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

Could be a sign either way? Already seeing a bunch of speculation.

i have a pretty strong stomach for this stuff but the texas drive through thing is fucked up.

the only thing i can say to make it seem less bad is ... if they go ahead and discard them, it's probably a net of "only" 25,000 votes for biden. i might live to regret saying this but texas is a huge electorate, and the presidential election is unlikely to be that close.

of course this is not the GOP's only move, and these things add up. and there are other elections going on.

Could be a sign either way? Already seeing a bunch of speculation.

2020 early voting analysis in a nutshell.

just as an example set of polls, if this is correct it doesn't matter what happens in PA/TX/FL/GA.

New CNN/SSRS polls show Biden ahead in four battleground state polls
MI Biden+12, 53-41
AZ Biden+4, 50-46
WI Biden+8, 52-44
NC Biden+6, 51-45https://t.co/kzfD9zlhZX

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) October 31, 2020

re: that Recount clip, Trump's wearing proper villain-in-a-corny-70s-thriller black leather gloves

I think at this point I'm comfortable predicting the biggest presidential blowout since, what, '84? I am not, however, comfortable predicting that the legitimacy of that blowout won't be compromised by the GOP stirring up an unprecedented level of bullshit.

gonna close this tab and repeat to myself three times "i know nothing, i believe nothing"

CNN's giving a lot of play to “If we win on Tuesday or — thank you very much, Supreme Court — shortly thereafter..."

I'm maybe being naive here, but I'm taking that as Trump bluffing to demoralize (and depress) Democratic turnout--making it seem that everything's been taken care of already, no need to vote. I don't even want to think about that meaning exactly what it seems to mean.

seems more likely to drive anti-Trump turnout

I'm taking that as Trump just spewing words from his barely-functioning brain like always

I’m ready for anything

seems more likely to drive anti-Trump turnout

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.