A Now We Wait Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, November 4, 2020
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66 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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At the moment, Susan Collins is below 50%, which means we have a good chance of seeing Ranked Choice Voting in action. She is, however, just barely below 50%.
Just something else to wait for. And the lawsuits this would cause.
How could the polling be so far off in MI, MI, and PA? Especially MI, where most polls had Biden up by 8+
I don’t want to live in this planet anymore.
After seeing the state of Florida elect a crook Rick Scott to office three times, I’ve drawn a conclusion about the American electorate.
Never underestimate their intelligence.
The Florida headline of the day-
Trump wins Florida, thanks to Miami-Dade
The headline of the day-
Pet parrot saves Australian man from house fire
@SenyorDave: First, we don’t know how far off the polling is, since the votes haven’t been counted yet. Detroit is estimated to only have 47% of the votes counted, for instance.
Second, polling requires a likely voter screen. This year is different than previous election years — pandemic, early voting, massive turnout, polarization, etc. — so that voter screen has the potential to introduce errors.
@Kathy: Options are limited.
I think Biden pulls it out, we send Trump packing, and then have to deal with a Republican senate. Which would suck — effectively a lost 4 years as we get more global warming, etc.
@Gustopher:
I have spent the last 15 minutes looking at the vote totals for PA, MI, NC, GA, AZ, WI etc. The first four show Trump with leads over 100,000 and the last two with Biden narrowly leading. If they hold, Trump wins.
@Bill: “Never underestimate their intelligence.”
And their flat-out evil.
Being disappointed in human beings is kind of a general state for me anyway, but this is unreal. I’ve never been quite so certain that a lot of people just aren’t decent.
It’s the 3-5% rule. If a bigot is on the ballot, actual count will outrun polls by 3-5%.
@Kathy:
Because of what’s happening in one country?
@SenyorDave:
Nate Silver:
Lots of votes in Detroit, Las Vegas, etc. still outstanding.
Biden is fairly certain to win the Presidency. The Senate, however, is quite another matter.
Get ready to be governed by the six reactionaries on the SC.
I am most interested in an analysis of the youth vote at this point. If we did indeed see a sharp increase in the percentage of young voters, I’m curious as to where (which states) and how they voted. The conventional wisdom would be that a strong youth turnout would lead to a decisive Democratic victory, so which states and how (mail in v. in-person) is important to understand.
If I hear another progressive tout a blue future because of demographics and the emerging Hispanic vote, I’ll punch them. White progressives (which maybe the only kind) seem to believe that Hispanics are simply lighter complexion African Americans and will vote the same.
@Sleeping Dog: Agreed. Democrats/progressives do not understand the Hispanic vote. It’s not a monolithic voting bloc. Cuban American voters in Florida are not like Mexican American voters in Texas who are not like Central American voters in California. And a good chunk of Hispanic male voters view Trump as a real “man’s man” (vomit emoji).
Wisconsin is looking better, UNofficial total shows Biden winning.
@Gustopher:
All of the things that happened when Obama was in office — much higher CAFE standards, Clean Power Plan, tighter limits on methane emissions from drilling on federal land — were done by rule changes w/o Congress doing a thing. Then undone by Trump w/o Congress. And could be redone by Biden. Perhaps the most important difference is that the Supreme Court make-up is quite different and the Court may decide to reverse some of its previous rulings and sharply curtail what can be done by rule.
@Jen:
Sorry to sound like a broken record here, but the bulk of Trump’s support is not from deplorables. (That’s the core of his support, but that’s different.) The bulk of Trump’s support is from gullible consumers of disinformation, who voted for him because he brought jobs back from China, beat Coronavirus, disarmed North Korea and Iran, beat ISIS, built a border wall and made Mexico pay for it, crushed the scary brown rioters, and fixed healthcare. Oh, and imposed lasting peace in the Middle East.
There’s no fixing America until we fix the disconnect between reality and Trumperception.
@Jen: Like the old adage, all politics is local, applies to Hispanics also. Democrats believe that South Texas Hispanics, especially Rio Grande Valley are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. What they don’t understand is that a substantial number of border Hispanics like the security that comes with the Border Patrol, State Police, etc. If the Democrats were more sensitive to the fears driven by the drug smuggling cartels, they may do better and not lose so many L&O votes.
@DrDaveT: You left off racist lite.
Ignorance, fear and apathy. I like my fellow Americans, then I listen to what they believe and why they believe it, I end up having this Robert DeNiro mafia like Wtf facial expression. It’s amazing what people will believe just so they can keep rooting for their team and avoid being criticized by their friends and neighbors. I expected better turnout as well. Yes, votes are still being counted, but even with coronavirus, early voting, absentee voting etc… plus close to 30 million unemployed. I expected more participation. I can’t believe with all that is going on that so many people basically just don’t care
@DrDaveT: Lack of critical thinking skills combined with social bubbles that reinforce those beliefs. The GOP’s war on the Department of Education has been won it seems..
@Gustopher:
There are seven other planets, plus Pluto, Europa, Titan, and Ganymede, and none of them are as screwed up as poor old Terra.
Seriously, a Venusian atmosphere of CO2 with crushing pressures and acid droplets mixed in for spice, is beginning ot sound better than 4 more years of Trump Covidiot.
On other things, I began to shiver when I got up today to make coffee, and I thought “F**k! I’ve chills and a fever!” Usually that’s nothing much to worry about, but in the time of the trump pandemic….
Fortunately, it was just really cold, around 4 C (abt. 39 F in the irrational system), and I was only wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
@Kathy:
Scratch one of them.
@Sleeping Dog :
I’ve been saying for a while that the only reason we count Hispanics as Dems is because of the racism baked into the current GOP. If conservatives manage to tamp down on the white supremacy, we’re going to see more Hispanic groups trend towards the GOP. I know that they are not a monolithic group but in general things like religion (traditionally Catholic, evangelicals making inroads), culture (“family values” would be more attractive, machismo, etc) and family histories of bad times with communism, authoritarian regimes and lawless cartels mean that GOP policies can find fertile ground to take root. What’s keeping them away en mass is the “eww, brown people!” attitude the alt-right espouses but has been evident for ages.
@Northerner:
It’s not just one country. Hungary, Poland, Russia, Brazil, China, India, the Philippines, and others. Britain is trending there, too. And Trump has lots of partial and full imitators all over, like Mexico, and some of them are smarter.
It feels an awful lot like the 1930s.
It’s also the Sulla effect. In his attempt to restore and fix the Republic to its former glory, Sulla actually showed the way to gain and keep power, with the consent of the Senate. Right away you got Caesar and Octavian. Granted they were not terrible people by any means, but there followed Caligula, Nero, Caracalla, Thrax, Commodus, etc.
@PJ:
My God, it’s full of stars.
@Kathy:
Same! Every morning I wake up flushed/ overheated and go “no, damn you COVID!”. Then I remember I sleep under a ton of blankets and recently doubled my weighted blanket weight because winter and stress (dog may or may not decide to jump up and added their body heat to the equation). I get laughed at every day because I rush out and ask everyone if it’s warm in here or just me. The house runs warm, I run warm and I freak before someone hands me a coffee and my brain remembers logic.
Nice cozy sleep, panicky morning. At least I’m training my fam to give me coffee first thing 🙂
@PJ:
If there’s no monolith orbiting Jupiter*, it doesn’t count.
*Or was it Saturn?
I had as my floor, 274 for Biden. Looking like he’s going to win MI and WI, and AZ, which gives him the presidency with no need for Pennsylvania.
I’m surprised about the Senate. Collins especially.
We should forget polling for the future. There is something very wrong with the polling methodology.
A little live blogging:
They’re setting up to take a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test at work, right here in our department.
No idea why, much less how reliable the test is. I’ll post my results in a few minutes.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I sort of thought “built a border wall” and “crushed the scary brown rioters” covered that part, but YMMV. My main point was that getting rid of the deplorables would leave most of Trump’s support intact, and that those people are living under a different-colored sky.
@Kathy: It feels an awful lot like the 30s.
Yep. So far without the national armies massing on each other’s borders, Japan deciding to invade China and a couple of other similar features of that horror story decade. But give them time….
Screw Nate Silver.
@JohnMcC:
Putin invading Ukraine and taking Crimea?
Not the same thing, no. Japan was attempting to get its own colonial empire, in the European fashion. Putin lacks such ambitions, or knows he can’t achieve them. No question of recreating the Soviet Empire over Eastern Europe.
But China is filling in where trump’s America has withdrawn. they don’t have the same resources, but some is always better than nothing.
And both are big promoters of despotism.
@Jen:
@KM:
@KM, absolutely, you fleshed out what would have been my rant.
Every now and then, conservatives hurl the charge of racism against progressives, but they point at the wrong things. Progressive racism is not taking the time to understand the communities that make up the tent of the Dem party. They don’t understand or won’t understand that just because an interest group will join you under your intersectional umbrella, doesn’t mean that the community that those interests purport to represent can actually deliver the votes. And election after election it has been shown large segments of the Hispanic* community are either disinterested in what liberals have to offer, actively hostile or attracted to what Rs have to offer, despite the racism.
Interestingly, progressives have championed the plight of migrants and falsely believe that Hispanic citizens share their outrage at the treatment of migrants, while numerous polls indicate that isn’t true and won’t motivate them to vote D.
*Using Hispanics as shorthand for all Latin peoples from Mexico, Central & South America and the Caribbean.
@Kingdaddy:
Last evening I looked at 538 a couple of times and Nate was thinking out loud about the polls and why they were so far off again, particularly in the SE. One thing he mentioned, that I know to be true, is that even the best polling operations see only a 2-3% success rate in contacting voters. 25 years ago when I was selling call center hdw/sw, we would assume that for outbound operations the contact rate would be 10%. Contact meaning that you got them on the line, made your pitch and got a yes or a no. When an outbound manager was running a campaign, if he/she only saw 2-3%, they’d trash that campaign and move on to something else.
Over the last 2 months, we averaged 10-15 calls a day, I never answer the phone unless I recognize the caller ID, my wife will pick up and usually just hangs up. People no longer want to speak with polling organizations and that is particularly true of the politically disengaged voter, that quite likely is a Trump voter.
@Kathy:
Fair enough, especially considering that the three biggest greenhouse gas producers (China with 25%, USA with 14%, India with 6%) are on that last. On the other hand, non-democratic gov’ts has been the norm for humanity for most of recorded history, and today’s leaders aren’t worse than historical ones (less if you go by war deaths).
Trump is a disaster, and I can’t believe he might get re-elected, but he’s not even the worst in American history (the ones that exterminated the indigenous people and accepted slavery for instance were far worse). You’ll pull through.
I’m curious that you think dictators are imitating Trump — most of them are in countries with long traditions of dictators and as you point out, are much smarter than Trump. I doubt any dictator uses him as a role model. He’s too much of a clown to have that kind of influence, though many are very happy to use his stupidity for their own advantage.
Okay. This is odd.
I listen to the radio on my computer. Twice in the past hour and a half there’s been a “test of the emergency alert system”.
A lot of people make the mistake of using Hispanic as interchangeable with Latino/Latina/Latinx. My wife is Hispanic but she is not Latinx.
@Sleeping Dog: This– I know Democrats will hate this– but America doesn’t like poor people. Dems or Republican. Period. A large part of Dem imagery of being the protector of marginalized people. This is honorable to do in governance–it is terrible in messaging Americans—especially rural American.
Rural communities (indeed Humans in general) are very much status-oriented. They want to be aligned with people and teams that portray status. Being aligned with women (medium status) and migrants (very low status) is just not an attractive pitch in these communities. You can also throw the several of the Latino ethnicities into that formula.
I don’t make the rules–you can either play the game or complain about it. 2 squeaker elections with Donald Trump, an imbecile, at the top of one of the tickets–to me represents a major messaging fail by Democrats.
It’s clear that larger turnout didn’t damage Republicans significantly. Its clear Republican voters aren’t dying off and giving Democrats large margins.
Democrats need to re-invent themselves. Its clear that even the Obama model isn’t the answer anymore.
@Jim Brown 32:
Good point.
A lot of Americans have a strange perception of where “Hispanics” or “Latinos” (which are typically treated as interchangeable terms) fall on the racial spectrum. At least when I worked for the census in 2010, we were told that it wasn’t a racial category at all. Respondents were asked for their race, but Hispanic and Latinx weren’t offered as options. There was a separate question asking whether a person was of “Hispanic, Latin American, or Spanish” ancestry.
Yet that’s profoundly not the way these categories are treated by the media or by polling organizations. It’s often given as a racial category distinct from white or black or Asian. I get the feeling that when a lot of Americans hear the term “Hispanic,” they automatically picture a brown-skinned person whom they presume to have significant Native ancestry. This is true not just of white racists, but of many progressives. Yet the racial image is linked in people’s minds to anyone who comes either directly or ancestrally from a Spanish-speaking culture in the Americas, even if that person is entirely or predominantly of European extraction.
@Jim Brown 32: I think you over-simplify it. America isn’t just urban and rural — for instance, small cities and their exurbs face very different problems than the major cities.
There are lots of places that Democrats can improve their standing. Places that wouldn’t require selling our souls and turning our backs on women and migrants and brown people and LGBTetc.
And America may hate poor people, but rural America is poor people. Poor people seeing their communities failing, who have been sold a bill of lies that if taxes on the wealthy were just cut 2% Main Street would rebound in Podunk, and lift the entire Podunk valley out of decline.
@Jim Brown 32:
There are cultural reasons for that, but I think the fundamental problem has to do with the power dynamics. Middle class people have power in this country simply because they are the majority. Rich people have power because they’ve got the money, which has massive influence in our system, a problem that feeds on itself because they’ve increasingly put in place measures that give the money people more power (hello Citizens United). Poor people have the worst of both–they don’t have the money or the numbers. So there’s nothing propping them up politically other than public civic-mindedness, which only makes an appearance sporadically. That’s why programs designed to help poor people, such as Medicaid and SNAP, are always the first on the chopping block when politicians attack the social safety net, while programs that heavily benefit the middle class like Social Security and Medicare have been much harder to get rid of or reduce, despite the GOP’s best efforts.
@Kathy: No argument from me on any of that. But I am a fairly constant reader of history of 20th and 19th centuries and by comparison to 2020 the millions under arms that characterized the pre-1945 world are absent (or hidden?). Example: Taiwan has every right to feel insecure but in the 30s, they’d have felt Japanese (IMHO).
And I loved your Sula ref earlier.
@Kylopod:
I think this is where the discussion of “What is middle class?” comes into play. A lot of the people who think they are middle class are really just the working poor, imo, but this country has done a very good job of making them believe that they are separate and that the even worse off are different.
Middle class: You can afford a house near your job, with good education for your kids, have good healthcare options, food on the table, can weather a crisis or two, and have a little left over for retirement.
Take away a few of those, and people still think they are middle class, but look at the even poorer with fear. A fear that makes these “struggling middle-class” people want to view the poorer as “other” to convince themselves that they aren’t one major crisis away from being them and having no way back.
Trump’s 2016 victory had a lot of talk of right-wing economic populism. He both strengthened that divide by demonizing the poor (particularly the brown poor), but also promised to magically fix the middle class.
I’d like to see a left-wing economic populist that isn’t a weird cult leader — someone who adds to the “corporatist middle-of-the-road” Democrats rather than running against them. It’s why I supported Warren, but she didn’t resonate.
(I’m not going to go into a whole “If we had run Warren, we would have won big” diatribe, because if she couldn’t beat Biden, she wasn’t going to win big… Same goes for Sanders. My prediction is that it will be AOC in 2032)
So, I tested negative for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 (oh, well).
The test was labeled Certum Diagnostics. Do far I found out it’s a Chinese company, and it’s approved by Mexico’s Health Department.
I don’t think they’re reliable. The tow people who tested positive on the PCR test lat month, and who has symptoms in their mild cases, tested negative to the antibodies
@Northerner: I’m not sure that it is “just one country.” From what I can see, the only nations that seem to have relatively sane cohesive populations are Japan, Korea, Oz, and New Zed, and I have relatives in both OZ and New Zed who aren’t sanguine about their countries to any great degree.
I really don’t want to believe this, but I’ve started to wonder if Pat Robertson maybe did have a divine vision. Weird times.
@Northerner:
Take His Majesty, Manuel Andres the Last. He was mayor of Mexico City (the largest city in the country), and he conducted himself like a normal politician, just a bit more narcissistic than usual. Now he’s president and he’s breaking norms, breaking laws, doing as he pleases, mishandling the pandemic at trumpian levels (I guesstimate between 2 and 3 million actual cases, and around 130-145 thousand deaths, not the official figures), and never, ever admitting to any mistake, much less ever issuing an apology. Plus he’s a saint, and everyone who opposes him is a traitor, including the media.
He wasn’t like that before Trump.
@Jim Brown 32: Additional to disliking poor people is the seemingly prevailing conventional wisdom that people are poor because they deserve to be and/or have caused their own suffering. That may well be Calvinism taking root as civil religion, but I’m open to other theories, too. (And certainly, the thought is not always false.)
Add conservative predisposition to believe in zero sum economics…
@Kathy:
He’s a good example for copying Trump, but how many others are there? Boris Johnson (who’s often accused of it) behaved as he does now before Trump’s presidency. And the list of world’s dictators (in essence if not officially) has its major figures such as Putin, Xi, Kim, Erdogan and the like. Most pre-date Trump, and if anything he’s toadying up to them rather than them imitating him.
@Gustopher: Being poor and living in a poor neighborhood is stressful. I know–I grew up in them and have family members that are still struggling. The Republican take on poverty has some merit–there is not an insignificant amount of culture that plays a part. Especially when we talk generational poverty.
You can clearly see the in my own extended family how different nuclear family culture and priorities yielded different results each generation.
I say that to say that–there is a significant amount of ‘crabs in a barrel’ syndrome in poor communities. It creates a palpable tension of family members that escape and then return to interact in these communities. This mindset is what makes the Democrat bet than they can offer something economic to these communities to “lift all boats’–a mirage.
Status over one’s neighbors is a higher priority than everybody succeeding–especially by the hand of Gub’ment programs.
I don’t make the rules–every plan and strategy has to deal with “human factors’ which are often irrational. Ive been to poor/rural communities around the South from Virginia to Texas. These people would rather drive through their neighborhood in a Cadillac Escalade and win the status game–then for everybody in the neighborhood to drive Ford Explorers. This is why so many people across the country and tangible percentage of minority men–rode with Trump.
The operating lesson from Trump (win or lose) for Dems is that you get people to buy-into an image and vision first–and very few people read the fine print after they’ve gotten onboard.
And here comes the legal ratfuckery:
Trump Camp Sues To Suspend Ballot Counting In MI
Trump Camp To Hold 3:30 Presser In Philly
Both at the same link at TPM
@JohnMcC:
We don’t have lots of people under arms in countries planning aggression, gods be praised. On the other hand, there are large standing armies just about in all major countries in Europe and Asia, as well as the US. And there are still thousands of nukes sitting atop ICBMs and other delivery systems.
But my point is the world is turning towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism and against liberal democracy. You may not need a war this time to kill democracy for a few decades or longer.
@Jim Brown 32:
And this is why we need a decent minimum wage.
Right now, we have a lot of people who cannot survive except with direct government assistance, and that generates resentment, and subsidizes the companies that cannot make ends meet except by screwing over the employees with poverty wages.
Even directly subsidizing the companies so they can pay a living wage would be better.
Testing out the new editing plugin.
@James Joyner: Let’s see…
ETA: It works, it works!!!
ETA2: But it didn’t return me to the page. This time got an edit box. Betting it works just fine now.
ETA3: It did.
@Kingdaddy:
Hard to disagree with that.
On the other hand, trying to plan in politics without an inkling of the range of possibilities, largely made possibly by polling, is like trying to plan a road trip without a map, when all you know is that some thousands of miles ahead there’s another state.
Edited to add: the edit function was available right away.
@James Joyner: Just an FYI,
It has happened twice now that the first edit attempt sends me to a different page and then does not return me to the original after I hit “Save”. When I hit the return button, I get to the original page but it does not show my edit. Once I hit the refresh button, my edit shows up.
After that I get a pop up editing box and everything works as normal
Also, the Edit/Request Delete buttons look different when I first post up, then look as they have in the past after I edit.
NOT complaining. I am very happy to have a working edit button again.
It’s over. CNN is projecting Michigan for Biden. That puts him at 270. The networks are going to be cautious about this, since there may be a recount in WI, and some are holding out for AZ and NV…but it’s pretty much a done deal.
@Kylopod:
Really?
Using the 270 to win map I have Biden at 253, including Michigan and Wisconsin.
Assume he takes Nevada, that’s 259.
If you also assume (as seems sensible) Trump takes North Carolina and Georgia, that means Biden must take Arizona or Pennsylvania to win.
And frankly I wouldn’t like to stake my neck on Arizona.
Am I making an obvious mistake here?
@JohnSF: Arizona has been called for Biden by FOX and AP. The Trump people are still holding out for a late turnaround in counting of ballots, but it’s unlikely.
@Kylopod:
I really hope they, and you, are right there.
I’ve been looking mostly at 270-to-Win which still shades AZ for Trump by a hair.
And does my digestion no favours at all.
@Kathy:
Update: one of the people who tested positive for SARS-Cov-2 in the PCR and then negative for antibodies, now says he didn’t have symptoms in his two-week quarantine.
Hm.
That lends credence to the antibody tests.