US Politics, September 2024 -- “I’m Not Going to Apologize For Posting a Joke”

Right, the point is, these are all correlated, so a candidate who wins one is disproportionately likely to win all three

vote power index, love me some vpi, gimme vpi alerts on my phone

Apparently signs keep selling out, was told there won’t be more until sometime this month.

Signs, signs--everywhere a sign.

(xpost) Your hero agrees.

― clemenza, Tuesday, September 3, 2024 12:44 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that was the thing i saw lol

Just fuck up vote certs in georgia pa and mich then? mich has made that a little harder by law and has a dem gov, dunno about pa hit it seems like shapiro has some authority over it, and ga seems like a playground with a gop gov. def start by fucking up ga.

https://www.votebeat.org/2024/08/22/presidential-election-certification-delays-trump-republicans-disputes-georgia-board-rule/

Ah but Georgia's governor hates Trump

he does but he also supports him. that said I think GA would be foolish to allow the sort of fuck ups he pushed for last time this time around.

the good thing re: PA is that it's a big union state and unions really dislike Vance. also I don't think Trump palling around with Elon Musk is gonna be doing him any favors

saw some thing predicting whoever won PA had a 90%+ chance of taking the whole thing

― lag∞n, Tuesday, September 3, 2024 12:38 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Basically if Harris wins PA she can afford to lose most of the other swing states

― There’s a Monster in my Vance (President Keyes), Tuesday, September 3, 2024 12:39 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

first point is true, winning PA makes you very likely to win, but only because winning PA is correlated with winning a bunch of other states. it does not mean you can lose most of the other all the other states. and winning PA does not *cause* you to win the states.

the tourist shop near my office has been selling trump t-shirts since the conviction/assassination. no Biden shirts. they added Harris t-shirts last week. I've seen enough.

how many of these did they have
https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--NyV2QroO--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_crop,x_10,y_10/c_fit,w_470/c_crop,g_north_west,h_626,w_470,x_0,y_0/g_north_west,u_upload:v1571669489:production:blanks:jaeeqnv4r8crsxalh03n,x_-395,y_-325/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_auto,h_630,q_auto:good:420,w_630/v1723928254/production/designs/64600815_1.jpg

is Russia bad now it's so confusing

If Harris wins PA along with MI, and WI (where she's ahead) she will have 270 EVs and can afford to lose AZ, NV, NC and GA, which are "most" of the swing states.

and its hard to envision her winning PA without winning both WI and MI

Likewise, if Trump wins PA, along with NC and GA he would have 270 and could afford to lose MI, WI, NV and AZ

sorry I mean either NV or AZ

I want a “childless cat dad for Kamala” shirt

As RFK Jr. fights to get off ballot in some states, his team files to get him on Mississippi’s
https://mississippitoday.org/2024/09/03/kennedy-ballot-mississippi-trump-rfk-jr-swing-states/

idgi

He seems to want to be on the ballot only for states Trump has locked up...as to why, though, ditto--not sure what it accomplishes. (Maybe he thinks he'll take votes away from Harris in such states, thus narrowing the popular vote?)

He has some dumb idea about getting 5% nationally so his "party" will get federal funds. But dropping out of the race tends to shrink your vote total.

Trump is throwing all of his thoughts and prayers into GA and PA
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F089ec98c-45f2-4987-b826-358cb96404f2_1279x1237.png

A contrary opinion (I guess): Dems, afflicted with PTSD since losing Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016, think and act (right) as if they're battleground states; but, really, wasn't 2016 a fluke? So long as they keep their governors and state legislatures blue, they've got those states. I realize Trump sings that siren's song for rural Pennsylvanians and those from former industrial districts, but is it that much more compelling eight years later?

With the union endorsements, its blue governor, and Walz on the ticket, I tend to think, "Nah, they got Pennsylvania so long as they don't get cocky."

yeah there isn't much evidence that PA is really in play, the thing that worries me is that Fetterman barely won despite his opponent being fucking Dr. Oz, but who knows maybe they figured out how much Fetterman sucks before the rest of us

Yeah. Also: political media, in an attempt to keep boredom at day, keep talking up the Blue Wall.

I think WI is stronger for Harris than PA, but I don't know if I have evidence for that beyond vibes.

i.e. I do think the nightmare scenario is alive where Trump wins PA and Harris wins WI and wins GA very narrowly and the election comes down to whether SCOTUS upholds openly corrupt vote-dumping by local GA election officials is really alive (wait, maybe I should put this in the Trump containment thread)

or find a riverbank and tell it to the reeds

The polling advantage for Harris is currently narrower in PA than in MI and WI, though I've also seen some people say that there hasn't been much high-quality polling there within the past few weeks, so there's a lot of uncertainty around what the aggregates are showing.

This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: none of us are gonna relax until we win this thing. 2016 is a fresh wound.

she has been getting some really good polls out of Wisconsin lately

none of us are gonna relax until we win this thing. 2016 is a fresh wound

and here's hoping it's a popular vote blowout... that'll make their chicanery less viable

Towards the end of the August thread--or maybe it was in the containment thread--someone posted a tweet from someone in Pennsylvania saying the worry was just a rerun of 2020 and that Harris was doing fine.

In a way it's ridiculous that Trump is even competitive in PA. There's only been one GOP governor term there since 1987.

Meanwhile, North Carolina GOP sure picked a doozy of a gubernatorial candidate. Not gonna be any coattails for Trump there. Not into porn-shaming, but even at that this sounds like uh fairly egregious behavior.

https://www.theassemblync.com/politics/nc-election-governor-republican-mark-robinson-porn-allegations/

Why polling-based election prognostication is bullshit:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/03/election-forecasts-data-00176905

That's hardly what he actually concludes:

It’s still possible that these forecasts may end up being the best way to predict the outcome of presidential elections. But right now, we simply do not know if these models are particularly accurate. And we certainly do not know if small fluctuations in the probability of a candidate winning represent anything other than modeling error or meaningless random variation.

Which I think amounts to "we're not sure yet."

My hot take is that polls can accurately tell us that a race is close, as opposed to a shoo-in. But in a close race polls can't tell us who will win, because they just aren't accurate enough for that. In the Electoral College, this clearly is a close race right now. Unless the polls change to reflect something very different, that's about as far as they can take us.

speaking of polling

A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Tuesday shows Biden’s approval rating rising from 41 percent in late June, shortly before his fateful June 27 debate with Donald Trump, to 48 percent today. While Biden was more than 15 points underwater in his approval back then, his approval rating is now nearly even with his disapproval rating (49 percent).

Those are Biden’s best numbers in Suffolk polling since he was inaugurated in January 2021.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/03/biden-is-suddenly-seeing-his-best-polls-years/

filing that with things that make you think

>> Which I think amounts to "we're not sure yet."

As Niels Bohr (or maybe Yogi Berra) said, prediction is hard, especially about the future.

(xpost) How can we miss you if you won't go away?

(Okay, you went away, so now we miss you.)

(xpost) Right, which I think is what at least one leading pollster concedes: "So, who’s gonna win the election? Well, honestly, we don’t know — but we can give you our best probabilistic guess."

Is it okay for the Washington Post guy to offer a hedged guess about the accuracy of polls, but not for the polls to offer a hedged guess as to who'll win the election?

And anyway, isn't the Washington Post itself part of that awful media cohort you bemoan, not to be trusted about anything?

imagine if this happened? trump would lose it all. unlikely , but still...

"Vice President Kamala Harris trails former President Donald Trump by 5 percentage points in Texas, shaving off nearly half the Republican nominee’s one-time advantage over President Joe Biden from earlier this year, according to a new poll released Thursday."

"imagine there's no texas/it's easy if you try..."

uh, when a polling company offers a hedged guess about who will win it will have more real world effects on voters compared to when some Washington Post guy makes a hedged guess about the accuracy of polls. viz. confirmation bias is more strongly at play over who wins and that ensures the hedging will be widely ignored.

the day a Democrat wins Texas the GOP is over

This is a pretty weak sauce year for the Texas GOP. Most of their ghouls in Congress are locks, and Cruz is running on the Border Security bill he voted against.

xp yeah i was just commenting on the rhetorical device, which imo intensifies the use of "comfortable" beyond what it normally means

not a defense of biden by any means. this is pathetically too little, too late

while i'm on it, on "the economy", the reason most people of means think the economy is great is because the stock market looks like this

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

and that's what a ton of people's 401k's and retirement livelihood depend on. some might have argued, as we destroyed the national safety net and pensions over the last 50+ years, that it was a mistake to tie people's livelihoods to the financial (not actual) wellbeing of corporations. but it's too late now, and because of this a lot of people are very happy with the economy because every time they check their retirement savings it's gone up by 10% or more, year over year. having been both the person who has the retirement savings tied to the stock market going up year after year, and also the person who blew their entire savings to paint more (last month i bought what might be my last resupply of oil paints and the purchase was more than 20% of my entire bank account), i can see how some people can say "the economy is actually doing well" while others might say "actually the economy fucking sucks because i get paid $15 an hour and the only food near my work costs like fucking $12 for lunch and that's if you don't get chips and a drink". it's always astounding to me when people on either side of that "the economy is doing well/ fucking sucks" divide can't expand their imaginations to understand the other's situation

I mean, to Ta-Nehisi Coates' point: Palestinians have no voices on American television with the exception of 10-minute bits on Saturday afternoons on MSNBC. Holocaust guilt, stereotypes about Arabs, residual fear of 1979-era Iran, our military-industrial complex, and expert lobbyists (including Bibi when he's out of office) have shaped the entire American sociopolitical discourse.

and yeah yeah, i'm in missouri and i'm voting for harris, because somehow, there's a worse alternative and that's what i'm being asked to choose between. it's possible to both vote for the democrat and also recognize that, even before they become a historic president, they're already making a gigantic fucking mistake

― z_tbd, Tuesday, October 1, 2024 11:59 AM (three minutes ago)

trump has said he would consider invading mexico to secure the border. it strikes me as not great for a D admin to back Israel doing the same thing with a similar justification right before an election they could definitely lose

Israel invites a lot of poorly thought out analogies but that one is spectacularly bad

dude fuck off

My point is conceding political ground to fascists is bad

Whether maga or Israeli

yeah that’s what gabbneb disagrees with

I really do want to be clear though: I’m not making an “analogy”

yeah that’s what gabbneb disagrees with

whenever there's any question about your status as the site's dumbest poster, you open your mouth you remove all doubt

Time for Green Day to wake up

Mods...?

seriously, haven't we gone through this three or four times already?

U.S. Politics, October 2024 -- “They smear because they fear”

Yeah, I had held off banning PD because I wasn't 100% sure they were gabbneb, but 99.9% is enough.