Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Everybody saw this coming.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / The Only Poll That Matters…

The Only Poll That Matters…

by | 140 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

…is already in the field. About two weeks ago I started checking in with the University of Florida’s Early Voting tracker website. Back in 2020, the daily updates there offered me a dose of reassurance, and this year is no different. The scholar who’s in charge of the project is Michael McDonald, who notes that as of this morning approximately 43 million of us have voted in the election. Click the embedded post to follow him on Bluesky (you can also find him at the Other Place, but I’m going to try not to embed tweets here when there’s a Bluesky account available):

#earlyvote morning update 10/28: at least 42.9 million people have voted in the 2024 general election 🥳
election.lab.ufl.edu/early-vote/2…

[image or embed]

— Michael McDonald (@electproject.bsky.social) October 28, 2024 at 12:45 PM

The site has a nifty dashboard for parsing data by reported characteristics such as gender, party registration, etc. (Note that not all characteristics are available for all states.) Professor McDonald also has a Substack where he breaks down what he’s seeing in the data, but most of those posts are for paid subscribers only, unfortunately. This post, “Republican Antipathy Toward Early Voting May Haunt Them”, however, isn’t. It’s from October 20th, over a week ago now. It focuses on data out of North Carolina and notes that:

“North Carolina law allows counties to set times and hours for in-person early voting within state guidelines. The 2024 general election schedule of in-person early voting is here. Importantly, counties have the option of holding in-person early voting on the weekends, which the larger Democratic counties opted to do.

“Why didn’t Republican counties do the same? Probably because their election boards when making their plans heeded Donald Trump’s warnings that early voting is fraudulent. But as the unusual surge in Republicans voting the first days of in-person early voting suggest, these decisions were perhaps shortsighted because it cut off eager Republicans from voting over the weekend.”

He also notes that when Republicans are voting in North Carolina, they seem to be more women voters than men (I wonder how many of those Republican ladies are Nikki Haley crossover voters). In fact, early voting data generally shows a much larger gender gap so far this year:

Here’s data from the states that report voter gender:

UFl early voter data by gender 10/27/24

That’s currently a gap of 10.4% between men who have voted and women who have voted. In 2020, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, the gap was 3.4%. Now, the current gender gap will undoubtedly narrow over the next eight days, as more people vote but that it is so large right now seems . . . interesting.

Some of our fellow commenters highlighted more early vote data that should provide you with some motivation, even if it doesn’t help you sleep better (and anyway, to quote Governor Walz quoting Warren Zevon: we’ll sleep when we’re dead).

First, dm posted this DailyKOS diary with some survey data of people who have already voted. The choice excerpt:

“Here are the polls and the Harris-Trump percentages those early voters have said they voted.

  • ABC/Ipsos: Harris 62-33
  • CNN:  Harris 61-36
  • NYT/Siena: Harris 58-40
  • HarrisX poll: Harris 61-32
  • USAToday/Suffolk: Harris 63-34

That’s 5 polls all showing roughly the same thing . . . That’s an average of 61.2% for Harris, 35% for Trump.”

(Bolding mine.) Within that DailyKOS diary there’s also a link to another data aggregator, TargetSmart, which offers a model of voter partisanship that is 47% Democratic, 44% Republican, and 9% other. So, again: interesting.

Next, Ceci n’est pas mon nym shared the latest article for Today’s Edition, a Substack newsletter run by a writer (and attorney? couldn’t confirm) named Robert Hubbell. Titled “Reasons to be hopeful!”, the article notes the belated turn by the press toward calling MAGA what it is, the lack of attention paid to women’s issues, and, most interestingly, a link to this Vox article about the gender gap in candidate preference in recent swing state polls. Behold this chart:

holy gender gap, batman!

Look at those North Carolina numbers. I hope you Tar Heels will help the rest of us have an early night on the 5th.

Finally, rarely is the question asked: is our white women learning? Apologies for the Newsweek link, but it appears the Rough Beast may only have 51% of white women behind him (as opposed to 56% in 2016 and 57% in 2020):

“This year Trump holds just a 1-point lead among white women, marking the weakest performance in this demographic for any Republican candidate this century, according to CNN political analyst Harry Enten, who cited an average of post-election surveys from 2012-2020 and pre-election surveys this year.

‘He’s doing the worst, if this holds, for a GOP candidate this century among white women,’ said Enten, who previously worked for FiveThirtyEight.”

Again: innnnnnnteresting. We’ll see whether this is all a mirage in eight days. Meanwhile, check in with all the angry ladies you know to make sure they’ve voted or have a plan to vote. This is down to us, it seems.

***

It’s hard to focus on anything other than the election this week, but there’s also a UK budget announcement and a Google earnings call coming on the 30th, plus Halloween, the best holiday, on the 31st. While the thread’s officially open, please do share any more early vote data you’ve seen – commenters make this place what it is! Thanks again to dm and Ceci n’est pas mon nym for the links.

Reader Interactions

140Comments

  4. 4.

    Eunicecycle

    I will send this to my normie adult kids. They are all pretty freaked out by the polls. My son has already voted in Texas, one daughter is voting tomorrow in Ohio, and the other will probably vote on election day. They also can’t understand why it’s so close. I lost credibility in 2016 by promising them Trump couldn’t win so I make no promises but try to be encouraging.

  6. 6.

    arrieve

    Thank you, Rose. This is reassuring, and I need all the reassurance I can get.

    I do believe we are going to win, but it’s nice to see a little evidence.

  8. 8.

    Baud

    @Eunicecycle:

    They also can’t understand why it’s so close.

     

    I don’t know why people have higher expectations of half this country even after all these years of experience.

  12. 12.

    OId Man Shadow

    Having a hard time getting past the pessimism I was taught to face the future with by the church. Having a hard time getting over the trauma of 2016 too, I suppose.

    It’s difficult for me to see anything but disaster, disease, death, misery, war, famine on the horizon, so I’m glad some of you are functional and can be optimistic. You’re probably keeping me from spiraling at this point. So… thank you.

  14. 14.

    lowtechcyclist

    I’m having problems making sense of the “Harris has stronger support among women in swing states” chart.

    The subhead is “Percent of likely voters.” So in Michigan, do women make up 57% of likely voters, while men make up only 40%?  Or among likely voters, do 57% of women support Harris, while only 40% of men do?

    If the latter, it looks like we’re fixing to get clobbered all across those swing states if men and women vote in anything close to equal numbers.  Take Pennsylvania: if we win women 55-45 but lose men 59-41, we’d better hope a lot more men don’t bother to vote.

  16. 16.

    OId Man Shadow

    @Baud: It was a bit traumatic to navigate through life thinking your neighbors and your (former) church friends were really good people and then discovering no they were not. Too many of them were closet Nazis all along.

  17. 17.

    moonbat

    Thanks for these encouraging numbers! Christopher Bouzy over at Spoutible has been tracking the early voting in Florida with similar encouraging results so far.

  18. 18.

    Jeffg166

    There are now 801,991 registered Democrats in Philadelphia. That’s up 50,000 since 2020. Now if they only show up and vote.

  19. 19.

    trollhattan

    My give it a rest campaign on BBC’s election coverage continues.

    ‘It’s rough out here’: Why Trump and Harris should listen to this mum of seven

    When the sun sets over Las Vegas, Nicole Williams gets to work, serving drinks from behind the bar of an opulent hotel on the city’s infamous strip.

    But life for Ms Williams, 45, and other service-industry workers who form the quiet backbone of Vegas’s booming economy, is far from luxurious.

    “When you’re shopping for a big family like mine, it’s rough out here,” she told the BBC while shopping for groceries and taking children to appointments across town.

    The mother of seven children, aged 10 months to 16, said she often fears buckling under the weight of the economy.

    From sky-high prices on groceries to petrol, Ms Williams said she has had to cut back on vacations as well as on football and gymnastics lessons for her kids that would force her to stretch an already strained household budget.

    “We haven’t been able to do the things we want to do,” she said. “I want a future for my kids.”

    She is not alone. In dozens of interviews with Las Vegans who work in vital local industries from construction and casinos to restaurants and bars, low-wage workers from across the political spectrum told the BBC that kitchen-table issues – especially unaffordable housing and costly childcare – are what will determine how they vote on 5 November.

    JUST like Hillary in 2016, if you wish to pretend Harris isn’t specifically revolving her campaign around working people and the middle class, you can go find people who think she’s only figuring out how to make the borders more opener while transifying All THE KIDS.

    Also, too, mum of seven? The hell does she even find the time to work? Oh, maybe vote for the lady who wants to fund daycare? No, can’t have that.

  20. 20.

    FelonyGovt

    Yes, Robert Hubbell is a retired CA attorney who writes a daily political newsletter called Today’s Edition. I’ve been a subscriber for a few years. He covers political newsletter, emphasizing the positive and also opportunities for reader engagement (kinda like BJ).

  21. 21.

    BellyCat

    Women, even of the WHITE variety, are gonna vote HARD this Roevember.

    (…and a lot of dudes, too)

    And I am here for it!

  23. 23.

    Brent

    @lowtechcyclist: It is a bit confusing.  Especially since it only shows the chart for Harris and not for Trump in those same swing states. But here are both charts:
    https://www.vox.com/politics/380132/gender-gap-election-harris-trump

    On the other hand,  we know that women traditionally vote more than men, so if the numbers do reflect reality,  it still means at least a narrow win for Harris in those states.
    So, for instance,  in Michigan,  Trump is projected to get 56% of the male vote while Harris is projected to get 57% of the women.  Since women vote more than men,  thats still a Harris win but of course not as dramatic as the chart makes it seem.

  24. 24.

    Anoniminous

    Off Topic:

    Hospitals adopt error-prone AI transcription tools

    Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached “human level robustness” in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

    Large Language Models are stochastic parrots spewing word salad at the speed of electrons so this is no surprise to anyone not a credulous stenographer tech journalist.

  27. 27.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @OId Man Shadow:

    It was a bit traumatic to navigate through life thinking your neighbors and your (former) church friends were really good people and then discovering no they were not. Too many of them were closet Nazis all along.

    Oh, I learned that by living in my small town in Central Misery for 20+ years.
    I learned that those people were the same kind of person who, if they lived in a similar village in Ukraine in WW2, would have turned in Jews in hiding.
    Polite, surface nice, turn you in in a nanosecond.

  28. 28.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Anoniminous: Actually, this was SHOCKING since the programs are transcription programs, not chatbots.  All the program should do is translate sound to electronic words.  The difference between this and something like Dragon is that the LLM smooths out pronunciation better.
    This is like the AI running the program got bored and started writing a screenplay in the middle of transcription.  And the genres vary wildly.
    For someone involved in research or medical care, this is a huge warning.

  29. 29.

    trollhattan

    @Anonymous At Work: Good lord. This at least is welcome news for folks who understand what’s at stake.

    Voters were encouraged to check their ballot status online at http://www.votewa.gov to track its return status. If a returned ballot is not marked as “received,” voters can print a replacement ballot or visit their local elections department for a replacement, the Secretary of State’s office said.

  30. 30.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @OId Man Shadow: It’s similar to finding out that some friends, family, and co-workers are anti-vaxxers, and all that that implies. It is hard to believe given how nice and normal they are otherwise. Like, REALLY nice and normal.

  31. 31.

    TBone

    @Jeffg166: I’m confident that Philly isn’t sitting on any sideline this year.

    I am in a tiny bit of a teeny funk that we Pennsylvanians cannot have any ballots counted until polls close on Election Day, thanks to the rethugs (for NOTHING!  GAH!).  So our completed ballots (not yet dated!) are sitting here waiting to be hand delivered to the County Election Board.  I’ll be wearing either my Four Seasons Total Gritty t-shirt or my Cat Ladies for Kamala t-shirt or my I Vote in This (Fetterman) Hoodie to that office and also my baby blue Chucks!

  32. 32.

    Jeffro

    Look at those North Carolina numbers. I hope you Tar Heels will help the rest of us have an early night on the 5th.

    DAMN STRAIGHT!!  (I’m not a North Carolinian, but I play on on TV sent in my “Postcards to Swing States” this morning, and I’m still fired up. =)

    (Couldn’t even get a decent power nap in, I was so happy!)

    LET’S GOOOOOOOOO Dems!

  33. 33.

    MazeDancer

    Anywhere we can get reassurance is good. Thank you, Rose.

    Every person on Twitter who is reporting their Puerto Rican friend, neighbor, cousin, co-worker, etc, turning in their red hat and vowing to vote for Harris is reassuring.

    Of course, they could be fake, and just like Erique Tarrio,- may he be having a swell jail time – one wonders how could anyone Black or Hispanic give Trump anything but the middle finger.

    But better late than never, eh, Ricky?

  35. 35.

    FelonyGovt

    I wonder if some of those women voting early are married to men who won’t bother to vote at all.

  36. 36.

    Layer8Problem

    @trollhattan:  I wonder what the penalties are for election interference?  I’m sure the deep thinkers committing these acts were prepared to do the time before they did this, because principles.

  37. 37.

    Anoniminous

    @Anonymous At Work:
    AP

    “Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

    All of OpenAI’s products stem from their various Large Language Model. ChatGPT is only one such.

  38. 38.

    delphinium

    I just voted so that is one more white woman for Harris/Waltz. Also, mailed out my remaining postcards last Friday reminding folks to vote.

    Hoping NY will win back a few house seats this time around.

  39. 39.

    TBone

    Steve Bannon is getting out of prison too soon. Tomorrow!

    Thank gawd his earlier release requests were DENIED.

  40. 40.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @trollhattan:

    Reminds me of a radio interview I heard of a Republican analyst – name forgotten – doing a 2016 postmortem. He listed three or four things that Hillary Clinton should have offered if she wanted to win. The interviewer than informed him that she had indeed offered all those things. I can’t remember what they were, but they were in the realm of health care, drug addiction, and mental health.

    NB – Of course the Republicans’ proposals on those issues are “Fuck you, that’s your tough shit, I’ve got mine.”

  41. 41.

    StringOnAStick

    @TBone: Are part of his release conditions that he can’t socialize with felons?  Because getting back with Felonious Orange would definitely violate the “no hanging out with felons”) rule.

  42. 42.

    David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch

    Here’s a delightful video of Governor Walz and AOC together. (link)

    So much chemistry. Both of them are so good at this.

  43. 43.

    Velocifowl

    @Anoniminous:

    Working in IT most IT departments are trying to stop AI from being used.  It’s not even that it produces garbage it’s fear of business data being scraped and seen as a massive security risk for catastrophic data leakage.  So at this level it’s not the techies pushing it.  It’s the damn users who want it to make their life easier.  To the extent it isn’t banned there are industry specific AI tools that are very locked down and specific that get the OK after a ton of vetting.  Everyone I know in IT from the internal running of things hates AI.

    A lot of my job involves stopping people from making career endingly stupid decisions that would land us in the news.

  45. 45.

    JWR

    (I wonder how many of those Republican ladies are Nikki Haley crossover voters).

    I wonder about that, too. I just hope that people who voted for her in the primary are solid Haley voters who’ll either do it again or just leave the presidential box blank.

    Meanwhile, from Aljazeera:

    Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican and outspoken critic of Trump, says neither he nor Harris will get her vote.

    “I want to vote for somebody and not against someone,” she told the Anchorage Daily News, adding that she was disappointed with the choices from both major parties.

    ETA cue the tiny violins.

  46. 46.

    Kirk

    I have been convinced, and still am, that nobody is correctly measuring the Dobb effect. I believe the reason is that it is large enough and uncommon enough that it fails the “sanity checks” the pollsters use.

    If, as newsweek’s poll suggests, a full 4-5% of white women are voting for the Democrat this year, that’s a move of at least 1% on both sides of the chart. And that’s if it’s only 4-5% and only white women.

    I fear to hope what my reading of tea leaves show; that we’re entering landslide territory. The territory that proves the weakness of gerrymanders. The landslide that makes “close” states not so close, and “leans” states close instead.

    I hope.

  49. 49.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Baud: There’s this fantasy that something will shake the majority of US voters into completely upending historical trends (where 47+% always choose the worst candidate) and at times, I fall into it.  Then I remember that even people as horrible as W and now Trump haven’t been enough to somehow make voters deliver a 20-30 point win for Dems.  I think that’s what people want to believe is possible, but I don’t think it is, at least not nation-wide.  The biggest landslide we can ever get will still be well shy of a complete flipping of the historical script.  It sucks, but it is what it is.

  50. 50.

    Glidwrith

    @lowtechcyclist: Gender gap in Pennsylvania for already voted is 56-43 favoring women, according to NBC News. Dem vs thug is 60-30 with 10% independents, with almost 1.3 million votes cast. Too soon to call it, but those are great numbers!

  51. 51.

    Baud

    @UncleEbeneezer:

    Yeah, people want a blue 1984. Won’t happen. We don’t have a demo or an issue as compelling as racism to pull it off.

    Hell, it’s more often than not a struggle to get our own people to take these things seriously.

  52. 52.

    TBone

    Meanwhile, in Texas

    Threatening Flyers By ‘Trump Klan’ Attached To Harris Campaign Signs In TX
    The KKK is trying to intimidate Harris supporters. It won’t work.

    Author’s Note:

    The Klan targeted me before the 2016 election for being what they called a ‘race traitor,’ posting maps to my home. They even showed up late at night (three times), but my armed Black neighbor and his brother scared the shit out of them, and they took off. Their little visit only made me more energized to vote for Hillary Clinton.

    Please get out and vote, y’all.

    https://crooksandliars.com/2024/10/threatening-flyers-trump-klan-attached

  55. 55.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Velocifowl: A big fear for businesses is basing anything on OpenAI when the copyright infringement lawsuits really get rolling.  Reusing whatever you find online for personal/parody use is protected.  Reusing it for commercial purposes could be “theft” and could result in “massive eyebleeding fines” causing executives to pucker so strongly “they carry their chairs with them.”

  56. 56.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Finally, rarely is the question asked: is our white women learning? Apologies for the Newsweek link, but it appears the Rough Beast may only have 51% of white women behind him (as opposed to 56% in 2016 and 57% in 2020):

    One little nit to pick: Pew Validated Voter Poll (which is the gold standard of polls for figuring out how people actually voted based on validated ballot returns, not just what they tell exit pollsters) had only 47% of White Women going for Trump and 45% for Hillary in 2016 (the rest going to Stein or Johnson).  In 2020 they went 53% for Trump and 46% for Biden.

  57. 57.

    Layer8Problem

    @JWR:  ” . . . she was disappointed with the choices from both major parties.”

    Aw, how sad.  I wonder what her difficulties were with Harris?  Murkowski didn’t share those with us.  She’s probably casting a principled write-in vote for Liz Cheney that will send a powerful message of some kind or another somewhere.

  59. 59.

    TBone

    SeeYouInRoevember, ya ball gargling thunder twat!

    Hit dog hollers 😆

    “FoxNews spends far too much time promoting the Democrats, their surrogates, and their agenda,” he wrote. “Today I watched, over and over again, an angry and totally out of control Michelle Obama trying to save the dying Campaign of Comrade Kamala Harris.”

  60. 60.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Baud:

    Yeah, people want a blue 1984. Won’t happen. We don’t have a demo or an issue as compelling as racism to pull it off.

    It isn’t just that we don’t have a compelling issue. It is that for most of the 20th Century the Dems and GOP were in the middle of a very long & complicated process whereby they almost completely swapped ideological, demographic and regional geographic bases with each other. Not just the Solid South, but all sorts of other bits and pieces of both coalitions were in movement and up for grabs by whichever side could do a better job of attracting them, in which the details mattered.

    Which meant that neither party was solidly anchored with a dependable coalition of voters who were simply not movable under any circumstances. It was a more volatile electorate than today, which made landslides on the scale of 1964, 1972, and 1984 possible.

    Putting aside the ones who are just straight up fascists or fascist-curious, much of the stupidity of our current political pundit class comes from people whose formative experiences came during this period of flux in party loyalties and them thinking that political lessons from that era apply for all time and to every electorate, rather than being historically contingent and now past their sell by date.

  63. 63.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @OId Man Shadow:

    It was a bit traumatic to navigate through life thinking your neighbors and your (former) church friends were really good people and then discovering no they were not.

    Baud! opined downstairs that one unforgivable thing about Trump was being forced into alliance with people like Geraldo Rivera but I think seeing previously unseen “true colors” of friends, neighbors and relatives is worse. Especially those who had better natures to appeal to…we are all conflicted in some way or another…but Trump really succeeded in turning off the good and kind impulses that once moderated their bigotries and might have led to some self discovery. How many of us have lost friends and family forever and have a real sadness about it?

  64. 64.

    TBone

    @Baud: 💙

    Source from comments:

    US President Joe Biden pushes a woman in a wheelchair as voters wait in line outside a polling station in New Castle, Delaware, October 28, 2024. Kamala Harris crisscrosses Michigan on Monday…(Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

    I edited out any references to the ball gargling thunder twat.

  67. 67.

    ArchTeryx

    @TBone: Once again the MAGAts keep thinking that only they are armed. Looks like the OP’s neighbors armed up, and weren’t afraid to tell them to get lost or get shot. That takes real courage for a black man in Texas, but it was absolutely necessary.

    And it’s only the beginning.

  69. 69.

    TBone

    @trollhattan: You didn’t recognize that?  I won’t spoil it for you then!

    I read Digby a lot and she’s a gem! Thanks for sharing.  (I’d already seen it but thought it too upsetting for some so did not share – glad you did!)

  70. 70.

    ArchTeryx

    @Baud: It’s what happens when a political movement becomes a straight-up cult. And if there is any hard core proof that what MAGA is is a cult, that’s it. Suddenly, these peoples’ bigotries become their only defining feature, the only one that matters to them any more. Just like any cult, there’s the cult, and there’s everyone else, all the Others. I have my regrets at tossing all my Ohio friends out the airlock after 2016, but they did it to me first, whether or not they realized it. They voted for me to die. That’s not something any sort of human relationship can survive.

  73. 73.

    Gloria DryGarden

     

     

    @Anonymous At Work:

    I heard part of a talk in diary of a ceo podcast, that AI is a looming massive danger, likely to affect us before even climate change.

    I couldnt listen to it all. Sounded ominous, and the guy was in the tech world, knew what he was talking about. The artificial intelligence can perhaps soon surpass us, and get destructive, seemed to be the takeaway.

    It’s not my area.

  74. 74.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Layer8Problem: The problem is that forty-five+ percent of voters think Affirmative Action, Pronouns, Assault-Rifle Bans and vaccine requirements are “Fascism.”

  76. 76.

    Layer8Problem

    ” . . . artificial intelligence can perhaps soon surpass us, and get destructive, seemed to be the takeaway.”

    It will reach the point where it’s finishing all our sentences for us, based on its statistical inferences.  With all the time we’ll be spending telling those Artificial Intelligences “That’s not what I was going to say,” we’ll all be driven mad, or at least very very vexed.

  77. 77.

    ThatLeftTurnInABQ

    @Layer8Problem:

    I’d like to think anti-fascism is a compelling issue

    I would too, but I’ve come to the very, very reluctant conclusion that it is not.

    One of the things I find most distressing about a fair chunk of the population of the USA becoming fascism-curious is that we have far less excuse for it (in the sense of responding to large scale societal trauma) than did Germany, Italy, Japan, or for that matter Hungary or Romania or Spain or any of the other countries which went fascist or nearly so in the early 20th Century. We’ve suffered nothing like the death, dislocation, disruption, and economic & social chaos which ruined the lives of so many people during and after the First World War.

    What is our excuse (in the USA today) for losing our minds and throwing away our moral compass?

    I’m starting to think that the human species is so favorably wired for tribalistic hatred and ethno-centric violence that the popular appeal of Fascism is something which roughly every second or third generation is going to have to struggle against in a truly existential way. This poisonous weed is so deeply rooted that after being cut down it will just grow back again after the memories of the previous trauma of fighting against it grow old & stale.

    That is not a very optimistic long-term take I’m afraid. On the more optimistic side, right now in the short run I like our chances.

  78. 78.

    Mike E

    I’ll be voting here in NC for the last time, on Wednesday. I’ll report what I see there, here on B-J.

  79. 79.

    clay

    So like probably most people here, I’ve been inundated with texts from a bunch of people, asking for money and my vote.

    Always Democrats, of course… Harris, Walz, Biden, Obama, a bunch of Senate candidates…

    I early voted on Monday.  Yesterday I received a text from a Trump group asking for my vote.  Today I received another one.

    I was irritated by this but I think it’s a good sign. The Trump side is so incompetent that they’re spending time and effort to add me to a text message when a) I’m a longtime registered Democrat and b) I’ve already voted.  Both of these facts should be easy for them to know!

  81. 81.

    TBone

    Ballz to the Walz!

    WALZ: Now he says we should just let China dominate the industries of the future.

    That’s who this guy is. Look, no surprise.

    Trump’s all talk when it comes to being tough on China. We found out that his Trump-branded Bibles were printed there. I said this, he outsourced God to the Chinese.

    My favorite was this, though.

    As I said, I was going to try and show him a little bit of grace. I don’t really blame him, because the Made in China sticker was inside the Bible, a place he’d never seen.

    From praising Xi Jinping, he loves him.

    He rules his people with an iron fist.

    That’s what Donald Trump said.

    Gov. Tim Walz is very good on the stump.

    There’s no need to fact-check him because every thing he said here is true.

    https://crooksandliars.com/2024/10/tim-walz-trump-outsourced-god-chinese

  82. 82.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Layer8Problem: like the recent challenges w autocorrect, which doesn’t recognize and guess the same way it used to, and fucks with nearly every text and post?

  83. 83.

    KrackenJack

    @Velocifowl: I’d have to include executive FOMO as a bigger problem. Most of those initiatives will just vanish in to a convenient memory hole. But a lot of tech companies desperate for the Next Big Thing are hollowing out their companies to fund AI development. Folks like Ed Zitron anticipate a reckoning when that bubble pops it will hurt a lot of innocent bystanders.

  84. 84.

    TBone

    @Rose Judson: if they’re being used for assistance with medical records (which, in turn, are used to make medical decisions), they very well might be killing humans.  At least hastening the demise of some unfortunate patients.

  85. 85.

    Velocifowl

    @KrackenJack:

    I’ve been on both sides of it.   Working for big consulting trying to push these solutions on people so they could slash their work forces and working for big law trying to stop it from being used because of the issues it would cause.  I find that pretty hilarious.

  88. 88.

    Steve LaBonne

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ: It helps to remember our history. The actual Nazis learned a great deal from our example. The struggle, often against long odds, for a better society has been going on throughout our history and will continue for the foreseeable future. But we are better than we once were and if decent people keep fighting we can keep, slowly slowly, getting better.

  89. 89.

    Pharniel

    One thing I do begrudge the Founding Fathers for is putting Election Day so close to Halloween.

  91. 91.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @JWR:

    “I want to vote for somebody and not against someone,” [Murkowski] told the Anchorage Daily News, adding that she was disappointed with the choices from both major parties.

    What an asshole. She quickly forgot that it was Democratic voters who gave her the ~2000 vote edge over Kelly Tshibaka or she would be former senator Murkowski.

    And really, what is so disappointing about Harris? I want to ask her, “Senator, it’s Trump or not Trump. Liz Cheney gets it, why don’t you?”

  93. 93.

    Citizen Alan

    @Layer8Problem: I am reminded of those fun little Facebook games where you put in three specific words in your google window and then start adding words suggested by google based on predictive text to create wacky sentences. And now I imagine that technique being used to generate NYT editorials and don’t know whether it would be better or worse.

  95. 95.

    Citizen Alan

    @Ksmiami:  In my more cynical moments, I wonder if our only hope for survival is that Skynet takes over but turns out to be benevolent, sending out Terminators to confiscate AR-15s while performing disaster relief and figuring out how to solve climate change.

  96. 96.

    Wave Function Collapse

    @band gap:

    From 1985 to 1994 I lived about a half mile from that ballot box at Fisher’s Landing so I know the area well. I live some miles from there now but still in WA-03 which is much more likely to be a nail-biter than the Presidency (IMO)

    Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have always been a factor around these parts. My guess is that it is their doing. The voting precincts around that box (and also downtown VanWa where a bomb was defused successfully) are some of the blue-est parts of WA-03 so I suspect intent against MGP more than anything.

  99. 99.

    Gloria DryGarden

    i too find this fascism possibility really compelling, and appalling. How can anyone be curious about going that way again?

    I guess some of the more important parts of world history ie “European history of war, business and power structures” actually took. Because I’m clear that the fascism and stuff pre WWll is not a thing to repeat.

    Are young people not reading diary of Anne Frank, and talking about it in school?  Are younger adults living in such insular bubbles, that white people don’t know folks who don’t look like them? Or don’t know people who practice a different religion than them? Are people just not making friends across differences?

    People are people. Making friends, or living other places, and learning how someone thinks or lives, both the differences and similarities… that’s to be encouraged.

    I just keep finding out how much people can care and be kind. People who can’t see it or look for it, I am not patient with their blindness

  101. 101.

    Ksmiami

    @Citizen Alan: super intelligence will have its own moral compass… I joke that it’ll actually take one look at us and nope into the cosmos. We really are a terrible species overall

  102. 102.

    dnfree

    @TBone: Polling places often don’t allow political clothing or signs in the vicinity of voters?  I’ve seen articles about people wearing MAGA shirts or hats having to turn them inside out at polling places. Might want to check before you go.

  103. 103.

    moonbat

    @Baud: The Kansas abortion referendum was defeated with almost 60% against enshrining an abortion ban in the state constitution. In Kansas. Harris has wisely made reproductive freedom a cornerstone of her campaign I don’t think a landslide is out of reach especially with the early numbers we’re seeing.

  104. 104.

    ArchTeryx

    @TBone: The big problem is when the mere sight of an armed black man gets the SWAT team sent out, instantly. And they always go for the kill. We’ve seen enough evidence of THAT over the last couple decades. That shit also can happen anywhere, but it’s ESPECIALLY prevalent in the South. There is nothing a white Southerner fears more than an armed black man.

  110. 110.

    Bill Arnold

    @trollhattan:

    From sky-high prices on groceries to petrol, Ms Williams said she has had to cut back

    Gas prices are not sky-high. Either Ms. Williams is not an American, or the author (not an American) made up that bit.

  111. 111.

    catclub

    @lowtechcyclist: ​
      agreed, not clear what that chart means.

    of course, the chartt with Trump instead of Harris may not add up to 100 when the two are put together.

  114. 114.

    Peale

    @clay: They tried to reach me yesterday with support for Elon. And the day before, and the day before, and 3 times today. I’d visit their website, but I don’t want viruses.

  115. 115.

    New Deal democrat

    @ThatLeftTurnInABQ:

    What is our excuse (in the USA today) for losing our minds and throwing away our moral compass?

    The ethnic and religious majority (Whites, WASPs, and Evangelicals*) that was dominant  or at least was not threatened by other groups, is on the verge of becoming a minority and sees itself under existential threat.

    *apologies for the generalization and oversimplification

  116. 116.

    Peale

    @Bill Arnold: I think there was one of these safaris that went to Wisconsin complaining about how there used to be 99c bread and now there isn’t. Yet when I went home to Wisconsin the other week, KT had bread on sale for 99c and I picked up a loaf for my mom.  And gas was well below $3.00. Really cheap if you went with the high ethanol gas that Midwesterners demand that we continue to subsidize yet refuse to put in their pickup trucks.

  118. 118.

    West of the Rockies

     

    @Geminid:

    It was a straight question, not some passive-aggressive slight or challenge.

    I have not heard of any arrests being made or suspects being identified.

  119. 119.

    Velocifowl

    @New Deal democrat:

    Watching the Evangelicals throw in with the Catholics and Orthodox because they all share the same hate for anything not traditional despite the fact they all hate each other has been interesting.  They aren’t sending their best to SCOTUS.

  122. 122.

    TBone

    @dnfree: thank you, but our County Election Office that collects mail ballots is not a polling location and is therefore not subject to any such restrictions.  The girls manning the indoor drop box desk in 2022 were thrilled to see hubby and I in our ‘I Vote In This Hoodie’ Fetterman gear!

  123. 123.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Melancholy Jaques:

    Murkowski is a political coward just as bad as Susie Furrowbrows.  She’s simply dialing up her Collins-like concern to 9 and wondering if she should go to 11.

    Her comments are no different than the black sheriff in ‘Blazing Saddles’ point a gun at his own head.  She isn’t gonna pull the trigger.  All her votes will continue to be (R) votes.  But it plays well with Alaskans who self-identify as “independents” but, in fact, core (R) voters.

  124. 124.

    TBone

    @ArchTeryx: this friend is in DelCo and has a lifetime of experience dealing with such possibilities.  Police there are also accustomed to seeing Black people who are not cowed.   I thank you for the heads-up concern anyway!

    Rural area anecdote:  my cabin was robbed and seriously damaged/vandalized.  When I called the police, they had no idea how to find it, and I had to drive out to a locally known grocery store and have them follow me back to the cabin.  It took 45 minutes round trip.  A lot of the time, well, sometimes, police do not arrive instantaneously.

    ETA but I hear you loud and clear regarding whipipo fear!!!

  126. 126.

    Geminid

    Senator Murkowski endorsed Democratic Representative Mary Peltola for reelection. again, and that’s a good thing.

    I understand this doesn’t make Lisa Murkowski a good person.

  127. 127.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Anonymous At Work: yeah, as an intellectual property lawyer I have been taking a lot of continuing legal education on this, and I think we are only at the beginning of the copyright lawsuit phase. If/when Disney gets involved I will go buy all the popcorn and watch the conflict.

  128. 128.

    West of the Rockies

    @Geminid:

    I’d love to see arrests. A lot of Harris signs have been stolen in my neighborhood (a lesser crime, to be sure), including ours. A neighbor has had his taken now four times.  I wish the grinding wheel of justice would roll over these shit birds.

  130. 130.

    Anonymous At Work

    @Velocifowl: Sorry, work.  Now free.  People listen to attorneys and attorneys who know tech will be clued in.  Anyone that knows tech might try to make their life easier with AI (that’s the point) but only a select (and stupid) few would try to make real money doing so without checking with an attorney.

  131. 131.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    Yeah, people want a blue 1984. Won’t happen.

    Hell, a 2012 in the Presidential race (I’m not gonna hope for even a 2008), combined with a 2020 in the House and Senate races, would be frickin’ amazing.

  134. 134.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Geminid:

    Peltola refuses to endorse Harris.

    Of note, the latest news from that race suggests Peltola’s in trouble against Nick Begich.  Given Murkowski’s antipathy toward the actual (R) apparatchiks in the state, her endorsement of Peltola can’t hurt, but it’s nothing bold either.

    Although it’s easy to pound on Murkowski and if I were a (D) living in the state, Peltola would infuriate me, it’s understandable.  I’ve always said that the two, truly foreign countries in the USofA are Alaska and Louisiana, so one shouldn’t expect an AOC-like congressperson from there…and Peltola is certainly not that.

  136. 136.

    Geminid

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: If I were an Alaska Democrat I’d be pretty happy with Rep. Peltola.

    And speaking as a Virginia Democrat, I believe Peltola is a valuable addition to the Democratic House Caucus and her non-endorsement of Vice President Harris does not bother me.

  137. 137.

    Ruckus

    On the difference in M/F voting when this was posted, how many of the female side work and how many of the male side work? I seem to recall that the percentages are more equal at the end of voting but on the first weekday of voting, I’d always imagine there will be a difference. And it may take up to the last day to see closer equality.

    @UncleEbeneezer:

    Agree.

    Humans seem to take a long time to decide major change and then time to actually make that change. And the closer the change is to basic principles/momentum, it seems to me that making that basic decision to change can take a fair bit of time. Add in relationship whatever and that can add a not insignificant something to the process. People get used to their routine, and often/sometimes even a good change can require time.

    @TBone:

    I edited out any references to the ball gargling thunder twat.

    With great reason. And THANK YOU.

  138. 138.

    Weftage

    @band gap: Thanks. ….and we may have found the culprit:

    Washington Republican Party Chairman Jim Walsh disagreed.

    “Washington needs to get back to in-person, same-day voting,” he said. “Our experiment with ‘100% mail-in-voting’ is not secure, because of the broken chain-of-custody issues inherent in mail-in voting. These arson attacks are proof of that.”

    Well-trained, instantly ready with a typical logic-free, victim-blaming response. I’m sure he’s an asset to his party.

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