Probably a lot of you are following the 538 election forecasts. I am too. But…have you started to find Nate insufferable? He does a great job of summarizing the COVID data every day on Twitter but in between is Halperin-level punditry, freshman bong hit philosophy of statistics, and a weird obsession with prebutting criticism, even though most of what he writes is not controversial. What the hell happened?
Anyway, I still use the 538 poll summaries and, believe it or not, the last two polls for Kansas Senate show a very tight race. Barbara Bollier is raising a lot of money but not the insane amounts we’re seeing in the states that are rated as toss-ups. Seems like a good race to sink some money into.
Baud
I found him insufferable a while ago.
PeakVT
Fame and money. They ruin nearly everybody.
Baud
I would love to be able to say, There’s nothing the matter with Kansas.
Baud
@PeakVT: They have ruined me.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: I can help take some of that money off your hands if you want to be sufferable again.
Paul W.
Honestly, the 538 presentation of this year’s model is absolute garbage and shows NOTHING interesting. 2018’s visualizations were way more snappy and let one play with numbers and peak under the hood.
What the fuck am I supposed to do with “100 random maps”, who cares? At least tell me the likelihood of every map or something about the 40,000 simulations you have run in the background. Also, even the sidebar showing the model doesn’t give a number but has two cartoon heads of the Pres candidates with the written words of “Biden is favored to win” – whoopdefucking do! I have taken to the Economist forecasting page, even if I don’t trust it as much, because I can at least poke around and see where the strengths or weaknesses are coming from.
download my app in the app store mistermix
Agree on Nate. He’s devolved into shitty punditry most of the time.
PsiFighter37
This year’s model sucks. Having a color-coded state map was a much better way of presenting the information…
dmsilev
@Paul W.:
Glad I’m not the only one to think that. Definitely a big step down from what they used to have.
PsiFighter37
Also, Nate has never been a good pundit. Ever since he got big in 2008, his political punditry has been useless.
As for Kansas Senate race – hopefully there is a sense of being fed up in the state…but who knows. They never send a Democrat to statewide federal office.
Mo Salad
I also partially blame Mickey Mouse Upper Management along with the Mickey Mouse Money.
Poblano, come back!
ALurkSupreme
Took me a moment to process the thread title, but … hee.
Yeah, Silver’s writing is not his strength. I check 538 as I do ESPN.com — numbers only.
Emma from FL
Maybe y’all should create a working group and start a competing site? Or even right here. I’m sure John would have no objection to hosting one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the Nate Silver twitter wars are like arguments about the post-Alec Guinness Star Wars to me
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Yeah, he really is kind of an ass.
Baud
@Emma from FL:
I just ignore it. Polls and predictions are irrelevant to me.
Edmund Dantes
Nate Silver is horrible once he steps outside his expertise of data. He has bad takes and they are often not supported by the stuff he is using to support it.
Kay
I forgive him his insufferable attitude because honestly the people who question him on Twitter are morons. There’s basically two types- the people who say he called 2016 wrong, which isn’t true, and the people who are not looking for statistics but are instead looking for reassurance. I get looking for reassurance- I too would like to be told everything will be fine- but that’s not the business he’s in.
There’s risk. Even with a 95/5 you sometimes get the 5. That’s hard but it’s also true.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay:
that’s my recollection of ’16, though the chaos has somewhat clouded my memory: Sam Wang was all “we got this, no bed-wetting!”, and Silver was saying, “You guys, trump could pull this out”, and we all went with Wang and a lot of people called Silver names
Kay
I will also always appreciate that he absolutely reamed the NYTimes for their emails coverage and he was one of the few who had the balls to do it. He backed up up too. Measured the coverage.
That was outrageous. That so few people -professionals in media and politics- admit it to this day is just appalling. Plain fact- the NYTimes relentlessly flogged email coverage and led all the other outlets in email coverage and that affected the race. They put a big, fat thumb on the scale for their boy Trump.
Silver said it. I appreciate that.
DougJ
I still think it’s a good site. He just annoys me.
Baud
@Kay: Good point.
rhetormorrison
I’ve been really impressed with G. Elliott Morris’s forecasting model. Silver is incidentally engaged in an ongoing Twitter rant at Morris, in which Silver is particularly grating and petulant.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Right. And “could” is a hard thing to explain. That’s what he does. He explains “could”. No one “likes” it including me but it is real and it’s basically his entire reason for being so not sure what else he would talk about.
Barbara
@Edmund Dantes:
I think this is it. I know that Nate has a lot of disdain for data free punditry, and I don’t blame him. But putting data in context turns out to be harder than it seems, and requires greater knowledge and judgment than he seems able to muster himself.
Kay
@Baud:
The NYTimes newest big blockbuster book is by the emails reporter. I kid you fucking NOT. Him again. Right on cue.
Now all we need is Comey. OMG I uttered his name, now he’s going to start talking again.
Mary G
When Nate first became famous, a lot of people believed he was a genius and said so. He seems to have internalized the hype. Also, I don’t follow the website so may be talking out of my ass, but the glimpses I see on Twitter indicate to me that like Trump, he surrounds himself with people who never disagree with him and are scared to tell him he’s wrong.
Plus there’s no sports. People who are big into sports are getting weirder and weirder as the pandemic goes on.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Nate did call 2016 wrong–in the primary. He got it completely disastrously wrong and it was because he was ignoring the data right in front of him that said Trump was obviously gonna get it, and playing pundit. That sobered him up and he went back to his older tradition of heavy hedging during the general election campaign, and it served him well.
Meanwhile, Sam Wang, who’d called the primary correctly on the same basis, was getting fatally overconfident because he’d called the 2008 and 2012 cycles so precisely on the nose, and you could even argue that his data had done the same thing in 2004 though he’d applied a bad fudge factor. It turned out it was just a small-number coincidence. Wang had always maintained that Silver over-hedged on correlated error, but he was wrong.
artem1s
I find those idiot graphics insufferable. Three FIVE bright red TRUMP WINS maps all across the top. While the Biden wins are mostly buried unless you scroll down. They know better than to present visualizations and graphs that are misleading. They are doing it for the clicks. You have to scroll two pages down to see that the outcomes are 27 to 73 in favor of Biden and the actual graphs. It’s like the climate change both-sider trick of having 2 guests onstage – one scientist and one denier – as if the split in the scientific community is 50/50. Why not put the graphs at the top and use the stupid maps as wallpaper?
270towin is a much better site
Barbara
@Kay: Yeah, me too. I think Nate Silver is talented, and mostly I like what he does, but when he starts opining he doesn’t really seem to have any more insight than lots of other people. You, for instance, are way more knowledgeable. But he at least tries to park his opinions in real data, unlike, say, Thomas Edsall or lots of others who still think it’s 1975 and if we just turned a little more this way, white “working class” voters would be up for grabs. Yeah, no.
Mary G
@Kay: Don’t say his name. I can’t take more of that so called patriot.
Baud
@Kay:
I’ve been wondering how Comey feels with almost 200K deaths on his hands. Of all the men that acted to take down Hillary, he delivered the coup de grace and may be the only one who feels a bit of regret about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I see from the twitters that Jared Kushner is doing a lot of media the last couple of days. I doubt that is a sign of confidence. Also, he’s not terrible good at it
Kay
@Barbara:
Would it be helpful if he took his 73/27 Biden number and showed how that has played out historically?
“This was a 73/27 race and 73 won” or the reverse?
I ask because I looked at his numbers for an Ohio governors race some year (I don’t recall) and it was 75/25 R and I was like “I can live with those odds!” but as it turns out those are pretty bad so I was delusional.
Starfish
There are some people who are smart who have very stupid political takes. Another person in this boat is Neil deGrasse Tyson. His political takes are very bad.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The media shouldn’t have brought it up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I believe he’s said that his wife and daughters make sure he’s felt regret about it. That said, even a blind and syphilitic squirrel will find a nut, and I think trump wasn’t wrong when he said that Comey was a little bit nutty. A bit too invested in his own Eagle Scout-ness.
James E Powell
@Kay:
The NYT & the rest of the political press/media will never explain or answer for their hatred of Hillary Clinton.
And it wasn’t just that they smeared Clinton with rumors & lies, they covered for Trump. The NYT has the names, dates, & places on Trump because they have been covering him for his whole adult life. But they decided to treat him like a celebrity and his white supremacist horde as salt of the earth RealAmericans®.
Every day I pray for the demise of the NYT.
frosty
Damn! It’s just too easy to send money with this thermometer, ActBlue, and PayPal. I’m in again. If you keep it up, DougJ, I may have to pull a few bucks out of the IRA.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He deserved to be fired, just not for the reason he was fired.
DougJ
@Starfish:
He’s much worse than Nate.
Emma from FL
@Baud: Moi aussi. But I was responding to those frustrated by Silver’s failures.
The Moar You Know
No. His core competency is still rock-solid. The opinion pieces I just don’t pay any attention to. He’s gotta drive traffic, I get that. Just got no use for it. I want polls and aggregated results and he’s very good at that.
Kay
@Baud:
Oh, I’m sure he’s riddled with (useless) guilt because he’s an ego maniac and thinks it’s his job to control the world.
That was 100% ego. Until he admits that (and he never will) he’s bullshit in my book.
All he had to do was follow the long standing rules for prosecutorial/investigation conduct – the rules PROTECT him from accusations of bias because all you have to do it point to one and say “I followed it” but no, he had to get creative because he thinks he’s a genius. Recite the result and shut up. That’s all he had to do. There was no moral quandary! He invented one because he loves to think of himself as the One Honest Man.
MattF
Silver on the intertubes has devolved into clickbait, so I don’t bother with the articles on his site.
And, as for his charts, it’s quite clear that they are heavily filtered, so any ‘current’ numbers you see on a chart are delayed– by how much, I don’t know, but a few days, at least.
lee
No. I’ve found him insufferable for years now.
His data and analysis of the data is great. Once he gets out of his element, he does poorly.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s not completely useless because the thought of it makes me happy.
I feel guilty when I miss a typo in a document.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No you don’t understand! Disney SW is the absolute WORST! RUIN Johnson and Jar Jar Abrams have ruined Star Wars FOREVER with feminazism! Rey is a total mary sue!
/pretty much the current state of SW criticism on the interwebs these days
BTW, does anybody know what happened to Mnem? I think I heard she was taking a break
Bobby Thomson
FTFNYT & FNS
Back to Kansas, another good point is that your dollar goes a lot farther there. Except for the KC metro area, the media markets there are relatively cheap.
grumbles
To be a little charitable, for a change, I think Silver has been under sustained abuse for a long time. Professional masochism like that has to make you a bit shell-shocked. Add in the money and I suspect he’s become a rather odd person. I can’t not do things to you.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I’ve been thinking about her recently. It seems like she’s found life after BJ.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Right there with you. A large part of my major in college (social psych, it was called back in the day) involved polling and numbers and a crapload of stats analysis – ironic because I picked that major as it got me out of school with a degree quickly and (I thought) involved no math, which was a real weak spot for me at the time. So I ended up getting MUCH better at math, because for the first time it was interesting.
Nate runs into two kinds of people and you nailed them both; people who want to be told it’s a dead lock and Trump might as well start packing his bags, and innumerate morons who don’t understand polling, weighting, or statistics – but who are hellbent on showing him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about anyway.
That would get real fuckin’ old after a while.
Roger Moore
I think the problems with 538 reflect the broader problems of for profit news media. Aggregating polls is a very useful way of taking a bunch of information that can otherwise be confusing and putting it into a nice, comprehensible format. Some of the other stuff they do to help make their predictions more accurate, like ranking pollster reliability and house leans, is also really good.
But fundamentally that stuff is pretty boring, which is bad for news media as entertainment. The aggregated polls by their nature don’t change much from day to day. For media that’s built around a 24 hour news cycle and driving engagement, something you can check every week or maybe every day for people who are truly obsessed, is just not enough. The commercial need to sell ads and bring eyeballs demands more material, which drives him to punditry.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
This. I’ll never forget that one video, Mueller Time I think it was called, that had “Comey is my homey” as sign or something. Some people forgot his October Surprise and lionized him
Kay
This is good for us. Slotkin is, to me, the bellweather for Trumpiness of Michigan.
You won’t read THAT sentence on Nate Silver!
I want someone to poll Wood County, Ohio. I recognize this is a specific request but I swear we would know if you just did that :)
You people. With all your money.
Gretchen
Bollier’s opponent, George Marshall, also an MD, said this:
“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves …
Just, like, homeless people … I think just morally, spiritually, socially, [some people] just don’t want health care,” he said. “The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER.”
He also was doing indoor mask less gatherings of elderly supporters, shaking hands. When asked if that was wise, he hedged. He knows it’s not, but doesn’t have the courage to say so.
The Moar You Know
@Starfish: That fucking guy. We suffer from a horrendous loathing of/lack of respect for science in this nation, and before he got his goddamned Twitter account, he was helping to turn the tide, Making Science Great Again, if you will. That’s done. That fucker is about one or two more gaffes out from not only doing the institution of science some more reputational damage, but ending his career.
Baud
@The Moar You Know:
I’m not on Twitter and missed the NDT drama. Sad to hear. I liked him.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The way to not be accused of bias is to follow the rules. That’s the protection of process. Treat everyone the same. Once he stepped outside that he was lost, because now it’s subjective and he’s using his own discretion. Just to ice the cake his judgment is BAD, so, ya know, now we’re in a world of hurt. The egomaniac makes up his own rules and he’s bad at it.
He injected himself into a process that is deliberately designed to make “him” – the individual- irrelevant.
matt
Nate Silver’s instincts have always been basically the same as the rest of NYT’s instincts.
Amir Khalid
You Got The Silver by the Rolling Stones, from the 1969 album Beggar’s Banquet. Keef on lead vocal. Because that’s all I can really say on one of these threads.
piratedan
@Matt McIrvin: Has any official Democratic or Independent commission ever stated conclusively that no votes were tampered with? Either by not counting, double counting or being electronically altered from 2016? If that hasn’t happened and that election has been vetted, then I can get on board with the revisiting what went wrong with the projection models
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: Nobody can say that! The information just doesn’t exist.
DougJ
@Amir Khalid:
It’s become a favorite of mine. They played all these different covers of it on my morning radio station.
Kay
Why don’t they do that? Instead of polling states just poll bellweather counties. Say there’s 100k people in a bellweather Great Lakes county. Just poll 5000 of them. That’s a big number of people in 100k! We can put Nate Silver out of business :)
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know: If I recall correctly, Tyson has some #MeToo stuff lurking in the background as well.
The Moar You Know
@Amir Khalid: Keith’s not one of the World’s Great Vocalists, or even one of the World’s Adequate Vocalists, but the songs he sings on tend to be pretty badass. He should sing more.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It sure seems the Republicans are doing their best to help the Democrats do a wave election from what I’ve seen. The GOP entire campaign is a rerun of 2016 and utterly ignores things like the Virus. It’s kind of really hard to get worked up about a cop being injured in Portland when a 1,000 people die a day from a preventable disease.
Luciamia
Trumps brother’s been hospitalized. Report doesn’t say for what.
Geminid
Pollsters differ in modeling and technique, so different polls come up with different numbers. But I like to look at results of the same poll- Quinnipiac for example- week over week, or month over month. Trend is real information, at least to me.
Matt McIrvin
@Paul W.: My problem with that model page is just the rampant cutesiness–it seems terminally unserious. This isn’t a goddamn party game. This is about the barrel of a gun that is pointed directly at us. A lot of us are going to live or die based on the results. It nauseates me.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Luciamia:
Uh, yeah, God…? You missed
Hoppie
<a href=”#comment-
Hi Kay! Grew up in Greene County, specifically the Peoples Republic of Yellow Springs. While Ohio has a gangrenous soft spot in my heart, I am very pleased as an elderly Murican to say I am now a Californian, with sojourns in Baltimore and Lexington, KY (both thankfully quite blue). Thank ghod, even with my four years in Italia, I have not lived in a red state. Shudder.
i
NotMax
Nothing. He’s always been, a the Brits would have it, a right wanker.
H.E.Wolf
I’ve found https://electoral-vote.com/ to be a useful site. They started out as a site to make sure overseas absentee voters (particularly military personnel) could exercise their franchise, and that info is still listed on the site’s header.
NB: The two writers have slightly differing style/tone, and they won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
The Moar You Know
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve read that. Until some proof or legal proceedings happen, I’m treating it as bullshit.
A lot of the “great scientists” had lives that were not above reproach (Einstein in particular comes to mind, hoo boy, he’d have ended up on the wrong end of multiple jury trials if he pulled the shit he did back then these days) but Tyson is the only one who gets the treatment? Pretty obvious the motivation for that. Take down a smart black man with a VERY high positive public profile and do some more damage to science, big twofer for the bad guys. So, like I said, someone wants to come forward and do the process, I’ll listen, but until then I’m treating those rumors of allegations as such: a bullshit smear campaign.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: The strategy has shifted from winning the election to stealing it and destroying democracy. And they’re using our own concern about COVID-19 to their advantage there, by shutting down every outlet for voting that doesn’t involve mortal danger.
Raven Onthill
I found Silver insufferable almost from the beginning, when he first emerged as a national figure. When 538 hired Roger Pielke, Jr., I was pretty well done with Silver.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Again J.-L. Cauvin has nailed it with a Trump statement on Twitter.
James E Powell
@Matt McIrvin:
With respect to both Silver & Wang in 2016, neither were able to assess the impact of Comey’s intervention in favor of Trump. There just wasn’t enough time to get a handle on the impact at the state level.
And it wasn’t just the negative impact on Clinton. The Comey letter revived the Trump campaign at a point where it looked like it was swirling down the drain
If there were any justice in the world, Comey would be cleaning the toilets in a prison.
Matt McIrvin
@H.E.Wolf: The guy who runs that site is pretty well-known in computer science–he’s the author of MINIX, a small Unix-like OS that preceded Linux. I recall him having long arguments with Linus Torvalds over OS kernels back in the day.
Kay
@Hoppie:
That’s funny. Good for you for moving on. My youngest is moving west. He’s in high shcool one more year and then he’s going to college but he doesn’t belong here. His older brother took him to Portland this summer and while the older brother was not enchanted and will remain in Ohio the younger told me yesterday “I have to get out of here”
He does, too. I said “I will help you!” He’s delightful and I will miss him but the truth is he’s done and then I can visit him wherever he lands.
JR
I’m annoyed as hell that Nate moved the polling summary (useful) to the background and the projections (enh) to the foreground.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@The Moar You Know:
I’d be careful about that. I can’t speak for Tyson specifically, but patterns tend to point towards the truth. It also takes a lot of guts to go to court with allegations. Women can get death threats or worse
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
That’s too bad. I enjoyed reading her takes on things
Matt McIrvin
@James E Powell: Yeah, but the probability of something like that happening needs to be baked into your estimates of uncertainty if you claim to be doing credible election modeling.
I personally think Sam Wang’s error was getting into computing an actual election probability at all. Before 2016, he never did that–he just presented his results as an “if the election were held today” distribution assuming uncorrelated errors, and presented the Meta-Margin (which is still a really clever, useful idea) as a tool you could use to see what could happen with correlated error. None of this “Hillary in fact has a 98% chance of winning,” which requires you to just guess what you think the distribution of correlated error actually is. Even in 2016, you could have just used the computations on his site in that way, instead of paying attention to the top-line number. But he chose to fly too close to the sun.
joel hanes
@Kay:
“could” is a hard thing to explain
It’s difficult enough when there are only two possible outcomes.
But when the universe of possible outcomes is very large, and most of them have very small probabilities … many of the things that actually happen are improbable. That’s when the human mind (which seems to demand reasons and meaning) fuses into a lump of stupid, and leaps to conspiracy theories or the supernatural to provide explanations.
When you believe in things you don’t understand
Kay
They’re so out of control.
I just don’t think we “go back to normal”. The collapse was too profound. Every single guard rail failed. We just didn’t know how weak it was. Not resilient at all, although there seems to be a very entrenched denial of the extent of the failure.
These people were and are not legitimately in power. To me it’s akin to jurisdiction with a court. It should have been fatal to them acting in any capacity. They literally don’t have consent.
Hoppie
@Kay: I remember my first year at Hopkins. I had made friends with a a guy from Toledo, and our joint presentation to the other guys (1970 was the first year girls were allowed so there were like 6 of them) was “we are the fortunate dudes from Ohio ” very long pause while they thought up appropriate insults — then “cause we escaped”. Then we were in the club.
@Kay:
JR
@The Moar You Know: Jim Watson still lives at Cold Spring Harbor, although they have dissociated themselves from him.
James E Powell
@Matt McIrvin:
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Woah, but mama that’s where the fun is
Haroldo
@Barbara:
@Edmund Dantes:
I think this is it. I know that Nate has a lot of disdain for data free punditry, and I don’t blame him. But putting data in context turns out to be harder than it seems, and requires greater knowledge and judgment than he seems able to muster himself.
I’ve found this to be the case for the modeling/modelers for the fields with which I’m familiar.
Matt McIrvin
@The Moar You Know: It’s not just Tyson–there have been a lot of lower-profile cases in academic science. Lots of respected professors with bad behavior. (And the Epstein revelations turned out to hit a bunch of respected figures too–Marvin Minsky may have been saved from career destruction by becoming dead just in time.)
Standards have certainly changed. Richard Feynman would probably have gotten in immense trouble over the past few years had he been pulling that shit today.
JR
@Matt McIrvin: Feynman was a sexist douchebag. And I *loved* him.
Brachiator
I don’t pay attention to his punditry. I guess he does this to try to set himself apart from other pollsters and to justify the space he gets in various media publications.
Is his stuff about philosophy of statistics wrong? I haven’t really followed it, but most people need help understanding statistics and data analysis. If this helps, what’s the problem.
His main work is usually pretty good, and that’s all I ask for.
Hoppie
@Mo Salad: Yes, remember when he was poblano. Nailed the NC and Indiana primaries. Kinda wish money had not suborned him, but you have to eat, no?
Martin
Here are the things we’ve been told are happening with regards to the election.
I normally drop off my mail in ballot at the voting center ahead of election day. I won’t be routing it through the USPS. I’m assuming that states that historically had drop off will be fine, that they’ll have the best success targeting states initiating it for the pandemic. But if I were in a battleground state, I’d suck it up and vote in person. If we lose the integrity of our elections and get another 4 years of Trump, and if successful we’ll also have lost our shot at the Senate and possibly lose the House – because there’s no way Trump is making up an 8 or 10 point gap without amplifying the existing effects of gerrymandering – then you’re going to be far, far more likely to catch Covid as a result of 4 more years of complete inaction than an hour at the polling place. Your best bet of not getting sick is doing whatever is needed to get Biden elected.
Also, there’s probably a simple solution to this problem. We need to convince Democrats to tell pollsters they’re going to vote for Trump. He’s trying to compensate for the poor polling. So convince him he’ll win. Then vote for Biden.
Yutsano
Y’all…the most important prognosticator has already weighed in and Biden is gonna win. Just please don’t let the model be wrong this time*.
*The one time he was he was predicting the popular vote, which is why he picked Gore. He refined his model after that.
robmassing
not. following. at. all. No horserace coverage for me. We’ll know when we know.
Bobby Thomson
@piratedan: no, and much to the contrary, we confirmed Russians had the ability to hack into state voter databases. You can’t convince me they didn’t flip those states.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
It’s kind of shocking how easy this is for them. Just take the machines out, take the mailboxes away. Dems spend a couple of weeks trying to get people to pay attention, go to court, justice is delayed… I just hope this riles up some Montanans.
Link.
Kay
@Hoppie:
I like the flatness of NW Ohio. My daughter brought it up when she relocated to Pittsburgh. She felt slightly claustrophobic in a valley. I had never considered that, how it stretches out from Erie on a plain all the way to Indiana.
Kay
@Yutsano:
I decided I like him because he’s such a goofball and all the stats people were sneering at him.
But I once watched an incredibly boring and incomprehensible video that purported to show who would win the Ohio governor’s race based on their body language in a debate.
Roger Moore
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I would be cautious about claims about postal collection boxes being removed as part of some massive conspiracy. USPS has been gradually removing them for some time. They apparently monitor how much mail is deposited in them and eliminate ones that aren’t getting sufficient use. I’m not saying this isn’t part of the broader plot, but eliminating collection boxes is not a new thing.
joel hanes
@Bobby Thomson:
If I recall correctly, several states have stated that they have considerable evidence about the extent of Russian penetration of their voting systems, and every one of those states with Republican governance has steadfastly refused to release details.
joel hanes
@Kay:
I know a people who live in steep-sided valleys in the Santa Cruz Mountains, shaded by tall redwoods.
I could not live there. They don’t actually see the sun until late morning, and then it goes behind the trees to the west by 2 PM. Also, it’s frequently foggy much of the day.
I gotta have light.
Yutsano
@Kay: There’s a video of him going through the thirteen questions. I need to find it because you can tell he’s a big dork at heart. Even the outfit he wore for the interview was delightfully quirky.
EDIT: A-ha! Found it! Let me know if that link no work and I fix
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I guess it takes all kinds. I’ve lived my whole life in areas close to the mountains, and I can’t imagine living somewhere completely flat. If nothing else, you always know your directions when there’s a big mountain range nearby.
Kay
@Yutsano:
He’s great. He should use dramatic music- “the KEYS to the PRESIDENCY”. I, for one, am sold.
Trump is a good example of risk. One day he’s cutting taxes for billionaires and there’s some downside but it’s marginal (to them), the next he’s killing 170,000 people. Ooops! Did not see that coming.
Hoppie
@Kay: Southwestern Ontario is like that. I never understood until I read some geology.
Anyone who is interested can learn about the Cincinnati arch. Google it. Links are your enemy.
Marcopolo
@Kay: I totally love and for the most part agree with your comments but if you (or anyone for that matter) wanted to get 5000 respondents to a poll, with today’s response rates I am pretty sure you’d need to make well over 100K calls. When you consider the nuts & bolts problems that “modern” polling is up against it is frankly pretty astonishing that they are (wiggle room) accurate to any useful degree whatsoever.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
She’s visual in a way I’m not so I’m always “That’s what that was!”
I do love how it looks in the winter. Bare. Uncluttered. Okay, desolate.
Marcopolo
@Roger Moore: That’s fine. If removing street side mail boxes is part of a long term planned USPS process I am sure there is documentation to that effect. Just show us the documentation. And if they can’t there is a problem. After all, OR is actually one of the few states that does all its voting via mail-in balloting. You’d think, at least, there would be some form of heads up communication between the state elections folks & the USPS–like “hey elections folks, we are getting rid of a bunch of mail boxes at these locations, you might want to consider putting out more drop boxes” or something like that.
Hoppie
@Marcopolo: I will never be included in a phone poll, cause my phone is programmed to never ring unless the number is on my list. Duh!
Mike in NC
We live in a development that didn’t exist 15 years ago. In this town and the surrounding area there are no sidewalk mailboxes. You have to go right to a post office to mail anything. Assume that holds true in other states, too.
James E Powell
@Roger Moore:
No disrespect, but given the corruption & bad faith that the Republicans have demonstrated with respect to elections over the past 30 years, I do not think being cautious about anything is a good idea. I think the better idea is mass demonstrations, screaming, shouting, going to the postmasters’ houses, blocking streets, forming huge crowds at Republicans’ offices.
The Ohio Sec’y of States order banning extra drop boxes should produce a riot. It won’t, but it should. We are all going to feel like real dumb-asses if Trump and the Republicans pull this off.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The WSJ says Trump is going to be featured every night of the R convention.
Because of course he is.
Matt McIrvin
@Yutsano:
where “refined his model” here means “claimed it wasn’t about the popular vote after all so he could say he got 2016 right”.
Kay
40 is a good number :)
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I think the Keys to the White House guy is a total charlatan–his “keys” are so subjective that he can change his mind about what they say as the election season goes on, and just make them call whatever the most likely result from polling seems to be right at the end.
When he called 2000 wrong, he started emphasizing afterward that he had been predicting the popular vote all along, so actually he was right. I remember asking one of his fans if he’d have claimed a correct call if Gore won the electoral vote but lost the popular vote, and the fan said no, the guy had far too much integrity for that.
Then, what happens in 2016? He calls it for Trump, and Trump wins the electoral vote but loses the popular vote. He says he got it right! Turns out that now it’s an electoral-vote predictor, who’d a thunk it?
Gin & Tonic
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Boy, I’d hate to have that kind of schedule affect his health adversely.
[The few times I’ve been unable to avoid seeing him on TV in recent weeks he’s really seemed low-energy, so they’ll really need to juice him up]
Kathleen
@Kay: I graduated from University of Portland, home of Megan Rapinoe. Came home to Ohio at Christmas and summer.
Martin
@Roger Moore: It doesn’t need to be. Once the President goes on TV and says he’s fucking with the USPS to help him win the election, every action is fair to question.
And we’ll have lost the election by the time anyone in the USPS is compelled to provide documentation. Running out the clock is trivial for them to do at this point. It’s 80 days. If they succeed, it won’t matter what that documentation reveals.
sdhays
@Gin & Tonic: Fire up the meth labs, South Dakota!
dww44
@Roger Moore: I’m with you on that one. Don’t live in the mountains, but live in the Piedmont with lots of hills to make driving interesting. I’ve found, though, that the really important thing for my sanity is living in a green world. I know how everyone has romanticized the West and its beauty, but it kinda doesn’t work for me. Took a road trip with daughter in 1995 across the U.S. from Portland, down to LA and across via I-15 to Las Vegas and down to Grand Canyon and then east on I-10 somewheres and traveled towards Atlanta.
Of course, it didn’t help that it was the 3rd week of July and just PAINFULLY hot. We had rented a little red Ford sedan in Portland that had a black interior. That’s when I discovered why everyone in the Southwest drove a light colored car with light colored interiors. Drove with a towel draped over my thighs, even with AC on.
My brother, calling after that trip, said “Well it was a dry heat, wasn’t it?” My response was “Dry or not, when it’s close to 100 degrees at 9:30 in the evening in Las Vegas then it doesn’t matter. It’s all painful.”
I will never forget that trip. The day we toured Hoover Dam was extraordinarily hot and the glare was hard on one’s eyes. My daughter, seeing the nearby and incredibly blue Lake Mead and a couple of boaters, wondered aloud why anyone would want to be on that water with no ability to shelter from the sun. Guess it’s just what one gets acclimated to.
J R in WV
@The Moar You Know:
Yeah, my third semester of Calculus, when we hit orbital calculations, I was like “Finally, a reason to care about Math other than to get a good grade!”
Of course, since I never really needed to do orbital math, I lost the ability to do that flavor of Calc…
Albatrossity
As a Kansan, I thank you. I do believe that Bollier is the perfect candidate for taking out the odious Roger Marshall. Smart, female, stump-ready, well-financed because all her opponents dropped out before the primary, and running against someone who has spent the last three years living somewhere up Trump’s colon. She would make a great senator!