The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: Global Pandemic Edition
In 2011, we made predictions about 2012 and then, in 2012, enjoyed reading those predictions.
Back in 2015, we made predictions about the coming nominations and then, in 2016, had a real hootenanny looking back again.
In 2018, we made predictions about what would happen in the mid-terms.
And, yes, in 2019, we made predictions about who the Democratic nominees would be.
And, just a few months ago, we made predictions about the election tomorrow.
Well, the election is tomorrow. There’s a lot of stuff we knew in August that we no longer know. There’s stuff we now know that we didn’t know in August.
We’ve got record turnout, they say. We’ve got huge numbers of people who have never voted before who have been inspired by the last 4 years to get off their duffs and go vote!
The only thing left to do is look at the lay of the land and place your marker.
Who wins the electoral vote? (If you want to post your map, you can go here and start clicking until the map matches your idea of what’ll happen.)
Who wins the popular vote?
Last time around, the 3rd Parties made a splash by getting more than 4.5% of the vote (combined)… are they going to show up again?
Will the loser gracefully concede or are we going to stick around for a while? (If we’re going to stick around for a while, how long? December? January? APRIL?!?!?!?)
Remember: you can’t mock someone else as being worse than Hitler for how they think the election will turn out without making your prediction first!
(Featured image is The Crystal Ball by John William Waterhouse. Picture is in the public domain.)
Here’s the main problem I have: I don’t know how people who have never voted before are going to be inspired to vote.
I’m not talking about the 19 year old who *FINALLY* gets to vote in her first election! Hurray! She’s going to vote for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker (“if I’m going to vote for an old white guy and a woman of color, it’s going to be one I respect!”, she said to herself).
I’m talking about the guy or gal in his or her 50’s who never got inspired to vote before. They’ve had opportunities to vote for… Reagan/Mondale but weren’t inspired. Bush/Dukakis but weren’t inspired. Clinton/Bush but weren’t inspired. Clinton/Dole but weren’t inspired. Bush/Gore but weren’t inspired. Bush/Kerry but weren’t inspired. Obama/McCain but weren’t inspired. Obama/Romney but weren’t inspired. Trump/Clinton but weren’t inspired.
Now they’re inspired.
What inspired them? Trump, presumably. Is it because they looked at the last year and the pandemic and said “I can’t let this madman stay in office!”? Is it because they looked at the last year and the mostly peaceful protests and said “I can’t allow these mostly peaceful protestors to win! Not that they have a preference because they’re protesting police brutality which is a bipartisan thing to oppose! And I support the police but I just think that they need to be reformed! A little! Not a lot! Unions are important!”
I mean, I can easily imagine someone who has gone to Subway a million times going in and ordering a sandwich based on what they ordered the last 10 times or so. I feel like a Spicy Italian. I feel like a Veggie Delight. I feel like a Tuna Fish! He’s Henry, Clay Henry!
But someone who has never, ever eaten at Subway before… what are they going to order?
Nope. No idea.Report
Has anyone been making the distinction between new / previously unregistered voters, and voters who had been registered and maybe voted in the past but are updating their registrations to their new address, or voting for the first time in 20 years?Report
I don’t know, but if you look at reported voter turnout so far, it’s significantly higher and folks are projecting once-in-a-century turnout.
I don’t know that you can get once-in-a-century turnout with new address voters.Report
Yeah, I’ll stick with my prediction from the previous thread that Biden will win a significant EC victory.
BUT, I’m epistemically prepared to say to myself, “huh, I guess I really underestimated how the influx of all these “new” voters were going to vote.” Which is to say, my read on people who willingly voted for Trump last time remains the same (98% renewal), and my read on how the folks who unwillingly voted for Trump seems to be breaking about how I expected (50% willing / 25% unwilling but yes / 25% staying home or 3rd party)… so a slight net loss for Trump (which would be enough to undo the EC – assuming the trend is more than local). But, I just don’t have a read on the influx of “new” voters. I think the bias is that all these voters are people fed-up with Trump (and maybe they are!), but I won’t be surprised if the raw vote counts show significant growth for Trump. I’ll be surprised if Trump wins a majority, but I won’t be surprised if Trump garners 10%-15% more votes than last time and depending on where those votes land… whelp… my hindsight will be 20/20.
* of course, they aren’t necessarily “new” voters… its just that when we have 30%-40% who regularly sit out elections, its hard to say what’s gonna happen when 10% – 20% decide to show up.Report
My old prediction was this:
Trump gets New Hampshire.
Biden gets Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Biden wins. Easy peasy.
He doesn’t need to change the game. He just needs to be not as historically awful as Hillary Clinton. That’s it! Just don’t be Hillary Clinton!
And you know what? He isn’t Hillary Clinton!
But the Mostly Peaceful Protests make me waver.
And the new voters make me waver.
But if you want a boring prediction it’s merely this: Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton. He rebuilds the blue wall.Report
You point to the Mostly Peaceful Protests, but I point to the COVID Surge, which is much more in people’s minds than “oh right, yeah maybe a few people carried it a little too far but can you blame them really I mean it is an important issue…”Report
The covid surge means two different things, though.
Does the covid surge mean “OH MY GOSH AMERICANS ARE DYING!”?
Or does the covid surge mean “YOUR RESTAURANTS ARE CLOSED YOUR THEATERS ARE CLOSED AND YOU HAVE A MASK MANDATE!”?Report
Yeah… this is it (I still think the Riots are local vs. National factors, esp compared to Covid).
Part of my unscientific analysis comes from my small Red area and my even smaller parish. Covid is *the* dividing line… about half are wearing masks, but about 80% would be gettable Trump (well, Republican) votes. The fact that half are wearing masks is a real divide.
Sociologically it’s interesting… the Mask/No-Mask doesn’t break by Theological, Liturgical, or Economic position… seems to be correlated directly to support for Trump (or the Republican Party). It makes me sad that this became part of political wars, but it did.Report
and yet, maybe the Mostly Peaceful Protests were more in people’s minds than I had thought.Report
I know that use of the phrase “Mostly Peaceful Protests” is meant as a dig at the George Floyd protests, but everyone should keep in mind that most of the violence in the protests was instigated by rightwing militia types.
Cops being shot? Rightwing guys.
Police station burned? Rightwing guys.
So yeah, lets never forget about all the violence that happened.
Lets revisit it over and over and remind ourselves of who it was that did it.Report
How many heard that though. Sure the press has covered it but not nearly as much as the riots got. You would think a press completely in the tank for a party might have put all that out on blast for weeks. But yeah it appears extremest RW’s caused some of the worst violence.Report
Flashing Back:
And, of course, this one:
Report
Wait, wait, wait. The police station burning was rightwingers?
Are we talking about the Minneapolis police station burning or a different one?Report
The alleged perps were RW’s “boogaloo boys”. Weird edgy violent RW’s.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/texas-boogaloo-boi-minneapolis-police-building-george-floydReport
Yes, they filed charges against a Texan Boogaloo Boi for infiltrating a protest and opening fire on the third Precinct in Minneapolis.
https://www.startribune.com/charges-boogaloo-bois-fired-on-mpls-precinct-shouted-justice-for-floyd/572843802/Report
Holy crap! I spent the last 6 months thinking that the mostly peaceful protesters finally hit the matador instead of the cape!
And it wasn’t them at all.
Huh.Report
The fact that this was reported, but disappeared without a trace points to my larger point here.
Immediately after the protests, we saw a whole spate of essays and op-ed pieces from the Cult Of Savvy about how terrible this violence was for the progressives.
And they all had some variation of positing how this was going to cause people who totally were for sure going to [regretfully and sorrowfully] switch their vote from Biden to Trump because we can’t tolerate such violence can we?
Now when it comes out that it was rightwingers, where are the pieces that interview some guy in a Ohio diner who is now going to [regretfully and sorrowfully] switch his vote from Trump to Biden because we can’t tolerate such violence can we?
There aren’t any.
Why?Report
Well, let me open by saying that I deplore violence in all its many forms.
That behind us, if there was an awful police killing and there was either:
A: A Large Store Looted
B: A Police Station Burned
I’d have to say that B actually addresses the topic of the horrible thing that happened.
Is it going to help? Not at all! But it’s staying on the topic in a way that going downtown and throwing a brick through a Starbucks does not.Report
Most (all?) of the violence was in Blue cities and the local DA’s wouldn’t prosecute any Antifa terrorists? I know Portland has been playing catch and release with them for months. And don’t forget, it was antifa who have killed people in Portland and Denver.
Even now, there are reports of cities across the US boarding up downtown and shopping districts. And, it hasn’t been right-wingers bailed out by celebrities lo these many months of BLMriots mostly peaceful actions.
But, hey! Maybe you are right and you have nothing to worry about tomorrow.Report
Did you hear about the cops shot in Oakland? A quick google or even bing will find a double butt load of links to articles claiming it was antifa. Weeeelllllll that is not the rest of the story. The dude in custody is another alleged RW boog boi
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/16/accused-killer-of-california-cops-was-associated-with-right-wing-boogaloo-movement/?sh=
Fwiw, none of this is new. It came out a while ago.Report
I predicted https://www.270towin.com/maps/NnJnA and I think that remains plausible and I’m sticking with it. I would so love a landslide victory though. Georgia or Texas and Florida and a nice 54+ Democratic Senate.
But I’m sticking with my head and sticking with my old map (I can’t bring myself to ever assume Dems will win Florida).
But Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina strike me as the states to watch around 8-9 pm CST tomorrow. They count fast and start counting early. Even if Biden doesn’t win the first 3 the margins may tell us a lot and if Florida or North Carolina fall into Biden’s hands then Trump is finished no matter how PA goes.Report
I can totally see that argument.
My problem is that the rallies have been… weird. Republicans show up for their rallies. They get abandoned in the cold for their President. Biden rallies are much less enthusiastic. (Someone pointed out that the Mostly Peaceful Protests were Biden rallies and if you look at them that way, Biden has a *LOT* of enthusiasm.)
But the energy is confusing. I can’t read it.Report
538 hasn’t let me down yet so I continue to go to it. I think they saved my life on 2016 because if I’d been reading Wang or similar fools I’d have been deeply tempted to jump out a window. But with 538 I knew that a Trump win was a possibility even if the overall certainty of the time soothed my anxiety about it. Then when Trump turned it out the soothing nostrums blew away but the math still made sense, the world hadn’t turned upside down.
This go round the math seems to be tilting so far against Trump that I think I’ll feel like the world has flipped upside down if he wins. Also I’ll be really worried about my own party if Trump pulls out a win- centrists and moderates really put all their chips down on Biden this time (God[ess?] he’s so old though…). I don’t know if we’ll be able to hold the line if Trump beats another centrist candidate. So that makes me feel more apprehensive as well.Report
That’s probably the map I would pick. The follow-on question for the future that I think will be interesting is, “Which of the five states that flipped represent a change that will show up in future elections as well?” My belief is that AZ is part of the American West’s Democratic trend that’s been going on for 30 years. MI and WI, I think, are temporary deviations from the corresponding Midwestern Republican trend. FL and PA I don’t have an opinion about.Report
No exotic prediction. Biden gets around 350 electoral and 8+ % in the popular. Pretty landslidey. 10% more for Biden in the pop vote wouldn’t’ surprise me. He doesn’t win Tx but it’s close.
Trump/R threats of deploying lawyers DOES NOT occur. I’m actually on the fence about this. Trump bs about sending in lawyers at the end of the night tomorrow to stop counting is so classic trump: stupid, loudmouth, all for getting applause but so far from reality it has no chance. They may try some other shenanigans though.
Trump does not declare victory though he might try to hedge it.
D’s at 51 senators with large pick ups down ballot.
There will be Trump supporter violence. There will be dozens of trump “poll watchers” causing trouble and sharing clueless vids to twitter. Mostly minor threats and thugishness.Report
Another thing that has me wondering.
Third parties got 4.5% last time. It strikes me as *EXCEPTIONALLY* unlikely that they’ll get that this time. I don’t think that the 3rd Party vote will break 3% this time. So that means that 1.5% gets redistributed. Where does it go?
Michigan: Gary Johnson got 3.59%. Jill Stein got 1.07%.
Wisconsin: Gary Johnson got 3.58%. Jill Stein got 1.04%.
Pennsylvania: Gary Johnson got 2.38%. Jill Stein got 0.81%. (Huh! What the heck happened in PA?)
My guess is that Libertarians won’t get *HALF* those votes this time around. Green… Yeah, green will get around 90% of that, maybe. Bless ’em.
And the Libertarians were polling in the high single digits last time.
This time… can you name the Libertarian Candidate off the top of your head? (Can you name the Green?)
In years past, the 3rd parties always got some novelty coverage (and Johnson/Weld were actual names who had actual accomplishments so that helped too).
But this time? Nothing. And I’m someone who follows this sort of thing.
How is *THAT* going to shake out?Report
I have libertarian buddies on Facebook so I know about Jojo Jorgenson from them and their pithy memes.
I’m assuming that third parties are gonna get really short shrift this time around- neither side feels very much like they have the luxury of third party votes.Report
Which brings us to a much nicer way of phrasing what Saul said:
To what extent are the Libertarian voters sympathetic to what Trump is going for and what he represents versus how sympathetic are they to Biden and what Biden represents?
Which status quo will they prefer? The new one or the promise of the old one?Report
Ehhh… I think the libertarians who vote libertarian now? They’re libertarian and they’ll keep going libertarian.
I can’t even begin to guess what the breakdown of 2016’s libertarian supporters will be. On the one hand one could think they’d default to Trump. On the other hand the Republitarians voted for Trump in 2016 already.Report
All libertarian votes are protest votes but not all protest voters are libertarians.Report
The thing is, a lot of Gary Johnson voters were never Trump people who couldn’t vote for the woman they believed conspiracy theories about for 20+ years.
I forget the specific numbers, but there was polling on this, and the 3rd party vote from 2016 is going something like 50% Biden, 25% Trump, 25% Third Party again.Report
I can believe that, and also that members of each of the big parties were both disgusted in 2016.Report
IMO this is an especially good time to vote Libertarian. Being registered in a safe Democratic state, my vote definitely won’t flip the state either way. With Trump being…Trump, and with Biden going full FDR (actually, worse; even FDR campaigned on cutting spending), this is the most Alien vs. Predator election of my adult life. It’s never been a better time to give one of my middle fingers to each side.
Why vote for the lesser of two evils when you can vote for the least of three?
But you may be right that I’m unusual in thinking about it this way.Report
Given that Jo Jorgenson has proven surprisingly and inexplicably awful on judges, might I suggest the American Solidarity Party?Report
I looked into their platform when I read that post, and in many ways it strikes me as combining many of the worst aspects of the Republican and Democratic platforms. It’s not quite the polar opposite of libertarianism, but I don’t see a single thing here that would make them preferable to the LP.
I actually don’t know that much about the specifics of Jorgenson’s policies. Since she’s definitely not going to win, it doesn’t really matter—the sole function of a vote for the Libertarian Party, IMO, is to signal to Democrats and Republicans that there are votes up for grabs if they move in a libertarian direction. I definitely do not want to encourage them to move in a Christian Democratic direction.Report
Jo Jorgensen is the Libertarian candidate. And most of the Libertarians I know (who are not of the Niskanian variety) are very disgusted by her support for BLM and moving to Trump for that alone. Though she did backtrack on this.
I kind of like her myself, but as a libertarian, Trump’s actions re CRT is much more important to me.Report
SOLIDARI… ok, maybe not. But hey, at least my candidate personally thanked me on Twitter. I told my family that it will be cool to see our votes individually tabulated in Virginia as the count goes from 4 votes to 9 votes.
In years past I would assume the Libertarian vote would follow the Liberal Social issues into supporting the Dems if someone like Trump were on the ballot. But, from what I’m reading, I’m not getting that vibe at all. I am not a libertarian expert, but the vibe I’m getting from that faction is that the Left is the bigger threat to liberty. But on the contrarian hand, I’m not sure that we won’t see an increase in third party voting. So… my prediction is that we see the same (or nearly the same) levels of third party votes. But if I’m wrong, the break will be mostly for Trump.Report
I think the left is the bigger threat to liberty long-term, but that Trump is the bigger problem short term. One reason to prefer Biden over Trump is to punish Republicans for nominating Trump and reward Democrats for nominating Biden instead of one of the more left-wing candidates.Report
Biden is leading Trump in 2020 polls. But expect Election Day to be a repeat of 2016.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/amp/ncna1245282
Interesting how things like this are coming in at the zero hour.Report
I have mentioned before that I follow a bunch of people who look at the election and see Trump easily waltzing to a second term.
I also happen to hang with a number of people who look at the election and see Biden winning in a Reaganesque landslide.
They are all intelligent people.
But some of them are either lying to themselves or completely oblivious to something that the other side sees quite clearly.Report
Honestly? I see both outcomes as plausible.
One of the very real problems in US society today is we have killed all semblance of a singular point of view on these things. Whatever the reason for that each person thinks is the reason for this is immaterial. The fact is we are in a hole, information wise.Report
538 had an interesting article:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but-the-polls-would-have-to-be-off-by-way-more-than-in-2016/
They put a Trump victory within the zone of plausability. Which feels right. They peg his odds around 10%. Not impossible. But not likely.
Biden will probably win. But nothing is guaranteed.
For the people who predict Trump waltzing to victory, I wonder what they’re basing that on.Report
As far as I can tell: the fundamentals (which, until the pandemic, were pretty strong), they argue that polling never explained why it got 2016 wrong in the way it did (even though most polls were within the margin of error, the overwhelming majority were within the margin of error in the same direction… a failure to address why this happened tells them that it’s going to happen again and they argue that the reasons that it happened have gotten worse, not better, since 2016), and they argue for a Shy Trump Voter Effect that has increased since 2016.
Additionally, there are some numbers from minority communities that are confusing for a lot of progressive people and the progressive peoples’ confusion feeds their certainty.Report
Somewhere on 538 (maybe that link, maybe another) they dug into what the polls got wrong and how they adjusted their model based on that. Impossible to know if they’ll be more right this time (I just changed from the word “improved” to “adjusted” up there) until after the fact, but at least some pollsters and poll aggregators are doing it differently this time, though that is far from obvious if you just read the headlines.
I come back to a sports analogy: The Pats won the Super Bowl after trailing 28-3. Some of that was because of game mismanagement by the Falcons and some of that was because 28-3 wasn’t an accurate reflection of the relative strengths of the two teams. But it also took the Pats playing near flawlessly, the Falcons making boneheaded mistakes, luck/randomness, and quirky rules to win.
Does being down 28-3 mean you’re toast? Obviously not. But you’d rather be up 28-3 than down 28-3. And you’d be silly to say, “We got ‘em right where we want them!” when trailing by 25 points. Maybe you know it isn’t as bad as it seems, but it sure as heck ain’t good.Report
If I am playing football, I want to start every game at halftime with at 28-3.
But I don’t want the polls to tell me that I’m at 28-3 when I’m, really, at 21-17.Report
Sure, but that isn’t what the polls are doing. If the polls told you 28-3 when it was really 21-17, that would mean the polls are lying. The polls don’t lie. They reflect what they measure.
The scoreboard measures the points scored by both teams. But that hardly tells the entire story of the game.
A team could be up 28-3 because they are dominating in all facets of the game. Or they could be up 28-3 because enough breaks went their way. Advanced analytics look beyond the score and figure out what else is happening.
So, the polls are accurate insofar as when they say X% of people prefer Trump, that X% of the people they spoke with said they preferred Trump. However, going beyond the scoreboard, we need to understand how accurately does that reflect what is happening on the ground.
So the score is 28-3 (or whatever it is). That simply is. The question is, does that reflect how the game is going? Unfortunately, unlike with sports, we may not know until after the election is over.Report
The argument isn’t that the polls were horrifically wrong. They were pretty close! Most of them were within the margin of error! (And you can’t expect all of them to be within the margin of error either. It’s reasonable to expect somewhere between 5-10% to be outside of the margin of error!)
The question is how many of the polls, given Trump’s victory, do you think should have had Trump winning? Let’s say the last week of polling had 10 polls.
How many?
Here’s RCP’s final tally of polls for the last week before the election in 2016Report
If all the polls are wrong in the same or same-ish way, there is some sort of structural bias writ large. There seemed to be last time.
538 writes:
“ To some extent, that’s on purpose. If pollsters knew what the source of a polling error might be, they’d presumably try to fix it. Many pollsters are weighting by education now, something many didn’t do in 2016, and that was a big source of error that year. Another big source of error in 2016 was the large number of undecided voters, who broke toward Trump in the Midwest. To some extent, that one isn’t on the pollsters, since polls aren’t really supposed to try to predict the vote of people who say they’re undecided. Nonetheless, that’s much less of an issue this year, because there are far fewer undecided voters.”
From: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/im-here-to-remind-you-that-trump-can-still-win/
We’ll see.Report
If there are so few undecided voters, how are we seeing massive swings in the polls in the last two or three days?
And does anyone actually believe that after four years of constant media bombardment, people are suddenly switching sides now?
What is more likely is that the polls were purposefully skewed, and now the pollsters are trying to walk back the nonsense so they don’t have quite so much egg on their faces tomorrow. As one prominent pollster says, if they blow this one, there really won’t be much of a polling industry left.Report
I am going by memory here, but 538 doesn’t do its own polling, correct?
Which means, if I am right on that, we are still talking GIGO. GIGO filtered through Nates lenses, but still.Report
Here’s 538 from a week ago:
Report
And to that point, here is a nice graph showing Trump rising and Biden falling over the last few days/weeks.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/trump-vs-biden-top-battleground-states/Report
Correct, 538 aggregates and analyzes. What exactly does GIGO mean?Report
Garbage In -> Garbage OutReport
It’s a very old a common computer term. If you feed garbage data into your fancy model (written in FORTRAN), you get garbage back out. It was the days when people were impressed because some prediction came out of “a computer”, and computers were all-knowing and infallible.Report
I think Biden has a clear but far from decisive lead after tomorrow. I think the final vote tally shows a pretty big win for him, both in terms of the popular and electoral college. I think Trump huffs and puffs about the illegitimacy of the election, but when it becomes clear that it is a lost cause, the GOP largely abandons him and pivots towards how they are going to handle the Biden presidency and what the Congressional make-up looks like.
I think there will be problems with voting. But there always are. Some of these problems will be the usual type and may be blown out of proportion, sometimes innocently and sometimes maliciously. I think some folks will seek to create problems.
I think there will be more talk of post-election problems than actual post-election problems.
Trump will eventually fade to the background, his memory and power largely kept alive by the extremes of both sides… his devout supporters who continue to lionize him and his most ardent opponents who maintain him as a bogeyman. I think most conservatives and GOP folks will act as if he never happened, happy to take the wins he created for them (like SCOTUS) and quickly distancing themselves from all the ugliness.
I won’t make a firm prediction on the vote totals only because I don’t have time to go state by state, but I think the final result is a pretty decisive Biden victory.
I think the Dems take the Senate and the House.
I don’t know what actually happens when they take power. I don’t know what a Biden presidency will look like.Report
Let’s look at some data. From North Carolina:
Total Voted by Party Registration
Party Count Percent
Democrats 1,701,366 37.4
Republicans 1,443,822 31.7
Minor 24,603 0.5
No Party Affiliation 1,381,172 30.3
TOTAL 4,550,963 100.0
Almost 1.4 Million unaffiliated voters. How they break will be the key to the EC and Senate races there, though polling has both Trump and Thom Tillis in trouble. Also note that this early voting total exceed the 2016 voting total – Voted in 2016 General 3,256,069.
Texas has 9,719,101early votes. That exceed the total 2016 voting totals, which were 8,969,226.
Wisconsin has 1,886,533 early votes. This doesn’t exceed the final 2016 totals of 2,976,150 but its still impressive.
My summary of the data – 538 is probably spot on in their probabilities. I’m looking for Biden to hit 290-305 EC votes with around +7% of the popular vote. Democrats hold the House and pick up a net 5 seats in the Senate (as Alabama is probably going back to R territory).Report
I don’t know if this is an acceptable kind of prediction…
Regular readers know my usual geographic partition of the states: the 13-state West, the 12-state-plus-DC Northeast urban corridor, and the 25-state Rest. (The population split is about 55% for the Rest, 45% for the West plus urban corridor.) The West and the urban corridor are heavily Dem, the Rest heavily Republican. In 2018 I scored things based on +1 for gaining any of a governor’s office, a Congressional seat, or a state legislative chamber. While the Dems made gains in all three regions, just over two-thirds of their gains came where they are already dominant: the West and the urban corridor. I predict a repeat of that in 2020: the Dems will make gains in all three regions, but two-thirds of the gains will be in the West and the urban corridor.Report
1. I don’t get the need to be “inspired” by politicians. Politics and policy are about improving the lives of as many people as possible and the protection and expansion of civil rights for minorities. I don’t really care if the person who does this is the most boring person in the world who can only speak in a monotone. There is a lot of slow-boring of hard wood in politics and people seem to get upset at the very fact that almost all politics (especially left politics) is based on coalition and coalitions require compromise.
2. Most people seem to make predictions that are indicative of their priors and prejudices and partisan leans. The polling for Biden right now is much, much better than it was for HRC at the same point in 2016. Plus any attempt to Comey letter Biden has fallen flat on its face but Trump is trying to actively ratfuck as much as possible and get the courts to save him. Even though the Texas Supreme Court denied the petition to throw out 127K votes in Harris County. The federal court is also an emergency hearing on it and they got the luck of the draw and an archly imported draw.
3. For the sake of predictions, I predict Biden gets the popular vote in a landslid and retakes Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. He also gets Arizona. Texas is close but no cigar like Beto in 2018 but Democrats do better in down ballot races and get some more victories. I’ll be bold and say Georgia goes blue as well. Florida is on the edge as is Iowa.
4. For the Senate, Democrats gain seats in Maine, Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina and probably Iowa. Georgia’s races go into run-offs. Graham, Cronyn, and McConnell are reelected. Daines and Sullivan are probably reelected. Though I would not be surprised if Democrats managed to pick up one or two from the last five.Report
I don’t get the need to be “inspired” by politicians.
It’s a holdover from how many people felt about particular politicians when they were younger. Like, remember this?
There were people who *LOVED* feeling that way about a president. They want to feel that way every single time.Report
I never said there was anything wrong with a politician being inspiring but it is more of an extra, not a mandate. Saying you don’t feel inspired to perform a civic responsibility is consumerist wank. Obama was more inspiring than Gore and Kerry, I still voted for Gore and Kerry. Very few people reach Obama levels of charisma. Scott Weiner is a politician I support but I don’t consider him inspiring. He is a technocrat who understands what boring, no fun solutions are needed to lower housing costs and make San Francisco more affordable for all. If anything his opponents (Jane Kim and Jackie Felder) get adoration for their fans for being inspiring and charismatic and those act as bugs for both.Report
I am as big a fan of Obama as anyone, but the whole hero worship strikes me as being too close to the craving for a Strong Man On Horseback for my liking.Report
I’ve been told I am mean when I say “never have heroes.”Report
I might go so far to argue that looking for inspiration in a politician is *BAD*.
If I were hiring an accountant, say, I wouldn’t care about whether my accountant was a cold fish. If I were meeting the surgeon who was going to be removing my appendix, I probably wouldn’t care if he were awkward and couldn’t maintain eye contact.
Looking for someone “inspirational” might result in you being bamboozled by some flim-flam man. And if you get addicted to feeling inspired, you may find yourself creating enemies where there are none when you find yourself stuck with an insufficiently charismatic guy to vote for.
And that would be bad.Report
“Biden/Harris in 2020 — They won’t inspire you!”Report
I don’t get the need to be “inspired” by politicians
You should have clapped. We all should have clapped.Report
Working on my Post Mortem of how I failed to correctly pick the winner…
“I know why Biden lost, but I know not how.”Report
Biden wins every place he’s up big and that will be the ballgame. How Texas, Ohio and Georgia falls will be interesting to look at but irrelevant to the outcome. The real drama will be in the Senate.Report
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1323360824753270785?s=20
Harris County GOP lawsuit thrown out by arch Republican judge over lack of standing.Report
If that Texas election official is smart (and I believe she is) she will order them to mingle all the drive thru ballots immediately so they can’t be tossed out later.Report
Thrown out with “I wish I could find a reason to shut this down. If you guys in the Circuit Court can figure one out, here’s what to do next.”Report
He apparently went far enough, at least speaking, to say that if he had granted standing, he would probably have shut down the drive-through for election day, but kept the votes previously cast.Report
Yet another right wing judge saying, “you dumb SOB’s can’t keep admitting to taking notes on a criminal conspiracy and expect me to OK it. Learn how to word it better.”Report
I’ll play: at the end of the day, assuming the results are fairly reported, I predict the national map will look like this, a decisive Biden-Harris win.
But that map is how I predict it will end up. It won’t look like that by tomorrow night. By the time most of even us junkies go to bed tomorrow night it’ll look like this because there are lots of states that a) don’t have their acts together with the new reality of tons of early and absentee ballots, and proved it during primary season, and b) are going to be places where partisan election litigation and other shenanigans keeps the outcome in flux.Report
Plausible… but a little depressing. Neither side will concede on election day (nor should they, probably)… I’m just hoping the process while delayed is at least organized, competent and swift.
The narrative building BS will be overwhelming though. Give us strength to remain properly agnostic through it all.Report
Why do you think New York or Washington will be too close to call tomorrow night? Everything else is plausible.Report
I suspect Burt left it that way for the same reason that I have NY on my short list of states likely to have a total screw-up: handling the absentee ballots in the primaries was a disaster, particularly in NYC. If it quickly becomes obvious that the mess is being repeated, the networks will probably hold off on calling things just for appearances’ sake.Report
Illinois, NJ, and CT were also off the called list on second inspection. Some of these are just too blue for me to hold off on calling.Report
Because NY made a clusterfuck of its primary and WA doesn’t start counting ballots until election night. Both are reliably blue states, but I think they may well not be ready to announce enough results to project tomorrow night. I’ll be counting them, and several other non-competitive but likely-to-be-late-announcing states, in my informal tally, as should most rational people.
As for states that could potentially matter, and plausibly go one way or the other, but which also are expected to have delays of one sort or the other, that’s four of them: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, and quite-possibly-decisive Pennsylvania.Report
Biden – 54.4% – Trump -43.9 – Others – 1.4%
Biden – 413 – Trump – 125
Biden wins the Blue Wall, NC, GA, FL, OH, IA, TX, AZ, and NE-2
In addition, Missour, Montana, South Carolina, & Kansas are called much later than normal.
Senate – Dem’s pick up AZ, CO, ME, NC, IA, the GA regular, and wait for it…South Carolina. Bullock & Bollier get incredibly close, Hegar loses by 5, Warnock gets around 47%, while Loeffler outpaces Collins by 3 or 4 points.
Oh, also, even though the run-off will be Safe R obviously, the LA Senate race also goes to a run off, because Cassidy barely misses 50%.
53 Dem – 46 GOP – 1 TBD
House – Dem’s pick up 10-ish seats, but my real shocker is…Dan Crenshaw loses in TX-2, and it’s not even that close (52-47-ish).Report
Trump is crushing Biden in New Hampshire so far, 61.5 to 38.5. I’m hoping his 6 vote lead hold firm, and perhaps even grows.Report
More bullish on Trump now than at any time for the past six months. Still not enough to think he wins, but less ridiculous now than even say, a week ago. Let’s say Trump 220-240 EVs.
I’ll predict the GOP holds the Senate, though I’m not completely sure that I believe it myself. It could be that the effect of the 3-5 days of GOP momentum is that GOP holds all their Senate seats except the ones that have been obviously vulnerable the whole cycle, so GOP holds Mississippi, Kentucky, both Georgia seats, South Carolina, Kansas, Texas (and picks up Alabama). That part I am pretty comfortable with.
With the Selzer poll out, I am convinced Iowa is safe for the GOP. Libs and even most neutral observers are reasonably confident that GOP is lost in Maine, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan. I’m not buying it, but if the GOP wins as many as one of these, they’re probably doing as well as you could hope. North Carolina is a pure tossup, don’t even have a guess of that one. Montana is going GOP but by the thinnest of margins.Report
I’ve got 319 to 219. Biden wins the popular vote by 7.2 points and the tipping state by 5.4 points.
Swing states for Biden:
Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania
Swing states for Trump
Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, IowaReport
Oh sure… wait for *all* the pre-election polls to come in.Report