448 thoughts on “Linky First Tuesday After The First Monday Of November”

  1. H3: Clearly the writer of the article hasn’t read Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Cycle. And more clearly (or it would be amazingly coincidental) the guy who translated Brevik’s writings did.Report

  2. Classics hottake: Thermopylae was an irrelevant skirmish in the Greco-Persian wars, all the Spartans accomplished there was to be a road bump in the Persian advance towards Attica. Leonidias also massively cocked up the whole thing by allowing himself to get outflank after only a few days. He had the good grace to die fighting as a consequence of his failure so the thing got spun as a propoganda victory rather than a tactical slaughter and a strategic defeat.Report

  3. C1: This seems decidedly unfair.

    C2: China has been one of the most hostile countries to curbing global warming. This makes Trump’s belief that global warming is a hoax created by China odd.

    E1: Saul noted that the right has spent decades portraying many decidedly non-Elite people like artists working as bar tenders to pay the bills as part of the elite because it suits their purposes. Now they know what it feels like.

    E3: A multi-party system would be a disaster without big changes to the American political system. There would be no incentive for the different parties to work together in Congress or with the Presidency and their would be more gridlock on everything. You need a parliamentary system to make multiparty systems work because it creates incentives to form coalitions to control the government. Scott Lemieux on LGM is skeptical and whether multi-party systems are inherently more favorable towards liberals than two party systems.Report

    1. C1: Sounds like every salaried professional out there. What is unfair, if anything, is a salaried position being treated like it’s hourly. Pick one & stick to it.Report

      1. Not sure i agree why salaried or hourly are the only options. With respect to those agents hired after the cap was in place why was their accepting a hourly with a cap option problematic. Even with respect to those who it was sprung on after they started, employers change pay all the time, they certainly have the option of securing other employment. But I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of law enforcement positions that pay over $160K a year.Report

        1. What I wonder about is why the cap in the first place if they are paid hourly? The cap strikes me as a way to control personnel costs by not allowing a person to work crazy amounts of overtime, except most people don’t actually want to work crazy amounts of overtime as a matter of course. People want to have family and other leisure time, so typically large amounts of overtime are worked because the employer needs it (like during an election cycle).

          So the fact that a cap was passed into law tells me that either A) Federal managers/supervisors are operating perpetually understaffed* (and thus require lots of overtime), or B) Federal managers/supervisors had gotten into the habit of allowing employees to work overtime as desired as a way to pad paychecks**. Both reasons strike me as bad management, but as usual, the employees have to bear the cost of that.

          *Or management is really bad about making sure the staff they have is actually working.

          **Usually with little in the way of oversightReport

  4. E4: A related link from the Atlantic about Trump’s appeal. The best you can see about Trump supporters is that they are heavily influenced by a fantasy of America that partially was and partially was not.

    E5: The crucial test of liberal democracy is trying to create a peaceful society that consists of people and groups with mutually inconsistent beliefs and goals.

    I5: This makes sense. The Far Right is making gains by combining their issues, a desire to keep Europe more monocultural, with the concerns of people anxious about economic security and globalization.

    H3: Th nationalist right always imagined itself as the defenders of Western tradition over groups perceived as the enemies of Western tradition. The Battle of Thermopylae in its mythological form is very appealing for them for that reason. As the article points out, actual history is much more complicated. The Spartans were not particularly democratic and actual serve as a template for some of the worst aspects of Western civilization, a sort of proto-fascism of antiquity. The Persian Empire wasn’t particularly despotic. It was the Persians that allowed the Jews to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. The empire tended to be run in a very decentralized manner because of its seize and the level of communications available in antiquity.Report

    1. Has the nationalist right always revered Thermopylae? i don’t know, but I wonder if it isn’t a secondary effect of Victor Davis Hanson becoming a right wing pundit. Hanson (whose early academic and semi-academic work was superb) woke up one day and realized that Muslims doing inscrutable (Mid)East stuff is just like the Persian Empire invading Greece. He took this idea and has been running with it ever since. The fascination with Thermopylae would naturally follow from this.Report

      2. Fun Fact: VDH hired my then girlfriend, a palestinian critical theorist with a newly minted PhD, as an adjunct prof. I ended up having beers with him several times, turns out we are both fans of James Ellroy. This was in the late ’90’s.Report

        2. His writing on early Greek warfare rocked! He was being touted as the next John Keegan, and with good reason. His conversion into a political hack is a crying shame. We have plenty of political hacks, and not many top-flight military historians.Report

      3. The Far Right always also saw it as the defenders of the West against the East. Who was the East could vary a lot. During the Cold War it was the Communists, including the very European Eastern Bloc countries. Now its the Islamists. In the build up to World War II, it was the Jews and the Communists acting in concert to subvert White Christian capitalism with Jewish Bolshevism. The Greek war with the Persians is probably the oldest example of the West against East fight in our historical memory.Report

    2. You conveniently overlook the fact that the Spartans didn’t want to be forced at spear point to be part of the Persian empire, however beneficent, it was. Not to mention that the Spartans were still more democratic than the Persians.Report

          2. A- The Spartans did indeed lose. The Persians were stopped by the Spartans’ mortal foes, the Athenians

            B- The Persians did conquer Ionia (The Asiatic coast of modern Turkey) which was the area of Greece were most of what we now call Greek culture developed (Athens was the only Ionian enclave in European Greece, the rest being mostly Doric). Without Plutarch we wouldn’t even remember the Spartans. Ionia continued flourishing uninterruptedly under Persian suzerainty, and afterwards in Hellenistic and Roman times. It’s not likely a Persian conquest of European Greece would have stopped Western Civilization.

            C- The Gauls gave us trousers. Roman conquest of Gaul stopped the diffusion of such an important sartorial development. The Romans considered trousers a sign of effeminacy, because they were better as keeping you warm, and made horseback riding “easier”. Real manly men don’t complain about the cold and don’t need things to make riding easier. Hopefully today will see the implantation of trousers as the only acceptable way for world leaders to cover their legs, and the Roman skirt will be confin d to the dustbin of history.Report

            1. My understanding is that by the fourth century A.D. trousers were pretty standard Roman military dress. This undoubtedly explains their failure to stop the barbarian onslaught.Report

            2. A: Yes the Spartan sacrifice gave the Athenians time to organize and prepare. That’s why their sacrifice is important and is remembered.

              B: If the Athenians had lost we wouldn’t have a history of democracy nor probably all those other western liberal values liberals love so much.

              C: So what.Report

              1. A: Well, that’s the narrative. No one knows if it’s really true. Military history is full of headlong advances that peter out to a slow crawl. There is always the temptation to create a narrative of the heroic defenders, when often it is actually a prosaic matter of the invaders outstripping their supply lines. See also: The Miracle of the Marne. You can find people claiming that Lee would have marched on Philadelphia had he not been stopped at Gettysburg. I point and laugh at these people.Report

              2. “B: If the Athenians had lost we wouldn’t have a history of democracy nor probably all those other western liberal values liberals love so much.”

                Why not?

                The Romans did not copy democracy from the Athenians, nor were the Athenians a beacon of Democracy (ha!!) in a sea of absolute monarchs.

                Even the Germanic barbarians were fairly democratic, and not because they had read PlatoReport

              3. The Spartans earned a whopping 3 days that the Athenians didn’t particularly need by dieing. That small amount of time gained wasn’t at all relevant to the later campaign. If the opperation was a holding action to buy time, it was to shore up the fortifications on the Corintian ismuth, which didn’t end up being a significant factor in the later war.

                The heroism of their last stand was that it bought time for the allies they brought to the gates to make their withdrawl. Noble as all get out sure, which is why they were remembered, but not strategically important. Thermopylae didn’t do anything to help the Athens and Aegina and all the others beat the Persian fleet at Salamis, which was the victory that actually mattered.Report

              5. Wait, you’re the one that was saying, with hindsight, that the Spartans helped buy the Athenians time. You don’t have an issue with hindsight, you have an issue with someone pointing out that you’re full of it.Report

          3. If the Spartans had been defeated and the Gauls had not, then “Western culture” would have been different – more Persian and Gaulish, less Spartan and Roman. Not “less”, not “hindered”, but different. Which would have been the case had pretty much any major historical event come out differently from how it did.

            And alternate-history folks would be making this same point about how a Gaulish loss would have “significantly hindered the development of western culture, whereas a few dead Spartans was no great loss.”Report

          1. Don’t forget Hermann the German, though he won a big battle before his inevitable ignominious death at the hands of his own tribesmen. More to the point, he got both a statue and a hard candy.Report

  5. E1: I’m not sympathetic. The right-wing has spent decades lambasting low-income left voters as being elitists while praising the Koch Brothers as salt of the earth regular joes. So fuck them. Fuck the pompous National Review.

    E3: The problem is how we split our government. Multi-party systems work well when you have spoils to split. One party gets to be PM. The coalition joiner gets to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer (which is cooler sounding than Treasury Secretary.) The US system gives all or nothing in the branches. You can’t exactly split a Senate majority. There is no reason to. Same with the House and Cabinet appointments for the Executive. Lots of Democrats are currently angry that Democratic Presidents still like to appoint Republicans to positions in the wake of the Comey e-mail scandal.

    I2: I think this story is insane but fascinating. It says something about our economy, Macedonia’s economy, and our political anger that Macedonian teens can make money making inflammatory clickbait for the GOP die-hards.Report

    1. E3: Why couldn’t you have a Cabinet agreement for coalition party members? You join the coalition and we give you Treasury or AG. You could certainly do that with Senate and House Committee chairs.Report

    3. E1: I’m not sympathetic. The right-wing has spent decades lambasting low-income left voters as being elitists while praising the Koch Brothers as salt of the earth regular joes. So fuck them. Fuck the pompous National Review.

      So…..you support Trump?Report

  6. [C1]: Cry me a river. Welcome to my world. Only I make substantially LESS than 160K. I had 100 hours 6 days once.

    [C2] Obama may not have created it, but the US did have a hand in it and currently is funding it, whether that’s directly or through our Saudi “friends”.

    [C6]: Gotta agree. Never understood the “my opponent is the devil” before the balloting when then turns to “congrats to my worthy opponent”. Trump may disappear, but the elements of his movement will linger on…..and likely build strength. HRC is not a aisle crosser or team builder.

    [E1]: Well, his is part of 8.7% that has a graduate education. That’s pretty damn rare, or “elite”.

    [E5]: We do not have to live together, and frankly, most of us don’t. That’s the fundamental background to “I can’t believe you think like that”.That is the fundamental difference between red and blue states. Sure, there’s some mixing in the coasts, and other than an occasional campaign sign being stolen off someone’s yard (and the parental inability to condemn it (zing)) most people live separate untangled lives.

    [P4] When I was married, I didn’t care who she voted for. I don’t care who my girlfriend is voting for, nor any of my friends. My relationship to them is greater than some minor political differences.

    [I1] Because it’s better to claim the ruskies are doing it….proof? pff. Propaganda don’t require no proof.Report

  7. C1: I suspect it will be hard to gin up sympathy for folks earning $160K getting extra overtime. There are a ton of people who make less than half that who don’t earn overtime.Report

    1. Yup. I made a good bit less than half that and I work lots of weekends even though I technically shouldn’t “have” to. I work until the work is done. And I dealt with a pay cut (but no work cut) this spring.

      Though it would well and truly suck to be a Secret Service agent this campaign season.Report

  8. C4: The American two-party system has been a feature of our politics for the vast majority of our history, and in that time there have been wide swings in terms of how polarized and ideologically sorted the parties are. This makes it very hard to credit Mr Faust’s argument that attribute current high levels of polarization to the fact that we have a two-party system. Indeed, the gun control legislation Jeb! passed in FL, which he praises as an example of bipartisanship, was also passed as part of a two-party system.Report

  9. E3: I’m curious about why no one ever suggests trying a large increase in the number of members in the House. IIRC, using district sizes comparable to those of other developed countries would have a US House of about 3,000 members. Those districts are small enough to get people elected on the basis of single topics even within the two-party structure, rather than having a batch of (essentially) single-topic parties.Report

    2. Many liberals actually do want to increase the number of Representstives to make it reflect actual geography and demography more. The usual suggested amount is 200 to 400 more.Report

    1. I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out to those polls tonight and vote. Vote! It’s yours. If not, you’re gonna be shinin’ my shoes. And you know what you’ll be sayin’, a bunch of losers sitting around in a bar: ‘Oh yeah, I used to be informed. It’s a tough racket.’ These are the new ballots. These are the good ballots. And to you, they’re gold, and you don’t get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They’re for high-information voters. I’d wish you good luck, but you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you got it. And to answer your question, pal: ‘Why am I here?’ I came here because Jefferson and Madison asked me to. They asked me for a favor. I said, the real favor, follow my advice and fire your f–kin’ asses because a loser is a loser.Report

  11. I2: Rick Pearlstein has been talking for a few years about the strong thread of hucksterism that runs through the Republican Party since the direct-mail days of Richard Viguerie. When hucksters from Macedonia are getting in on the act with clickbait titles meant to be shared on social media, and with the sorts of things described in C2 being espoused by one of the candidates, along with that candidate’s endless self-dealing even with regard to the actual campaign, we may have reached Peak Huckster.

    I sure hope so.Report

  12. E4: Just for a change, I’d love to see a piece written for a center-right or right-wing outlet that tries to explain sympathetically to a center-right or right-wing audience why any of the segments of the electorate that reject the Republican Party at least as overwhelmingly as blue collar white voters reject the Democratic Party do so.

    I’m not even saying they aren’t out there. Perhaps they are. But I haven’t seen one this election cycle, and I’ve seen dozens of versions of that article John Cassidy wrote for the New Yorker.Report

    2. I was going to say something similar

      Rod Dreher continuously points out that the working class abandoned the Democratic Party and supported the GOP for cultural reasons, and even though they acknowledge that the Democrats would be better for the working class from an economic point of view, the cultural issues are a bridge too far.

      Of course, for Dreher, “culture” is code for religion. But he has a point. I just think he has the wrong point.

      Because it’s not the working class that has abandoned the Democratic Party. It’s the White working class. Blacks and Latinos are very religious. Blacks are probably the most religious ethnic group. So religion is not the cultural issue that drives the White working class away.

      I’m not saying that Race and Racism are the critical cultural markers. It is totally possible that the White working class that supports Trump and the GOP in general are not personally racist and are perfectly comfortable with black colleagues and supervisors. But they pine for the “traditional” America. And The Traditional America they see in their mind is full of wives baking apple pie, children chasing a ball, husbands toiling in the garage talking football, and only lily White people, hey, they probably don’t even realize that in their dreams there is nothing but white people.

      But that America is gone for ever, for various reasons, economic as well as cultural. And that America was built over a substructure that hurt many people. People that, for “cultural” reasons do not want to vote for a party that would bring it back, even if it comes with $15 minimum wage and Medicare for allReport

      1. “I’m not saying that Race and Racism are the critical cultural markers. ”

        uh. Yeah you fuckin’ are, bro.

        “People that, for “cultural” reasons do not want to vote for a party that would bring it back, even if it comes with $15 minimum wage and Medicare for all”

        Democratic voters rejected Medicare For All when they overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, who said straight out that she didn’t want it and never would.

        “…they pine for the “traditional” America.”

        The traditional America of strong worker unions and well-funded pensions and high-paying jobs for unskilled laborers and tradesmen? The traditional American that was, as you describe it, “built over a substructure that hurt many people”?Report

    3. @pillsy
      Just for a change, I’d love to see a piece written for a center-right or right-wing outlet that tries to explain sympathetically to a center-right or right-wing audience why any of the segments of the electorate that reject the Republican Party at least as overwhelmingly as blue collar white voters reject the Democratic Party do so.

      It’s not going to happen, for two reasons.

      One is that reasons to support the Democratic party *aren’t complicated*. You have to do all sorts of handwaving and justifications and stuff for why certain people support Republicans. (Unless you just want to say ‘Well, the real answer is just that they’re a bit racist’, which we’ve recently figured out from Trump was rather a large percentage.) You don’t have to do that for people supporting Democrats.

      I’m a liberal. I’ve been a liberal a while. But let’s pretend I hadn’t been, that I was an independent leaning conservative. But I’d probably have voted for (To remove Trump from this) Obama instead of Romney, though. Why?

      Well, the Democrats made it where I can (Well, in 2012, ‘would eventually be able to’) buy health insurance for the first time in my life, and the Republicans ran on the explicit promise to undo that law, without actually providing any *alternate* means for me to get insured.

      Um, duh. Not a particularly complicated issue. And when people write an article about politics, they want something really complicated so they can make up a bunch of nonsense.

      The other reason is…those articles exist. Hell, the Republican party itself wrote something after 2012 that was basically that, saying ‘Where are we screwing up? Here, here, and here.’ The thing is, *Republicans don’t read them*.

      Democrats will read nice, polite explanations of Republicans that mildly criticize Democrats for failure to do things. The majority of Democrats think Republican voters are being dumb, and will entertain the idea that they, themselves, are *also* dumb, as long as they are *less* dumb than Republicans.

      Republicans…won’t read the inverse of that. The majority of Republicans, as far as I can tell, thinks Democratic voters are *evil*, and will not entertain the idea that they might also be evil at all. (Or dumb.)Report

  16. Anecdote from Colorado Springs:

    I showed up at my polling station, the DMV on Powers (this is the nice DMV, not the crappy one) and there were 3 people ahead of me in the line.

    There was a situation where every person had to spend 5ish minutes with a person at the counter before being given a paper ballot (I soon found out that the person at the counter was voiding your mail-in ballot, if any).

    When I got to the front, I asked the nice gentleman pointing people to various counterpeople how busy they were today. “Long line or slow and steady or what?”

    “Oh, I’d say it’s been steady. When we got here this morning we expected a long line around the building but there were just three people!”

    I got my mail-in ballot voided (not that I sent it in) and proceeded to fill out my paper ballot and then get the sticker.

    If the nicest El Paso county voting area did not have a long line around the building, El Paso county will not make the state competitive.

    Which means that Clinton wins Colorado.Report

      2. I thought about that but my prejudices tell me that conservative voters are more likely to show up on election day itself, want to fill out the paper ballot with which they are already familiar, so on and so forth.

        I did see a truck drive up to “MAIL-IN BALLOT DROP OFF” and hand a ballot over to the nice people standing there, but I didn’t see two vehicles do that.Report

    2. We had 200 people in the first 45 minutes when we opened (6 am) then a bit more relaxed, a steady pace but no line more than about 5 at a time at check-in after that. 955 out of about 2200 people have voted so far (1145 am) in the precinct I’m working at.Report

        1. There’s either 300 or 500 additional absentee ballots out there too in our precinct (the system doesn’t make it clear, on our end, which are the mail in type and which are the persons that have voted in-person absentee (the Virginia version of ‘early voting’*))

          * it’s not early voting because you need to state a reason to use it. The reasons though, are somewhat permissive.

          (Geographic note – my precinct is inside the Capital Beltway)Report

              3. 5:45 pm 1353 voters 56% turnout, people showing up about every 3 to 4 minutes or so, 75 minutes until polls close.

                It seems a lot of people in the county did the in person absentee maybe as many as a quarter of the total votersReport

          2. More seriously, I’m now wondering about voter turnout and what it means.

            I started with 1944 because my inner actuarial tables are telling me that the youngest person who voted for the first time that year is 90 years old now.

            1944 56.1%
            1948 51.1%
            1952 61.6%
            1956 59.3%
            1960 62.8%
            1964 61.4%
            1968 60.7%
            1972 55.1%
            1976 53.6%
            1980 52.8%
            1984 53.3%
            1988 50.3%
            1992 55.2%
            1996 49.0%
            2000 50.3%
            2004 55.7%
            2008 57.1%
            2012 54.9%
            2016 ?????

            I was hoping to see something like “huh, when we’re above 53%, it means *THIS* but when we’re below 52% it means *THAT*” but there’s no rhyme nor reason.

            So I don’t know what particularly high turnout would mean this time around.Report

            2. Low turnout means high-voter disgust or indifference to the top of the ticket, which can be offset by fear. If turnout is below 52% tomorrow, I think the story is that a lot of people were turned off by the election and by both candidates; perhaps someone will look into cracks in the Obama coalition, particularly among African-Americans, or whether Republicans in red states stayed at home.Report

              1. Then fear is the great motivator.

                Generally, it appears that turnout is lower when a Veep is trying to run for the President’s “third term.” Turnout dropped for Truman in ’48 (*), Humphrey in ’68, Bush in ’88, and Gore in ’00. I’m somewhat surprised since these can be important transitional elections.

                (*) or “fifth term”Report

              2. Well, of course fear is the great motivator. That’s what they teach us in trial lawyer class: “Scare the jury.”

                You can’t reason with fear. Fear doesn’t care about policy platforms. Fear causes people to act quickly, decisively, and impulsively. Fear works. Fear isn’t interested in justice, fairness, equality, compassion, morality, or any of the other better angels of our nature that you might care to name. Fear sees a threat and it acts directly and in linear fashion to obviate the threat.

                The only choice fear allows you is fight or flight.Report

              5. Fear is the great motivator, true, but that generally only works on the Right. Scream about crime, scream about welfare queens…

                … you really think the left listens to that? The left sees those lies for bullshit.Report

              11. There is some evidence from the western initiative states that having a good controversial policy choice on the ballot drives turnout. High early voting in Arizona and Nevada this year might be as much about marijuana legalization as anything.Report

        1. Thank you for your thanks. I feel better about this thanks than the thanks for my service I got for making sure the karoke bars of the Western Pacific were maintained on a level consistent with US National Security.Report

          1. Not to denigrate military service at all, but with the logistical challenges of voting being what they are, anybody who takes any of their own time to make elections happen smoothly and fairly is doing us a service that we should all be grateful for.

            Seeing the photos of long lines at so many polling places, it’s easy to guess how much worse things could get without people who step up and keep elections running. It’s nice to have system to choose our leaders without killing each other. The easier it is for people to use that system, the less we have to worry about the other option.Report

    3. Big turnout in Jefferson County (west Denver suburbs) — fourth by population, first so far in returned ballots. Jeffco has drifted steadily left over the 30 years I’ve lived here — big turnout here is another good sign for Clinton. Probably for passing the assisted suicide and minimum wage initiatives as well. Looks like the state will go over 70% participation by registered voters this year, maybe over 75%.Report

      1. More Jeffco anecdata… When I went out to lunch I went by the vote center at the library near where I live. Lots of people putting the mail ballots into the return box. About 20 people in line inside to vote. Appeared to skew younger than me (not that that’s all that hard these days). I spoke with one of the librarians I know and asked if the line had been like that all morning. “Oh, this is short. It’s been much longer at times.”

        Something’s got the west Denver suburbs coming out this year.Report

    4. I mailed my ballot in early last week, after spending 2+ hours going over every choice and doing some research into the person or issue. This is why I love mail in balloting, I appreciate being able to see the choice, do some research, and not have to arrive at the polling place with a cheat sheet.Report

      1. If the state/county puts out a sample ballot in advance, you can do the same thing and take notes into the polling place. This is what I used to do before Colorado introduced its permanent no-excuse absentee ballot list. Which I jumped on when it was created, as my employer was known to tell me on Friday that they needed me to be in New Jersey for a meeting Tuesday AM.Report

  18. [I1] How would you prove that emails are forged? They’re just files, some bytes in a specific order. You can’t readily prove anything about their origin.

    You have to prepare well in advance to prove stuff like that – say, make a complete archive of each day’s email, add a newspaper article from that day, sign the whole thing with a PGP key, store in perpetuity. Then if someone produces a forged email you want to repudiate, you are forced to reveal everything from the whole day, a much greater intelligence breach than the fake email would have been if it had been real – but you could at least theoretically do it.

    Almost nobody does that. So, in any normal organization, it’s impossible to prove that an alleged email is forged.Report

      1. Excellent point.

        And oh look, it seems there’s been a bit of non-NPOV editing on that wikipedia page

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail#Non-repudiability

        “It has proven useful to news media sources such as WikiLeaks, which has been able to leverage DKIM body signatures to prove that leaked emails were genuine and not tampered with, definitively repudiating false, defamatory claims by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US Presidential Election running mate Tim Kaine, and DNC Chair Donna Brazile. [29]”

        (emphasis mine)Report

        1. Forging DKIM probably isn’t past the abilities of any modern state, but I’m not sure a relative handful of hackers could do it.

          Then again, most people won’t read emails from a large dump, they’ll read headlines — and you can selectively dump easily enough, handle it O’Keefe style.

          Headline spin is how you got #SpiritCooking — which neglected to mention the “performance artist” bit, or the fact that Podesta didn’t actually attend (verified in a later email).

          Probably the best is to selectively release emails to fit the narrative, and then forge (or edit) the ‘hacked documents’. If you don’t release the emails they were attached to, you can’t validate them via DKIM, and if you’re released legitimate hacked emails, that makes any forged documents that can’t be validated seem more trustworthy.

          Basically you social engineer the lie. Give them stuff that can be validated, but selective, truth (emails) and then slip stuff that can’t (documents) in and use the trust from the first to cover the second.Report

        2. It depends on *how* the emails were obtained.

          If the *server* was hacked…well, the server has the DKIM private key, so the attacker can sign any damn thing they want. (The way a mail server works is that to compromise it, you usually have to compromise the entire server. They technically run as specific users, and it is hypothetically possible just that user could be compromised, although it’s unlikely unless the mail software has some serious bugs in it…but whatever user the mail server is has to access the DKIM keys anyway!)

          Wasn’t the DNC server itself hacked? If so…the attackers probably have the private key, so can forge anything they want.

          OTOH, if just an account was hacked, like Podesta’s was, any DKIM is harder to forge…although I will point out that you *actually sending the emails you want signed* through the mail server.

          The problem is you’d have to do this in real time, because DKIM includes a timestamp. And you’d also want to immediately delete them from the recipient, so you’d need to hack *their* account also.

          But it’s not rocket science. Give someone the passwords of two different email account, and they can ‘forge’ signed messages between those two accounts…by literally just sending messages between those two accounts and quickly deleting them before the actual account owners see them.

          Or if you just want to send it to *yourself*, you can do that. That would work almost as well:

          If Alice wants to discredit Bob, she simply emails an email about a scandal or something to Bob, and CC’d to a bunch of others, asking about it. And then Alice forges the *reply*, sending it through Bob’s email to be signed, confessing the crime, and making it look like Bob was *trying* to just send an email to one co-conspirator to discuss their evil plans, but accidentally sent a Reply-All.

          Now Alice has a signed copy…as does Carol, the totally-without-reproach woman Alice included on the original CC. As far as Carol can tell, it’s legitimately signed by Bob’s server…because it is. If Alice plays it right, she doesn’t even have to do anything!

          (Originating IP might give Alice away, but that just means Alice needs to pick a plausible source IP, like a library near Bob, or even hijack his computer…which might be how Alice got his email password in the first place.)Report

          1. Answering part of my own question:

            Considering that the DNC hack also included *files*, and because file sharing and mail would always operate as separate users….the only plausible intersection of ‘mail’ and ‘files’ is root access.

            Or the hackers hacked the server *twice*, in two different ways. Or maybe were different servers.

            But the easiest answer is that the DNC server was totally owned by hackers, from top to bottom.

            So, yes, the hackers have the DKIM keys, assuming they were not idiots, and can sign whatever message they want. (Unless that message is later included in some message that was signed by someone else, and anyone bothers to check *that* signature.)Report

            1. As you quite rightly assume, the DNC hack got away with the entire server.
              Of course, it’s nowhere near as fun to release forged e-mails.

              Pity the poor guy who now needs to read Every Single E-mail Again (so he knows what’s been released, and what hasn’t).

              I am totally tempted to post that Microsoft racist-as-all-fuck advertising that 4chan had posted. (This was real, kids. Done by an intern who got his ass fired the next day.) Hackers don’t gotta bullshit, because real life is Weird Enough.Report

          2. That particular DKIM-signed email was sent from an @hillaryclinton.com address – which domain uses Google for its email.

            Yes it’s possible the Russians hacked Google’s email servers. They’re certainly a high profile target.

            It would also be a heck of an operation to burn up that resource on.Report

            1. Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. That email is almost certainly real.

              Well, just to check, having never used google’s email like that before…is the DKIM key generated by *google*, or is it something whoever is paying for service can put in?

              I assume the former, mostly because there’s no reason for google to do the second. DKIM isn’t like SSL certs, you just make it up, you don’t need it signed, and you can have multiple DKIM per domain by using different…erm, prefixes or whatever the term is. So logically Google should be generating those keys. (And giving you the public key to put in the DNS, but not the private key)

              But I’d like confirmation of that.Report

      1. It looks like I was wrong above. Wikileaks is claiming the emails were DKIM-signed, and the signatures check out – which, if true would mean that the emails were legit.

        At least in part, this seems to be true – the single email that seems to have gotten the most discussion here, in which Jennifer Palimieri forwards the question about the death penalty, and that Donna Brazile claimed was falsified, apparently checks out (see http://blog.erratasec.com/2016/10/yes-we-can-validate-wikileaks-emails.html#.WCIfotUrK70)

        So, Brazile’s accusation of email forgery, in that instance anyway, is provably false.Report

        1. At least in part, this seems to be true – the single email that seems to have gotten the most discussion here, in which Jennifer Palimieri forwards the question about the death penalty,

          The oddest part of the discussion is that, while the *lead up* was indeed, very close, clearly someone working off the same notes as the moderator, the actual *question* asked was entirely different.

          If you read the email, it continued with a weirdly misleading sentence that ‘That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed.’ Erm, no. Bad grammar alert. The correct statement would be something like ”Of the Americans who were sentenced to die, 11% were later exonerated and freed.” 11% of Americans have not been sentenced to death.(1)

          And then said the actual question was: Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?

          But, in the debate, the actual question: I came perilously close to my own execution, and in light of that, what I have just shared with you and in light of the fact that there are documented cases of innocent people who have been executed in our country, I would like to know how can you still take your stance on the death penalty in light of what we know right now.

          (Okay, that’s not technically a question, but whatever.)

          And her answer, likewise, had *nothing* to do with whether states should abolish it. She said that states have proven they can’t do it fairly, that she would be relieved if the *Supreme court* abolished it, but, OTOH, she felt it might should be held in reserve for terrorists.

          I.e., this leaked question *in no way prepared her for the actual question and the answer she gave*!

          At best, the only information the leak gave her was ‘Hey, a question about the death penalty will be asked.’.

          1) Mocking my own grammar: That means that 89% of Americans *have* been sentenced to death.Report

      2. Looks like I was wrong above. The hillaryclinton.com domain does use DKIM, and at least some of the Wikileaks emails have DKIM signatures that check out.

        In particular, the one in which Jennifer Palmieri forwards a debate question to a number of people including Donna Brazile, and that Brazile has apparently specifically claimed was forged – that one checks out. (http://blog.erratasec.com/2016/10/yes-we-can-validate-wikileaks-emails.html)

        It’s not entirely impossible for the email to have been forged – but it would require the hackers to obtain a copy of Google’s DKIM private key, a much taller order than tricking someone on the Clinton campaign into typing their password into the wrong place in a moment of inattention.

        So, it looks very likely indeed that Brazile’s claim that that email was forged, is false.Report

      3. I’m trying to reply to you but I’m not sure where my comments are going. Maybe the link I was trying to insert is flagging something.

        Short version: it looks like there is quite good evidence that Brazile’s claim of forgery w.r.t. the specific email in which she received debate questions in advance, is false.

        Falsifying the DKIM signature would take hacking Google’s servers and getting a copy of their DKIM signing keys, a considerably harder feat than getting one’s hands on real emails.Report

        2. Yeah, it’s the link. Maybe it’ll work as something you have to copy-paste rather than click

          http
          then colon slash slash
          then blog.erratasec.com
          then /2016/10/yes-we-can-validate-wikileaks-emails.htmlReport

        5. Oh my gosh, this site reeeeaaaallly doesnt’ want me to post the link with the information, even just the name of the website without making it clickable.

          Trying now with the link being ROT13ed. If this doesn’t work I give up.

          uggc://oybt.reengnfrp.pbz/2016/10/lrf-jr-pna-inyvqngr-jvxvyrnxf-rznvyf.ugzyReport

  19. [I1] Romney: “Russia’s gonna be a problem.”
    Dem: “LOL you old man and your conspiracy theories!”

    Wikileaks: “Emails!”
    Dem: “OMG IT’S A RUSSIAN CONSPIRACY”Report

    1. Wikileaks didn’t get their e-mails from Russia.
      Someone left the barn door open on their way out (with everything, of course), and the Russians just danced in gay as you please.Report

        1. All I have are tea leaves that I do not know how to read.

          Is anybody watching the television? What is the general mood of Fox? Of CNN? Of MSNBC?

          Not “what are they reporting?” but, if you turned the sound off and had to guess what mood the newsreaders were in, what mood would they be in?Report

              4. Was it destroyed?

                I’ve been mulling over the 538 formula for a while, because of an Elizabeth P tweet, actually. She wondered why Sam W was going with a 98% Hillary win prob. vs only a Nate Silver 64% (and that was before Nate copied Sam Wang and posted Florida as Hillary leaning…). IF you ran that game a hundred times, given the point margins in the polls and the starting position of each candidates “sure things”, there’s simply no way Trump wins 1 outa 3 games. Trump would basically have to win 6 (I think, at the time) states in which he’s trailing to actually win. That’s basically running the table, in my book, which doesn’t happen 36% of the time. More like, or closer to, well, 2% of the time.

                My prediction? Sam *destroys* Nate.Report

              5. Nate has really been emphasizing the level of uncertainty this year. So it is possible that he has the same map as Wang or someone else but is simply saying, “I’m just not too certain.”

                I saw a friend post an article that stated Silver was taking a more cautious approach than in previous years because he wanted to avoid being wrong. Basically, that he was hedging his bets. I am not informed enough to know if that theory holds any water.Report

              6. That’s cuz he got the GOP primary disastrously wrong.

                Which doesn’t necessarily mean there’s high volatility all on its own, tho. It may just mean Silver’s model was in serious need of revision…Report

              9. That was my understanding as well — and it may be that he overcompensated, especially in his polls-plus modeling, which as we saw in the past few weeks became very inelastic after reaching about 85% certainty. A few bad turns for Clinton in the past week and a half, and the inevitable narrowing as the actual election closed, seemed to be a precipitous drop in the odds for her, but with one day excepted, Trump has never been forecast as the frontrunner even in Silver’s model.

                One thing that it looks to me that Silver modeled for that seems to prove true: partisan identity is really powerful. If you’re inherently a Republican, your mind is capable of doing backflips in reasoning to find a reason to justify voting for the Republican no matter who it is, even Donald Trump. Mutatis mutandis for Democrats. So I think Silver is right to take into account that presumptively, an electorate that has voted for any one given party in the past is more likely to do so again now than it is to switch.Report

              11. This is correct. From what I recall, both Silver and Wang had pretty similar maps and pretty similar popular vote differentials. (As opposed to Huffington Post, which had a larger popular vote differential.) It’s just that Silver was more gun-shy.

                It’s worth pointing out, I think, that what Silver got most wrong in the primary wasn’t due to the polls. It was that he incorporated other data, such as endorsements, the very same election we found out how little such things matter.Report

              14. This touches on what I was talking about with my “Election Is Probably Over” post and my “Thin Blue Wall” post.

                Basically, running the table is not as difficult as it seems. It doesn’t require six better performances. It requires a better national performance, which will then change those six states. As I say in the Blue Wall post, if Trump has a 40% chance here, a 30% chance there, and a 20% chance in another place, his likelihood of winning is actually closer to 20% than to 2%, because if he does well enough to get that 20% state, then he probably has the other two.

                And as I say in the Election Probably Over post, we’re not gauging the likelihood that something happens in this state or that state. We’re gauging the likelihood of a systemic polling error.

                35%-ish seemed way too high to me and allowed for way too much uncertainty, but I think Wang’s 2% was too low. The goldilocks was Nate Cohn, in my opinion, at about 7% or so.

                (Personally, I thought 7% was too high. But I thought it was too low for non-data reasons: Faith in my country, GOTV, and Trump being Trump. I just… couldn’t see it. But that’s not empirical. In another circumstances, give me a similar set of polls, and I think 7% sounds about right.)Report

              15. Trumwill, I get that. From a stastical pov, tho, the argument can be reversed: if Trump, in states X, Y, and Z, is .4, .3, and .2 likely to lose, then what’s the probabality that he’ll achieve a national level polling sufficient to carry all those states? It’s a function of national polling increase given the gain necessary to win all those states, which necessarily includes the margins of each particular state, yes?

                Or no? I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore.Report

              16. If the odds of the last state are 20%, then I would argue that they’re closer to 20% than 2%. It’s possible that there is some X-factor (the Zoroastrian vote specifically swung in a big and unexpected way!) that makes the 20% considerably more volatile, but that’s not the most likely thing. The most likely thing is just that the 20% state has more roadblocks, and that if the candidate can clear those roadblocks, he’s probably also cleared the roadblocks of the other two. (Or, if not the 30% state, then maybe in that state nobody is looking at where his likelihood is 12%).

                Silver’s hedging was mostly looking out for a national systemic polling error or a huge national shift. I don’t think there was a 30% chance of that, but under non-Trump circumstances I wouldn’t expect a 2% chance either.Report

              18. Getting a mixed read on Twitter right now. Broward votes not counted yet. Kraushaar (who has always been Trump-favorable) says Clinton should win easily. Others are mum.

                Report

              19. Florida’s absolutely decisive — if Trump loses it, he has no path left. I suspect that the media will be loathe to call it (and it is legitimately close, as it has been) until it’s really obvious.

                Because calling Florida for Clinton ends the race, really. Which is not a call they want to make too soon (lest they get it wrong, among other reasons).

                From what I’m reading, the remaining counties are all Democratic strongholds (the urban districts are always slower to report) and I don’t think Trump’s lead is even close to what he needs.Report

              25. Mark Halperin saying don’t worry about the exit polls, they aren’t that good anymore. That always used to bother me — do these talking heads know something? And do they actually know what they think they know?Report

          2. Caught a few minutes of “The Five”. Not paying strict attention but heard talk of what Trump should do if he loses, what Hillary should do if she loses, and what Hillary must do if she wins. Did not hear talk of what Trump out to do if he wins. For what that’s worth.Report

  22. Just voted in Yonkers. A predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood. Polling place was somewhat disorganized and some folks were being turned away. Multiple wards or districts voting in one location but in separate areas. Confusion and miscommunications about who votes where. ID was not required but seemed to be expected and at least one woman turned away because ID had an old address; the person would not even look her up in the register. Another was told he was in the wrong area even though other poll workers insisted he wasn’t; were insisting that the person holding the ballots look him up. I left before it was resolved.Report

  24. C1: It would be nice to hear a bit from the Service regarding how much presence was actually necessary for all of these people. They are loath to talk about their work, citing security concerns, so how do we know the job being done is actually worth doing?Report

  25. I saw Trump followed a lawsuit in Nevada that was denied. From what I see, the question is whether early voters were allowed to vote after polls were supposed to close. They want those votes kept separately so that if further legal action is pursued, they can identify which votes came in after the closure. The argument against was that this is already done.

    But I’m trying to understand the thinking here. I mean, the precincts in question are heavily Latino so I understand the strategy. But, logically speaking, why should someone who voted early but “late” for that day be excluded?Report

    1. Procedure. It may still be illegal if done that way. Which, if within the margin of error, makes them worth pursuing.

      Just a guess though.Report

    2. Nevada law says that if you’re in line to vote when the official closing time comes, you get to vote. This has been the law everywhere I’ve ever lived and voted (and on at least one occasion I stood in the rain for an hour after closing). The Trump side had affidavits from assorted people saying that the officials allowed people to join the queue after closing time. The action they asked for, at this point, was for a court order to preserve the voting records — something that Nevada law already requires. The judge said she wasn’t going to issue an order that just said “follow the law”.Report

      2. @aaron-david @michael-cain

        I understand all that. But zooming out… if the question is, “Should these people be allowed to have their votes counted?” and the answer is “No, because they were late. Not really late. Just late on an early day,” isn’t that just a little silly? How does counting those votes undermine the process? Besides a general appeal to “because rules”.Report

        3. As I understand what happened, this was the County’s point too.

          They said you can always join a line at an early voting location after it “closes” so long as the people keep it open.Report

        4. From a practical perspective, I am of two minds about this question.

          The OCD part of me, honed during the time I was part of legislative staff and had to worry about picky details in statute, says no. We’re not going to leave it up to how the local election volunteers feel. Polls close at X o’clock on Friday. If you’re present at X o’clock and stay there, you can vote. Otherwise, no. Certainly not “If voting place Y has people in line at X o’clock they stay open, and so long as the queue length doesn’t go to zero, they stay open.” After all, how do you deal with the case of the zealous volunteer who asks someone, “I know it’s 2:00 AM, but do you mind waiting to vote for another 20 minutes in case someone else shows up?”

          The rest of me says that we ought to work really hard to be sure that everyone who meets the basic criteria of “citizen 18 or older” ought to get to vote. (Should felons still in prison get to vote is outside the scope I’m debating here.) Oregon showed us the way, and Colorado refined it. Every registered voter gets a ballot in the mail, three weeks early. Fill it out. Mail it back. Or drop it off at a convenient drop-off box. During that three weeks there are vote centers open where you can vote, and register if necessary. If you can’t cast a ballot given those opportunities, you’re not even trying.Report

          1. @michael-cain

            I agree that zero bounds is problematic. Though it sounds as if the people here followed the rules. I guess that remains to be seen.

            But if the idea is that, “Well, if you came an hour earlier or 12 hours later we’d count your vote but you didn’t so tough nuts,” that just seems kinda nuts to me. Especially if these people walked away thinking their votes counted and only found out otherwise when it was too late to go back and vote again.

            What harm would be wrought by a polling station open 24 hours?Report

            1. What harm would be wrought by a polling station open 24 hours?

              None — if those conditions are spelled out in advance. But none of this “If you show up at the right station under the right circumstances it will be open, but the next one over will not.” Rural counties will hate you, though, because it will be expensive for no benefit.

              Which is why I’m an advocate of “everyone’s kitchen table is open whenever they want to fill out the ballot”.Report

  29. The thread is already on point for tonight’s election, so rather than try a liveblog or figure out how to set up a livetweet, I propose we all simply post here. I may be active on Twitter for a while also.

    So first, I have a serious issue to confront for election night, y’all. Hoping you can help me out here:

    Decision 2016
    Report

    1. Lagunitas for a few rounds. Then the Eagle Rare. And Scotch if things go wrong (for whatever your definition of “wrong” is).

      I’m learning to enjoy Scotch but it still feels like a mopey drink for me.Report

      1. Nah, it’s not mopey. It’s contemplative, but that’s not always a morose or unhappy thing.

        Okay, sometimes it’s mopey, yes.

        Also, I’m showcasing the Lagunitas as my beer selection because, after that most recent Green Bay Packers game, I’m out of homebrew (bottling my most recent batch is scheduled for Wednesday, and it won’t be ready to drink until the Washington game).Report

  30. Well, my goal for any given election anymore is for the amount of votes between the winner and 2nd place to be smaller than the amount of votes gotten by the 3rd parties.

    Having it do that in individual states?

    I’m getting the vapors.Report

    1. In Portland you reminded us all to be wary of the Bradley Effect in this race. I’m going to have to give you props for that, @jaybird , as it appears there was a lot of Clinton up-polling getting thrown in to all of the aggregators.

      Nevertheless, there’s a 78-vote backstop of four out of the five states that have Pacific Coast shorelines at the end of the night. 192 votes for Clinton before 11:00 p.m. eastern time and we can still avoid President Trump. Plus I’ve seen calls of Virginia for Clinton, which is helpful.Report

      1. I still predicted a Clinton win earlier, though.

        I based that on the mood around me in town rather than on what I thought was true back then.

        And this morning at the DMV did not disabuse me of my newfound Bradley skepticism.Report

  33. So, outta curiosity, who is looking at what? I am keeping an eye peeled to RCP, as that has been my go to for the election. Where is everyone else parking their eyeballs?Report

    2. I’m on fivethirthyeight, L.A. Times, and Decision Desk HQ. DDHQ is running behind the other two, which is odd compared to its performance during the primaries.

      I may turn on some music to, you know, soothe the nerves. Enya. Thievery Corporation. Then either disco or Nine Inch Nails, depending on how Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida turn out.Report

      1. My guess is that DDHQ is not quite scaleable (yet) to do a coast to coast contest, vice a collection of assorted states in different time zones.

        (Also the individual precincts are slower to report through official channels simply because there are so many more voters, and more ballot items to collate)Report

          1. California, yes.
            Maine? Maybe-probably.
            North Dakota? I’m guessing yes, because they’re probably hoping to increase tourism?
            Massachusetts? “Banned in Boston” used to be a thing. It might still be.Report

  38. Looks like a long night.

    Trump had a late surge in the Florida panhandle and Josh Marshall thinks he is outperforming recent Republicans in rural areas.

    Urban locations tend to get their results later but Democrats like myself are on edge.Report

      1. Who is that guy anyway? We need to settle on a single pundit round here, one who’s views are consistently anti-Trump. I’m way past this “fact-based reality” nonsense.Report

        1. This will have to take a while because I’m pretty sure that pundits who got freaking *EVERYTHING* wrong about the last year will have to demonstrate some sort of self-knowledge prior to becoming the official Ordinary Times pundit guy.Report

      2. @jaybird

        It looks like you were right in your prognosis but this makes me feel very ill. A lot of my friends are very worried about their civil rights and liberties and safety. I think they are right to be concerned.

        Someone on LGM is going trollishly rampant with racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and other attacks. I already got an anti-Semitic attack.

        This isn’t good.Report

    1. I’ve been mentally pushing back on the triumphal certainty of Clinton’s victory among many liberals IRL and online, but I’m realizing now that I never actually imagined that it was really in doubt.

      And maybe it isn’t — 538 still has Clinton at 73% likely. But wow.Report

          1. Not too much bourbon, I need you coherent for a while… Let’s see how Arizona goes, particularly the marijuana initiative, and Nevada. California can offer the low-population red western states a better deal then the eastern US states will. Water, fire, renewable energy, initiatives and referendums. Western States of America, baby. Time to let the rest of them go their own way :^)Report

    2. I bought S&P 500 index funds late Friday.

      They immediately went up Monday at opening bell, thanks to Comey’s Saturday ‘Sorry about randomly releasing information, here’s some more information’ news dump.Report

  42. Whether or not the race turns around, it seems to me that we can call some meta-winners and losers:

    Winners:
    * Poll skeptics
    * Nate Silver’s fat tails
    * Bill Mitchell

    Losers:
    * Sam Wang
    * Campaign consultants

    EDIT: Scott Adams, of course, is a winnerReport

            1. So here’s how I’m counting it right now (7:49 p.m. Pacific time):

              Clinton has or will very likely have: CA, CO, CT, CD, DE, IL, HI, MA, MD, ME+ME1, MN, NJ, NM, NY, OR, PA, RI, VA, VT, WA. 242 votes.

              Trump has or will very likely have: AL, AR, AK, FL, GA, IA, ID, IN, KS, KY, LA, ME-1, MS, MO, MT, ND, NE, OH, OK, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY. 249 votes.

              Which leaves AX, MI, NC, NH, NV, and WI. 62 votes left. But pro-Trump early numbers at this moment in all of them. I’m particularly discouraged by Wisconsin, which has basically counted all of the votes from Milwaukee and Madison and Trump is still up by 3%: excepting some rural blue areas to the southeast, pretty much all of upstate Wisconsin is Republican territory.Report

              3. All hail President Trump.

                With Pence as his VP and complete control of Congress, I’m sure this will go well.

                By the way, I’m not even gonna look at my 401k anytime soon. The markets appear to be committing suicide.Report

              10. Yeah, if he wins it’ll be fascinating to see how the numbers shake out. Higher turnout from his peeps or lower turnout from the Dems.

                Also the Senate is basically set for GOP control. So it’s a disappointing night for team blue however the Presidency turns out.Report

              11. I know Florida saw Clinton gain 200k voters over 2012 Obama.

                Trump gained 700k over Romney.

                It looks like the “shy Trump voter” is real.

                Now it’s arguable whether Clinton hatred or Trump love dug up 700k new Republican voters, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they hated Obama just as much but didn’t bother to vote.Report

              13. Oh yeah. The D’s are going to have a super sized helping of sadness even if H. wins along with a real need for a hard look at the details of what happened.Report

              15. So far I have “Democrats did nothing wrong, it’s just that they didn’t understand how sexist, racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic the country truly is, deep down.”

                I suppose I could write a paragraph about each and pad it out a little.Report

              18. No, no, no. Stein doesn’t seem to have commanded enough votes in any state to have made a difference. Johnson voters, to the extent they drew from one of the two major candidates at all, were likelier to have drawn from Trump than from Clinton.Report

              20. I’d change that a bit:

                “Democrats did nothing wrong, it’s just that they didn’t understand how sexist, racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic the country truly is, deep down assumed that other folks who they viewed as wrong would inevitably lose.”Report

              22. Sure. This is just a blip in the road. Nothing to see. Move along.

                No, this is (or so I hope) a massive earthquake that shakesthe foundations of what the Democratic party is actually all about.

                Same for the GOP, but that, at this point, goes without saying.

                I have less faith in the Democratic party readjusting from this tectonic shift than the GOP. (Assuming Trump wins, that is, but really, the same applies either way.)Report

              23. Dems can say, “We underestimated the deplorables.”
                Dems can say, “We couldn’t appeal more to the “deplorables” than a man whose policies would be awful for them.”

                Those aren’t mutually exclusive. But skewing towards one will be much more productive than the other.Report

              26. I’ve just never really grasped how that line of reasoning works. It’s not like any party can appeal to every single voter. Certainly the R’s wrote of plenty of voters because they were “wrong.” It’s looking good for Trumpy which is going to suck hard but the various prescriptions for the D’s are all over the place. I’m not sure they will get it either but what concrete policy suggestions are there for them. I get people think they should have abandoned a major plank of their platform of decades ( Health care) but they made sense.Report

              28. I hear ya. I just remember Saul (D – San Francisco) writing a post detailing what a weak candidate Hillary is/was, and how shutting out competition in the primary did a disservice to both her (as a candidate) and the party in general.

                And here we are.Report

              29. @stillwater

                In the end, I don’t think that there was anyone who could beat HRC in the primaries. Maybe Warren but probably not. She had the deference of the party (unlike the GOP clown car.)

                Trump had his pulse on something that I wish was not there but is. There are a lot of white populist types still in the United States and they came out for Trump in ways that they did not come out for Romney. If the polls are correct, Trump won 700K more votes in Florida than Romney did and it looks like the upper midwest is going red.

                I’m sick to my stomach. Unlike North, I suspect there will be a backlash of anti-LBGT legislation after Trump appoints the 5th Supreme Court Justice. A lot of my friends who are immigrants, who are LGBT, and other minorities are in despair right now. I don’t blame them.Report

              30. Unlike North, I suspect there will be a backlash of anti-LBGT legislation after Trump appoints the 5th Supreme Court Justice.

                I think that’s overly pessimistic. We can’t be sure of how Justice Hulk Hogan will vote on those issues.

                Then again, maybe I’m being optimistic about it being Hulk Hogan.Report

              32. Do we honestly think RBG is going to last four more years?
                Let’s face it, the GOP played for all the marbles and they won em. Supreme court, Senate, the lot. It only cost them their principles and their soul. All that remains to be seen is if they can get the latter back and what exactly the former is going to be rewritten as.Report

              33. @north

                Did it cost them the principles and their soul? I think that Trump showed how impotent the small government conservatives are. Where is the Commentary and National Review set going to go from here? Where is Dreher going to go?Report

              35. Dreher has already made peace with Trump. All he wants is conservative justices who’ll keep the imaginary SJW’s who want to police his orthodox church away.

                And yes it cost them the lot of it. What exactly is left of the Reagan principles? Neocons are utterly out, economic libertarianism is out, the man is a living repudiation of social conservatism. All that’s left is paleoconservativism. Now maybe Trump will not give a fish and the existing GOP just gets to do what they want to do. The odds aren’t bad for that. But what will their voters think of that?Report

              36. Dreher may not like Trump, but he’s an archetypal Trumpist. He’ll come around.

                The others will probably write encomia to Paul Ryan while awkwardly skirting the identity of the man signing his bills.Report

              38. From your lips to God(ess?)’s ear. Ryan is far too capable and ideological to be Speaker.

                I’m turning in. Oh man, I did think of one YUGE winner tonight: PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
                Now there is gonna be one happy paleo.

                Oh and as one last grumble: I’m still perversely glad Trump won rather than any of the other GOP candidates. At least we’re not 100% certain what Trump’s gonna do, though I grant that includes a possibility of cataclysmic stupidity.Report

              40. Oh and as one last grumble: I’m still perversely glad Trump won rather than any of the other GOP candidates.

                The problem with that is I’m fairly certain that Trump will not make it to the next election, and we’ll have *Pence* in there.Report

              41. Eh, he bent the knee without losing the support of most Trump skeptical and outright #NeverTrump Republicans. He’ll be a loyal foot soldier, and even if he gets pushed out, the movement cons will back his successor.Report

              42. Ryan was already on shaky ground even given a Trump loss. Now? Not only do I think he might be displaced, if I’m advising Trump I’m probably telling him that needs to happen. It’s up to congress to push back, and I don’t think they will.Report

              43. She’s been illin’ that’s for sure. But, hey, she’s already made clear that she’s going to go out feet first. We simply don’t know when that’ll happen. She’s kind of a hero of mine so as long as she wants it, and she can actually do the job, there we go.Report

              45. @stillwater

                Despite performing well with the under-30 crowd, I suspect Bernie Sanders would be doing just as well or worse than HRC this election eve because hi is still a self described democratic Jewish socialist from Vermont by way of Brooklyn. I can only think of the ways that he could have been vilified and despite what you and Conroy said, I think Trump has been flirting and later embraced old school anti-Semitism through out the campaign.Report

              46. So much the worse for the Democratic party, that he was our second best option.

                On the other hand, his Jewishness (which isn’t selfdescribed, btw) woulda been an issue. Not necessarily by Trump (Idon’t think) but by his surrogates and supporters. That part woulda been ugly.

                On the third hand, Bernie might – MIGHT – have motivated Dems to actually show up to the polls. Sadly, we all knew that Hillary would do no such thing.

                On the fourth hand, I think you were absolutely correct way back when (what was that, a year and a half ago?) when you wrote that post about the problems inherent in anointing Hillary without a competitive primary. Sadly, we knew then that what we’re experiencing tonight was not only on the table, but served as the entre*.

                *OK, not necessarily the entre, but a superdelicious side dish.Report

              47. @stillwater

                Democrats did turn out. HRC received more votes in Florida than Obama did in 2012. She might even narrowly win the popular vote.

                The problem is that Trump got far right social cons to come out in ways that Romney did not.Report

              48. Here is a lesson I learned over the last year or so:

                Does your explanation for a phenomenon give you endorphins?

                If the answer is “yes”, then you are lying to yourself and you are very probably wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

                Find an explanation that is endorphin independent. That one at least has a shot at being right.Report

              52. Hillary most assuredly had her flaws and Trump has clearly tapped into a bigger vein than most people, myself included, gave him credit for.

                If he wins big losers:
                -Centrist Liberals
                -Libertarians (partially- on FP he’s libertarianish sometimes but he basically defenestrates the most libertarian part of the GOP)
                -The voter turnout industry (big big time, like yuge)
                -Me (though I suspect Trump won’t take a run at SSM so there’s that).
                -The Clintons (natch)

                Oh, though an interesting winner: Speaker Ryan- He’ll most likely get to do whatever he wants legislative wise. Oh and Mcconnel too, that stunt with the Supreme court will look very sage.Report

              55. When it comes to weed, I’m hoping that he sees an opportunity for Hoi Polloi to love him even more as he pushes for bread/circuses to be handed out to the American people.

                I imagine that his indifference to gay marriage will be monumental… which means that sheer inertia will keep it where it is. (Though I also appreciate that that is easy for me to say… but he doesn’t give a shit about the gay thing. It radiates off of him that he doesn’t give a shit about the gay thing.)

                When it comes the other hot button of abortion, I don’t see him playing around with that either. (Though, again, easy for me to say.)

                Cosmotarians, it seems to me, have reason to hope… well, except when it comes to immigration.

                Also the full transition to “Empire”, thing.Report

              56. Trump isn’t going to be a culture warrior on weed. I can’t even imagine. Worst case scenario is he’s going to ignore it and it’s entirely possible if it wins big along with him then he may embrace it.

                Agreed on SSM.Report

              62. My belief these last few years is that Republicans didn’t actually *CARE* about those things but used them as fundraiser fodder.

                Is the argument that Republicans actually care about those things?

                I submit: meh. Not really.Report

              63. Some care a lot and they feel, correctly it seems, emboldened. Pols often do try to push the agenda their voters want especially the big symbolic ones. So if are socially liberal this may not be a good thing.

                I know the line about all D’s talk about is R’s are racist etc etc. I agree people use the R word to often. But do you hear the palpable fear of all the various minorities? Do you think they don’t know what they should be afraid of?Report

              66. Without a popular vote win it’s difficult to claim a mandate from the election.

                But remember 2001. George W. Bush really didn’t have a mandate to claim in January either. He claimed it in September, and used the ever-loving crap out of it.

                Shit is going to happen. Here’s hoping President Trump has good advisors nearby when it does.Report

              67. That’s a rhetorical question, right?

                The better question is how do Republicans, with their newfound majority and nearly-untrammeled control of the government, find a way to shunt them off to the “noisy but harmless” corner of the room. My prediction, and fear, is that they won’t have the guts to do anything meaningful in that respect because they are well aware that 2016 was a razor-thin vote and care about winning more than the moral evaluation of the members of their coalition.Report

              69. @burt-likko

                Even if 2016 was razor thin, it was razor thin with Trump proving there was enough rable out there to win an election and peel away some key blue states.Report

              70. I imagine the media has reason to fear as well. Oooh! And the IRS! We can probably kick cleaning house at the FBI down the road a ways too!

                But I was talking about weed, gay marriage, and abortion with regards to the cosmotarians.Report

              71. The media will be fine. I was talking about the fear POC feel. Have you been reading Elizabeth’s tweets and Daniel’s. They seem to be somewhat ruffled and concerned. Of course they are cosmotarians so ….

                But weed is doing well. Do you think any prison reform is on the horizon now with a strong Justice and Vengeance guy liek Trumpy. Will some decidedly none elite working class folks be losing health care is some way?Report

              76. Well sure Trumps victory has many fathers. Imagine if Comey hadn’t put out his email? Imagine if Hillary was more likable. Imagine if every pollster internal and external in the country hadn’t been blindsided by the Midwest… I think I’m gonna go ta bed.Report

              79. greg,
                Yes, when fucking caucasian college students insist on being referred to as people of color, and are scared to go out of their dorm, I think they DON’T KNOW a damn thing.
                (See my local paper for details.)Report

              80. Welp, since the poll errors seem to be correlate nicely with the share of white, non-college voters…..

                There’s two reasons they could have been driven to the polls in such high numbers: They really like what Trump is selling, or really hate Clinton.

                I could go either way, really.

                On the other hand, they still had to actually vote FOR Trump, so….

                Anyways, I freely admit being wrong. I didn’t think there were enough white, non-college voters to swing an election. At least, not enough that would actually vote.

                On the bright side, any chance I had of taking an evangelical seriously just evaporated.

                And on a personal note: Boy, my brother better be done with his cancer treatment by January, because they’re about to take his healthcare out back and shoot it.Report

              81. It’d take them a little while to enact it. The GOP will actually have to decide if it’s going to just repeal it and regress to pre-ACA status; they’d have to throw out the filibuster; legislation can move slow so say June-December 2017?Report

              82. North,
                GOP will not just repeal Obamacare. That would completely bankrupt all insurance companies currently in the markets. 16% of our GDP is health care.

                The insurance companies will show up with guns to prevent this from happening (okay, maybe not literally guns. piles of cash).Report

              83. Stillwater,
                I’m hopeful, actually, that the left is going to purge itself of the Astroturf and identity politics.
                The left in this country used to be really fucking awesome (say, four years ago). Did you see what a fun time Acorn was doing??Report

        2. The mythical Midwestern breakthrough that some Republicans were passing around at least as early as 2012 (and I think had some Bush II era predecessors?) seems like it may be happening. State errors are correlated.Report

        3. I’m not sure we shouldn’t be blaming you for this turn of events, North — did your wish for Trump to be the GOP candidate come true thanks to a monkey’s paw?Report

            1. Setting aside the small possibility the man will actually start a devastating war out of pique or do some other titanically terrible thing I still dunno if I wouldn’t rather him win than any other of the GOP clowns. He’s certainly going to wreck the GOP or perhaps turn it into something fundamentally new. And if HRC loses tonight the Clintons will be done, most likely forever. Not that they were likely to go on past a HRC presidency anyhow.Report

    1. Jesus, it’s come to that. It really has. I had no illusions about Hillary’s ability to close, but I didn’t think it’d be this bad. I mean, this ^%$#@#$ @#@$%$# ^%@#$# is absolutely %$#@#$% *!@#%$# unbelievable.Report

          1. Ooops. Switch “Obama” for “president Trump” up there and my comment makes sense. Sorry, I got confused about the blurring distinction between current reality and the next one.Report

      1. I’m scoring off of vaguely competitive states, where it’s a blowout presaged by early ugliness. If we’re going with the full map, App State is better, given the combination of overestimating the favorite and underestimating the underdog, though still perhaps too close and dramatic.Report

  46. I’m struggling with the math here. How did Broward County go from 25% returns to 95% returns and maintain a strong Clinton edge while the Florida margin got wider?Report

  50. Johnson over Feingold is the real shock for me, the only bigger (but still theoretically plausible) upset would have been Kirk over Duckworth.Report

  53. I am in Reno and depressed. Looks like the networks are giving HRC a narrow electoral college lead. Lots of anxious democrats here.

    Lots of my friends are feeling fear and anxiety right now.

    The GOP is changed forever no matter what happens. Things are going to go badly for a lot of people I care about if Trump wins. Maybe myself. I have dread.Report

      2. I was going to post this morning that I saw a really sharp break in my tribe (orthodox Catholics) who had been firmly on the sideline towards going out and voting.

        Some of that was people “coming home” but only about 33%… the rest was strong motivation to vote for a terrible candidate to prevent a horrible candidate.

        Hillary was never going to win our votes, but she failed to do anything to keep that vote at home. I chalked it up as a blip of small sample sized data and decided not to say anything… now maybe I wonder if this happened in a lot of places.Report

        2. My precinct had more than 50% extra turnout.
          This is a “Bernie Sanders votes Republican” precinct. (Aka white liberals who don’t mind expressing themselves if they think the Democrat is truly awful — or conservative).Report

  55. Pence may have bet his entire political life savings on green on the roullette wheel, and it will wind up with ball hitting double zero.

    And Reince may have double parlayed a craps yo bet.Report

      1. It slipped my mind until just now that Christie was named the chair of the Trump administration transition, making him de facto the most powerful person in America right now. (as reports have outright said that Trump has had no interest in that activity)Report

        2. That’s actually a pretty big relief to me. Agree or disagree with his politics and personality, he’s probably one of the most capable Trump associates when it comes to managing government operations.

          I had assumed it would be one of his close personal friends. The type of person he liked to put in place after firing competent, experienced casino managers.Report

        1. I never understood why anyone expected anything different. Was there ever really a chance that Trump was going to get a lower percentage of the black vote than McCain and Romney? Black people came out to support Obama. You just don’t get the same kind of numbers when people are voting against someone. HRC has a lot of support among the black political class, but that’s because the black political class is intertwined with the Democratic Party.Report

              2. The Powers that Be pulled harder to get Remain.
                This time they… mostly… didn’t fuck with shit.
                (The theory being that there were too many Trump voters, and the nation might be ungovernable if he didn’t win).Report

  58. The interesting thing is that this currently seems to be an Electoral College phenomenon; Clinton should win the popular vote by a percent or so.Report

        1. I never read it the first time.

          I’m on record (regarding 2000) that pointing to the national popular vote in an electoral college system isn’t very useful. It’s like saying that a football team who got outscored should be declared the winner because they racked up more yards: the point of the game was to score points, not rack up yards; racking up yards is just a good way to score more points but not a guarantee.

          But it seems worth considering how well a system is working when we have a majority of voters for most of 30 years preferring one party and yet that is in no way reflected by how our federal government has been led.

          Which is what is. Complaining is sour grapes. So I won’t complain. But I will continue to wonder if a better system might be out there.Report

        2. One thing I noticed from John King’s maps is that urban centers and corridors vote overwhelmingly Dem, and that everybody else (what the rednecks call “ruralia”) vote overwhelmingly R. Which means to me that the Big Sort isn’t geographically or economically based, but primarily – like fundamentally – urban/rural.

          Add: which means to me that people aren’t sorting, but rather, that where you live increasingly determines your ideological views of gummint. So, sorta like anti-sort sorting.Report

  59. Does anyone know why the NYT seems to think Pennsylvania will go Trump?

    Clinton is ahead by 40,000 and Allegheny Country, at 25%, probably has a 100,000 more votes for her, and i’m having trouble figuring out where any more Trump votes could come from.

    The only counties that aren’t way up there in reporting percentages are Bucks (Which is tied, so probably won’t give anyone anything.) and a bunch of really tiny ones…and Lebanon and Lawrence which have none in at all. But those two counties, put *together*, have a population of 250,000, which means they can’t possibly have a voting population of more than 80,000.

    So I’m totally baffled as to why they are saying ‘Trump’.Report

    1. 538 says “Clinton needs to win Pennsylvania. The problem is that her lead has dropped to about 7,000 with plenty of votes left to be counted in Republican areas. Meanwhile, the city of Philadelphia has had almost all of its votes counted.”Report

        2. Allegheny was mega, mega slow to come in (normally a much faster count). I think someone was recounting a couple of times to make sure they didn’t miss some Democratic votes.

          Pittsburgh Metro threw the state Republican.Report

        1. And that is where I’m confused. I’m not crying foul but I’m not seeing how the numbers add up. Maybe there was a lag between updating vote totals and precincts reporting?Report

    3. @davidtc

      The story of this election is going to be that Clinton underperformed among minorities (which seems to be true) and Trump outperformed Romney among whites without a college degree.

      On the one hand, Clinton received more votes in Florida than Obama did in 2012. On the other hand, Trump won 400K more votes than Romney did in 2012.Report

  60. No matter what happens, it’s fair to say that this ought to lead to a bit of epistemic humility for partisans on both sides of the aisle. I don’t think that’s going to happen though.

    If I wrote science fiction, I’d be working on a book about the not-too-distant future where virtual reality and other technology allows people to literally live in their own world. So, if you’re a Clinton supporter, you go to bed and wake up in a world where Clinton won and assumes the Presidency. There is not insignificant chance that this is the future towards which we are heading.Report

    1. I would like to call for an understanding that dissent is an important part of our political process.

      I would also like to point out that the presidency has become too powerful and needs to have its powers curtailed.Report

      1. He might be right. We’d need to ascertain what their second choice was, in the hypothetical scenario. Unfortunately, hypothetical scenario exit polls were cut from cash-starved news outlets.

        Actually, the real exit polls were hypothetical, it turned out.Report

        1. The argument that third party voters swing a state from column A to column B is based on the faith-based notion that we can know how those voters would have voted given only two choices.

          We might have faith that a Johnson voter might have preferred Trump to Clinton in a forced-choice situation. But the fact is, a Johnson voter preferred Johnson to all other available alternatives and that’s all we can really know about that voter.

          Even in a runoff, they would have a third choice: not voting at all. Is it so hard to call “reasonable” the faith that a third-party voter would absent in a forced-choice situation?Report

          1. The argument isn’t that Johnson supporters would have preferred Hillary but for Johnson, but that they would have preferred Trump and Trump lost the votes.

            I’m 2000, polls showed that 60% of Naderites supported Gore, 10% Bush, and the rest wouldn’t have voted. I think that tells us what we’d need to know there.

            A similar poll could shed some light on 2016 in a hypothetical Clinton comeback.Report

    2. I voted for Gary Johnson!

      With that said, I’d say “no, not really” because the margin between R and D in:

      Michigan
      Florida
      Pennsylvania
      Wisconsin

      Is smaller than the vote for “other”.

      It’s arguable that Gary Johnson gave those states to Trump rather than that he’ll have given, what? Arizona? Alaska? To HRC?Report

  63. OK, it’s over. And I just wanna say, for the record, that I, personally, won’t accept any nonsense about how Comey turned this election. That only happens – could only happen – if the Candidate has so much baggage that the implication actually sticks. If she wanted to run the country, she oughta been cleaner or been a better politician. Can’t be bad at both.

    Right now, tho, I gotta get my head around four years of Trump as leader of the free world. Which is a bit of a mindfuck right before bedtime.Report

    1. I blame Jon Stewart. If he hadn’t retired right before primary season, he could have pilloried Trump on a national stage night after night and we might have completely avoided this whole thing.Report

    2. I think it’s important that progressives acknowledge that in order to regroup. They fell behind a very compromised candidate and all the identity politics and appeals to establishment credentials weren’t enough, even when the opponent was a demagogue and buffoon. Loss of those upper Midwest states and Pennsylvania speaks volumes.Report

      1. American pundits have gotten into the bad habit of treating the white working class as a monolith because that’s what they have exit polls on, but its one thing to do poorly with Dixie white working class and quite another to do poorly with the ones from the Great Lakes states.

        Obama by contrast to H. Clinton, seemed to do alright with the Great Lakes whites, his bad numbers tended to be more with whites from “red America”Report

      1. Damon,
        if palin had taken office, I’d probably have moved to Canada.
        Unlike most people who say shit like this, I actually have decent reason to believe that canada would let me in (even if Palin wanted me kept in the USofA).Report

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