GET OUT: US politics November 2020

(even though he....technically wasn't 'wrong'?)

That's the great thing about being a an election forecaster – unless you're so foolish as to actually call a race ahead of time, you can always just say "well 90% isn't 100%"

Nate Silver should make you pass a math test before you’re allowed to see the forecast

Only Nates are allowed to see them.

That's the great thing about being a an election forecaster – unless you're so foolish as to actually call a race ahead of time, you can always just say "well 90% isn't 100%"

― Alba, Wednesday, November 4, 2020 1:01 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is what I meant upthread -- there is no way to run the same election 10 times, so any claims about odds are unverifiable.

we should be offering people something besides "not as racist as them"

strongly disagree that this is all Biden is campaigning on. he has a progressive agenda!

Can't remember who asked/brought it up, but this from NYT on recount:

Reid Epstein, in Madison, Wis. 8m ago

The margin needs to be less than 1 percent for a recount in Wisconsin. Trump will have to pay about $3 million for it unless the margin is less than one quarter of 1 percent.

This is what I meant upthread -- there is no way to run the same election 10 times, so any claims about odds are unverifiable.

I guess over a course of a forecasters career people can make their own minds up about their success rate, but there are so few of these big moments that that takes decades, if they're in the game that long.

Trump will have to pay about $3 million

That's that, then.

they gotta figure it out quick or they're liable to get shellacked in 2022. assuming Biden does win, this is still an insanely good result for the GOP, given where things looked like they were headed in 2018. if you offered any GOP pol "keep the Senate, gain a little in the house, get a 6-3 SC majority, and lose the presidency to Joe Biden" back then they'd all have taken it in an instant.

― frogbs, Wednesday, November 4, 2020 12:53 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

And that’s because they are a much more focused and tight group, the politicians and the constituency. Dems demographic is pointing the better days, but boy it’s seems like always more work than anticipated to unite this coalition.

Biden's lead up to almost 50,000 in Michigan

https://apnews.com/article/ap-explains-arizona-joe-biden-bb16f91b04456b2513f40436248eb62d

That's that, then.

He prepaid!

I don't know that this tells us anything we don't already know, but since I'm spending my day number-crunching for a local analysis story: In my quite-red county in a quite-red state, Trump's vote share slipped slightly from 58 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2020. Not a huge deal, but what's more telling to me is that it was across the board — he underperformed his 2016 percentages in 69 out of 89 precincts, including most of the precincts he won, and only did better than 2016 in 8 precincts. And this is a county with a ton of MAGA hats and Trump flag truck parades and so forth.

And there were 7 precincts where he did sufficiently worse for the precinct to flip from Trump to Biden, all inner-ring suburbs. There were zero precincts that flipped from Dem to Trump.

strongly disagree that this is all Biden is campaigning on. he has a progressive agenda!

― real muthaphuckkin jeez (crüt), Wednesday, November 4, 2020 1:04 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

So does every democratic candidate, somewhere on their website. The question is how is that message actually getting through to people.

How many times do the unlikely scenarios in your analysis have to occur before you acknowledge that your analysis is fundamentally flawed, or your data is bad, or there is something you are not accounting for?

You should ask Silver himself.

strongly disagree that this is all Biden is campaigning on. he has a progressive agenda!

I feel like because Bernie's agenda was more progressive and he lost to Biden, that even if Biden was promoting progressive policies, people drawn to progressive policies weren't going to see it that way. ... Also Biden's history as being a moderate increases that perception.

I doubt Sanders voters didn’t vote Biden en masse so I think this is already a non-story.

I think we've seen that this time it wasn't about who sat out the general.

Yeah maybe we need to cool it on the election takes until the final numbers come out. The numbers are all over the place. Biden is outdoing Clinton in a lot of places but severely underperforming in others. There isn’t really a consistent pattern to it. I do think having the last 4 years completely dominated by coverage of an insane sociopath is doing a number on our country and has led to some unpredictable things. Remember how in 2016 both sides were pretty confident that Hillary would win handily? Our brains are broken.

xp -- trump is paying the $3 million to do a recount apparently

lol kept wondering why the needle wasn't updating and then realized I missed the header at the top that said WE STOPPED UPDATING THIS MORNING AT 6 AM.

Also, Biden hasn’t lost yet so let’s not have post-mortem analyses.

There are so many permutations and "what-ifs" that I don't think you can conclusively say that. The issue is, is this a story we want to think about?

Biden squeaking out a win w/ Great Depression II and 230k dead requires just as much of a post-mortem as an outright loss.

yeah I have to think he’d have been crushed without COVID.

which is massively fucking depressing

I mean, incumbents do generally win. even when they're shitheels.

I think the key problem with Biden and Hilary is that they let Trump be the center of the story. Bernie would have at least had his own counternarrative so I think he might have done better, but a more conservative democrat could have also done well if they similarly had a stronger presence. Trump’s campaign had almost nothing to do with policy this time around so it really seems like this is a popularity contest.

doesn't help when you have an empty shirt as a candidate.

really hate to whine about what appears to be a unequivocal Win, but gah I was really hoping for crushing rebuke of Trumpism in the electoral and pop vote. not just for the MAGA tears (though delicious), but for my friends and other folks who don’t have the relative luxury of living in areas papered in Biden & BLM & Science Matters signs. ngl I’d probably be a total mess if I were stuck in Trumpville, even with Biden squeaking it out. :-/

Gideon just conceded to Collins. fuck.

(although, to be fair, indications seem that it's less that it took COVID to cost Trump his support, and more that Trump's support was just low enough to lose narrowly but that not even COVID could reduce it. which is equally depressing)

One thing seems certain to me, even tho it’s armchair punditry, is that the growing rural/urban divide is going to help the EC do its thing and without EC reform, landslides are going to be less and less impossible for the dems.

That’s certainly the GOP line. Although of course they blame China for it rather than Trump’s total mismanagement.

Trump did better than 2016 the only difference is that Biden isn’t as hated as Hillary, seemingly, it’s just absurd.

xposts

There’s a lot to figure out about what went/is going wrong, but there also needs to be a focus on going all in on 2022 without missing a beat, regardless of the outcome of this election. I hope the party can do both.

Nate Silver's every utterance is peppered with the understanding "look, I don't make the polls, I am not a pollster, polls are imperfect, I'm just analyzing the data that is in front of me and trying to make sense of it, and yes, things that have a 10% chance of happening about 10% of the time, and yes, you motherfuckers, how many times do I have to say TRUMP CAN STILL WIN before you take me seriously."

At the same time, I feel like a lot of polling organizations should just fold their tents and go home. Learn to do something else, anything else. Weave baskets. Make pottery. Take up midwifery or plumbing or become a licensed chiropractor.

I am sympathetic, because they are just measuring what people say to them. In a strict ethical sense, they can't be blamed for reporting what people say to them. But the institution is not working as it should, and it is not delivering information that helps the nation or the world. To be fair, in between elections, polls are all we have, so it's not stupid that we paid attention to them. But they aren't doing what people want them to do, so it may be time to let them go or find some other solution.

I heard earlier that the US had actually lapsed out of the Paris Accord after nominally doing so a year ago, it takes a year to do and presumably if anybody sane was in charge it would have been cancelled in the interim. I am aware that it is a nominal agreement that doesn;t go far enough to fulfil its purpose but it wasa t least a direction that was being followed before t had a hissyfit about it.,
Wasn't it hollowed out heavily by the GOP in the first place.

I suspect the real question isn't "what did Democrats do wrong?" but "why is the American populace so full of shitheads?"

Don't want to stir things up *too* much but it seems like if a forecast says that Biden is favored because he could survive a 2016-style (~3 point) polling error when Clinton couldn't, and you get that polling error and he indeed (probably) survives, it was fairly informative?

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 4, 2020

I suspect the real question isn't "what did Democrats do wrong?" but "why is the American populace so full of shitheads?"

― real muthaphuckkin jeez (crüt), Wednesday, November 4, 2020 1:20 PM (thirteen seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

people are really doing the cirque du soleil of hot takes to avoid grappling with the fundamental issue

why can't we have both xp

botching an election when you had the means not to is at least somewhere on the shithead continuum

(which, I realize, also makes me a shithead)

trump is paying the $3 million to do a recount apparently

I would gladly pay you Tuesday wimpy.gif

and cirque du soleil filed for bankruptcy!

It’s because that question is very difficult. What do you make of a society that elevates a man who acts like a petulant child?