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

uh we're seeing it now

It’s a natural experiment

It’s a natural experiment

I doubt anyone motivated by electoral probity is not already turning out for biden, regardless of what trump says in the next couple of days.

This stuff he says is bad electoral politics because it depresses turnout on his own side: “the election isn’t fair and don’t worry we’re going to fix it in the courts later” is not a message that motivates yourself own voters.

I can't get much angrier right now. This is such a toxic place to live
I fucking hate it

the thing about throwing out votes in Harris County and saying that it won't matter because Texas is huge so it won't be close either way, is that the only way Biden and maybe Hegar win in Texas is if it's close.

sorry for garbled syntax. What I mean is, a Democratic win in Texas is a longshot and will only happen with tight margins.

Just did myself a favor and got myself banned from FB for three days for saying "fuck you, cunt" to a male Trump voter cheering the ambush on.

Meanwhile, my friend reported someone who posted "Defeat Biden and that half-breed Kamala" and was told it didn't violate community standards.

#FBexit

Trump leads the final Selzer poll of Iowa by 7 points, 48 to 41.
That's the same margin as their final poll four years ago, which wound up foreshadowing Trump's Midwestern sweephttps://t.co/bIOVhFRaQh

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 31, 2020

I know this is likely an outlier since it doesn’t correlate with any of the other polls we’ve gotten but still hard not to feel a little PTSD from shit like this

yeah

Nobody show this video to @realDonaldTrump 🤭 🏀 pic.twitter.com/r5HaS0ufuE

— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) October 31, 2020

It's a uh huge outlier

Sorry I’m drunk and watched that way too many times

Don't overreact to one poll ad infinitum

Pretty much polling Twitter is treating it as an outlier. Wasserman in response:

Updated rough personal rankings of the Trump '16 turf likeliest to flip to Biden:

1. Nebraska's 2nd CD
2. Michigan
3. Arizona
4. Wisconsin
5. Pennsylvania
6. North Carolina
7. Georgia
8. Florida
9. Texas
10. Maine's 2nd CD
11. Iowa
12. Ohio

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 31, 2020

And Silver:

Certainly Trump's best result in a high-quality poll in a while. We have gotten/will get lots more high-quality polls though and there haven't been many others with results like this. https://t.co/eSgsuL01wZ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 31, 2020

And Cohn himself in a follow up

It is also worth noting, though, that Selzer can be wrong, and has been before. No pollster has been put on a higher pedestal, but in the end everyone in this business is subject to sampling error and so on. If you expect perfection out of N=800 polls, you won't get it

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 31, 2020

And this Selzer Iowa poll is off on its own, not just in Iowa but in terms of the overall story. Every national poll has shown doing Biden way ahead of Clinton among white voters / white working class voters. He's excelled across the white, northern tier.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 1, 2020

Georgia more likely to flip than Florida??? I'm skeptical

May seem strange but I’ve seen more than one person suggest it in recent weeks.

A further thing from Wasserman (who remember is a House district guy above all else)

If you want to play the "unskew Selzer" game, one thing I can tell you is that Republicans are not about to win #IA01 (which flipped blue in '18 by 5%) by 15%. https://t.co/Dxy4rJbFYc

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 1, 2020

hi! xpost

One last one:

Possible that the Selzer DMR poll is the pro-R equivalent of the Langer ABC/WaPo wildly pro-D Biden +17 result in Wisconsin several days ago. Both are very respected pollsters, but those can’t both be true at the same time.

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) November 1, 2020

Lol the commenters in Silver's thread are ridiculous

xp that makes me feel better

Remember - every good poll for Biden is a mirage, but one positive poll for Trump means he's won

Two of Trump's laundry-list of promises today: first woman on the moon, first human on Mars.

Is this brand new? First I've heard of it. He presented the later like it's already happened: "And we're going to land someone on Mars--it's very exciting."

He's sending Kush to Mars

With no space suit

he never said they would be alive when the landed

Infrastructure week in the asteroid belt

I figure he must be arbitrarily grabbing stuff at the last minute from every winning president of the past 50 years, and that's the JFK promise.

Decided to check into Iowa early vote numbers as well — most requested ballots have been returned for all parties/non-party pref voters. Very few rejected, and the difference between GOP and Dem there even slimmer. Overall it’s 56% of the 2016 total.

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

Yeah I thought of the WI +17 too. Are polls like that normal in the final week if the race truly is stable? I dunno usually I don’t try to pay attention to the minutia

Good news is there were some CNN polls in 4 swing states, all good results for Biden, even with an entire MOE in Trumps favor he’s easily winning WI and MI, and slightly winning AZ and PA

There's gonna be Cuban missiles on Mars, and we are gonna free South Vietnam from the Branch Davidians

He's talked about Mars for a couple of years - better to go there because the moon isn't exciting, very low energy

Moon is a liberal star

i thought the military was giving everyone free regeneron? did i dream this?

Separate thought too re mail ballots in general — if you look at Elections Project’s site you’ll see that 33 million mail ballots aren’t returned and that might freak you out. But: literally over a third of those are California, where the state mailed out a ballot to everyone; a large amount would never be returned anyway, etc. That could affect internal contests but not the presidential end result. So it’s 21 million in practical terms, and a number of those are similarly in states that switched to sending one out to all, again not expecting everyone to vote that way. So basically check out the states individually — and see what they’ve done or haven’t done — to see where concern might matter.

so one thing I'm trying to square

a lot of polling of early voters is showing that they tend to lean heavily Dem - I'm seeing stuff like "people who voted early are 63-37 Biden, those who plan to vote in person are 61-39 Trump".

but when you break it down by party registration there seems to be a fairly even R/D split, and the 65+ demo leads all age groups. which implies that a lot of registered R's and seniors are voting Biden, as well as a huge chunk of independents. this seems like good news, but I'm not seeing any of the 538 guys comment on it yet. so what's going on here?

Mother mother
Everybody thinks the polls are wrong

Because as our own caek has always indicated with his sign tapping you can’t know for sure quite that. It’s certainly a strong assumption — McDonald and Wasserman keep going back and forth on this — but it’s just not a guarantee.

Selzer in Iowa is the best pollster in the country so that poll should be taken seriously.

But it doesn’t make a ton of sense.

this seems like good news, but I'm not seeing any of the 538 guys comment on it yet. so what's going on here?

Meantime once again

Trump has finished and left, but there’s thousands of supporters who have been let loose into the night with no sign of the shuttles they’ve been told will take them back to parking. People are filling the street, blocking the road for ambulances and police. pic.twitter.com/uMgfvUZ4Jg

— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) October 31, 2020

don't read too much into one poll, move on

bush ii also made a big thing of Mars for some reason in one of his SOTUs. somewhere there must be some single-issue crank GOP consultant who just really loves Mars and keeps generating studies promising it's an electoral winner.

xp

It’s 41° for those wondering. https://t.co/jk4B24ecJS

— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) November 1, 2020

Silver is nettled

Man, Democrats' anxiety levels is off the charts. Which, of course. But it's a good night to have a glass of wine or whatever and chill out about the polls. It's pretty unlikely that the overall polling outlook is going to look much different on Tuesday morning than it does now.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 1, 2020

We've gotten a lot of data, most of it very recent. 91 million people have already voted. There's no October surprise unless you want to count the latest COVID spike, which isn't good news for Trump. Trump can win but there's not much indication of a last-minute surge toward him.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 1, 2020

There’s a comment in there about some bad polling dropping midnight, not taking that seriously but Jesus Christ my nerves are getting frazzled

now that Trump is officially history, can we talk about the size of Hunter Biden's schlong in that new Chinese sex tape?

...if it's OK with DJP, that is