Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, November 5, 2020
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128 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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The headline of the day-
Group tries to disrupt ballot counting at Detroit convention center
The Florida headline of the day-
Florida Man Jailed for Allegedly Threatening to Kill Pro-Trump Republicans Including DeSantis
It’s entertaining to check the pro-Trump websites such as Lucianne.com as it dawns on the devotees that Trump isn’t winning in a landslide. There is much muttering about fraud and speculation about the contents of all those suitcases and coolers being wheeled into election headquarters all over the country.
@CSK: Over at Political Wire, for the past month the place was being flooded by trolls talking about the coming Trump landslide. The most prolific of these called himself Ex-Biden Voter (at first), though he certainly didn’t sound like someone who had ever been a Biden supporter. I took screen shots of their output. Since Wednesday they’ve been nowhere in sight. Who knew a victorious Democratic election would be the biggest troll kryptonite ever?
U.S. sets new record for increase in COVID-19 cases day after election
Boy, when the Chinese do a hoax, they go all in on it.
@OzarkHillbilly: Relax, they’ve moved on from China. From now on it’ll be the Biden Pandemic.
@Kylopod: Yeah, I know. All the people who die from now till Inauguration day will be added to Joe’s tally, just like all the growth between E day and I day in 2016 was because of trump’s magical economic influence.
@OzarkHillbilly:
VA’s active coronavirus cases reach record level
Given that this is an older demographic group, this is very bad. VA COVID mortality rates are running about 5%.
Don’t hold your breath.
@Scott: Suckers and losers, right?
Everybody is talking about counting and not counting. Then there’s this:
There are still tens of thousands of military absentee ballots yet to be counted
@OzarkHillbilly:
Thanks; that was my first laugh of the day.
NPR has some good reporting on the case of Fulton v City of Philadelphia before the Supreme Court. The city is being sued after it ended a contract for foster care services with Catholic Community Services because the agency won’t certify same sex couples as foster parents.
The spurious arguments offered by the conservative justices are appalling:
If like me you are feeling a little anxious,
The only winner coming out of Tuesday is the R establishment.
Their Trump problem has been sidelined and they can protect the gains that they’ve delivered to their patrons.
Trump won’t go away, but he can be ignored. Out of office and with no prospects for a return, Trump becomes that ranting uncle who you avoid sitting next to at holidays. Various other politicians will compete for the trumpkins, including Cotton, Hawley and Junior and as each makes headway Trump’s influence will fade, even as Trumpism becomes the R party. Trump’s future of spending lots of time in civil, criminal and bankruptcy court will further diminish him.
The R establishment will be delivering no more gifts to their patrons, but they’ll protect the gains. No tax increase, no climate legislation, except on the edges, no reeling in of the big banks. Some version of Medicare for All? Forget about it, there won’t even be a public option. Electoral reform, dead, vote suppression is how the Rs will stay relevant. Whichever judges that Biden appoints and the Senate approves will be center-right and few, as the slow walking of judicial appointments returns.
All the while, the US circles the drain.
From NYT.
Any time you wonder how so many people could vote for such a transparently self-serving Know Nothing with orange skin, remember this quote.
Also keep in mind that Fox, OAN, Breitbart, et. al couldn’t do this without a population possessing a meager thought toolkit.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Mrs. Kraus won’t let them anywhere near the silverware.
(bonus points to anyone old enough to get the reference)
@Kurtz: I guess this guy is going to give up his Medicare and Social Security to make his point. I guess he can always move to Mexico.
@Mu Yixiao:
I hear you!
And it is Ms. Kraus.
Copying here a tweet seen on balloon-juice:
In 2002 Nevadans approved a ballot measure to ban same sex marriages in the state 67% to 33%.
This year they repealed that ban & enshrined same sex marriage in their constitution. Right now the ballot measure is ahead 61% to 39%.
from someone with the handle ‘Taniel’
I’m going to bring out my quick and dirty Occam’s Razor, and say it all comes down to turnout, and unfortunately the Cheeto monster is good at whipping up his supporters.
Further, a few weeks back there was the sense that Biden voters were more enthusiastic voting against Trump rather than for Biden. On the Trump side, things were reversed.
But not all enthusiasms are the same. You can get very strong, deep enthusiasm to vote against someone, but that may not be enough (see 2016, were most voters voted against Trump, but all too many backed Stein and Johnson rather than vote for Hillary).
So why can’t the Democratic party produce a candidate large majorities of people want to vote for? They’ve done it before with Obama, who, despite how it feels, left the White House not quite four years ago.
@JohnMcC:
Now same sex couples can get married by an Elvis impersonator in a Las Vegas wedding chapel just like anyone else!
I said yesterday that without accurate polls, it’s hard to make plans for politics. I likened it to planning a cross-country trip without a map.
If we’d thought the race would be this tight, perhaps ending in 270-268, not to mention a Senate minority for the new president (gods willing), we’d have discussed things here far differently than we did when we expected a relative blowout and a good chance for a Senate majority.
Now imagine what Biden and his transition team must be going through.
We do have polls right now, and perhaps they were accurate at the national (ie irrelevant*) level and in some states, but they were side off the mark in others. Nate Silver can claim his models calculate only probabilities, which is true. But a 90% probability of a 320-340 to 220-200 (rounding up) is far different from a 90% probability of 270-268.
I assume campaigns have their own polling and don’t rely on what’s on the media or 538 (did you sell your stock in 538, BTW? Does it even have stock?) But how good are their polls?
As much as I’d love to just ignore polls and treat every election as a total crap shoot, we need them much as we need maps.
So, what’s the root problem and how do we fix it? partly it seems even getting enough respondents is a major chore, but plainly this wasn’t always the case. We need to find out why. Maybe too many other entities are carrying out polls, like those you get after you visit a restaurant, and this gives people poll fatigue. Can we correct for known biases? Can we determine all or most existing biases? Are there alternatives to polling, like data-mining? Can polls be simplified in some way and still get the relevant data needed?
the quality of Silver’s modeling isn’t at issue (yet). But the best model is worthless if the date fed it is of pior quality or unreliable. As the old acronym GIGO has it: garbage in-garbage out.
*The popular vote should not be irrelevant, but we all know it is.
Purdue has apparently just dropped below 50%, and with most of the remaining votes to be counted coming from Democratic areas, it’s looking like two run-off elections for US Senate.
I feel kind of sorry for Georgia right now…
I’m just going to say they did and leave it at that. Neither one of us has the evidence to support our conclusions. You even admit as much when you say, “there was the sense that Biden voters were more enthusiastic voting against Trump rather than for Biden.”
@Sleeping Dog: I can’t upvote your comment enough. Trump isn’t going away, he still has to somehow make enough money to cover his losses as a “billionaire” real estate developer. He’ll set up shop at FOX or competing with FOX. He’ll try to keep the cult going. My local semi-pro newspaper has a front page article today about the two storefront Trump junk shops a mile apart on the main drag. They’re considering staying open thru Christmas.
But you’re absolutely right that removing Trump from active politics won’t change the Republican Party. They’ll still be the party of the plutocrats with a faux populist front. After all, it’s working beautifully. They got their tax cuts, they’re getting deregulation, and we’re doing nothing about AGW. And we’re hoping the most incompetent, personally repellant, leader in our history is going to miss reelection by a hair.
Astroturfing the Tea Party was incredibly successful. We don’t hear much about the TP anymore, but I wonder if the Koch Bro won’t stand them up again against President Biden.
@Kathy:
It is the difference of a party organized around a melding of interests rather than social grievance or if you want to be polite, ideology. All the various communities of interest in the Dems can agree to support a candidate, but the level of enthusiasm may vary greatly. The Rs organize around a common enemy and whoever the standard bearer is becomes their hero. Of course Trump is fairly unique in his ability to gin up the base.
My view on Obama, he was a special case, that allowed Dems to rally around him and enough moderates of all parties to vote for him, if for no other reason than to prove to themselves they weren’t racists.
@Kathy:
Obama was a great politician and manager, but he was so successful because we were in W’s recession and everyone was realizing Iraq was a huge blunder. I’m afraid negative partisanship is here to stay. Why? Because the Constitution forces us into two parties and one of them can’t survive as currently constituted without dividing us.
@Jen, maybe you can comment on this as well.
Looking at the Cow Hampshire election results is giving me whiplash.
As expected Chris Sununu was reelected by a wide margin ~65%. Dems comfortably won the the congressional and senates seats up for consideration by margins of ~52% or better, yet the state legislature flipped. That it flipped isn’t surprising as in the 21st century, one or both houses has flipped pretty much in each election cycle. But what is curious is the dichotomy between what happened on the state level and the fed level. The Executive Council, a pretty much New England anachronism, will also be heavily R with 4 of the 5 seats.
My only thought is that the state is facing a yawning budget deficit due to Covid and Dems were advocating revenue raising, i.e. taxes to help close it, while Sununu is advocating cuts. Given that the state doesn’t provide a lot of broad based services, most of the citizenry won’t know they’re gone, but it will devastate communities of interest.
Next summer we’ll notice that they’re not repaving the roads as the frost heaves will be small mountains.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I said “sense” because we gathered this datum from polls, which I now view with mistrust.
We could get confirmation through exit polls. But, well, polls, you know.
@Kathy:
It seems quite likely that once all the ballots are tallied, Biden will have a popular vote total at, or above, Obama in 2012. Obama won 51.01% of the pop vote in 2012, and Biden is already at 50.5 with a lot of votes in NY and CA not yet counted.
Biden is currently beating Trump by over 3.5 million votes.
I think that we are getting too caught up in Electoral College thinking (plus a desire for fuller repudiation of Trump) when we assert the Dems made a bad choice of candidate.
Also: in 2008 Obama won 52.86% of the pop vote.
Biden will get close to that this year.
@Sleeping Dog:
@gVOR08:
I think it’s more shallow than all that.
Think, Dukakis, Clinton (Bill), Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton (Hillary), Biden, are all solid on policy, most of them are true wonks. But aside from Bill and Obama, the rest fall short in the enthusiasm and charisma front.
Not that the GOP is much better, except for Reagan and for some reason Trump. I wouldn’t call McCain or the Bushes unlikable, but I’d rate Romney as cold and calculating, much like Hillary.
Obama, IMO, won the primaries mostly through his personality. It’s a pity he didn’t wait a decade more before running for president, he’d have done a better job with more experience under him. In fact, I don’t think he expected to win the nomination in 2008, but rather aimed for 2012 or 2016.
Correction, the official FEC number was 52.93%
@Kathy:
re
The parties share the problem. Very few of our brightest and best are willing to subject themselves, their families, and their associates to the circus the process has become. The media, following what is apparently the only profitable “news” business model, have become political paparazzi. Hence, we currently have a reality TV host POTUS.
In a perfect world this polling face-plant would get our big media journalists more focused on issues instead of the horse race nest time around.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I must have been unclear. I don’t think Biden is a bad candidate, just not one who generates much enthusiasm even with his supporters. He’s one of the best candidates, as regards expected job performance in the White House, the Democrats have nominated in my lifetime.
@Kathy: Fair, but I was really responding to “why can’t the Democratic party produce a candidate large majorities of people want to vote for? They’ve done it before with Obama” by noting that Biden is not that far off, empirically, from where Obama was in both 2008 and 2012.
I mean, I get the gut-reaction that Obama generated more enthusiasm, but if at the end of the day charismatic Obama and boring Biden produce a similar percentage of the vote, does the enthusiasm issue mean what you are asserting it means?
I saw a report on Reuters this morning: Deutsche Bank’s directors are trying to come up with a plan to recoup all or some of the $ 340 million Donald owes them. Wonder how much of that stash is funds laundered from the Russian Mafia or Putin’s personal account? Losing the election could be the least of the President’s problems.
@Sleeping Dog: I had noticed that as well, and agree with your analysis.
Unfortunately, taxes WILL go up no matter who is in the state house, and they’ll be driven by local property taxes, which will have to increase. My fear right now are all of the nonsense culture war issues that will likely get floated at the State House, although if they are too wacky about it, my guess is the House will flip back in 2 years.
@Kathy:
Because the vetting process has become so detailed–and long-tailed–that only incredibly boring people can make it past the microscope.
Anyone with real charisma and drive is going to have done too many “improper” things in their past. We’ll never have another JFK. The liberals (from what I can see) are much stricter than the right-wing. But that’s because the right is in desperation mode, and Trump was a big “up yours” to the left.
@Mu Yixiao:
I understand what you mean, but JFK’s margin in 1960 was extremely close, and there were plenty, plenty of complaints about the way in which the Chicago votes were totaled and reported.
He barely won.
@Steven L. Taylor: @Kathy: It’s time for the bloodless, technocratic approach to Democratic campaigning to die. It consists of the following:
1. Gather “information” from polls on voter preferences.
2. Create a “message” that addresses these preferences.
3. Collect a lot of money for ad buys.
4. Jam the message into the mouth of the candidate.
5. Record and distribute the results in ads.
The problem with this approach was on display in this election. Biden was much better unscripted (check out his podcast interview with Brene Brown for an example) than he was in heavily-scripted events like the debates. Voters have good BS detectors, and so they know when they’re hearing a pre-processed “message,” the mental equivalent of Cheese Whiz. And retail politics — talking to voters, instead of spewing ads at them — is way more effective than ads that people ignore.
Talk to people. Be a real person, instead of a message bot. Make people feel that they’re heard. It’s not hard to figure out.
@Mu Yixiao:
There is no vetting process at the Presidential level. See Trump, Donald.
And the Democratic primary voters aren’t immune to a similar candidate. The primaries are structured a bit better, more proportional delegate outcomes, but they are still at risk of a populist. If Bernie Sanders had figured out how to talk about race AND class, rather than always using a framing of class, he might have won the primary. (Also, if he was a Democrat…)
@Jen:
For the 2011/12 session Rs had a veto proof majority in both the House and the Senate, yet very little social legislation got passed. For the 2011 session, R leadership refused social conservative attempts to clutter the agenda in order to focus on budget and economic issues and promised them free reign in 2012. The signature issue of 2012 was repeal of marriage equality and that was crushed. After that the social conservatives lost steam.
In NH, social conservatives make up a much smaller part of the R coalition, libertarian and main street business support for social conservative legislation can be pretty spotty and on issues like abortion, the polity seems satisfied with the current compromise.
The R legislature will take its lead from Sununu and so far, he’s kept pretty close to the middle of the road. Given that he wants to be a US senator and that Cow Hampsterites are pretty comfortable sending Dems to Washington, I don’t expect him to lurch to the right, even with an R legislature.
@Kingdaddy:
I agree with you, but remember this year the candidate was Joe ‘Malaprop’ Biden, who knows where an unscripted Joe would have taken us.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Oh, I see. I concede you’re right. I can’t claim negative enthusiasm against Trump wasn’t as good as enthusiasm for Obama.
I oversimplified. It’s obviously more complicated than this.
I’m still baffled by trump’s showing, now and in 2016. By all rational measures, he should not be getting so much of the vote after the terrible job he’s done pretending to be the president.
@Sleeping Dog: I think that Trump may have demonstrated how overblown the concern about gaffes is. Every day, Trump says something profoundly stupid. I know that there are double standards at work, but there’s also not living in fear of saying something momentarily regrettable. Projecting confidence (i.e., not living in fear of saying, “Wow, did I have a brain fart today”) goes a long way.
Insanity, right now, means constantly checking the election results when you know there won’t be any change from five minutes ago.
@Kingdaddy: OTOH, at the party/national level there needs to be tighter messaging. Republicans are much better at the 3-4 bullet statements. Democrats tend to be “everybody gets a message and they are all equal in importance”. Example: How many times did you hear a Republican say “Trump rebuilt the economy”. Over and over again. The truth didn’t matter because it was drilled into the brains of everyday people as a fact.
@Kathy:
I think it is incredibly hard for a lot of us to understand this, although I have talked to a number of educated, rational people who can justify it to themselves. (Abortion alone motivates a lot of people).
I return to the partisanship drum I have beat over the years as a major variable (and also evidence that candidate doesn’t matter as much as we think it does).
Even with Obama, how much of 2008 was enthusiasm over a charismatic candidate and how much was the fact that we were in the middle of global recession?
@Gustopher:
Of course there was. We knew about everything.
But, as I said, he was the right-wing’s big “FU” to the liberals. The Republican party saw the groundswell and thought they could ride it to power. Perhaps they thought they could manipulate him.
@Kingdaddy: That’s why I liked when Jill Biden responded to a reporter who asked about her husband’s gaffes: “Oh no, you can’t ask about that. Not after four years of Donald Trump.”
@Kingdaddy:
Maybe or is Trump and exception to the rule. After all it was only 8 years ago that Romney was wounded by “binders of women” and “47%.” It has been observed that Trumps inarticulateness is excused by his fans, because that’s how they speak. This might be true, but I’ll opine that if Trump were not reflecting and excusing the biases of his fans, they would be making fun of him as well.
@CSK: Well, as I agreed with JKB yesterday, “boxes full of ballots found in the trucks (sic) of people’s cars” has been a staple of the post-election conversation since the days of voting machines and almost no paper ballots. I think it goes back to the earliest days of voting here when there were only paper ballots and boxes of them were found on the backs of people’s wagons.
It seems like one of Trump’s biggest assets is that his supporters think he’s a fighter, and not just that, but an effective fighter. Personally, I think they’re wrong on both fronts, but that’s another story.
However, what we can take from this is that the willingness to fight is a really attractive quality in a candidate. The problem is that democrats will push for regulatory changes that make some change for people, and say “see! we’re fighting the good fight for you!” and it just doesn’t register with most people, especially if they aren’t directly affected by the change. So, the big change is that democrats need to make a bigger show of fighting for their constituents to make it clearer.
I think part of the problem is that fights aren’t terribly effective in getting actual things done and that policy is difficult and complicated. I’m not sure how that can be communicated while making progress on the president’s priorities and not alienating groups that you might need to achieving those priorities.
@Mike in Arlington: sorry for the double. I accidentally hit delete instead of edit and then lost the edit function.
What I wanted to add: I think a lot of behavior can be excused if enough people believe that a politician is fighting for them, even if they don’t agree with them.
@OzarkHillbilly: My little town/county did what we could to help set the record in Washington. We contributed 17 cases for Wednesday and 25 total over the 3 days since the weekend. We’re back up to a near record 195 active cases, 15 away from our personal record of 210. With a good effort, I’m sure we can push through the barrier.
@Bill: Yes. Played by Inga Swenson–although I had to look up the name to get it right.
It turns out when you listen to an audiobook about the history of the Internet, the word “Google” comes up a fair bit. About one tenth, maybe one twentieth, of the time when it does, it triggers the Google Assistant on the phone you’re playing the book in.
I don’t quite get why, as it’s supposed to respond only to “OK Google” and “Hey Google,” not to just “Google.”
@Bill: Years ago when my fundie associates were yammering about the “sanctity of holy matrimony,” I noted that anyone who lives in a country where inebriated Brittney Spears can get married at mid-night by an Elvis impersonator and have the marriage annulled a day or two later because she was drunk and didn’t know what she was doing has no standing to make a claim of sanctity for marriage.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Couple of things about Swenson. I’m writing this from memory.
1- Swenson was born somewhere in the Midwest
2- She had some noteworthy roles before Benson. She played the wife of the Utah or Wyoming Senator who committed suicide (He was being blackmailed over a homosexual affair he once had, I think Don Murray was the actor who played the Senator) in Advise and Consent. I also think she was Ben Cartwright’s 2nd wife and mother to Hoss on Bonanza.
If my memory is wrong, shoot me with a water pistol.
@Kathy:
You do have a certain flair for expression. 😀
@Just nutha ignint cracker: No edit function for my @Kathy comment–although I did get one for Bill’s comment just above.
One more thing in passing. I realize that I’m a dinosaur and part of a vanishing breed, but I wish we didn’t believe that we needed to tailor our message to polls and that it was simply enough to be who you are and let the chips fall where they may.
Then again, I stopped running for office having been elected President of the David T. Denny Junior High Boys’ Club. (And yeah, when I was in school, school-sponsored boys’ and girls’ club was still a thing.)
ETA: Also, I should note that I ran unopposed, but not because I was so popular that nobody would run against me. It was in the waning days of such clubs and at high school orientation someone joked about my not being able to repeat as BC Pres, because the high school had disbanded theirs 2 or 3 years earlier. The Cooperative Girls Association provided and sponsored all of the activities that both genders required–post game dances, Tolo/Sadie Hawkins dance, prom and such.
@gVOR08:
Personally, I would go for a “Black Friday Going out of Business” event, but marketing is not my forte.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
As I have said more than once around here, I write LGBT fiction. I couldn’t resist the joke.
Another semi-connected to this. I do past baseball season replays with Computer Strat-O-Matic baseball. One of the features of the computer game, is that while a game is going on, a newsworthy event will sometimes be announced for the day you’re playing in history. Such as*- The sinking of the submarine USS Scorpion, A plane crash in Egypt, Richard Nixon being nominated for President in 1960, The first home fallout shelter in the US, Arnold Palmer winning the Masters, Roger Bannister running the first sub 4 minute mile, or some noteworthy space launch/news or event and pop culture stuff like the first appearance of the San Diego Chicken. SOM also likes Elvis and Beatles stuff for pop culture.**
Two of the seasons I have going are 1969 and 1977. So if the game don’t mention Neil Armstrong walking on the moon (July 20, 1969) or Elvis dying on August 16, 1977, when I get to those dates I’ll ask SOM for a refund.
*- They are either worked into the game play by play between innings or as a news flash. One example- “Damn Yankees opens on Broadway” sometime during the 55 season.
**- These things only pop up occasionally 2 to 6 times a whole season replay.
@SC_Birdflyte: DB may already be too late lining up to get a bite of whatever is left of the Trump “apple.” They needed to get their hooks into whatever Trump had been able to get from the government’s sofa cushions. That may well be the whole asset.
Ironic that Rudy Giuliani, who kick-started his career as the NYC DA who got the Mafia Commission locked up, ends his career as the archetypal mob lawyer shilling and lying for the worlds biggest mob boss.
@Kathy: While it’s a larger pie this year, Trump’s showing is reflective of the power of party label and that the 3rd party vote went back to microscopically small this year. With 1.1% of the national vote–about 1/3 of Gary Johnson’s 2o16 result–Jo Jorgensen is calling the result “a wake up call” for Trump and Biden. (No hot link, but https://news.yahoo.com/libertarian-candidate-jo-jorgensen-pulls-161532757.html is the article.)
There’s no reason to expect that every new voter would be a Biden vote and it appears that the portion that didn’t go to third parties this time around sorted out along the lines of the general population sort out. Roughly half of the population is willing to vote for whoever has R beside their name. It’s why it’s called a two-party system.
@Steven L. Taylor:
What kind of recession are we in on now? 😉
There was also the twin quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, going on for 7 and 5 years respectively. Trump has managed to avoid that.
He’s not getting blamed for the recession now, which is not entirely accurate. All countries suffered a downturn, those that locked down and those that didn’t. But those that have managed to contain the spread of COVID-19 have not fallen as far.
Sometimes I simply give up and decide there are things we’ll never know or understand.
@Kathy:
He is losing the election, so there’s that.
Indeed, sans recessions and pandemic, he probably would have been re-elected.
State of Georgia election official just reported among other items that one county thought that they had uploaded 400+ ballots and discovered that they had not and had to repeat the process. He also stated that this is the first time in 20 years that Georgia had used all paper ballots.
@Steven L. Taylor: This fact alone is the cause of a fair share of my insomnia.
Speaking again of polls, I’m reminded of one of Asimov’s Multivac stories, “The Machine That Won the War.”
Spoilers may follow.
after victory in a war (who saw that coming?), three important leaders meet privately to celebrate away from the general celebration. All credit Multivac’s reports with giving them an edge in the war.
But then one confesses he adjusted the data fed to the giant computer, because what he was getting was wrong and incomplete. The second says he adjusted the processed data Multivac issued, because the machine suffered from malfunctions due to a shortage of maintenance personnel and spare parts.
The third man, who had to make use of this data in policy decisions, then asks “So I was getting man-made interpretation of man-made data?”
Ok, more would be a spoiler.
I see something like this going on with polls. Remember the flaws of 2016 were supposed to have been fixed? Not so much, right? The flaws seem similar to last time’s. A rather accurate popular vote totals polling, and a really bad estimate of electoral college results.
538 predicted 53% of the vote total for Biden. It’s around 52 and change now, which is close. But they also predicted well over 300 electoral votes for Biden, the average never dipping below 317. Well…. Biden would have to sweep the remaining states: Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to reach 321. Still possible, but not likely.
Now, if Biden were around 300-310 now, I’d have said the polls were an improvement over 2016. As is, it’s almost 2016 all over again.
Regarding polls, I was looking at 270 to Win a lot.
My personal approach was assume that only leads of over 5% on multi-poll averages were safe; that being the rough margin of error both ways, BUT especially for Biden because of various factors:
1) “shy Trumpers” (related: “third party”and “don’t know” breaking disproportionately for Trump)
2) differential in”polling reach”
3) the universe hates me and wants me to suffer.
So my personal guesstimate was: Biden holds all Hillary Clinton won in 2016; polling indicates MI/MN/WI should go for Biden; of the remainder PA is the biggest prize and the most likely win for Biden, and it looks like I was not far wrong, except that AZ and GA are a bit better for Biden than I thought.
Now, if a foreign fool like me can get that from a reasonable read of the polls, that suggest to me they are not doing too badly.
The trouble is the people who ignore the likely error bars and take the raw percentages as a hard forecast.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I feel like laying down. A week ago I said what I had said multiple times that if the economy didn’t go down the toilet, Trump would be re-elected. Your response- Trump was down 6 or 7 points on March 1st. Sure would be nice if you admit to being wrong.
Steven L. Taylor says:
Friday, October 30, 2020 at 16:27
@Bill:
The problem with this hypothesis is that Biden was leading at roughly the same level before the economy went in the toilet.
Care to say you were wrong?
Steven L. Taylor says:
Friday, October 30, 2020 at 16:27
@Bill:
Before the pandemic and the resulting hit it made to the United States economy and while Biden was the declared frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, I proclaimed around this blog multiple times that Biden would more than likely lose unless the economy went in the toilet.
The problem with this hypothesis is that Biden was leading at roughly the same level before the economy went in the toilet.
So yes, you said Trump would win if the economy was good, but that doesn’t explain either a) why Biden was polling so well while the economy was good, and b) why Trump’s approvals were negative the entire time.
*****
And what did you just write today-
@Steven L. Taylor:
Indeed, sans recessions and pandemic, he probably would have been re-elected.
Want to say you were dead wrong?
@JohnSF: No discussion of USPS sabotage by DeJoy and his goons? It amazes me how much this factor has been totally forgotten. What they did was nothing less than an attempted coup. It mostly failed, but it probably had an impact. How much of an impact, we may never know. But I suspect we’re going to find out more about it in the coming months.
When I used to blog actively, I wrote one of these posts every year. Do you what was always my last prediction? Here it is-
More than half the above predictions are wrong.
See it. I admit to being wrong.
In the next few days, the US will surpass 10 million Covid cases, and Texas will be the first state to surpass 1 million cases.
@Bill: We also now know that the polling was wrong, and was likely wrong for some time. I think both of Dr. Taylor’s statements can be correct with the information at the time.
It was a much closer election than estimated, and it’s very likely that the economy and the pandemic affected things at least on the margins.
(Personally, I think it might have affected things the other way — pick between the guy saying “we need to take our medicine” and the guy who says “oh, cancer isn’t real, it’s going to go away.” I know which one I would want to believe)
@Gustopher:
Bullshit.
There was another post where Dr. Taylor was hitting me over the head with how accurate polls are. How accurate were they about this election?
Take it a further step. How many people tell pollsters the answer considered correct, more popular, etc etc.? I bet many do.
@JohnSF:
People also don’t read the analysis. On Monday, Nate Cohn wrote in his final analysis that if the polls were accurate, the final map would be the outcome. If a polling error as large as 2016 in Biden’s favor would result in an landslide, a similar polling error in Trump’s favor would result in a 50-50 chance that the election would go either way. What we ended up with is an election where the polling error is slightly less than 2016, but still in Trump’s favor.
It also doesn’t help that many people are clueless how odds and averages work when applied.
Another gem after I asserted people vote their wallets-
Wrong. The polls were bullshit.
@Kylopod:
I honestly don’t know enough about the functioning of the USPS and how far a Postmaster general could impose his will on state level operations, and what the posting rates at t-time were versus delivery times.
Plus just plain forgot it doing my initial calculation
In my excuse, for a UK citizen, these sort of shenanigans, like the electoral roll and polling station shockers, are a bit hard to come to terms with. So far. (With the partial exception of Northern Ireland back in the days of “Old Stormont”)
So didn’t include that in to my “bugger factor”
I’d guess it had an effect, but how much? Damfino.
Looks like not enough to come outside the bounds of my “rationally pessimistic discount”.
Let’s hope that a zealous Democrat prosecutor is even now looking forward to pursuing DeJoy like a whole pack of Furies should there be proof of such actions.
Bill, your posts are going to be politely ignored. Other than making you feel better about your I was right you were wrong stance what do you gain from this insistence that Steven admit he was wrong? Yeah, the same type of wrong that caught Steven, James, and a jillion other people off-guard. Frank Luntz is a well-respected polling guy and even he thinks the political polling profession might be done for given how off the polls were.
Just move on dude, water under the bridge, bygones, agree to disagree, whatever…pick your poison.
You have mentioned that you used to host a blog back in the days, how kindly would you take to someone who insisted that you bend the knee and admit they were right and you were wrong.
Who cares if you put together a list of things you were wrong about on a yearly basis, I bet Steven will put together a similar list in a couple months time. Admitting you are wrong on a list is not the same thing you are asking of Steven and we both know it.
Steven does not owe you anything and there is no need to try to shame him into bending the knee…not cool dude, just move on with your life.
@Kathy: Yep.
An unscripted Joe Biden is pretty damned good and approachable as all fuck. He is a people person and folks intuitively sense this. Joe loves talking about the mundane problems regular folks confront every day.
@JohnSF:
There’s no question the policies he put in place led to a slowdown in mail which affected everything, not just the ballots. People have reported not getting their medicine on time, or missing bills. Who knows how big an impact this had on the election? A lot of it is very hard to measure. And some of the problems don’t come from DeJoy directly, but from various Simon-says technicalities that probably caused some ballots to be rejected, and which varied by state.
The absentee ballot I sent for took weeks to arrive. Fearing the shenanigans, I didn’t mail it back, I gave it in to the nearest polling station when it opened. And I live in New York, which isn’t run by rethugs intent on making voting as hard as possible.
And all this isn’t even getting into the more traditional methods of voter suppression that Republicans have been perfecting for decades. It also doesn’t get into the impact of outright voter intimidation, being actively encouraged by Trump himself. How many people might have stayed home or avoided a polling station because they were scared of getting assaulted or worse by some 250-pound white guy with a firearm? There’s no way to know.
This isn’t quite the Klan or Jim Crow. But these thing add up, and I believe they have an impact.
The bottom line is that a lot of people are rushing to come up with analyses when all the facts aren’t in. We won’t know how big or small a polling error there was until everything’s been counted. And a lot of people are allowing narratives to set in based on incomplete information.
An interesting bit of news from Europe.
The Presidency of the EU Council and delegates of the European Parliament have reached agreement on “rule of law conditionality” in funding.
If (and still quite an IF) the full Council agrees, this will be a significant step towards forcing Hungary and Poland to choose between their EU budget incomes (€5 billion/yr for Hungary, €11 billion for Poland; plus the planned EU pandemic recovery package funds) and their more extreme neo-authoritarian policies.
It will be interesting how hard the Poland and Hungary fight this in the Council, and if they can get any other support (Italy?); though as ever in EU politics, the implementation may be fuzzier (see link).
The states are always reluctant to order each other around, or allow the Parliament or Commission to sanction them.
But a significant move nonetheless (especially as the presidency is currently held by Germany).
@Bill: I have been wrong far more than I have ever been right. I never insisted somebody acknowledge one of the few times I was right while I ignored the many times they were.
If Pessimus Trump wins a second term, what do you think are the odds he’ll do something massively stupid like invade Venezuela, or engage in a bombing campaign against Iran?
He doesn’t seem enamored of war, but he kept hinting using force over and over. perhaps he feared a war would sink his reelection chances, but now he doesn’t have to worry about that.
Oh, dear. I just realized such idiocy is far more likely from lame-duck Pessimus. Kind of a scorched earth tactic.
He might let lose in other ways, like arresting journalists who displease him, shooting immigrants at the border, expelling legally admitted refugees on thin or no justification, I’m sure I can’t imagine the worst.
Damn I’m seriously stressed. I haven’t felt this way since my dad was in the ICU for days on end.
Just announced: Trump will speak from the White House at 6:30 PM Eastern today.
Any predictions on the level of utterly unhinged batshit crazy this will involve?
Remember a show called Early Edition? the premise was that this nice, divorced guy, Gary, got tomorrow’s edition of a Chicago newspaper the day before. That is, today Nov. 5th 2020, he’d get the edition for Nov. 6th 2020.
That would come in so handy in this situation. We’d be spared one full day of agonizing wait.
A little bit of personal GOOD news…..my Dad got on a horse today and rode for an hour or so. First time since his accident! He only got officially released from his wheelchair a week or two ago….he’s not been using it for at least 6 weeks, him and my Mom even tried to pull a fast one on the doctor and she wheeled him into the hospital for his checkup. The doctor saw right thru it, and said he doesn’t need to come back til January. 😉
Before I head out for the night, I’d like to leave you with some context:
Tonight, thanks to an app, I was able to watch–live, on my phone, streamed on the internet–an unremarkable, regular launch of a reusable rocket, built by a private company–including the guided re-entry and landing of the first stage on an unmanned drone barge.
Think about that for a minute.
Now… if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find who’s cutting all those onions.
@Kathy:
I know you are stressed but Trump is losing and he knows it. These nuisance lawsuits are just to make him happy until Biden is sworn in this January. I love how the Trump Campaign thinks sending out folks like Corey Lewandowski to make sure things are on the up and up is supposed to scare anybody…yeesh, Trump does like his lawsuits but he is dead in the water and knows it. Gonna be a long 2 months before Biden is sworn in but again, he is just filing these lawsuits because he is pissed that he lost.
The White House is a great security blanket for him to cling onto but he about to lose this security and is just lashing out. NRO/The Corner, Politico, none of these sites (and NRO/The Corner is a straight up Conservative site) are putting up stories that would have Biden worried…I say let Trump be Trump because soon enough he will just be a blowhard that folks who are into Fox news listen too on a regular basis (but since Trump just rambles on that might give Fox pause into letting Trump into their fold…they will be concerned that Trump does not drag down their ratings, especially once the shine of being President has left Trump’s aura).
Fox already has Tucker C and Hannity, and love them or hate them they know how to string together two sentences in a row and can focus on a subject at hand for more than 4 seconds in a row….they may not need or want Trump to join their “News” team.
After all, failure quickly becomes an orphan in politics and I think less people may embrace Trump come this new year than one might imagine. Again, the right wing media machine has plenty of articulate folks that drive liberals up a wall, Trump may not be needed.
@inhumans99: I’ll repeat my prediction: Once Trump is out of office, he’s going to launch a TV show called “Donald Trump – the REAL President” where he’ll be shown in a replica of the Oval Office to impart his wisdom. He’ll always refer to his successor as “Fake President Biden,” and keep reassuring his audience that he’s right on the brink of getting back into office in the next couple of weeks, just as soon as he has all the legal matters settled.
@Mikey: And he’s on, and it’s every bit as ludicrous as you might imagine. Possibly more so.
I cannot wait until this orange stain on our nation is finally gone.
Holy shit, ABC just…cut him off. They just cut in and started calling bullshit on his claims of “illegal votes.” He’s still talking, if you tune to Fox News you can hear him, but ABC just basically pulled the plug. Glorious.
@Bill: I will answer your question if you could first clarify something for me, and this is an honest and sincere question as I don’t want to misinterpret the situation due to the sometimes difficult to interpret nature of text in these little boxes: should I be interpreting your tone as belligerent? Because that is how it is coming across and I am not sure belligerence is warranted based on our prior interaction.
Could you clarify and then I will provide my answer.
@inhumans99:
Oh, it’s not the lawsuits and the trash talk. It’s the waiting and uncertainty. We were burned, and traumatized, in 2016 because what was supposed to happen didn’t. We got burned again last Tuesday for the same reason. There’s no natural law limiting the number of times we can get burned to only two.
I’ve said this before, mostly in jest, but I do get it now at a visceral level: count no one happy until Minimus Trump is declared the loser.
Trump’s election-related lies are getting flagged by Twitter. They should have banned his ass a long time ago. Maybe they will after he relinquishes power.
@Steven L. Taylor: It comes across as belligerent and holding a grudge, from this end.
@Mikey: My wife channel surfed and said everyone except FOX cut away from Trump.
@Mikey: With any luck, other news organizations will follow suit. Taking away his “ratings” will be a death blow.
@Kylopod:
Yeah, they will ban his ass. Saw this at Bloomberg before stopping here
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-05/trump-s-special-treatment-on-twitter-would-end-with-biden-win
I suspected as much. Tiny can lose his megaphone.
@Sleeping Dog: I bet he’ll buy more bots, on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see how many actual Russian bot farms abandon him if Putin determines him to be a….loser. 😉
@Bill:
Polls that far out don’t have a likely voter screen, and really cannot be compared to polls closer to the election that do. They are good for rough baselines and measuring change over time. Not great for predicting precise outcomes, plus there is no outcome then to predict.
But, on polling, you might enjoy the most recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast, with special guest Chris Hayes. At one point, Hayes says (very close paraphrase) “I’ve been reporting on the polls all year, and now I have to wonder if I was just peddling bullshit”
I love Chris Hayes’ weekly podcast “Why is this happening?” by the way. It’s so much better than his nightly show, and really fits his personality more.
Also, I don’t know why you have such a bug up your ass on this. Dr. Taylor hasn’t acknowledged that I might have been right with my repeated statements that this election was going to be different enough from past elections that it would stress the models, and that all of the results needed bigger error bars, but I’m ok with that. I know, in my heart, that he was wrong, so very, very wrong*, and that’s enough. Why pick fights?
——
*: There could be other reasons and he and I could both be wrong, so I’m not saying I am right. The important thing is that he was wrong.
@Bill: Also, I don’t want to be too patronizing, because I know that this is a hard time for everyone, and anger and frustration with one thing just kind of spills out elsewhere and we should all be a little more understanding, but… I do want to be at least a little patronizing.
Whatever you do for self-care and to relax — exercise, smoking pot, cooking a nice meal for the wife, petting a stray cat in the neighborhood — don’t skimp. You’re a nice guy who is sometimes prickly, and you’re being prickly. I assume you’re mostly normal, and that means you’ve not been making yourself a priority. So, make it a priority.
@Jax: Good News! Happy for you and your family!
@inhumans99: @Kylopod: Trump’s 15 minutes of fame are at an end. My guess is that as much as he might want to host “Donald Trump–the Real American President,” he’s not gonna find any sponsors and doesn’t have the cash to fund it himself.
Thank you for riding, please watch your head as you exit the car.
@Kathy: I remember that show! I loved it. Yeah, that would be nice. Except that usually the goal of him getting the paper in advance was to stop something bad from happening…
@Steven L. Taylor:
No, you answer the bloody question. A week ago you were pummeling me with not a chance for the scenario I was stating and suddenly you see the light but at the same time you neither can withdraw what you said or admit that I was right. Instead you got to ask me a question. That’s bullshit.
The five people who upvote you should be ashamed. Most of you thought I was spouting bullshit a week ago. Teve said as much. Nope the bullshit is yours. So much hate here for Trump, and I dislike him too, but also so much disconnect with reality by too many people around here and hate is clouding the way you’re thinking. How many times have I heard here that Trump hasn’t done anything right and I had to remind everyone of his Gorsuch nomination.
@Bill: Ok, you are behaving ridiculously.
Out of respect for your long-term participation here, I will just move on.
I mean, do you think you sound like someone who would receive an answer in a reasonable fashion?
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is the continued crap* I have come to expect from you. Yesterday you posted something as if it were your own thesis when it wasn’t and without acknowledging how strongly you dismissed it only days early. My thesis had no basis you said. You were wrong and you won’t say it. That is Donald Trump like behavior, you know that.
*- Some months backs you countered my lack of faith in 2016 polls by writing a whole about them. People are still saying in recent days they were wrong/weak on the state wide level and pollsters were wary or hedging in regards to this year’s polling.
@Bill: I repeat: do you think you sound like someone who would receive an answer in a reasonable fashion?
@Bill:
Answer my question- ‘Care to say you were wrong?’. You’re acting like a bully who just got caught. So much malfunctioning from someone who is supposed to be smart.
@Steven L. Taylor: What’s that term for scholars who take someone else’s thesis and present it as their own without acknowledgment?
@Bill: Here’s a hint.
If you had done this:
@Steven
So, does that mean you have changed your mind from the other day?
I would have answered and we could have had a conversation about it.
Why in the world should I engage someone who is yelling at me?
@Bill:
Let’s see, you have cursed at me. You called into question my integrity. I am the bully?
Meanwhile, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and asked if you intended to be belligerent, and you responded with more belligerence.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You’re turning yourself into the victim here. I wrote that yesterday afternoon even before you replied here!
You’ve stuffed words in my mouth, belittled me, said I didn’t do something when I clearly did, and took credit for something you didn’t say and dismissed days earlier. You’re the one who is damaging your own integrity.
I wrote it the way I wanted. You said you would have answered it if I wrote it that way, which I did and proved so up above. Where’s that response you’re going to give me? It is nowhere to be found. Your word is worthless for someone who is supposed to be smart (You have a PHD, I don’t even have a college degree), you are acting both very stupidly and dishonestly.