2020 US Elections | Biden certified as President | Dems control Congress

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Tom Van Persie

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I’m of the opinion that D will fall just short like 2018, but even then as long as they win enough state legislature seats to have bipartisan redistricting, that’s a huge win and will make TX a true swing state as early as 2022.

On the other hand, even R pollsters are expecting turnout north of 70% there, that’s a huge increase and opens up a lot of possibilities.
This.
 

SirAF

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Hey, guys.

Who should I follow on Twitter ahead of the big day? Give me five/ten accounts of reliable sources.
@NateSilver538

@smotus

@jennifernvictor

Should go a long way for my money at least.

Might as well follow @Scaramucci for some Trump trolling too :D
 

InfiniteBoredom

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Hey, guys.

Who should I follow on Twitter ahead of the big day? Give me five/ten accounts of reliable sources.
Nate Cohn (NYT)
Nate Silver (538)
Larry Sabato/Kyle Kondik (Crystal Ball)
Sam Wang (PEC)
Michael McDonald (ElectProject)
Dave Wasserman (Redistrict)
Harry Enten (CNN)
Steve Kornacki (NBC)

That’s the main model guys on there, there are also a bunch of state specific guys but I doubt you’d get the granularity of their updates if you aren’t familiar.
 

Redplane

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What a fecking scumbag Rubio is.

Rubio is a slimey scumbag. I can think of few who are more "politician" than he is. Guy was demolished and insulted by Trump during the primaries - essentially ruining any shot the party and he might have thought he might have at a future presidential run and he and just rolled over and stuck his butt in the air.
 

owlo

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I’m of the opinion that D will fall just short like 2018, but even then as long as they win enough state legislature seats to have bipartisan redistricting, that’s a huge win and will make TX a true swing state as early as 2022.

On the other hand, even R pollsters are expecting turnout north of 70% there, that’s a huge increase and opens up a lot of possibilities.
108% already voted. 30% of total or more expected to vote on the day. Harris over 10% up.

The big deal though is both Bexar and Travis are up BIG as trump would say all in caps. Clinton won these 50:40 and 66:27 respectively. They both have around 20% turnout increase. That's real fecking bad for trump.
 

nimic

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Does anyone buy this talk of Texas being turned blue for this election?

It seems the lefty media are getting their hopes up for something that probably won't happen, from what I've seen the GOP have gerrymandered and disenfranchised enough voters to keep the state red.
Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidential election. Disenfranchisement... a lot.
 

Ubik

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Nate Cohn (NYT)
Nate Silver (538)
Larry Sabato/Kyle Kondik (Crystal Ball)
Sam Wang (PEC)
Michael McDonald (ElectProject)
Dave Wasserman (Redistrict)
Harry Enten (CNN)
Steve Kornacki (NBC)

That’s the main model guys on there, there are also a bunch of state specific guys but I doubt you’d get the granularity of their updates if you aren’t familiar.
Wang! Forgot all about him.
 

owlo

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Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidential election. Disenfranchisement... a lot.
Ain't worked though has it. Feck Abbott. They'll have to use good ole vote rigging instead like all the 'shithole countries' Trump talks of.
 

Suedesi

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Perhaps from a national perspective you may be correct, but I don’t think the NY AG or the SDNY (once it’s purged of all Trumpism) will give two fecks what Washington or the nation wants.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/why-trump-cant-afford-to-lose

Joe Lockhart, who served as Bill Clinton’s press secretary, suggested to me that, if Biden narrowly wins, a chaotic interregnum could provide an opportunity for a “global settlement” in which Trump will concede the election and “go away” in exchange for a promise that he won’t face charges anywhere, including in New York. Lockhart argued that New York’s legal authorities are not just lawyers but also politicians, and might be convinced that a deal is in the public interest. He pointed out that a global-settlement arrangement was made, “in microcosm,” at the end of the Clinton Presidency, when the independent counsel behind the Monica Lewinsky investigation agreed to wrap things up if Clinton paid a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine, forfeited his law license, and admitted that he had testified falsely under oath. “So there’s some precedent,” Lockhart said, although he admitted that such a deal would anger many Americans.
 

mav_9me

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Does anyone buy this talk of Texas being turned blue for this election?

It seems the lefty media are getting their hopes up for something that probably won't happen, from what I've seen the GOP have gerrymandered and disenfranchised enough voters to keep the state red.
I’m of the opinion that D will fall just short like 2018, but even then as long as they win enough state legislature seats to have bipartisan redistricting, that’s a huge win and will make TX a true swing state as early as 2022.

On the other hand, even R pollsters are expecting turnout north of 70% there, that’s a huge increase and opens up a lot of possibilities.
108% already voted. 30% of total or more expected to vote on the day. Harris over 10% up.

The big deal though is both Bexar and Travis are up BIG as trump would say all in caps. Clinton won these 50:40 and 66:27 respectively. They both have around 20% turnout increase. That's real fecking bad for trump.
I have family and friends in Houston and Dallas. Anecdotally it's as republican as ever. I understand the changing demographics idea but I don't know.

Wasn't the last senator election supposed to be a sign of the change? Anything in that to favor this interpretation?
 

Dr. StrangeHate

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Rubio is a slimey scumbag. I can think of few who are more "politician" than he is. Guy was demolished and insulted by Trump during the primaries - essentially ruining any shot the party and he might have thought he might have at a future presidential run and he and just rolled over and stuck his butt in the air.
Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan are worse.
 

Suedesi

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Rado is not being cynical.

RCP/538 modeling using polls misses two things
1. First derivative matters. While PA and WI have stayed stable, quite a few states have tightened in Trump's favor (OH, IA, AZ). This is generally a really bad sign. Momentum matters a lot in elections in the era of social media and this is a phenomena consistently observed in larger democracies around the world.
2. The shy Trump voter. Models have tried to correct for this, but one of the only pollsters to catch this in 2016 claims that he is still seeing his (2-3 swing in favor of Trump when people are asked whom they think their neighbour is going to vote for, instead of themselves).

I think there is some amount of unfounded optimism in the mainstream media.

Now, there is one factor which is breaking in Biden's favour.

The second wave of Covid is hitting hard and Trump is correctly associated as being unable to control it.
Polling is not an exact science. The practice of using telephones is so outmoded - after all who in this day and age willingly picks up their landline to spend 20-30 minutes going over a 40+ point questionnaire? The people who don't respond are just as valuable as the people who do. How do you get a representative sample? Even then, voters can still change their mind. This will be a slugfest for weeks.
 

nimic

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Rado is not being cynical.

RCP/538 modeling using polls misses two things
1. First derivative matters. While PA and WI have stayed stable, quite a few states have tightened in Trump's favor (OH, IA, AZ). This is generally a really bad sign. Momentum matters a lot in elections in the era of social media and this is a phenomena consistently observed in larger democracies around the world.
2. The shy Trump voter. Models have tried to correct for this, but one of the only pollsters to catch this in 2016 claims that he is still seeing his (2-3 swing in favor of Trump when people are asked whom they think their neighbour is going to vote for, instead of themselves).

I think there is some amount of unfounded optimism in the mainstream media.

Now, there is one factor which is breaking in Biden's favour.

The second wave of Covid is hitting hard and Trump is correctly associated as being unable to control it.
There is exactly zero evidence the shy Trump voter existed even in 2016, let alone in 2020.
 

Raoul

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He’s dreaming. You can’t get as humiliated as he and Cruz did with Trump and expect people to see you as a leader later.
Yeah but they have since fallen in line with Trumpism by not criticizing him and not pushing back on his narrative. Cruz, Rubio, Haley and a few others will definitely be in the mix in 24.
 

freeurmind

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The Laptop bollocks is real to you?
There is a laptop. Hunter Biden's emails were allegedly found on it. Some of the emails have been confirmed to be genuine by people involved in the email chain. The emails themselves don't show any proof of criminal activity but that doesn't make the story fake.
 

Brwned

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Polling is not an exact science. The practice of using telephones is so outmoded - after all who in this day and age willingly picks up their landline to spend 20-30 minutes going over a 40+ point questionnaire? The people who don't respond are just as valuable as the people who do. How do you get a representative sample? Even then, voters can still change their mind. This will be a slugfest for weeks.
Political polls are usually very short, many asking only the bare essentials about who you are, how likely you are to vote and who you'll vote for. You can do that in under a minute. And while polling isn't an exact science, you can apply scientific tests to them, including some of the things you've mentioned.

For example, we know that polls are about as accurate as they've been for over two decades - maybe a little more so. We know that telephone polls are generally more accurate than other methods, despite the fact that response rates have dropped off a cliff and overall access through that method has fallen. We know that polls have called the winner 4 out of 5 times, this close to the election period, stretching back to the 90s. We know that in close races, where the winning margin is 0-3 points, they get it right just 3 out of 5 times, while if the margin is 10+, they get it right 9 out of 10 times. There's a good summary here.

So even it only reaches a sample of the population, that sample is not perfectly representative, and the measure being captured is not perfectly precise, we know how accurate it is. 1 out of 5 times it will get it wrong. When that 1 time time happens, it becomes proof that polls are unreliable, but when those 4 out of 5 times happen, it barely gets a mention. We're just very good at intuiting statistics!
 

Kentonio

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Yeah but they have since fallen in line with Trumpism by not criticizing him and not pushing back on his narrative. Cruz, Rubio, Haley and a few others will definitely be in the mix in 24.
It’s a miscalculation though I think on their part. They’ve chosen to jump aboard the Trump train, BUT in the process allowed Trump to humiliate them. His supporters will remember that. Haley was the smart one, worked for him to keep in with his fans, then checked out well before he loses (can’t be accused of rat leaving sinking ship). In my opinion, she’s absolutely the one of the three to watch. Cruz and Rubio are done at least for the next cycle.
 

Djemba-Djemba

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There is a laptop. Hunter Biden's emails were allegedly found on it. Some of the emails have been confirmed to be genuine by people involved in the email chain. The emails themselves don't show any proof of criminal activity but that doesn't make the story fake.
Erm yes it does. The whole thing is complete nonsense but for the sake of argument lets say they did hack Hunter Biden.

They tried to make it sound like these laptops contained some explosive secrets about the criminal behaviour of the Biden family and it revealed feck all. So yes the story is fake.
 

Cheimoon

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Erm yes it does. The whole thing is complete nonsense but for the sake of argument lets say they did hack Hunter Biden.

They tried to make it sound like these laptops contained some explosive secrets about the criminal behaviour of the Biden family and it revealed feck all. So yes the story is fake.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the story is a mix of fake and real; the probably illegal way the data was acquired is ignored; and what little real there is, is not nearly as damaging as is being pretended, and anyway concerns Hunter not Joe Biden.
 

Suedesi

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Political polls are usually very short, many asking only the bare essentials about who you are, how likely you are to vote and who you'll vote for. You can do that in under a minute. And while polling isn't an exact science, you can apply scientific tests to them, including some of the things you've mentioned.

For example, we know that polls are about as accurate as they've been for over two decades - maybe a little more so. We know that telephone polls are generally more accurate than other methods, despite the fact that response rates have dropped off a cliff and overall access through that method has fallen. We know that polls have called the winner 4 out of 5 times, this close to the election period, stretching back to the 90s. We know that in close races, where the winning margin is 0-3 points, they get it right just 3 out of 5 times, while if the margin is 10+, they get it right 9 out of 10 times. There's a good summary here.

So even it only reaches a sample of the population, that sample is not perfectly representative, and the measure being captured is not perfectly precise, we know how accurate it is. 1 out of 5 times it will get it wrong. When that 1 time time happens, it becomes proof that polls are unreliable, but when those 4 out of 5 times happen, it barely gets a mention. We're just very good at intuiting statistics!
Quoting an article from Nate Silver on accuracy of polls has me totally convinced :wenger:

Kidding aside, I think two factors have rapidly made polling more difficult recently - the obsolescence of landline phones and the current heated political climate. The former makes getting a representative sample increasingly hard, the latter increases uncertainty on the accuracy of results. Given cancel climate and toxicity online you won't get many people to own up to what they truly believe.

I hope Trump loses, but I'm less certain of that outcome than what polls seem to suggest.
 

Raoul

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It’s a miscalculation though I think on their part. They’ve chosen to jump aboard the Trump train, BUT in the process allowed Trump to humiliate them. His supporters will remember that. Haley was the smart one, worked for him to keep in with his fans, then checked out well before he loses (can’t be accused of rat leaving sinking ship). In my opinion, she’s absolutely the one of the three to watch. Cruz and Rubio are done at least for the next cycle.
Rubio has largely stayed out of the fray since 2016, so he wouldn't be a wounded duck in future political cycles, as the likes of Graham, Jeff Sessions, and a few others will be. The real question is whether candidates in 24 will still run on Trumpism or a post-Trump reversion back to standard conservative politics.
 
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