The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal - US elections 2016: the october surprises

Drove by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections this morning. Early voting starts in Ohio today, saw this little Clinton rally across the street. No Trump signs visible, but I assume those folks sleep in.

http://i.imgur.com/LfSJrxL.jpg

Guys, you should all know by now the left-right spectrum goes Morbz > Abbie Hoffman > Saint Jill Stein > Nader > Nixon > Hitler > Clinton

Checked the 538 forecast. 84%. Took a shower. Now it's 86,5%. The bottom is falling out.

Arizona is blue.

keep taking showers, it seems to be good for the polls

remember 538 is a bad and insane this year.

i want to see the utah poll in 538 but i don't think they mcmullen in their model?

I understand 538 is insane, but it's still notable that this may be the first time all three 538 indices are over 80% (polls-plus was in the 70s for a long time). Nowcast is over 90% this AM.

PEC's forecasts are up to like 95% / 97%. It is pretty dramatic.

oh yeah the race is over and it's good for 538 that it now agrees with everyone else. it's just shifts in 538 driven by one or two polls do not necessarily tell you anything about those polls.

that said, lol at the utah poll

538 is bad and insane in an overly cautious direction though, was my feeling?

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/780396156295770112

Silver was browbeating Dems about overconfidence for the last two months. We knew the bottom would fall out.

we were just waitin on the pussy

The 'problem' with the 538 poll was always that it was overly volatile. Because of the many undecideds, it underestimated Clinton's position even though she never lost her lead. The algorithm saw room for Trump to win over people, even though every sane observer could see that would not happen. I get why they programmed the algorithm the way that they did, but it did not work out for them this year.

It's been a pendulum. In the fall, they discarded the polls showing Trump in the lead, and relied on conventional wisdom that 'the party decides'. Then they went mea culpa, and started focusing only on the polls, without thinking about the fact that Trump is a stupid racist asshole who was quite likely to a) do awful in a one-on-one debate against Hillary and 2) have something completely awful in his past. They overcompensated from their earlier miss, and learned the wrong lesson. Which wasn't to trust the polls to the exclusion of everything else, but that the GOP is completely dysfunctional and couldn't figure out how to sink the candidacy of the worst major candidate ever.

feels like there's never been a worse election for some predictive model since it is impossible to really. silver's insight to the world was essentially 'don't pay too much attention to any given poll, just average them'. which was a good insight and helped raise the level of discourse. but these models - including sam wang's - seem totally pointless given that we're dealing with an environment that doesn't belong to the same universe as previous elections. there's a non-zero chance trump spends the next month campaigning against his party and/or telling people not to show up to the polls, that a tape comes out with him saying an ethnic slur, who knows. of course he's gonna lose, but the next month is not 'predict'-able at all I think.

Utah poll is a crazy outlier - Trump 15-39pts up in the last month, but then the massive margin differences there indicate how little good polling there's been in that state. 538 grades Y2 Analytics (who posted the 26-26-14 poll) as C+, same as CVOTER, who had Trump winning 67% of the vote only a week or so ago. So, who knows?

It would be pretty funny if states that no one had even thought to move out of the red column, due to lack of data, are actually toss-ups now. Alaska?

xp

first sentence got cut off 'feels like there's never been a worse election for some predictive model since it is impossible to really toss donald trump into your model.' xp

There does seem to be a difference between people who feel right and left represent relative positions and those who think they describe positions. I don't think you can be left wing and be enthusiastically pro-capitalism. I don't think you can be described as hard left if you believe in parliamentary change rather than revolution.

Or far left.

Alaska is closer than Pennsylvania, iirc. It's a swing state now :)

holy shit @ these latest Utah & Ohio polls

At this point I'd be willing to bet that McMullin takes Utah.

was gonna say

first third-party candidate to win electoral votes since wallace in '68?

yeah I get the "where people sit in congress" version, but ime "the left" and "the right" as labels are rarely if ever limited to "people currently serving in a legislative body," and it is v functional that the language gives us the capacity to discuss the full range of political positions in this country. that still doesn't mean an absolute standard, but just that a conversation about"the left in america" which is defined by the democrats' legislative agenda would be incomplete to put it mildly. and then you end up writing off everybody who advocates for e.g. socialism by name, as being some teeny ivory tower fringe with cartoon hippie stink lines, effectively outside the picture, excluded by the spatial metaphor before they even speak, or show up to vote for sanders/teachout/whoever. some might be fine with that but it just seems like a definition so incompletely descriptive as to be pointless.

omg
https://twitter.com/Jzokun/status/785708353360060416

One of my main criticisms of Hollywood is that it isn't populist enough.

She's gonna eat your boat, she's gonna have open borders

the majority of the time 'the left' is said in america, it's going to be using the 'where people sit in congress' definition. in a context like ilx, you can use the word however you want as long as you make it clear what you're talking about, but if you say 'the left' to a total stranger on the street, most likely they are going to believe you're talking about a group of people that includes clinton and obama.

I remember American friends of mine in the 90s (a reverend and his wife) who, if Hilary was mentioned would always call her 'lady Macbeth' and wait for you to laugh. Lovely people, as far as republicans go.

hillary clinton has hunger for man in the boat

Sharks out the kazoo.

lol at utah, hope that happens. now I'm a little surprised there haven't been more favorite-son protest candidates tho I get how utah might uniquely foster something like that. also a big problem for trump's snowball's chance in hell path to victory - he needs every last state he can get, and a utah loss - which I could see happening even if the race tightened up elsewhere - would cancel out a trump recovery in iowa, say.

first third-party candidate to win electoral votes since wallace in '68?

― fat fingered algorithm (rushomancy), Wednesday, October 12, 2016 8:51 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

didn't perot win some? I thought there were a few states that award proportionally?

Also, this is just anecdotal but I think it might be indicative of something that might be happening, friend at work said she had dinner with her Mom, a very big Christian conservative, always voted Republican and very right wing as long as she can remember, anyway she told my coworker "I'm voting for Hillary Clinton, but don't tell anyone especially anyone I go to church with."

I know there's been speculation that there's secret Trump voters out there who won't say they are but will vote for him, but I could definitely see the reverse happening esp. in demos like the one above.

nope, Perot was a 0 in both xpost

Also, this is just anecdotal but I think it might be indicative of something that might be happening, friend at work said she had dinner with her Mom, a very big Christian conservative, always voted Republican and very right wing as long as she can remember, anyway she told my coworker "I'm voting for Hillary Clinton, but don't tell anyone especially anyone I go to church with."

I know there's been speculation that there's secret Trump voters out there who won't say they are but will vote for him, but I could definitely see the reverse happening esp. in demos like the one above.

THE REVERSE BRADLEY EFFECT

Also, this is just anecdotal but I think it might be indicative of something that might be happening, friend at work said she had dinner with her Mom, a very big Christian conservative, always voted Republican and very right wing as long as she can remember, anyway she told my coworker "I'm voting for Hillary Clinton, but don't tell anyone especially anyone I go to church with."

I know there's been speculation that there's secret Trump voters out there who won't say they are but will vote for him, but I could definitely see the reverse happening esp. in demos like the one above.

THE REVERSE BRADLEY EFFECT

yeah I don't see why the opposite wouldn't be true as well. Hillary is extremely unpopular as well. I don't like telling people I'm voting for her.

"Secret Hillary vote" makes more sense anyway, I would imagine there are lots of people who are utterly unexcited about Clinton but consider it their moral duty to vote against Trump

A little more on why Utah is going to be very interesting going forward: I've been checking in on the Twitter feed of Rick Wilson, Florida-based GOP media/campaign dude and a from-the-start Never Trump type, for the past few months; he became McMullin's campaign manager and has cannily been cashing in favors to get McMullin some free media time for these past two months. Meantime by concentrating their efforts in Utah and surrounding states -- not a surprising calculation given McMullin's Mormon background combined with the state's clear unease with Trump in the primaries -- and adding a dollop of 'hey if you don't like EITHER big candidate, hi there!' along the way, McMullin was pretty easily able to carve out what we're now seeing. That he's trashing Johnson in the state where Johnson's campaign headquarters is is kinda hilarious too.

Wilson's been dropping a hint or two that some Utah endorsements are about to arrive -- I wouldn't be surprised if Mike Lee, Gary Herbert and (in what would be a REAL tell, since he has to calculate what Trump voters in his district could do) Chaffetz climb on board, especially in light of last weekend. This would likely be enough to further increase both name recognition and switched votes to push him over the top if these trends hold.

And at that point -- heck, probably right now -- Trump is suddenly in a real bind. Consider: his path to victory constantly narrows, and is getting narrower. (In practical terms, I think he's dead in the water, of course.) He needs every banked state in his column he can get, and while it was looking weaker for him in Utah he/his team/the RNC probably figured 'eh, imperfect, we'll lose some folks to Johnson but we're fine otherwise.' Now both McMullin and, of course, HRC can go "Hey, a little extra effort and we've got those votes." Meaning Trump and team now have to spend time, energy -- and probably even a personal appearance or two -- to shore things up if possible, though I don't think they are. And if they do, well, trashing HRC is of course par for the course. But Trump is probably pissed as fuck he has to even spend a little time thinking about McMullin, probably raging about how he's some small-time loser, who does he think he is, etc. And probably thinking the same thing about his supporters there as well. And if he directly attacks McMullin, whether in terms of Twitter or a speech or an interview, that's more publicity for McMullin right there. It would be more than a little hilarious if the 'outsider' is outflanked by, well, an outsider.

Other thought: it would be interesting to see what the spillover from Utah in surrounding states might be with McMullin too. Nowhere near enough to win I suspect, but more of a troubling spoiler for Trump regardless.

(Further: besides trashing McMullin in Utah, IF those endorsements come in, then he's got to trash whoever gives them as well. And that...won't go over well.)

thx Ned

(And further further: I would LOVE to see Trump complain about rigged voting in Utah. If you're going to blow yourself up, just go there too.)

Oh and one other potentially obvious endorser to consider: Romney.

(Further: besides trashing McMullin in Utah, IF those endorsements come in, then he's got to trash whoever gives them as well. And that...won't go over well.)

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, October 12, 2016 9:30 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at this point though he's just basically just beefing w/everyone and taking Ls like meek mill, i don't think he's ever going to think about what's going to go over well if he feels personally attacked by someone

Meanwhile, a fun read:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donald-trump-gop-229653

HRC is not likely to get more than 32-36% in the likes of ID, UT and WY (the deepest of red, don't-even-scroll-down-that-far states), but the prospect, however small, of her WINNING the EVs due to a three-way split of anti-DEM votes is amazin'. Obv, I'd prefer Senate+House if we're talking cratering GOP numbers nationally, but it would be pretty sweet.

A little more on Utah:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/12/a-new-poll-shows-a-tie-in-utah-be-skeptical-be-amazed/

lots of these national/state polls which show solid leads include periods pre-video (the IPSOS 50-state web poll dump, of dubious reliability, goes back as far as Sept). only a few polls (like NBC Nat'l) were entirely after, so I'm really intrigued to see what the most recent ones will show.

House might be a reach but I'm amazed it's back in the discussion. thanks Donald.

I soudl also point out that the Murphy/Rubio race in Florida has tightened considerably in the last week. Rubio's ahead but not by much. I used to think that even if Trump lost Florida we'd still see The Moron with the Haircut back in the Senate; now I'm seeing increasing signs that Rubio and Trump's fates are coupled.

oh dear God please take Rubio

I mean in the election, don't kill him