I hope Marci is right, and Selzer has a good track record, but she’s guessing on the model like everyone else when she publishes her poll showing Harris +3 in Iowa.
That said, the latest Epstein revelations probably aren’t going to help Trump’s standing with women:
He offers a portrait of Trump womanizing, yelling at staff and living a basically friendless life with only his daughter Ivanka, his secretary and his bodyguard truly loyal to him.
Trump, he said, was almost “functionally illiterate” but did read the Page Six gossip column in the New York Post. He was “incapable” of reading a balance sheet, and any “act of kindness” would have been an accident, Epstein said
But it is Epstein’s description of Trump’s conduct toward women which is likely to attract most attention, given the pair’s long friendship, and the 28 women who have made accusations against the former president of sexual misconduct (all of which he denies). Many of the attacks are alleged to have occurred when he and Epstein were friends.
On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”
On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f— the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.’”
There are still plenty of women who will vote for Trump. Tim Miller was on Pod Save America with Lovett, and he’s an out, married gay man who was Jeb Bush’s communications director until he became an anti-Trumper, so voting (and acting) against your political interests is certainly not something confined to women or the politically naïve.
Nelle
I keep hoping that this will be the nail in the coffin. For ten years or more… I keep hoping.
J. Arthur Crank
Wednesday morning can’t get here fast enough.
Baud
The new Epstein stuff is all over Reddit. It probably helps at the margins. Supposedly there are photos but if they aren’t public, they won’t move the needle.
Yarrow
@Nelle: If he loses I wonder if he’ll immediately declare his candidacy for 2028? And what will the Republican party do about all his supporters who overwhelmingly voted for him in primaries? I hope they tear themselves to shreds.
Of course he might not lose, so this is just idle musing.
Eolirin
Stuff that’s unique to Trump is great for this cycle, but we really need a repudiation of the entire Republican party. We’re only going to get that if we focus our efforts on making their core values toxic to the rest of the country the same way we did to lynchings
We have an opening with abortion rights and public corruption.
kindness
The new revelations will never get Fox air time. MAGA folk don’t read the NY Times or WaPo. And Trump’s disgusting nature isn’t a shock to us. Maybe it’ll sway some undecideds. Hope so.
A pox on the undecides btw. How is such a thing possible?
Jackie
@Baud: Agreed. A lot of TCFG and Epstein rumors were swirling around in 2016. Obviously, it didn’t matter then, and it’s not going to matter now. MAGA knows who TCFG is and admire him for it.
JML
The Selzer poll was a delight. It may not come home, but she doesn’t worry about “being wrong” and fall for the herding you see from others. And it might be the canary in the coal mine about what could be happening in other states in the midwest.
But even if all it does is send a panic through TFG’s campaign it’d be brilliant.
Come on, ground game! Keep turning out the vote!
Mike in Pasadena
Log Cabin Rs are gay Rethuglicans voting against their own interests.
HumboldtBlue
I don’t know a damn thing about what Trump and Epstein did, all I know is Noodles has no fucking clue what daylight savings time is.
3Sice
GOP pols will pivot to picking up his blockheads, not understanding the appeal is sui generis.
cmorenc
I am scheduled to be an inside-the voting site D poll observer on Tuesday at a precinct here in NC. The BIG rules for both D and R poll observers are: 1) thou shalt not speak to any voters (even if you are friends or neighors with folks in line), nor make any sort of effort or gesture to influence them. 2) anything potentially noteworthy problems at the voting site, we speak only with the Chief Election Judge (not any other official poll workers) at the precinct (most of whom are long-time veterans at that post over many elections) – and then silently report the issue from within the polling place via text or observer app to the D election lawyers “boiler room”, or else step outside the polling place if it needs to be communicated via phone; 3) essentially, do no harm in trying to do good, don’t get yourself tossed from the premises by the chief election judge.
bbleh
@Yarrow: No, he’ll deny he lost, insist that he’s the real President, and do everything he can to stir up trouble, very much including violence. And he’ll get LOTS of media, because it’s entertaining. And any eruptions of violence — and there will be some, although hopefully mostly sporadic and local — will likewise get LOTS of media. And all the shouting and finger-pointing will continue for weeks until most people tune it out completely because of the holidays. And there’ll be another spate of it around the certification and the inauguration. And the legal shenanigans will last for even longer.
[sigh]
But the good news is, assuming Harris wins — which is looking more likely almost by the day (two weeks really IS an eternity in politics, thank you Ed Rendell) — I’m gonna guess, in line with Cheryl Rofer at LGM, that it’s all going to amount to LESS this time than it did last time, because he’s out of power, the core insurrectionist groups have been decapitated, and generally far more people (including the media) are wise to it.
hells littlest angel
Yes, and then immediately start demanding that his trials be delayed because it would be unfair to hold them “in the middle of an election.”
TF79
I think the combination of Selzer’s outfit being known for a) not herding and b) being accurate is what makes this a particularly big deal.
The “stability” of the polling this cycle certainly reflects a lot of “baked-in” voter preferences, but it seems like the variance from poll to poll is even tighter than what would be expected from just basic sampling error. If the margin of error from just the pure sampling problem is +\- 3 or 4 percent, we should have seen far more random +9 Harris’s and +3 Trump’s. This lack of variance suggests there’s a lot of ex-post model weighting and re-weighting going on (herding). Obviously we won’t know until Tuesday which of these model weightings were correct, but the Selzer result is eye-popping
3Sice
It was over at the debate, it’s just a white man in American will be afforded infinite opportunities to avail themselves, especially over a minority and woman.
MattF
Today’s Doonesbury has a comment on TFG’s attitude towards women.
Wapiti
@Mike in Pasadena: They weigh some of their interests more heavily than others. I think everyone does; the weighting just varies.
sixthdoctor
What I want for Tuesday is a Harris win that’s the equivalent of the soapbar beating scene in Full Metal Jacket, but recorded and looped endlessly like that scene in the movie Brainstorm.
I’ve thought about this for some time.
azlib
Selzer’s poll may be a wakeup call to other pollsters if her numbers turn out to be correct. Keep in mind the 3% is still within the margin of error with a lot of people not understanding how statistics and probability work. The question is has the Iowa electorate’s political attitudes really changed that much from her earlier polling of Joe Biden vs Trump which had Trump with significant polling leads.
If Selzer’s numbers are correct for Iowa then Trump is finished and it will not be that close.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I stayed up the night of my birthday, Nov 8, 2016, waiting for Hillary to be elected as my birthday present. I never went to bed that night, waiting for the early call to change.
I expect I’m going to be up quite late on Tuesday again, even though it’s going to take days to count the early mail in ballots (currently at 34.7 million). My only question is whether I’m going to pour the glass of wine, allowing it to warm to room temperature (Yeah, I keep it in the refrigerator. Sue me.) anticipating a celebratory toast with my wife that night.
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I’m still debating whether to stay up.
MattF
@hells littlest angel: IMO, that’s mostly due to ‘correcting’ your model until you get the answer you want. Nearly impossible to avoid that kind of bias.
3Sice
IfWhen it turns out the MSM has been gaslighting the American public for three months.Geoduck
@kindness: Except the NYT and the Post… and CNN and MSNBC.. none of them are talking about Epstein any more than Fox is. (At least on their websites.) Looking at Google’s news aggregator, there are maybe three new articles about it anywhere.
Any word about it is being spread by Reddit and such.
3Sice
@azlib:
They don’t give a shit. Polling for the Des Moines Register doesn’t get one to Martha’s Vineyard for the season.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Most of the Republicans in office have made their “core values” abundantly clear: their only core belief is to hold onto power. All politicians have that characteristic to some degree, but this election has shone a spotlight on it.
Anoniminous
@TF79:
I agree. I think there so of it we’re close to, if not in, “Dewey Beats Truman” territory.
bbleh
@azlib: @TF79: The good news is, ANYWHERE within the MoE is still AMAZING news coming out of Iowa. And some of the breakouts lend even more credibility to the numbers, notably that older White women are breaking strongly for Harris. Combine that with the national data on women outnumbering men 55-45 in early voting, and it could be a significant advantage for Harris. I’ll also second Josh’s observation at TPM that a lot of pollsters apparently are assuming that men will outnumber women by a similar margin on election day, but … what if they don’t? What if the Dobbs effect persists, and offhand why shouldn’t it?
Fingers and toes crossed. But that poll was a BIG shot of hopium
ETA: not so sure about “herding.” The numbers HAVE been remarkably stable, but I think it’s just as likely that they ARE stable. Per Bitecofer, people’s party preferences — which they tend to express reflexively in polls — are really baked in these days. There just AREN’T many cross-over voters, and variations aren’t voters switching parties but rather partisans switching from voting to not-voting and vice-versa. I think it’s just as likely that things really ARE pretty static — at least insofar as polling responses are concerned — and the difference we’re seeing now is late-deciding voters finally making up their minds. (And yeah, the OPS’s behavior over the last week-plus likely has NOT helped him with them at all.)
Jackie
@Baud:
One of the perks of living in PT zone…Sports and Election Nights 😊
japa21
@cmorenc: We poll workers are very touchy about poll watchers who overstep their boundaries.
KatKapCC
Hm, not sure about this quote. Because 1) Trump has no friends, which means that 2) he has no best friends, and 3) he also really likes to make money and talk about himself
(TBC I can fully believe he said it.)
piratedan
@Yarrow: he’s had sentencing postponed until the election plays out. If he loses, then there’s little to no incentive for Judge Marchand to go easy on him and send him to jail, after all Cohen did time for the same offenses, at DJT’s direction.
Then there are all of the other trials, if DJT is as big a loser as we hope, there’s absolutely no reason for those in the judiciary to not cut him loose to try and lend a patina of impartiality to their appointments in hopes that the media will simply forget all of their complicity in keeping him viable. That way they can continue to place their thumbs on the scales instead of getting impeached themselves.
scav
@Eolirin: Certainly a good to have over the long term, but perhaps counterintuitively somewhat detrimental to our immediate needs. Right now the Dems need to sorta clear the runway for Repubs getting off so at least they’re not a vote against sanity if not a vote for us yet. If they manage a parking lot full of dyed in the wool Rs waiting for the next rabid pumpkin, it’s still a win — and an important one. The job of convincing them long term that R-branding is no guarantee of freshness or quality is perhaps best done in the dull periods where it’s not all-hands-on-deck lets-stop-this-thing-from-crashing activity. Alas, that’s the exact time is when most people are ignoring politics. Quite a hairball. (at least some learn from the repetitive trauma of these all-hands-on-deck where do they find these idiots sort of elections. That’s maybe more a generational thing. Some have never experienced those mythical father’s republicans.)
different-church-lady
Sleaze recognize sleaze.
New Deal democrat
Since I addressed the Selzer poll in the last thread, let me offer a few more things.
Most importantly, Dan Guild’s tracking of reliable State level polls only shows Harris rising back to her post-DNC convention level of +3.2% nationally:
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGbUMfXKX0AAdWjg.png
This squares with my view that Trump gained during mid-September through early October when his campaign focused on their only popular issue: immigration. Since then he has repeatedly stepped on rakes, shifting the focus to things like Dobbs and his own cognitive capacity. He seems to be closing out his campaign acting like Grandpa the addled rodeo clown. Hence Harris’s rebound.
Be wary of demographic analyses. The “over 65” cohort now, for example, is completely different from the “over 65” cohort in 2016. In 2016 it was mainly people born in the 1940s, whose worldview was shaped by Eisenhower, Joe McCarthy, and Goldwater, and always skewed red. Now they are mainly mid-Boomers born in the 1950s, who have always skewed blueish.
By contrast, people born in the 1960s have finally reached the age where they vote at almost the same percentages as over 65’s, and this generation is deeply red.
Dan Guild has accurately said that the alleged increase in Blacks voting for Trump was a mirage, and the latest indications are he was correct.
Hispanics by contrast are behaving like every other second generation immigrant group before them. As more and more of them become successful small entrepreneurs, they become more conservative.
Baud
@different-church-lady: I’m hopefully not sleaze but I also recognize sleaze.
Betsy
@cmorenc: I did that exact same gig twice for the Obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Long day, many memorable scenes. Good on you.
different-church-lady
Vibes: this is feeling a bit like 2016 inverse — rumblings of late movement shaking things up, but in our favor this time.
SW
The primary news outlets are going to try to convince us that the whole thing shifted dramatically in the final three days 🤣
different-church-lady
@Baud: You’re not sleaze, but with a little more work…
New Deal democrat
@bbleh:
If pollsters weren’t herding, there would be a bell curve variation around the median. Instead almost all the most recent polls are being reported right *at* the median, with almost no variation. That’s herding (imo anyway).
Betsy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: When I saw Pennsylvania go red at 9:45 pm, and I saw a bunch of Hillary staffers leave to go back to her state campaign hq, I left the big watch party and went home, turned off all the devices, took a Valium and re-read Pride & Prejudice until I fell asleep.
Some time after midnight I heard lots of vehicles honking constantly.
Next day I avoided media and devices until some point after 11am when I encountered my very liberal roommate. She had to tell me. Actually, she did not really have to tell me; I kind of already knew, and her face was all unneeded to see
I still feel very bad about putting her through that.
But yeah, I no longer risk staying up. My instinct that night was that the night would reveal nothing certain, but I was sure I’d need a good sleep to deal with the next day, whatever it brought.
Starfish
@Geoduck: Everyone needs to be tying the Epstein mess to the Diddy mess and be having extensive conversations about it.
TF79
@bbleh: I think it’s generally the case that the population means have been pretty stable (though there certainly could be some late-breaking movement!). The specific thing that jumped out to me was seeing the same polling outfit putting out polls every week that were 48/45, 48/45, 47/45, 48/46, 48/46 etc, which just seems impossible from a sampling perspective – if I reached into an urn and drew 48 red balls every time, I’d wonder what the hell was going on inside that urn!
Ben Cisco
Good morning, jackals!
Have been kinda scarce, but I’m juggling a few chainsaws at this point:
Mama Cisco is sundowning – rapid, unexpected and excruciating. She is safe.
Future Mrs. Cisco has a hip replacement inbound – day after Election Day.
Doc says my BP is elevated (most likely due to stress – NO SH*T). I’ll deal.
Still engaging as I am out and about (wearing this shirt – every day from now till Election Day).
As Coach Walz sez: “We can sleep when we’re dead!”
I wish for you, my fellow jackals, peace, strength, and HOPE!
End transmission.
Kristine
@MattF: Even the pen-and-ink version is gross.
Baud
@Ben Cisco:
Too much to deal with. Good to see you.
MazeDancer
No one votes against their own interests.
We may think someone’s interests ought to include fair taxation or not having their Social Security reduced, and they may wish those things as well.
But not if they have to sacrifice their primary interests: Racism, Misogyny, White Power Rush, Feeling Important, Feeling part of something Big, ability to freely express their hatred, Christian Nationalism, Being Macho Man King of their household, Being part of “God’s” plan.
What matters to people guides how they vote. We think we know better what their interests should be. But that is just another thing they hate about us.
Bill Arnold
@Geoduck:
There are a few pages if you search for Jeffery epstein in the past week, but they are mostly in foreign press outlets, a few major.
Aziz, light!
Types of undecided voters:
3Sice
@TF79:
Polling is expensive. Can we just use AI?
48 48 48 48 48 48 48
different-church-lady
@Bill Arnold: “Everybody knows Trump is a creep, so it’s not news.”
Tom Levenson
@bbleh: Not sure why one would assume more men than women vote on election day (are there historical statistics?)
Just on the basis of workforce participation–men over 16 currently have 68% participation; women 57%.
I have no idea how big an impact having to work on election day has on in-person voting, but I imagine it isn’t zero.
Layer8Problem
@Ben Cisco: Welcome back. It sounds like you have a full inbox.
Sorry to hear about your mother. It’s painful for us seeing it happen. I’ve been there.
Carlo Graziani
Two points about the Selzer poll:
The sample is 808 likely voters. So ignoring noise like Kennedy, there’s roughly a 7% margin of purely statistical error in that +3% lead result (2/sqrt(808), since you did’t ask). So a sample fluctuation in a Trump-led race could easily produce this sort of result.
“Pure statistical error” is separate from modeling error, of course. It is entirely possible that Selser has a different—and possibly higher-quality—likely voter model than other pollsters, and under the right circumstances that could move the poll several points closer to the final outcome.
I have wondered how many polling houses have made post-Dobbs adjustments to their LV models. Many seem focused on fixing 2020 misses, but it seems to me that the very one-sided election results since Dobbs indicate a very clear shift in the world of likely voters that 2020 fixes would not capture.
oldgold
As a Hawkeye in the spring time of my dotage, I have closely followed the Iowa Poll over multiple elections. As such, I know that Selzer is a very good pollster, but is not (as she admits) an oracle. Frankly, I doubt that Harris wins Iowa.
All that expressed, what Selzer is exceptionally good at is catching trends/movement. This is what I think is so important about her recent findings. The race in its last days is moving significantly towards Harris.
TBone
@sixthdoctor: ☺️
rikyrah
@Nelle:
there are a lot of first time voters, who were children during his first run when the Access Hollywood tape came out.
so, this is their first time hearing it.
the generation raised on respecting people’s pronouns…
that tape is spreading like wildfire on TikTok. …and, the youth are disgusted by it
rk
I remember in 2016 someone (Nate Silver?) said that Trump had as much chance of winning as the Cubs had of winning the world series. Another guy said he’d eat an insect if she lost. So the polls were wrong in 2016. Wrong in 2020 (Biden did not win by as wide a margin as they said he would, just scraped by in some states), also wrong in 2022 (red wave?). If anything, polling seems to have become worse. All it does is drive everyone crazy! The only thing that’s certain at this point is that polling will probably be wrong yet again (in which direction who knows).
TBone
For all who celebrate, today’s Tiedrich🔥
https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/the-press-is-just-openly-trolling
Chet Murthy
@3Sice: it’s possible you didn’t see this, so just in case I thought I’d mention that in fact there was at least one company that thought this was a good idea! I’m not kidding, they had this idea that if they trained an AI on enough training data then instead of asking humans what they thought about various subjects they could ask the AI! Completely not shitting you.
Joey Maloney
Because time zones, I’ll be going to bed on Tuesday before the first polls have even closed. It’ll only be midnightish on the east coast when I get up the next morning. That of course won’t stop me from obsessively checking the news feeds when I get up to pee during the night, but I’m sure all that will get me is a further disrupted sleep cycle.
MattF
“I made that post to Facebook while under the influence of medication”.
Betty Cracker
@Ben Cisco: That’s a lot. Good to see you!
Kristine
Since OT thread…
…a few days ago, I received an email issue of the Babylon Bee (idk if they also do print). It was part of a pattern where every few weeks I would receive a conservative/MAGA publication that I knew I never signed up for—I’d unsub and move on.
I do wonder how I get on the lists, though. Is it product-related? Google search-related—I do recall searching “Babylon Bee” because I had seen it mentioned here and there and wondered what exactly it was.
Anyway, my point is that I wonder if liberal newsletters etc do the same? Do they send issues to unlikelys/maybes/who knows on the off chance they’ll reel a few in? The Epoch Times and other red missives did the same via print, and since then I’ve seen TET offered at the newsstand of one local grocery store. I have been hearing for years that liberal media don’t operate this way. Well, maybe we should try?
CaseyL
“Undecideds” at this point have to be people who not only never think about politics, but also don’t think about history, or what citizenship means, or anything deeper than their next online purchase or sportsball event. I can sorta kinda imagine that mindset, but cannot comprehend it at all. And I have no idea what to do about it.
(Though a Harris-Walz Administration starting a federal program of community events and engagement – not about them, but about broadening peoples’ horizons – wouldn’t be a bad idea. Might even be a great way to build support for the millions of reforms this country so desperately needs.)
Aziz, light!
@MattF: When I’m on medication, everything I say is the opposite of who I am.
3Sice
@MattF:
Isn’t that a requirement of the ToS?
K-Mo
@rk: Yeah I was putting a lot of faith in Sam Wang back then and he had Clinton at 99+% chance of winning. I think he didn’t account properly for cross-state correlations in the polls. Now it seems we have undue cross-poll correlations. This seems to be happening as a result of a deterioration in the quality of the raw data, mostly from massive nonresponse.
Selzer is a bad-ass.
HumboldtBlue
I didn’t understand a word, but the math nerds and stat heads can explain it for us blockheads.
TBone
@Starfish: I’ll add fuel to that:
https://www.wonkette.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-had-salacious-photos
Greg
@Tom Levenson: According to this, in 2020 men did show up on election day itself more than women. (In this quote “non-traditional” voting is early or mail-in.)
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/what-methods-did-people-use-to-vote-in-2020-election.html
Because of the pandemic, though, I’m not sure you can really draw much of a conclusion from 2020.
snoey
@HumboldtBlue: People are terrible at making up random numbers. If you try to fake them Benford’s Law will reveal it.
Since things like number of voters in a precinct aren’t random to begin with Benford”s Law is useless.
Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
@New Deal democrat:
There is even more rethug lying and disinformation in the Spanish speaking internet ecosystem than there is in the English speaking one, and that is a mind-boggling amount! See the Philly Inquirer article I posted a gift link to in the last thread.
FelonyGovt
I’m still on the FTFNYT mailing list even though I’ve never subscribed and they just sent me a “Harris slipping in PA” email, just when I had mostly talked myself into calming down. Sigh
suzanne
@CaseyL: Someone on Xhitter posted about an encounter they had with an undecided voter, who thought that both candidates were just excellent and either of them would do a fantastic job. So they were having a hard time deciding.
People are dumb as shit.
FDRLincoln
The thing with Iowa is this: even if Trump wins Iowa, he won’t win it by nearly as much as last time, and it fits with other polls showing measurable deterioration for TFG in places like Kansas and Ohio.
The Iowa result shows him slipping in previously strong areas and in a close election that matters alot.
Omnes Omnibus
Or how to get the kids to daycare and school and still make it to their swing shift job on time, plus stop and pick up the medication for mom who really shouldn’t be living on her own anymore.
Jackie
TCFG got the news, and started his morning with this:
So happy to not be in his inner circle this AM. Nor any circle of his! 🤭
HumboldtBlue
@snoey:
This is why we read this blog.
TBone
@FelonyGovt: spam. With pumpkin spice 🤮
dmsilev
@snoey: Back before computers were ubiquitous and had good (pseudo) random number generators, you could actually buy books filled with tables of random numbers.
Danielx
@HumboldtBlue:
At a guess, Noodles is the cat who woke you up an hour early?
Sister Golden Bear
@Yarrow:
Of course he will. Just like he immediately declared his candidacy for 2024 immediately after losing the last election. Gotta keep the grifting going.
Albeit after claiming he won and attempting to overthrow the government.
But fuck ’em.
HumboldtBlue
@Danielx:
Yes, that would be the case. He can’t read a clock, poor guy.
different-church-lady
@snoey:
Let’s keep it simple.
Chet Murthy
@dmsilev: CRC Standard Mathematical Tables. I had a copy in college.
dmsilev
@Jackie:
I’m sure we all know this, but Selzer nailed the Iowa result in 2020. And in 2016.
Anyway, spare a moment to feel sorry for whoever is on the cleaning ketchup off the walls duty today.
lowtechcyclist
I doubt that she needs to model nearly as much as most pollsters. Modeling is necessary because so few people will pick up for a strange number these days. But in Iowa, everyone knows about Selzer’s polls, and I bet most Iowans pick up when they see the call’s from Selzer.
If I’m right about that, then that eliminates a shitload of guesswork about nonresponse bias and the likelihood of people voting who don’t take your calls.
The big question is, how much does it tell us about other states? I think that’ll only be answered on Tuesday; there’s barely time to figure it out between now and then.
MattF
@dmsilev: I recall seeing a book containing a million random digits and thinking that it was probably not proofread.
K-Mo
@FDRLincoln: Split-ticket has a useful break down. The line that resonated with me is similar to what you’re saying:
”It is difficult to imagine a universe in which Kamala Harris achieves the level of white support necessary to be competitive in Iowa, but does not win Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska’s second congressional district – and with it, the election.”
https://split-ticket.org/2024/11/02/the-case-for-and-against-a-kamala-harris-victory/
Starfish
@TBone: I feel like Wonkette used to be pointed and sharp, but it feels different now. It feels meaner than it used to be. I can’t tell if I have changed and want things to be cozier, or it is a more unintelligent meanness than it used to be?
H.E.Wolf
@Ben Cisco:
Thank you for letting us know. So sorry, in particular, to hear that Mama Cisco is not doing well. It’s a rough journey for all.
Sending love, sympathy, and strength, and appreciation for your VOTE shirt!
different-church-lady
@dmsilev: Yeah, he sucks, but there was Dilbert where he’s in Hell and The Devil introduces him to a demon who is a random number generator. The demon is saying, “NINE! NINE! NINE! NINE! NINE!…” Dilbert asks, “Are you sure that a random number generator?” and The Devil says, “That’s the thing, there’s no way of knowing.”
snoey
@dmsilev: One more time we only catch the stupid ones.
Kay
@Carlo Graziani:
It’s more than just this poll though. She’s over performing in polls of Nebraska 2 and Ohio also.
No one thinks she will win Ohio but Trump should be up by more than 3 in Ohio. That’s been our feeling on the ground in Ohio – that he’s bleeding.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Ironically, this why one has to be skeptical of stories of Trump in a panic about the election. The man is an idiot and easily manipulated.
Some of these stories got me thinking that Trump is the kind of racist masochistic idiot who thinks him going down a mike on stage and dressing up like a cheep inflatable doll is POWNing Harris. Going by the descriptions of the Orange Haired Idiot I’ve read, he can’t even convince of a woman of color being competent, so her likely thinks Harris slept her way to the top (unlike Trump, who got to the top the old fashion way, by dropping out of the right womb, the man is an idiot on so many levels) It’s like he some left over from the Mad Men generation.
HumboldtBlue
Writer Lyz Lenz, who lives in Iowa, has an explanation for the positive Harris numbers in Iowa.
different-church-lady
@Kay: The important thing is not whether Harris wins these states, it’s that that they show movement towards Harris.
RaflW
I’d love it if someone could cut a quick and dirty ad with the video of Trump fellating that microphone, with audio of Epstein saying “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them,” and then maybe audio of Trump himself commenting on Arnold Palmer’s swing.
ArchTeryx
@japa21: Hope you’re just as touchy with voters who also overstep their bounds. (Like husbands insisting they must be with their wives in the polling booths).
CaseyL
@Omnes Omnibus:
I get your point, but would be interested to know how many people like that are “undecided” versus “too exhausted.”
Living in a pressure cooker doesn’t make you “undecided,” but it does narrow your focus to just getting through the next day, the next hour. I have been in that place, thankfully not for a long time, and did notice the changes it makes in how one thinks.
Good public policy would help people in those situations – undoing Reaganomics altogether, which I grant is a very heavy lift. (Biden accomplished quite a bit along those lines, though the changes he made need to keep on being funded and implemented.)
ETA: And tax policy! Reverse the Trumpian tax cut, for sure, but also restore at least the pre-W tax rates.
Carlo Graziani
@HumboldtBlue: His point about “independence” is not really relevant, but he is absolutely correct that Benford’s Law only applies to quantities that span orders of magnitude.
The specific modeling assumption under which BL is true is that the quantity is distributed “uniformly in its logarithm”. That basically says that there are about as many examples with values between 1 and 10 as between 10 and 100, or between 50 and 500, etc. Lots of things in the natural world behave roughly that way, and incomes/revenues sort of do too (hence the popularity of BL in forensic accounting).
BL follows immediately from this, because the distance between log(2) and log(1) is greater than that between ĺog(3) and log(2), for example, so the uniform-in-log property means that there are that many more values likely to be encountered with a first digit of 1 than with a 2. And so on up the other successive digits.
Needless to say, US State voting populations do not span the kind of range for a uniform-in-log distribution to constitute a valid model.
Starfish
@HumboldtBlue: Oh my. Your image in response to that thread. I have never seen that one.
Scout211
More from Elon’s messy canvassing operation at Wired. (web archive version)
Its a long read but worth a click. A few snippets:
. . .
Kay
@Carlo Graziani:
We’re thinking that bleeding in OH and Iowa means bleeding in WI,PA and MI too.
One thing political media hasn’t picked up at all is there is genuine excitement among very young women voters. This is an Obama level event to them. It’s really nice to see on the ground but unlike with Obama there has been zero coverage of it, I think because it’s young WOMEN. They don’t seem to count to political media.
Anyway, it’s a beautiful thing to watch. I’m too old and bitter to get it but I am thrilled THEY are so excited.
RaflW
@Eolirin: The whole GOP agenda is abhorrent. Musk (and his totally out of touch mom) out there braying that they’re gonna slash Social Security and “oh, well, people will suffer” needs to be a major theme the next few years.
RFK wants to destroy our whole public health system. I know people have become more suspicious of public health after quite a few bad decisions (and some bad optics) at CDC during Covid, but c’mon, a return to polio and g-d knows what else is insane.
Anoniminous
@Greg:
Can’t validly use data from 2020 voting behavior during a pandemic to analyze/predict voting behaviour in 2024.
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: That poor woman! And thank goodness she met Berdy. Also, gotta say, the ending of the story is HI-larious. I mean, talk about tryhard.
Ramona
@bbleh: Mathematically, a tied race should still show variation in the results of various polls. The argument against the “stability” i.e. the uniform results (within a very narrow range of variation) across several polls is a mathematical argument, not an argument against the stability of polled voters’ opinions.
To gain some intuition about this, get a pack of playing cards. Shuffle it thoroughly and deal out 10 cards. Count the number of red cards and the number of black cards and record these numbers. Repeat this several times and don’t forget to shuffle thoroughly each time. You are not going to get 5 black cards and 5 red cards every time you draw 10 cards from the pack even though there are 26 red cards and 26 black cards in the pack.
Say the red cards represent Harris voters and the black cards represent Trump voters. Even in a tie election, random variation dictates that independent polls, i.e. draws from a thoroughly shuffled deck, should not all show a 46% – 48% vs. a 48% – 46% result.
I hope this helps.
rikyrah
@Ben Cisco:
Sending Mama Cisco and the family prayers.
RaflW
I posted this in the overnight thread, but for daysiders, this from The Downballot seems to align well with yesterday’s Iowa news. It was posted September 25th!
Among the nuggets, an internal poll by the Dem challenging for IA-03 which includes Des Moines showed Harris up in the 3rd CD 50-43. Trump won the 3rd CD last time 49.3-48.9.
FDRLincoln
@Kay: harris is also overperforming in Kansas, due to strength with women voters in Kansas City suburbs where the racism and sexism don’t play well.
She won’t win KS, but it fits what we are seeing from other midwest states.
PsiFighter37
@RaflW: The DMR poll shows Dems leading in IA-01 and IA-03 and within 3 points of IA-02. I think there is a good chance you see a repeat of 2018 happen, when Dems won 3 of the 4 House seats. It would be more impressive this time around given that the IA state legislature gerrymandered the map to try and lock in 4-0.
HumboldtBlue
Wow, they did a male version of the secret vote ad.
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
Heh.
Scout211
@HumboldtBlue: I posted that ad a few days ago and let’s just say there are still some jackals who haven’t forgiven George Clooney. (He narrated the ad). I thought it was a really good targeted ad, even if it was narrated by Clooney.
Jackals here are not the target audience.
RaflW
@CaseyL: Saw some smart unpacking of undecideds yesterday. We’re told by august major media that undecideds are often centrists who have a hard time picking. Maybe they’re loaded down as sandwich gen folks working too hard. Maybe they’re working two jobs and just don’t have time for news consumption. Etc.
But at this point, the undecideds that remain are just weird people. They’re not centrists, they’re people at the tail ends of the bell curve, and often people with conflicted views of things, like being super anti-vax but also anti-rich people.
What will ‘reach’ these people is a grab bag of nonsense, and the media obsession with their importance is overblown.
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: i don’t understand? What’s there to forgive? I thought it was a fine ad! Any ad that includes voting for Harris is a fine ad isn’t it?
hrprogressive
Thing is, this has always been a “vibes” election.
Whether or not anyone should be determining their government via “vibes” is a wholly separate discussion (tldr, they should not) but it remains that it’s been true.
The “vibes” prior to Biden dropping out was “He’s old and senile and I don’t wanna vote for only old white guys”.
The “vibes” from Harris onward have – by and large – been “Holy shit let’s make history this is awesome”.
The “polls” have consistently shown “a tight race” because that is what the pollsters want the public and their employers to see.
A “tight race” reinforces the narratives they want.
But virtually all anecdotal evidence online and in district level polling has shown people are far more enthused for voting Harris than the Felon.
This anecdotal evidence has also shown a vast drop-off in demonstrated visual support for CFDT – IE- less signage, poor rallies, etc.
The pollsters refuse to acknowledge the “vibes” because (1) They don’t want a repeat of missing the upset in 2016, (2) the bullshit horserace narrative is good for clicks, revenue, and relevancy and/or (3) a number of pollsters are actually trying to shift the narrative themselves, see all the phony “Red Wave” pollsters.
Ann Selzer’s track record over the last decade has been exemplary – nailing ever final result except Iowa’s 2018 gubernatorial race.
And, my understanding from people who seem to know, is Selzer polls Iowa and only Iowa, so she’s not out doing any other races.
Selzer was also one of the first to show the impending disaster in 2016, showing a twice won Obama State (thanks everyone for reminding me) that Felonious Don was beating Hillary, handily, in Iowa.
Selzer showing over the last 5 months Trump going from being up 50-32, up 47-42, to now D O W N, 47-43 to Harris
Well, it’s tectonic.
And I know, nobody “wants to believe” because we all did that in 2016 and the worst outcome came to pass.
But the data, and the anecdotes, seem to suggest Harris has a real possibility to do much, much better than all the corporate pollsters have been saying.
I will also believe it when I see the results.
But discounting it as a possibility just because we’re all still traumatized by 2016 seems counterproductive.
Hillary thought she was inevitable, until she wasn’t.
Kamala has operated under no such illusion, and has legitimately busted her ass on a truncated time scale to make her case.
The comparisons to 2008 have been growing, and I think there’s a reasonable chance this country makes history, for a good reason, once again.
👻David 🎃Booooooo🎃 Koch💀
SimonSelzer Says:RaflW
@PsiFighter37: We will know in a few days, and maybe I’m just being naive, but I can hope that maybe Iowa isn’t just full of credulous people who will follow MAGA off a cliff.
Perhaps the semi-sensible people who voted for Obama twice are fed up with how very far right the GOP has gone, and this is the start of a snap-back towards (some) sanity?
TBone
@Starfish: I haven’t noticed any less snark than usual, but I don’t read there every day. I read articles only on those subjects I want to mock or learn about (I frequently learn things there) so I’m not a good meangirl judge. I am biased.
Anoniminous
@FelonyGovt:
FUD click bait.
WaPo reported “Harris leads Trump between 19 and 29 points among those who say they’ve already voted.”
THAT’S actual data as opposed to FTNYT fantasy. And I’ll point out FTNYT’s polling is so accurate they had Trump taking 30% of black male voters.
Scout211
For his very public opinion piece calling for Biden to step down during that turbulent period after the debate. I totally understand why folks don’t forgive him, though. He was way out of line.
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: ah yes. I forgot about that.
TBone
@HumboldtBlue: thank you for sharing, comrade! Message received and image appropriated! ☺️
Anoniminous
@K-Mo:
And you can add North Carolina to the list
Baud
Via Reddit
nonrev
I don’t think revelations like Trump/Epstein make any difference one way of another this late in the game. Very few undecided left and just as few who might be willing to change their mind.
It would take a video of Trump with a 16yr old girl at this point to make any impact.
News but not election moving news right now
Anoniminous
@HumboldtBlue:
Complete totally astounding* that women don’t want a shit load of old white men controlling their bodies.
Who could have predicted????
* not
zhena gogolia
@HumboldtBlue: I like that one!
Starfish
@TBone: I used to read articles there years ago, and the change in “voice” is jarring.
There used to be a lot of blogs written by women that were both snarky, feminist, and also smart, but this feels more jerk snarky and less smart snarky than it used to.
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Ooh, I guess it is. He doesn’t sound like himself. I guess he’s getting older.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Yeah, I didn’t recognize his voice at all.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I’ve been watching him since Roseanne and Sisters and ER, not to mention many movies, and I didn’t recognize it. It’s higher and more feeble.
😄
Jackie
@Baud: I truly love Tim Walz. Harris made the best decision in choosing Walz to be her copilot.
Chet Murthy
@Anoniminous: It’s looking like that, yeah. But I remember in 2021 when the Fleece-Vest Nazi was caught on videotape during his campaign saying he couldn’t take a hard line on abortion now, but once he was elected, he could deal with it, and harshly. And then the voters of so-called Blue Virginia elected him. The campaign was filled with transphobia, racism, misogyny, etc. And they elected him anyway.
So it wasn’t at all obvious to me that things would turn out the way they seem to be doing.
Anoniminous
@Ramona:
If you’re doing Random sampling and you don’t get outliers it means:
1. You’re doing it wrong
2. You’re lying
Scout211
@zhena gogolia: @Baud:
Okay. Now I see my mistake. I actually announced that Clooney was the narrator when I posted the ad in the comments. If I had left that out, no one would have known! 🤣
Baud
@Anoniminous:
“Harris can’t plausibly be winning by that much. Let’s adjust the weighting.” #Hopium
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: I still like the ad, it’s okay.
Anyway
I se that something like 45% of the electorate has already voted, That’s huge early voting numbers. I’m a poll worker and think the lines should be manageable on Tuesday…
Anoniminous
@Chet Murthy:
Have to look to be sure so I can only guess the voting population in 2021 was just enough different to sufficiently skew the results D -> R? Also McAuliffe is an out of touch Clinton Era “New Democrat” and well past his sell-by date. And the election was pre-Dobbs so abortion wasn’t much of an issue.
Baud
Via reddit, MSNBC actually found the kind of odd duck that is voting for Harris rather than the usual disaffected Dem voting red.
Anonymous At Work
@RaflW: They tend to include a significant percentage of clashing and/or nonsensical positions like Old Testament law on cultural issues AND economic issues, so death to shrimp eaters AND mandatory tithing of wealth each year. The two “balance” out to appear “centrist.”
The other group has no strong preferences because they don’t connect political choices to everyday reality.
Anoniminous
@Baud:
Exactly.
👻David 🎃Booooooo🎃 Koch💀
Back in 2008, it was Iowa that launched Obama.
The final Iowa polls were:
CNN: Clinton 33%, Obama 31%, Edwards 22%
Insider Advantage: Clinton 30%, Edwards 29%, Obama 22%
Reuters: Clinton 30%, Obama 26%, Edwards 26%
MSNBC: Edwards 24%, Clinton 23%, Obama 22%
American Research Group: Clinton 34%, Obama 25%, Edwards 21%
Then Selzer posted her poll, 3 days before the caucus: Obama 32%, Clinton 25%, Edwards 24%
The final results were Obama 38%, Edwards 30%, Clinton 29%.
She had Obama winning by 7 pts and he won by 8. Selzer is the one.
Chet Murthy
Indeed. Basically, the fact that the Fleece-Vest Nazi’s party had tried to end the Republic ten months prior, that they were all on record as wanting to kill abortion, didn’t matter. B/c it hadn’t happened yet. Literally, b/c it hadn’t happened yet.
E.
@HumboldtBlue: I thought the 4:20 time notification was kind of interesting in that ad.
Memory Pallas
I see another way to read the Iowa poll: its a “clean signal” from a state that hasn’t been drenched in misinformation and shenanigans because no one the red team thought it was necessary to so and misinformation resources are not actually unlimited. It doesn’t automatically mean that those results can be extrapolated to other midwest states that have been drenched in misinformation because those things may work.
kalakal
A few points swing could have a huge impact down ticket in heavily gerrymandered states. As the Repugs have upped the gerrymandered they’ve lowered the tipping point for a lot of down ticket positions. I hope to see a classic demonstration of unstable equilibrium
Jackie
Marco Rubio on CBS this morning re “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe at the MSG rally:
No lie told, Rubio; anyone voting for TCFG IS a RACIST, NAZI loving piece of GARBAGE. Period.
And… Biden isn’t on the ballot.
Ivan X
@hrprogressive: I don’t really like the “vibes” election framing because I think they’re all vibes elections at the presidental level. People just vote for the person they think they feel good about or trust more or like at some gut level, and the more charismatic candidate usually wins, more than people do a rational analysis of issues. For whatever reason I feel like “vibes” is a dismissive, breezy way of not taking Harris, and this election as a whole, seriously; it’s an invented media narrative.
Baud
@Ivan X:
It gained prominence as a way to diss Biden.
👻David 🎃Booooooo🎃 Koch💀
[Narrator: Gore would win Michigan by 5 points]
JoyceH
@hrprogressive: I have long thought that Trump won in 2016 BECAUSE it seemed impossible that he could win. I think there was a small but decisive number of people who voted for Trump because they knew he’d lose so it was a safe way to register discontent with the status quo. I think the same thing happened with Brexit.
Kent
Please, please, make it so. The best thing that could happen for Democrats is a senile 83 year old Trump running again in 2028.
Ivan X
@Baud: originating with whom?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@JoyceH:
See Putney Swope
Chet Murthy
@Ivan X: Contra @Baud:, I saw this “vibes election” thing as a way to explain how Americans could reject Biden, while being enthusiastic for his VP, who was quite careful to allow no daylight between herself and POTUS. Instead of thinking about -any- of the issues, these voters were simply voting in a beauty contest. That is to say, “vibes”. I’m not that sort of voter, and so I was pretty dejected for a good while, but now …. well, whatevs I guess.
And in a way there’s a silver lining. The Big Lie works on “issues”. I think it works less well on “vibes”, b/c when there’s no reality there, both parties can do the propaganda thing, and heck, I think the Dems might be better at it. So sure, elections will turn more and more on insubstantial things. But on the bright side, we have more of the talented bullshit merchants! Winning! Sigh.
Baud
@Ivan X:
I don’t have an originator. Do you?
Ivan X
@Baud: Yeah. Two of them.
Baud
@Chet Murthy:
“Vibes” was used to explain why it was ok for people to pretend like a good economy wasn’t a good economy.
Kent
I think it was more like 2000 in which there were a whole lot of people who just thought it didn’t really make much difference who was president and that it would be fun to elect Trump. Especially over the “humorless Hillary”.
Kind of like how Arnold became governor of California which shrug, didn’t turn out so bad. Life went on and it was kind of fun having a celeb as governor.
Baud
@Ivan X:
Who?
Another Scott
@Starfish: Apparently Wonkette is taking in a lot more money, and expenses have gone down a lot, since they moved to Substack. That enabled Rebecca to add a lot more contributors.
A healthy Wonkette is a very good thing.
Many more viewpoint choices now.
Be choosy if the tone, especially in the new writers, isn’t to your taste.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Audacity of Krope
Some people really just don’t follow politics. I had a talk with my buddy’s girlfriend last night. I asked her if she voted and said she hadn’t thought much about it yet. She asked whom I voted for and told her Kamala.
She said she was hearing things about Kamala on social media but wasn’t sure if she should believe it. I basically gave her a rundown of the candidates and some civics. She said it connected a lot for her. But I was always clear on what was my opinion.
She said the main things she was worried about were Project 2025 and she heard Kamala wanted to reinstate segregation. I assured her, in my opinion, the first worries are valid, the second not at all.
I told her she should never take just one person’s word so I recommended the DNC speech as sort of a personal intro to Harris and the debate to see the candidates on relatively equal footing.
We started the DNC speech before I left and I was sure to point out the diversity in the room. “Do these look like people who want to institute segregation?”
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
That’s a new one. Lots of stuff flying under the radar.
Chet Murthy
@Baud: aha, I remember now that’s how it started. But by late in the summer it also was used to describe the way people felt about Harris but they had not felt about Biden. But you’re right, originally Vibes referred to the economy, and it was used to diss Biden.
Kent
I think we also don’t understand how devastating a tariff-driven trade war would be to the Iowa farm economy which is entirely export-driven. Shut off the international markets for Iowa corn and soybeans and thousands of farms go bankrupt. Farmers know this. They’ve been through it before. Plus, Elon is out there this week tweeting about how we need to crash markets (while he gets tax cuts) so that the economy can come out healthier on the other side. Well, soybeans and corn are markets. And farmers won’t come out healthier on the other side. They’ll come out bankrupt.
3Sice
The GOP dropped the anti-trans commercial they’ve been running on NFL buys.
New one is “Up With Donnie”. He loves all races, genders, creeds…. and babies. He loves babies.
Ivan X
@Chet Murthy: I think that’s a really silly way of thinking about it, but thanks for the explainer. The idea that people, whether informed or not, don’t vote at least in part based upon how they feel about the candidate seems absurd on its face, to me. I think it’s possible that people could have felt differently about Biden than they do about Harris for any number of reasons, both valid and invalid. So what?
Also, it seems to me that our coalition is fragile, as it needs to encompass literally everyone who isn’t a protect-the-billionaires type, or white supremacist/nationalist, or evangelical, or Trump-specific cultist. And so I think Harris has, with some risk but with intent and calculation, avoided putting stakes in the ground strongly on more issues than she has to, so that she can avoid alienating one of the coalition’s factions; but this has left her exposed to being said to be less substantial in her candidacy. She needs to get everyone from progressives to ex-Republican never-Trumpers to different minority groups with different priorities and values, etc.
3Sice
There is lots of heavy industrial UAW workers in Iowa.
Ivan X
@Baud: They’re not married to each other any more, but they’re still with us, I’m happy to report.
catclub
IF it is representative of other states as well.
narya
@H.E.Wolf: Thank you for the info downstairs! I bookmarked that post.
Booger
@MattF: That is just existentially funny.
catclub
Of course, she cannot say, “Take a look at what the Biden Harris admin has done on a given policy, I am very likely, but not certainly, to continue that.”
“I am what you should expect from a mainstream Democrat.”
JaySinWA
@3Sice:
Reinforcing the Epstein tapes, I guess.
narya
All with a sinking dread that mom might have to move in, but there’s really no room and no one is around during the day, and mom will fight any notion that she has to leave her house . . .
Chet Murthy
@Ivan X: We’re both of good will, and we can differ on these things.
(1) My shock was in seeing that for many, many no-Biden-yes-Harris voters, they literally weren’t going on -any- real issues. I mean, Harris has zero space between herself and Biden, and yet they found Biden unacceptable. Just ridiculous. But sure, I’m good they found their reason for voting for Harris.
(2) Likewise, I don’t see Harris as somehow having to stitch together a fractious coalition, and that being the reason she was light on issues. I mean, she’s Biden’s VP, and they’ve governed for 3.5 years now.
To my mind what actually happened was Harris’ campaign concluded “voters don’t want to hear about issues, they’re fundamentally flighty airheads, so we’ll give ’em glitz and glamour, fanservice and celebrities.” And I don’t fault Harris for this: she met the electorate where they -are-, not where I would wish they would be.
it was I who was at fault, utterly mistaken in my assessment of the non-vapidity of the electorate.
Baud
@Chet Murthy:
It’s good though. Most policy issues need to be resolved by Congress. We’ve gone too far in believing that the president is some kind of royal with the power to do whatever he or she wants. I don’t mind curtailing the issue portfolio of presidential candidates to the most important ones.
catclub
yes, yes, yes.
Bill Arnold
@Scout211:
In the replies (on X/twitter) it is noted that they voted at exactly 4:20.
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
Subliminal FTW!
wjca
Change minds? No.
Remind Harris voters why they prefer her, and motivate them voters to make sure they get to the polls? It well might.
Chet Murthy
@Baud: Again I must demur. The presidential candidate is the leader of the party, and their platform is the party platform. So when they don’t actually run on a policy slate, they’re setting the tone for the entire party doing so. But (again) hey, it is what it is: American voters don’t want to be treated like adults. It is what it is.
With one salient exception: clearly when it comes to reproductive rights, American -women- apparently want to be treated like adults. Which, thank goodness for that.
Baud
@Chet Murthy:
I didn’t say that. I said focus on the most important issues. We have asked candidates to focus on minutiae in their campaigns. And then we expect them to fulfill them all even if the voters don’t give them a Congress of the same party.
ETA: That’s how FDR did it. Getting in the weeds is a modem invention.
ETA2: That takes accountability away from Congress, which is why Congress is so lousy.
Kent
@Chet Murthy: That is the thing about election season. You come face to face with the fact that half your fellow citizens are profoundly stupid, profoundly sociopathic, or both.
The rest of the time you can avoid that knowledge if you stay of TikTok and reality TV.
catclub
@Chet Murthy:
me too. How could they, there was no daylight between Harris and Biden while Harris is VP.
There was more between Biden and Obama.
Another Scott
ICYMI, Wiley today, with more adventures of the captain of the Anoesis.
Genius.
Cheers,
Scott.
wjca
Iowa is probably representative of other farm states. Places where farmers track prices for their crops pretty closely, export a lot**, and know tariff wars would hurt them a lot. So, Kansas and Nebraska, but not North Carolina.
** Did you know that most of the say beans consumed in China come from the US? You can bet the folks that grow them do.
Melancholy Jaques
@MazeDancer:
Generally that phrase is used to refer to the voters’ financial or economic interests. Those of us who use it ought to specific that for clarity.
catclub
Yes, if you ask a non-interested person if Harris is stupid, they are likely to have gotten it, and believed it, from Trump.
Ivan X
@Chet Murthy: I’d like to think so.
I think your point in (2) is entirely plausible — and also not orthogonal to my own read on how she has campaigned.
I do think a lot of people are pretty dumb, though, and there are a great many more who aren’t dumb, but also aren’t politically interested (much less committed in the same way we are), and sure, she needs their votes, too. So, it’s a good a theory as any.
As to (1), we agree to disagree. And I truly don’t care who’s “right” as long as Trump is not our next President.
catclub
Worst of all, the day after the election is when you may learn this about our fellow citizens.
Kent
Recent polls show Harris closing the gap in Kansas as well. https://themercury.com/a-stupefying-poll-shows-harris-breathing-down-trump-s-neck-in-kansas-here-s-what/article_e0a275ce-9791-11ef-8091-53993754b8b5.html
Maxim
@CaseyL:
And we have a lot of people living like that.
schrodingers_cat
Saw a red hatted MAGA in the wilds of Western Mass while grocery shopping. He was getting a lot of side eyes.
Mr. Bemused Senior
This may be true but I think it is a bit of an exaggeration.
For example, I watched the Michigan event with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney hosted by Maria Shriver. It didn’t ignore issues but to be sure the focus was on the danger of a second Trump administration. Is that just glitz and glamour?
catclub
@Kent: wasn’t the polling off in Kansas by 10+ percent for a post Dobbs election there?
Kent
A large segment of the electorate doesn’t vote on policy. The don’t even know what policy is.
They just vote on vibes. And Biden and Harris give off very different vibes.
Plus their policy focus has been somewhat different. Biden was an old union guy and car guy so big on labor issues, promoting American-made EVs, green policies. etc.
By contrast, Harris has been most more centered on social issues: Dobbs and abortion, home health care, crime, young women, etc. And Trump himself. I don’t think I’ve once heard Harris talk about electric cars, for example.
So even if their platforms are roughly the same, a word cloud of their speeches and primary points of emphasis would probably look quite a bit different.
Kent
@catclub: Yes. I’m just pointing out that Iowa isn’t necessarily an outlier.
catclub
@schrodingers_cat: If Boston is overwhelmingly Democrat, but Massachusetts overall is ‘only’ 70% Democrat, then western Mass is leaning toward Pennsyltucky politics. Leaning, not there.
Melancholy Jaques
@Kent:
I would enjoy watching a cage match between Trumpster & Never Trumper Republicans up & down the ballot, all over America.
Kent
MA has the same urban/rural split as every other state in the country. This should not be news.
catclub
The key thing to recognize in that poll is that the Seltzer polls in June and July were heavily in favor of Trump. The polling has detected dramatic change in Harris’s favor.
schrodingers_cat
@catclub: Actually western Mass is very blue and so is boston, its central Mass that’s purple.
schrodingers_cat
@Kent: Actually no. See comment #210.
HRC got over 70% in my town and we are pretty rural with plenty of working farms. Same pattern in the hill towns of Berkshires.
Seonachan
@catclub: Western Mass is one of the most progressive parts of the state. There are some reddish pockets, but the bulk of it votes D in the same proportions as Boston and Cambridge.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@HumboldtBlue:
My favorite comment from that thread:
The ‘shittiest shit’ part has gone into my clip file as it can be applied to sooooooooo many people.
RaflW
@Melancholy Jaques: Which version of Nikki Haley will we get?
1. Haley: ‘An unhinged president is an unsafe president’. 02/13/24
2. Haley Endorses Trump [on RNC stage] and Urges Republicans to Unite Behind Him. 07/16/24
Also, this from six days ago is f’ing hilarious!
She’s so thirsty, and being utterly ghosted.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Seems like more than an idea, at least for the last eight years. At both the federal and state level. Doesn’t mean they have to stay that way.
tobie
I’ve been phonebanking in PA since the Dem convention. Older women have been receptive to the calls. The most hostile on the phone are definitely white men between 40 and 65. I’ve heard stories of women who seemed afraid to talk in front of their husbands but today was the first day I may have encountered that directly. One woman I called said after I asked whether we could count on her support for Harris, “I already said I don’t disclose this kind of information on the phone. [pause] Yes, yes.“ I gave her her polling location and left it at that. I hope I didn’t cause her any problems. What an awful situation.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Those suburbanites…tsk.
Baud
@tobie:
Definitely a theme in this election.
Ramona
@Anoniminous: You put it succinctly. I find simple experiments which people can do with ordinary things go a long way towards developing a modicum of intuition with what is understandably easy to misunderstand random phenomena.
3Sice
@RaflW:
She got smoked by Liz Cheney.
Soprano2
@Kay: Mostly women don’t seem to exist for the pundits unless they’re TCFG supporters.
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: I’ve done price estimating. I’ve done regression graphs for sewer modeling. It’s shocking how easily numbers can be manipulated by changing one variable. “This point is an outlier, we’re removing it.” We’ll see if I’m right that they don’t know how to model the electorate this year.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Good, good.
Run up the score!!
Forward!!
Cheers,
Scott.
👻David 🎃Booooooo🎃 Koch💀
@catclub:
lot more than that. they had the abortion losing by 4 points, but it won by 18. oops.
K-Mo
@Kent: This seems right to me. The presidential election is about vibes, slogans, and branding. Kamala stepped in and from Day one the mood changed from moribund to hopeful. This allowed her to reassemble a faltering coalition and get the party moving in the same direction. And she immediately spruced up the messaging online and IRL. She projected a vibrant, energetic image that everyone rallied behind, and then she pitched a no-hitter of message discipline every day since. That is how you build vibes and it’s how you win national elections.
Also, against the odds, she has managed to create some space in peoples minds between her and Biden, so that she takes maybe only half the level of resentment over inflation. People don’t think she’s great on the economy but they don’t “know” her to be terrible. Along the way she has branded herself as a breath of fresh air after everyone was soooo tired of Biden and Trump.
That said, I actually think Kamala will govern differently from Joe. She’s more of a technocrat and a compromiser. Joe is an old pro who got a ton of big stuff through Congress while empowering true blue Dems in the executive branch. Of course the differences are small compared to Project 25, but they aren’t nothing.
The Audacity of Krope
Actually, you’d be surprised. I watch town-by-town election results pretty consistently here and while, yes, some of our more rural towns are like that, other rural towns go for Democrats by margins we’d only hope to ever dream of. Numbers up over 90 percent for team blue.
By contrast some of our smallish cities are more evenly split with the occasional reddish suburb butting up against it.
ETA: Haha, I see several people got there first.
Another Scott
@Kent: Various links on Google say that 57M American adults are functionally illiterate.
Library Journal:
So many things come down to education and knowing how to think.
I love the poorly educated. – TCFFG
That’s why they continue to try to gut public education, attack teachers’ unions, demand vouchers for their “private schools”, demand that home-schooled kids get access to public school facilities and sports, try to gut the Department of Education, and all the rest.
Grr…,
Scott.
hrprogressive
@Ivan X:
Believe me, I get it, and I am not saying I think that is the correct way to frame it.
But there are people in influential positions who have done so, so, the “feeling” is out there.
****
@JoyceH:
This is definitely a factor. Some people figured they were registering a protest vote instead of actually voting for an outcome.
I also know at least one personal friend who loathed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and voted Trump because “Trump was an outsider”.
Thankfully, I know that guy didn’t vote Trump a second time. I can’t see him flipping back now, tho I can’t say he’s now a reliable Kamala voter.
I suspect the voting coalition won’t be the same as either 2016 or 2020.
So many more people have reasons to vote, Affirmatively, For Kamala or at least Against Trump.
Tom Levenson
@Greg: Thanks.
hrprogressive
@Baud:
It did, but the vibes went from “Funeral Dirge” after the Biden Debate to “Joyous Exuberance” when Kamala took over.
Whether or not “vibes” is appropriate remains, IMO, a separate conversation.
The vibes went from awful to awesome in the blink of an eye, and now it seems, and feels more and more, like we are on the cusp of making positive history, like we did 16 years ago.
Scout211
I guess Trump is getting more and more unhinged in his rallies. AP from today:
Steven Cheung (*spit*) attempts to clarify (clean up) Trump’s threats of violence against the media:
JaySinWA
Tim Miller interviews Ann Seltzer:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/ann-selzer-how-could-this-be
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Brilliant, simply brilliant.
Another Scott
@JaySinWA: Thanks for the link. She’s good in the interview.
(Boo that they throw up the paywall just when she starts taking about how they control for older women answering the phone more than others…)
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Scout211:
Whenever I feel down, Trump’s loser stench cheers me up.
Msb
@Sister Golden Bear:
he probably will promise to run again, but will be dead or completely demented by ‘28 – he’ll also be at least 84 years old.
I expect him to pull a Pinochet: say he’s too ill/demented to stand the rest of his trials.
RevRick
@Baud: You won’t have to. Harris will seal the deal by 11. If she wins Florida, you can go to bed by 9.
Baud
@RevRick:
You are a man of faith.
Melancholy Jaques
@RevRick:
As a Left Coaster, I love the fact that those times are EST.
TBone
@Starfish: well, considering the subject matter of the article, sympathy isn’t what they’re trying for! I mean, pedophiles aren’t gonna get a puff piece, yaknow? That these people were/are at the levers of any power is enough to make me meaner!
zhena gogolia
@Baud: He really is!
I am not making any predictions. I’m constantly sick to my stomach.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Same. If I bother making predictions, it’s going to be something outlandishly positive. What’s the point otherwise?
Ruckus
I voted on Saturday. The first day I could vote. I’ve been voting for 54 yrs. The federal voting age was lowered to 18 the first year I could vote because I turned 21, and had been in the military for over 1 1/2 yrs. We could be drafted into the military at 18, but not vote. But that’s OK because now we can vote at 18. Life is more often not fair than it is. That’s life, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it SUCKS. And sometimes it is great. If you are 18 or older, PLEASE vote. Vote for democracy, vote like it’s the only thing saving our country, because it is.
TBone
@Msb: the Weinstein gambit. I’ve been waiting for that to get trotted out, but he can’t be seen as “weak” until after he loses. Don’t know why I put quotes around weak since that’s all he is, truly.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ruckus:
(doing the math) so… 1970? I’m going to guess you didn’t vote pro-Nixon in ’72.
I was 16 when the draft ended. Voting and drinking age were both 18. My first vote was the Ford / Carter race in ’76.
In the intervening years I’ve tried to vote in every election, primary or general. I think I missed one primary due to a work schedule.
TBone
@Another Scott: 😁
Citizen Alan
@Scout211: The thing that enraged me the most at the time What’s the public pronouncement by the guy who I think is clooney’s talent rep. I forget his name, but he’s a billionaire talent agent, which is the purest distillation of the idea of the human parasite. And he was out publicly telling everyone that no liberal billionaire would be donating to the democratic party unless biden stepped down.
Citizen Alan
@nonrev: The people who support donald trump are the same people who think a twelve year old girl should be forced to marry her rapist.
artem1s
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
My sense is that a lot of people who mailed in ballots during COVID are more comfortable with early in-person voting. So the states that count/scan mail-in ballots last after the polls have closed won’t take as long this year.
jonas
@dmsilev: How were those numbers generated, then?
jonas
Trump’s last round of tariffs hit midwestern farmers hard, but tens of billions in bailout subsidies helped ease the pain. I assume they think Trump will just bail them out again, so wev.
The Audacity of Krope
Stands to reason. He didn’t even mind a supporter he chose to share the stage with getting shot.
different-church-lady
@Scout211: It absolutely fucking INFURIATES me that we got blamed for the assassination attempt because of our non-existent “violent rhetoric” but Trump can just bleat as much as he wants about others getting shot and the media just goes, “Oh, uh, what are we supposed to do here?”
The Audacity of Krope
@different-church-lady: No serious person blames Democrats for the attempts on Trump’s life. Consider that they all seem to operate very much within Republican cultural bounds.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@jonas:
Good question. I don’t know, but I do know that spies needed them too. It’s called a one-time pad (for encrypting a message).
different-church-lady
@The Audacity of Krope:
That’s right, but I’m talking about the media.
The Audacity of Krope
@different-church-lady: Once we get the serious people to notice that the media aren’t to be counted among them, the media will really be in trouble.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: That’s what I thought when I saw the Harrison Ford ad. Is that Harrison Ford? His voice seemed quite different.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Harrison has gotten older. A lot of things can change when one gets older, and for some/many voice is one of them, as is hearing and energy levels. Harrison is 82 yrs old and still works in his field – acting.