Those two dickheads took the bait and sent their lawyer to make some threats, and the Lincoln Project essentially responded by telling them to go fuck themselves in dramatic fashion:

Jared and Ivanka have always been entitled, out-of-touch bullies who have never given the slightest indication they have any regard for the American people.

We plan on showing them the same level of respect.

Our full statement: pic.twitter.com/M3K5nOE5qd

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 24, 2020

those billboards are great

huh?

Lou Dobbs is telling South Carolina residents not to vote for Lindsey Graham pic.twitter.com/vQ67BZZN6P

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 23, 2020

someone in the responses says it's old footage

It's from yesterday!

There was a post I saw here or somewhere mentioning a C-Span caller who claimed he was undecided stating he was starting to lean closer to Trump *because* no one in congress or the media was pursuing the Hunter Biden story. This might be one of those same spite-your-face situations, that Dobbs is so far over the edge and he's mad that Lindsey is not following him.

That's pretty hardcore a week and a half out from the election....

anyway gift horse etc

Early voting amounts now 56 million, over 40 percent of the 2016 vote total. Texas is now over nearly 75 percent of their vote total.

insane

(If in fact 6 million turns out to be a weekday average over next week that pumps up the early vote to astonishing levels: 104 million by Election Day itself, over 2/3 of the current projected vote. Let’s see how this plays out — and what happens to that average that New York has begun voting.)

Trump is voting in person early in Florida today which is strange because he has run hundreds of Facebook ads claiming he voted by mail and urging his supporters to do the same.

Many of the ads included what purported to be a picture of his signed mail-in ballot

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 24, 2020

Are there pictures? Because I voted "in person" with a mail-in ballot, too. I filled it out, sealed it, went to the polling place, waited in the shorter line and dropped it in the box.

that lou dobbs segment is wild.

lou dobbs:
"graham has betrayed president trump at almost every turn. he has betrayed the american people and his oath of office. he's done absolutely nothing to investigate #obamagate, except to tell everyone 'stay tuned', time and time again. 'stay tuned'. senator graham needs to be 'tuned out' in South Carolina"

if i were graham i'd just be like ok...you dick

lol I’d put money on Dobbs self-harming when Trump loses. what an absolute lunatic.

there are the republicans who talk about #obamagate, and then there are the ones like lou dobbs who seem to actually _believe_ it. wow

It would be great if Dobbs could move the needle, but it would also be horrific if he could actually move the needle.

The Dobbs Paradox

lol

yeah his unwavering faith in Trump really mirrors the most insane maga Facebook boomer mindset. he would totally be out on the street corner doin this shit for free. I don’t have cable but I’m guessing of all the honest-to-god True Believers, he’s gotta have the biggest reach/ audience? maybe?

(ftr as much as the Ingrahams and the Hannitys et al love the racism and tax cuts,
I do believe they acknowledge & admire the grift)

Hadn't thought about that as a possibility, people falling on the ir swords cos thet great trumpian reich falls. That'll be a shame won't it.
Hope its a big enough trend.

It's good to remember that the generals who tried (and failed) to assassinate Hitler by planting a bomb under the table during a meeting were all loyal generals of the German armed forces, who had previously been quite happy to conduct a war of European conquest for the greater glory of the Reich. They simply recognized that Hitler was an incompetent imbecile who was rapidly losing the war. They were fine with winning it.

Now, about that Lincoln Project...

Hahah by chance I caught an old trailer for Valkyrie last night and was thinking about that. "Yeah, you weren't all heroes all the time here..."

Dobbs never met a white supremacist he wouldn't devote all his credibility to.

I remember his exit from CNN very well, but don't remember this (from Wikipedia): "After Dobbs left CNN in 2009, he gave an interview where he did not rule out the possibility of running for President of the United States in 2012, saying the final decision would rest with his wife."

Thank you, wife (although maybe if he'd run and embarrassed himself, that would've spared the world Trump in 2016).

It's not just that half of PA's mail ballots have been returned, its also that registered Democrats have returned them at a much higher rate than Republicans, a pattern happening across the U.S. https://t.co/dX0UoXDxen https://t.co/a998AdAwj2 pic.twitter.com/we1nhX2tbr

— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) October 24, 2020

But isn't Pennsylvania planning to throw out all the problematic mail in ballots?

Regarding Valkyrie - there's a part of the story that we may never know. We know that the blast was deflected by an extremely solid and bulky conference table.

What I want to know is: who designed that table? Who built it? Who was the decorator who decided it should be there, or the government procurement person who requisitioned it and had it placed there? Did they all get medals? If not, should they have? If they'd all somehow done their jobs a little differently - if someone had decided for a lighter, more Modernist look, maybe something Danish - the world would be different now. Such is history.

FWIW, since I've been reading (slowly) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I don't know about or haven't made it to that specific assassination plot yet, but there was definitely a collection of German generals and the like who were planning to kill Hitler I want to say well before he invaded anywhere, certainly before the shooting war. In their case I think it was largely poor timing that the plot never came to fruition - one guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or another was put more at ease by the same lies that placated the English, etc.

The PA news of course essentially fits the pattern everyone's already noticed, but again, it means they're already banked, etc. It also makes the flare-up over how late to count mail-in ballots -- the GOP wanted no late arrivals to be counted -- a bit curious in that, as I think one of the Nates said (Cohn maybe rather than Silver) it's entirely possible that would have the effect of cutting off more *GOP* votes via that route, which would be an amazing twist.

For Ned's "amazing twist" read "hilarious self-own." Democrats respond to your efforts to thwart mail votes by voting early in person, in historic numbers.

Many of the remaining mail-in absentee ballots (including olds and troops) were votes Republicans needed, and, well, if that happens, here's a hearty Nelson Muntz ha-ha for you.

Meanwhile, Philip Bump has an interesting little widget here

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/23/electoral-map-is-very-weird-right-now/

Similar to the RCP and 538 "make your own map" tools but with a twist. You can look at how wrong the polls need to be, and in what direction, to get different EC totals.

Lots of people are saying that 2016 won't happen again for various reasons - fewer undecideds, a greater share of locked-in votes, and improved polling methods.

Right now, per this exercise, the polls' blanket wrongness needs to be about 7 percent for Trump to win. Which is "wronger" than they were in 2016.

Even if the polls (in aggregate) are overestimating Biden by 6.5 percent, he would still win.

Don’t make me tap the sign

with the # of Dems voting early i predict that we'll hear some variation on "if you look at the numbers, I actually won if you look at the votes that were cast on Election Day, which is the most important day in terms of winning the election, in fact most people think it's the most important. nobody ever heard of a President winning Election Day and not becoming president, it's just never been done before. some people are saying only the Election Day votes should be counted"

xpost Isn't that what Nate Silver and even that Republican pollster was getting at, in congregate? Silver saying if the polls are off, they're off on Biden, and even adjusted he's still doing well. And Luntz said that if the polls are even more wrong than 2016, he'll be out of a job.

The PA state of play re those late votes (thread):

Looks like the Pennsylvania GOP last night asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the question of whether the mail ballot deadline extension ordered by the PA Supreme Court is allowed. (PA GOP says no and wants it overturned.)https://t.co/o14KDeRMbe

— Jonathan Lai 🙊 賴柏羽 (@Elaijuh) October 24, 2020

Again, though fuckery may be afoot in a final decision by the Supreme Court, it's only those later ballots affected -- and as noted, sure seems like the Democrats are aiming for and getting at running up the numbers well before that. So.

On the LOL front, BTW, a thread (useful for the screenshots as the article is paywalled):

”I was already doing small penis humiliation with a lot of these guys, so jumping to political humiliation wasn’t that much of a stretch.” https://t.co/wSZu1bQn8y

— Scafe says wear a gd mask (@erinscafe) October 24, 2020

The PA GOP may be setting aside the possibility of a self-own in terms of winning Trump another term, in order to capture a longer-horizon win based on their view of past election trends continuing in the future. They may have decided this is just what is best for the PA GOP in general.

with the # of Dems voting early i predict that we'll hear some variation on "if you look at the numbers, I actually won if you look at the votes that were cast on Election Day, which is the most important day in terms of winning the election, in fact most people think it's the most important. nobody ever heard of a President winning Election Day and not becoming president, it's just never been done before. some people are saying only the Election Day votes should be counted"

― trapped out the barndo (crüt), Saturday, October 24, 2020 1:03 PM bookmarkflaglink

he totally will say that, he did it with Andrew Gillum! it doesn't make sense and yet the GOP has lapped it up - your vote shouldn't count if it wasn't counted fast enough by the people who count votes

it doesn't make sense and yet the GOP has lapped it up

The propaganda value of an argument can be separated from its legal value. Mostly. Whatever the law says clearly enough will be upheld, but if a decisive majority swallows the propaganda and it becomes 'the truth' or 'common sense', then you can predict that the law is going to follow along soon afterward.

with the # of Dems voting early i predict that we'll hear some variation on (Trump blather removed)

Those incoherent incantations are phatic affirmations of power with no semantic content. I think a landslide result in favor of Biden will take away a lot of that power. It gives everyone concerned (judges, politicians, the press) license to ignore him (or, for the first time in a while, for his followers to actually attempt to parse him) in a way they couldn't do before the results come in. Like, once you see people start referring to Biden as the President-Elect in the days after the election... that seems like it might be stronger than any institutional trickery the GOP has laid the groundwork for.

Josh, yeah.

Sorry for long-form posting but I am soothing my anxiety rn by meditating on this:

More fun with Philip Bump's tool (ahem), I mean, looking at polling shifts.

Caveat: these are uniform shifts relative to 538 polling averages. They move everything in the same direction together, while in reality there are 50 separate entities. It's possible that Wisconsin's polling is off in a different way from Arizona's, and they're both "wrong."

That said, the threefold charge from Republicans has generally been that

1. All polls are bad (ahem), except maybe Rasmussen. Those sponsored by liberal media institutions (WaPo, ABC, etc) are especially bad.

2. They are designed to manipulate public opinion and not reflect it. Pollsters are placed on the earth to dispirit Republicans, and they deliberately juice the numbers to make them reflect liberal wet dreams.

3. Look at 2016; everybody thought Hillary was a lock; see point 1.

ANYWAY

If the current polling averages are as "off" as 2016, you get this result: Biden: 356 electoral votes. Trump: 182 electoral votes. Biden picks up 8 states

This means that polling would have to get (in the aggregate) 7 percent "worse," and all in Trump's direction, for him to win.

Polling, as an institution and profession, would presumably not recover from that, ever.

HOWEVER AND

If polling (as an institution and profession) has gotten even a little bit better - say, two percent better - and sampling and weighting and such, then Biden is north of 400 EVs.

it'd be funny for a mediocre candidate that nobody is really fired up about to deliver a Reagan-esque beatdown

For all the talk about the strength of Trump's base, I think there are an awful lot of voters who are definitely going to vote for Trump but will still be kind of relieved if he loses — and will not be energized to wage a months-long social media campaign disputing the vote. Of course, there will probably still be enough of the true believers to make it seem like there's an energized angry opposition, but it will be half of Trump voters or fewer.

remember when the narrative in the weeks after 2016 was "wow this just proves Democrats have alienated voters with economic concerns and disappearing industries, they have to find a way to win them back". which isn't false, of course, but now the narrative = "wow a lot of idiots voted for Trump thinking he wouldn't be the person he said he was".

Neanderthal, yep, and would forever kill the "bUt EnThuSiasM" argument

It is not mutually exclusive to believe that Democrats somehow did alienate voters yet Trump is alienating everyone.

I mean...they totally did. but the thing is, that narrative really downplayed a) the number of garbage human beings who voted for him because they wanted him to 'own libs', and b) that these people would run screaming from him in the next election cycle.

I agree that in the event of an unmistakable landslide, Biden will sweep into office easily. The entire strategy of hotly contesting every ballot in every close state falls apart if there are very few close states and a clear electoral college winner.

Trump's main hope is that he can hold the line in enough states with enough EC votes to allow room for doubt in two or three big-to-medium states, where he'll lay down a massive legal and propaganda barrage to keep matters up in the air until the courts can rescue him.

It's up to the voters to deliver that landslide and avoid that potential catastrophe.

it's just like when we said the Republican Party was dead and would never recover in 2016 when Trump became the nominee and then the next 4 years happened.

really too quick to define things, we are

I encourage everyone to NOT stay up watching returns on Election Night. Self-care! Turn away from the Internet, catch a movie, go to bed early.

nah, gonna take Wednesday off and stay up until dawn getting well and truly smashed.

I mean, that could be a blast. Election Night 2016 was so fucking soul destroying that I never want to experience another one, no matter the likely outcome or result. I need my sleep.