U.S. Politics, November 2024: GARBAGE DAY!!

ya its almost as if his entire existence is owed to fluke events like the Comey letter

I don't generally like Tom Scocca's writing; he seems like kind of a dick, in the Michael Moore-ish "I wish this guy wasn't on my side" sense. But this piece is good.

I don't think Kamala Harris has blown the election. I have no idea if she's going to win or not; I just don't see how, if Donald Trump becomes president again, there's any real way to blame the Democratic nominee.

Ever since 2016, people have comforted themselves with the stories that Hillary Clinton was a singularly unlikeable candidate or that her campaign didn't take Wisconsin seriously—that she lost to Donald Trump because she fundamentally didn't deserve to win. A less blindered, more righteous candidate would have been able to bend history just a few fractions of a degree away from the track toward disaster.

Maybe. Sure, why not. But there's no convincing story this time around that Harris is making some terrible, obvious, avoidable mistake. She quickly and decisively seized the controls of the tailspinning Joe Biden candidacy and accelerated the Democratic presidential campaign into the stratosphere. She's battling in the battlegrounds, swarming the ground game, maintaining steely message discipline, and obliterating Trump in fundraising. She picked Tim Walz when the clammy centrist ghouls were demanding Josh Shapiro. Tens of thousands of people are turning out to hear her.

...

The alternative is unthinkable, yet somehow plausible. All the reporting says that the Donald Trump campaign is a logistical disaster. He looted the Republican National Committee to pay his own legal fees; he has hardly any staff; his voter turnout operation appears to be a bumbling human-trafficking scheme outsourced to the visibly unraveling Elon Musk. As a candidate, Trump is sagging and rambling, canceling events or falling mysteriously silent onstage or boring his own audiences into leaving. And the polls say he's within a coin toss of winning.

Some people, in some places, do have sincere and pragmatic reasons to elect Donald Trump. If your job involves despoiling the environment—as many American jobs do—your paycheck will likely be more secure under Trump, even if you might have to worry more about flash flooding or cancer. Prison guards and cops should find more opportunities if Trump becomes president again, and with more room for kinetic action and self-expression at work.

None of that, though, adds up to the tens of millions of people whom the pollsters expect to see voting for Trump. Unemployment is historically low, gas prices are down and dropping more, the stock market is at all-time highs, and the economic coverage and the economic polling and the economic coverage of the economic polling has been about nothing but the public's dread of inflation. Large segments of the country say they believe that crime is rampant, rather than low and dropping, and that cities are war zones, and that migrants are crowding out citizens, and that the Biden–Harris administration attacked the inland South with a hurricane, or at least abandoned the region to drown, or definitely did something wrong there. Musk has turned Twitter into a maelstrom of race panic and warnings about voter fraud, the voice of a billionaire cabal who somehow believe that if they smash everything, they'll come out even further ahead than they are now.

When I voted in 2016, I remember the space for Trump drawing my eye with the same perverse, fascinating power as a cop's holstered gun on the subway. You could just reach out—you wouldn't, you would never—but a person could. It was right there. And then enough people in enough places did it. I don't remember what I thought in 2020 at all. In 2024, though, even after I'd bubbled in Harris–Walz, I kept staring at the empty Trump–Vance, not quite believing it was even on the page, an open sore that stubbornly hadn't healed.

Interesting fact: Trump's mother was beaten nearly to death by a mugger when she was a year older than Trump is now.

i like tom s. as a writer but that piece seems pretty dumb

Contemporaneous mugging story:

https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1991/10/31/Trumps-mother-mugged/4895688885200/

This is fucking crazy

At the same time, the 2016 and 2020 polling misfires shattered many pollsters’ confidence in their own methods and data. When their results come in very blue, they don’t believe it. And frankly, I share that same feeling: If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it? As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/upshot/so-can-we-trust-the-polls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk4.G5V1.UfwDaSVi0TF9&smid=url-share

Demons after Alex Jones now too apparently. I'm not a demonologist but I've seen enough movies about this kind of thing, does it not occur to these guys that this is just the debt coming due for whatever deals they made? Shoulda read the small print before clicking the box.

Alex Jones says Tucker Carlson told him about being mauled by demons in his sleep last year at his house, and they figured out it was connected to someone “laying hands” on him. Alex says he was also attacked by a poltergeist who threw him around and separated his shoulder. pic.twitter.com/xkjJPrghwj

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2024

Reminds me of my dad, who in his later years had dementia so bad he was convinced the nurses in his assisted living unit were not only attacking him at night, but were also roughing up me and my brothers.

First, the pandemic is over. There’s serious evidence suggesting the pandemic was a major factor in the polling error in 2020, as many Democrats stayed at home — and responded to polls — while Republicans went about their lives. It would explain why the fixes that pollsters made after the 2016 election proved so ineffective four years later. If so, many polls might be accurate even without any major changes at all.

I've always suspected this was the case so it's nice to see someone else say it

once again I must point out that the idea that the polls are actually underestimating Trump, suggesting it's plausible that he overperforms 2020 by 8,000,000 votes, feels insane to me. I don't think like that's within the scope of actual possibilities here, I mean it's easy to come up with theories why it might be so (certainly there are a lot of them in this thread) but there's really no evidence on the ground whatsoever suggesting Trump is even gonna come close to winning the popular vote

xxpost Can we donate to these demons?

GoScareMe

once again I must point out that the idea that the polls are actually underestimating Trump, suggesting it's plausible that he overperforms 2020 by 8,000,000 votes, feels insane to me. I don't think like that's within the scope of actual possibilities here, I mean it's easy to come up with theories why it might be so (certainly there are a lot of them in this thread) but there's really no evidence on the ground whatsoever suggesting Trump is even gonna come close to winning the popular vote

it's totally insane at this point, but to be fair, what this country has gone through in the past 20 years would drive anyone insane, to say nothing of the levels of insanity deemed acceptable since our country's founding

but yeah he's a chump and he's gonna lose

levels of insanity some of have deemed acceptable to be fair

as @pwnallthethings.bsky.social points out on blu sky

Another way to think about it is Trump's 2024 small dollar donations ($109m) are ~28% what they were in 2020 ($378m). Harris' ($428m) are ~ 5% higher than Biden-2020 ($406m).

to be fair the megabillionairs are donating way more to trump this time vs last but that's not a lagging indicator per se

https://i.imgur.com/Knjnn2N.png

hahaha

That is the most phoned-in costume I have seen in some time.

So Don Jr. decided not to wear a costume this year?

yeah its true this country has gone insane but the last three big national elections have gone well for the Democrats, not sure what would make this one markedly different

i guess the insanity leads to people panic that trump will win which i understand and did not express v well

I guess there's no big surprise revelation after all, e.g. Trump groping a teen?
Last week the conservasphere was sweating/warning about AI generated mischief

there's the Epstein thing but i think people are wary of it bc it's Michael Wolff

feels like at this point it'll take something truly massive to break through, there has to be video or photos at least

fwiw I suspected that maybe this actually was AI-generated mischief and that's why no one is touching it

As someone said in one of these threads, it'll come out next Wednesday.

seems like someone was def shopping a story but the media wasnt buying for whatever reason

Id wait till like Monday night to drop the AI video so they have less time to disprove it

If our final Pennsylvania poll comes in at Harris +7, why would I believe it?

staring bug-eyed at this quote

if you’re admitting that you’re gonna skew data to make a result seem more reasonable to you, why should we trust your data at all? what is even the point of polling averages if every pollster nowadays is trying to do both-sides data science?

why would you believe anything what is belief anyway time to go to my job working for the paper of record

not to mention that they find option a (they underestimate trump again and people get mad at them) so much worse than option b (trump uses higher poll numbers to push his claim of a stolen election)

its about trauma actually

https://i.imgur.com/v7R614n.png

anyway interesting choice to write an article talking about how youre doing this thing that doesnt make any sense, i appreciate the transparency tho

gonna be amazing when Pig Poop Balls wins the EV

first they came for the pollsters, and i said nothing, for i was not a representative sample

is Trump getting heckled at his own rallies now

While Trump is rambling about Biden, a supporter yells “who cares” pic.twitter.com/0NXcu9LqMp

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 1, 2024

but yeah it does seem like a lot of big name poll dudes have kinda suddenly realized in the last few days that the polls are not really matching what we're seeing on the ground at all and maybe this fear of underestimating Trump again made them go too far in the other direction

theyre looking at the facts on the ground and saying weird this looks like what my polls are saying before the fear of trump adjustment

I'm all for the trump-leaning polls if it drives turnout, they can eat their crow later

like if you could boil 2016 down to one lesson it's that Trump was not an aberration, if you treated him like a normal candidate his victory shouldn't have been all that shocked

now we're in 2024 and he IS the GOP establishment and we're still assuming there's some sort of Trumpy magic out there that's making this a coinflip despite the fact that his small donor numbers and crowd sizes have completely cratered, we see now he has basically zero ground game, and his campaign has decided to focus on "we are trash people" for its closing message

Politico story:

Harris campaign: Late-deciding voters are ‘breaking by double digits’ for the VP

Kamala Harris’ campaign is feeling good about their chances with voters who are only now making up their minds about who to cast their ballots for.

Harris campaign manager David Plouffe wrote Friday afternoon on X that late-deciding voters are “breaking by double digits” for the vice president, with “the remaining undecideds looking more friendly” to them than Donald Trump. His comments echo those shared by senior campaign officials earlier Friday on a call with reporters.

“We have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important,” said one of the senior campaign officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the race. “And we are seeing that be the case as we are closing out in the last week.”

The official said that a recent focus group with undecided voters in a battleground state showed that the racist, misogynistic and vulgar language at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York over the weekend isn’t just impacting Puerto Rican and Latino voters, but undecided voters as a whole.

“It really kind of crystallized for them the choice in their minds between the vice president, who they're seeing talk about being a president for everyone, someone focused on them and solving their problems, and Trump, and these really kind of dark, divisive language and events and activities,” the official said. “We don't always see, when we're talking to swing voters, anything that you can really see them kind of finalize their point of view or finalize their opinion.”

and his campaign has decided to focus on "we are trash people" for its closing message

would be great if he were to encourage his ever-dwindling crowds to throw rotting garbage at him on the podium, just go all-in on the garbage thing

just trash folks

Can’t believe sources inside the Harris campaign aren’t saying “we’re completely shitting the bed, everything’s fucked, everybody sucks”

Just dancing alone on stage to "YMCA" while he does that double jack-off dance he does, being pelted by garbage from all sides. Helluva way to end the campaign.

need to know what percentage of the electorate waits til the final week to make up their mind who are these people

"C'mon people, is that the best you got?? Let's see some GARBAAAAAGE!!" in a pro-wrestling voice

trash not trans

look I'll be honest if this really does all come down to like 50k votes in PA it may be worth all the heart attacks along the way. the idea of a roast comedian singlehandedly preventing the Fourth Reich feels like it would make the perfect Tim Heidecker movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PdKGDMhau4