I suspect most of this is true, but still it doesn't outweigh what I wrote in the earlier comment. Once I figured that out, this race became much less complicated for me.
Eg, it's very plausible to believe that, by getting closer to India and Japan and pushing back against China, Trump is reordering our foreign policy to a much savvier place, much more in line with our parochial national interest, more likely to advance the cause of global human rights.
But because Trump is Trump, he can't advocate for these things, he doesn't advocate for these things, we can't build any grassroots consensus for them among apolitical Americans, we're not going to be able to keep whatever policy achievements Trump gets (with the exception of SCOTUS appointments).
The American people have a very strong instinct to oppose whatever Trump is for, and that's more than we can fade. It's best if Trump loses.
"But one thing I have heard from the left/Dems is the screeching of a child who just had his toys taken away. Not one cogent argument about Trump, just an endless cycle of OrangeManBad, or words to that effect."
A lot of us on the Right want to think that the OrangeManBad is just propaganda from the ideologically committed Left, but it's just not so. But it's just not so. In fact, and for the benefit of those who want to racialize everything, it's disproportionately represented in normie white Americans.
Once I came to grips with this, everything else became pretty clear.
Somehow we missed the left turn at Albuquerque, and ended up here. We've ended up bitter and distant from each other, and we didn't want it to be this way.
Well, when push comes to shove there's reasons for that, and they're not necessarily that hard to figure out.
"Um you do know that liberals are, statistically, mostly white people, right?"
Well yeah, I'm especially talking about them. White libs, at least in their own mind, are going to have some kind of answer pertaining to why they aren't racist, or colonialist or what have you.
The vast majority of them have never meaningfully attempted to resolve why they aren't shitbags for their hostility toward their countrymen. Or maybe more topically, why they are routinely willing to brazen out the lie to steal a base or two regarding something relevant to their political interest.
Well yeah. (if you mean what I think you mean and I'm not entirely sure on that)
The point being, this election is about Trump, and how people feel about him and whether people want him around and whether they want to see his tweets on the evening news for the next four years. On that score the answer seems to be a pretty hard no.
A lot of people give George a hard time here, and I'm not sure he deserves it. But I do have a problem with George-style conservatism, in that he always wants to talk his way around this in ways that are completely not credible.
"I think the libs would say the same of the cons. This isn’t really an explanation, rather, more of a casting aspersion."
It sound that way for some people, but really it isn't. We've got our dirty laundry too, which imo is hurting now more than ever but the self-awareness thing isn't it.
With all the usual cheap identity politics polemics around racism and the rest of it, American conservatives of any strain, location, or economic class, even just apolitical white people have had to internalize some beliefs pertaining to this narrative, in a way that libs just do not.
ACA is staying, Roe v Wade could go either way, but I'm sure you appreciate that's not the last word on abortion anyway. What they are likely to do is eliminate Chevron deference, and that sort of thing. There's a few lib lawyers who get agitated about that sort of thing, but it's hard for me to see any real constituency for that.
"The State Department was deeply involved in covering up Joe’s Burisma kickbacks, as we found out during the impeachment hearings, yet surprisingly, there’s so far not been any evidence indicating that Hillary touched a single dime in that country. Soros was doing huge deals, Biden and Obama and key Obama people......"
I gotta admit, I'm not at all seeing the point of this line of thought, and others like it. It's probably not true. But if it were true, what would it change?
The motivation seems to be that Biden will fold like a cheap suit if the Trump campaign can land a square punch about Hunter, Ukraine, cognitive decline or whatever. It's pretty obvious for me at least this is not accurately understanding how the American voters are thinking about this election.
"They have been working toward that end for 40 years and now that its secure, the 29 state legislatures that are controlled by Republicans can escalate their evisceration of the New Deal and social liberalism by passing laws that will be contested all the way to SCOTUS."
Yeah, this is bullshit. I'm as happy as anyone that ACB got confirmed, but this is wildly overstated in terms of what SCOTUS can affirmatively do for the Right in America, and especially under the assumption that the Demos are going to have the Presidency and both houses of Congress for a while.
SCOTUS, as a rule, puts the hammer down on states and executive agencies which it deems to be coloring outside the lines. It is much more reluctant to tangle with Congress. Whatever libs want is much more likely to be stopped in Congress than it is by SCOTUS.
The bigger point is that a lot of libs think that they have a natural majority in America, specifically in the Presidency and in Congress that I don't think they do. In terms of realignment and political fallout, what happens after Trump loses, if Trump loses, is fundamentally unpredictable. And being unpredictable, that's where the upside for the Right is. That's why I'm not voting for Trump, or at least not intending to.
I don't think court packing is as big a threat as the more partisan commentators on Right and Left think it is. First of all, it requires a Demo majority in the Senate, which they might not get.
But even if they do, it will also require almost unanimous support from a thin Demo majority in the Senate, which they probably won't get. There will be a lot of speculation that Sen Manchin will defect, but it obscures that there will be probably at least 10 other Demo senators who will be reluctant or outright opposed, at least in their own minds.
It's a similar scenario to ACA back in 2009-2010, except that then, they were moving forward toward some version of collectivized health care, which is something that almost all Democrats badly wanted, even if there were substantial disagreements about exactly what form that would take. Here, they are trying to move forward on a priority that only the Twitter/identity politics Left really wants. And in the end, even Demo primary voters had little reluctance to Heisman those people. I don't think the overall political establishment or public opinion in general will be any more favorable.
Ok, I think a lot of this turns on some specifics about Sen Hawley's intentions and capabilities. And nobody (here) has done a good job of elaborating exactly what those are. You've come the closest in the latest comment.
Though, if you're correct there, then I think the "too big a stick" argument falls pretty clearly. That is, twitter and the like will pretty quickly and clearly stop user editorial censorship if that will cost them protections under 230.
Or, the threat being the victory condition is a feature, not a bug, and is probably why Sen Hawley is going down that particular road, if in fact he is. If he got a bill through Congress to criminalize twitter and put Jack Dorsey in jail, twitter might be able to use quirks and delays in criminal procedure to continue its prior practices. But if, on the other hand, twitter is threatened with losing its 230 protection, it almost certainly will come into compliance right away. Its own general counsel and investors will insist upon it.
To be fair, I'm not completely understanding this line comments by you and Inmd (and Duck). But my instinct is to think this train of thought is wrong, especially the part about "too big a stick", etc.
First of all, the OP is clear in its imputation of bad faith to Josh Hawley. It's less clear about exactly what Sen Hawley has done to merit the accusation. We get that he is in some way hostile to Section 230, but there's no quotes, no reference to a bill or hearings (except the ACB hearings), nothing.
And related to that, it confuses or glides over 230 in terms of its frame of reference. That's one thing I was trying to get in my earlier comment. Ie, the OP wants to think, wants us to think that 230 is central in the whole thing. But is it, or is it ancillary?
We've seen this issue before with SESTA/FOSTA, Backpage and the like. It's fair to say that SESTA/FOSTA are not primarily about 230. But, the safe harbor provisions of 230 essentially would have nullified SESTA/FOSTA had they remained in force. So SESTA/FOSTA created a carveout, where 230 is no longer in force of the scope of SESTA/FOSTA.
SESTA/FOSTA is law now, and it didn't change the free internet. It wasn't "too big a stick" for backpage. (Parenthetically and IIRC, backpage and its people were not hit by SESTA/FOSTA. Backpage was charged at the end of a longrunning DOJ investigation under statutes that predate SESTA/FOSTA. But it was largely the same advocates and the same movement which got the ball over the line for SESTA/FOSTA also hit backpage. And also parenthetically, SESTA/FOSTA predates the election of Josh Hawley to the Senate.)
The rest of the internet has adapted to SESTA/FOSTA decently well enough. I think it's fair to say 230 was ancillary to the whole thing. The central frame of reference was the policy considerations around sex trafficking and sex work, whatever you happen to think about them.
I'd also be very wary about investing too much any "too big a stick" train of thought for myself or anybody I cared about. I suspect that when push comes to shove, there are going to be some software developers, product managers and internet execs who are going to go to jail for it, and deserve to. Given the culture at many of these firms, they are not going to accept that they are in real peril until it's too late to prevent it.
For me at least, the real solution involves guarantees of access and service. We can view this as anti-trust, regulation of public utilities, both, or something entirely new. I assume this is largely Sen Hawley's motivation as well, though tbh I don't really know for sure. My own idea is a digital/internet Glass-Steagall divide where you can provide logistics or curation with respect to a particular service but not both. 230 is in there is well, but it's not necessarily the main ingredient.
I wish I could say something good about this post, but at least as it pertains to the title thesis the pickings are pretty slim. On that score, the OP is wrong and banal.
"While I personally dislike what Twitter does every so often, it is a private company that is allowed to have whatever policy it wants as long as it isn’t breaking the law."
Well yeah. When Sen Hawley passes whatever he intends, what Twitter and Facebook did to the NYPost Burisma corruption story is going to be illegal, that's the point, obv. And on that score, Sen Hawley is right. What they did ought to be illegal. It ought to be illegal precisely because it violates our expectations of the free and open internet, which has been clearly heading for the worse for the last say, 5-10 years.
Section 230 is not holy writ. More specifically, the terms of Section 230 are not holy writ. Section 230 is intended to create a safe harbor for internet entrepreneurs to be immune from certain kinds of liability, if certain obligations are met. Well, the particular obligations codified by Section 230 are no longer working for us, as seen by by the examples of the NYPost and a thousand other things. Therefore, Section 230 ought to be updated to require considerations of access and the like in order to move the internet towards a free medium and away from being walled gardens owned by tech oligarchs with substantial commercial interests in collaboration with icky regimes and the worst of American identity politics.
And it's not just Sen Hawley either. I'm pretty sure Liz Warren has a set of beefs with American tech that substantially overlaps Hawley and others on the Right, so at least to some extent it's not a partisan cause.
Along these lines, I'm vaguely interested in contemporary Israeli politics, mostly because I don't care about the outcome.
Given the trust issues involved, I'm not completely convinced that the continuous support for "unsuitable" officeholders or candidates is completely irrational. Binyamin Netanyahu has tried to convince the Israeli voters that they can't have mainstream Jewish-centric policy in Israel without him as Prime Minister. And a number of the voters believe him. And of course, a different set of Israeli voters don't believe him. And other voters oppose mainstream Jewish-centric policy on the substance.
From an outsider's perspective, I'm still not sure who's right.
Yeah, this is a weird one. I want to agree with the OP, but I don't.
I do agree, I think, with the logic of voting for a GOP or Demo vs minority party or not voting but I'm not sure it applies here. Part of the idea of voting R/D is that the voter wants to assert some measure of control over the outcome. Even allowing for hedging and caveats, I don't think we should say Trump is "my guy".
The lesser evil thing is mildly persuasive, but it assume that we know who the greater evil and the lesser evil are, and I'm not at all sure we do.
The other thing worth mentioning, I don't think the 1859 analogy is overblown or overstated at all. But, the antagonism is not fueled by the GOP or Demo political establishment. It comes from the grass roots a little bit, but mostly from the activist class. So the point about voting to send a message to the politicians really doesn't work.
"Will they patiently follow the logical and time-worn procedure you listed above, or do you think they’ll start torching cities yet again? Do you think they’ll push for the West coast to secede? Do you think they’ll try to use every legal and illegal means to oust the illegitimate Trump regime?
As I said, the election aftermath has the potential to make 2020 seem tame."
Most importantly perhaps I wonder why are you supposing that this represents a good outcome for you?
I've got a radical plan. How about instead, we run a good candidate, on good issues, with a good campaign, and just win the normal way?
Have you followed UK politics over the last year or so at all?
"And now many Democrat politicians have done a 180, panicked about all those mail-in-ballot schemes they pushed. The Republicans are all going to show up at the polls and vote in person, which is better than 99% successful. The mail-in-ballots are often less than 90% successful, with 10% or more being rejected as invalid, tossed aside, or what have you."
There's some juice in these sorts of issues, but less than you're arguing, I think.
Like you said, the Demos are panicking about votes-by-mail being thrown out. They are telling their voters to vote in person, or vote early in person where that's available.
As the lawsuits about counting mail-in votes go, the Demos will probably win some of them. The Demo percent captains/gotv people will probably get their voters to vote in person. Only some of the states extensively use vote-by-mail and only a fraction of those are competitive.
So instead of losing 10% of their votes, they end up losing .1%. Or maybe even they end up winning, if their vote harvesting schemes actually work.
"One of the reasons the national polling was fairly close in 2016 is that they blew the Trump surge in the critical states, but were even worse the other way in some blue states, which helped cancel the errors out."
Well yeah, that's the way it works. The point being is that Trump could 4 points ahead in Pennsylvania than he does nationally _and carry Pennsylvania_.
Point being, Trump already bottomed out that well in 2016. Maybe a point or two more, tops, in a wildly optimistic scenario.
It seems ridiculous to me to think we should be maneuvering and litigating our way towards scratching out some eyelash-margin win.
We should just try and earn more support instead, so all these other silly scenarios become irrelevant. Our albatross for winning that support is clearly Trump, so let's dump that albatross.
"In the same sample the polls have Biden up by between 3 and 16 points. Do you really think that in a sample of a thousand statistically random people, you can get 14 points of variation?"
Maybe not, but that's not the issue here. The three point margin poll is an outlier, and it's also stale after the events of last week.
Specifically, some of the respondents may have been interviewed after the debate, but I'm pretty sure that it predates Trump's post covid recklessness.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Curmudgeon’s Case for Biden”
I suspect most of this is true, but still it doesn't outweigh what I wrote in the earlier comment. Once I figured that out, this race became much less complicated for me.
Eg, it's very plausible to believe that, by getting closer to India and Japan and pushing back against China, Trump is reordering our foreign policy to a much savvier place, much more in line with our parochial national interest, more likely to advance the cause of global human rights.
But because Trump is Trump, he can't advocate for these things, he doesn't advocate for these things, we can't build any grassroots consensus for them among apolitical Americans, we're not going to be able to keep whatever policy achievements Trump gets (with the exception of SCOTUS appointments).
The American people have a very strong instinct to oppose whatever Trump is for, and that's more than we can fade. It's best if Trump loses.
"
"But one thing I have heard from the left/Dems is the screeching of a child who just had his toys taken away. Not one cogent argument about Trump, just an endless cycle of OrangeManBad, or words to that effect."
A lot of us on the Right want to think that the OrangeManBad is just propaganda from the ideologically committed Left, but it's just not so. But it's just not so. In fact, and for the benefit of those who want to racialize everything, it's disproportionately represented in normie white Americans.
Once I came to grips with this, everything else became pretty clear.
"
Somehow we missed the left turn at Albuquerque, and ended up here. We've ended up bitter and distant from each other, and we didn't want it to be this way.
Well, when push comes to shove there's reasons for that, and they're not necessarily that hard to figure out.
"
"Um you do know that liberals are, statistically, mostly white people, right?"
Well yeah, I'm especially talking about them. White libs, at least in their own mind, are going to have some kind of answer pertaining to why they aren't racist, or colonialist or what have you.
The vast majority of them have never meaningfully attempted to resolve why they aren't shitbags for their hostility toward their countrymen. Or maybe more topically, why they are routinely willing to brazen out the lie to steal a base or two regarding something relevant to their political interest.
"
Well yeah. (if you mean what I think you mean and I'm not entirely sure on that)
The point being, this election is about Trump, and how people feel about him and whether people want him around and whether they want to see his tweets on the evening news for the next four years. On that score the answer seems to be a pretty hard no.
A lot of people give George a hard time here, and I'm not sure he deserves it. But I do have a problem with George-style conservatism, in that he always wants to talk his way around this in ways that are completely not credible.
"
"I think the libs would say the same of the cons. This isn’t really an explanation, rather, more of a casting aspersion."
It sound that way for some people, but really it isn't. We've got our dirty laundry too, which imo is hurting now more than ever but the self-awareness thing isn't it.
With all the usual cheap identity politics polemics around racism and the rest of it, American conservatives of any strain, location, or economic class, even just apolitical white people have had to internalize some beliefs pertaining to this narrative, in a way that libs just do not.
"
ACA is staying, Roe v Wade could go either way, but I'm sure you appreciate that's not the last word on abortion anyway. What they are likely to do is eliminate Chevron deference, and that sort of thing. There's a few lib lawyers who get agitated about that sort of thing, but it's hard for me to see any real constituency for that.
"
"The State Department was deeply involved in covering up Joe’s Burisma kickbacks, as we found out during the impeachment hearings, yet surprisingly, there’s so far not been any evidence indicating that Hillary touched a single dime in that country. Soros was doing huge deals, Biden and Obama and key Obama people......"
I gotta admit, I'm not at all seeing the point of this line of thought, and others like it. It's probably not true. But if it were true, what would it change?
The motivation seems to be that Biden will fold like a cheap suit if the Trump campaign can land a square punch about Hunter, Ukraine, cognitive decline or whatever. It's pretty obvious for me at least this is not accurately understanding how the American voters are thinking about this election.
"
"If Trump is the symptom, what is the disease?"
Libs who lack the self-awareness of to see themselves as bad people in the context of American political culture.
"
Thanks
"
Can I get a comment rescue?
"
"They have been working toward that end for 40 years and now that its secure, the 29 state legislatures that are controlled by Republicans can escalate their evisceration of the New Deal and social liberalism by passing laws that will be contested all the way to SCOTUS."
Yeah, this is bullshit. I'm as happy as anyone that ACB got confirmed, but this is wildly overstated in terms of what SCOTUS can affirmatively do for the Right in America, and especially under the assumption that the Demos are going to have the Presidency and both houses of Congress for a while.
SCOTUS, as a rule, puts the hammer down on states and executive agencies which it deems to be coloring outside the lines. It is much more reluctant to tangle with Congress. Whatever libs want is much more likely to be stopped in Congress than it is by SCOTUS.
The bigger point is that a lot of libs think that they have a natural majority in America, specifically in the Presidency and in Congress that I don't think they do. In terms of realignment and political fallout, what happens after Trump loses, if Trump loses, is fundamentally unpredictable. And being unpredictable, that's where the upside for the Right is. That's why I'm not voting for Trump, or at least not intending to.
On “If Democrats are Going to Pack the Supreme Court, They Might as Well Go Big”
I don't think court packing is as big a threat as the more partisan commentators on Right and Left think it is. First of all, it requires a Demo majority in the Senate, which they might not get.
But even if they do, it will also require almost unanimous support from a thin Demo majority in the Senate, which they probably won't get. There will be a lot of speculation that Sen Manchin will defect, but it obscures that there will be probably at least 10 other Demo senators who will be reluctant or outright opposed, at least in their own minds.
It's a similar scenario to ACA back in 2009-2010, except that then, they were moving forward toward some version of collectivized health care, which is something that almost all Democrats badly wanted, even if there were substantial disagreements about exactly what form that would take. Here, they are trying to move forward on a priority that only the Twitter/identity politics Left really wants. And in the end, even Demo primary voters had little reluctance to Heisman those people. I don't think the overall political establishment or public opinion in general will be any more favorable.
I do think DC statehood is a little more viable.
On “Hanlon’s Razor and Why It Is Being Violated”
Ok, I think a lot of this turns on some specifics about Sen Hawley's intentions and capabilities. And nobody (here) has done a good job of elaborating exactly what those are. You've come the closest in the latest comment.
Though, if you're correct there, then I think the "too big a stick" argument falls pretty clearly. That is, twitter and the like will pretty quickly and clearly stop user editorial censorship if that will cost them protections under 230.
Or, the threat being the victory condition is a feature, not a bug, and is probably why Sen Hawley is going down that particular road, if in fact he is. If he got a bill through Congress to criminalize twitter and put Jack Dorsey in jail, twitter might be able to use quirks and delays in criminal procedure to continue its prior practices. But if, on the other hand, twitter is threatened with losing its 230 protection, it almost certainly will come into compliance right away. Its own general counsel and investors will insist upon it.
"
To be fair, I'm not completely understanding this line comments by you and Inmd (and Duck). But my instinct is to think this train of thought is wrong, especially the part about "too big a stick", etc.
First of all, the OP is clear in its imputation of bad faith to Josh Hawley. It's less clear about exactly what Sen Hawley has done to merit the accusation. We get that he is in some way hostile to Section 230, but there's no quotes, no reference to a bill or hearings (except the ACB hearings), nothing.
And related to that, it confuses or glides over 230 in terms of its frame of reference. That's one thing I was trying to get in my earlier comment. Ie, the OP wants to think, wants us to think that 230 is central in the whole thing. But is it, or is it ancillary?
We've seen this issue before with SESTA/FOSTA, Backpage and the like. It's fair to say that SESTA/FOSTA are not primarily about 230. But, the safe harbor provisions of 230 essentially would have nullified SESTA/FOSTA had they remained in force. So SESTA/FOSTA created a carveout, where 230 is no longer in force of the scope of SESTA/FOSTA.
SESTA/FOSTA is law now, and it didn't change the free internet. It wasn't "too big a stick" for backpage. (Parenthetically and IIRC, backpage and its people were not hit by SESTA/FOSTA. Backpage was charged at the end of a longrunning DOJ investigation under statutes that predate SESTA/FOSTA. But it was largely the same advocates and the same movement which got the ball over the line for SESTA/FOSTA also hit backpage. And also parenthetically, SESTA/FOSTA predates the election of Josh Hawley to the Senate.)
The rest of the internet has adapted to SESTA/FOSTA decently well enough. I think it's fair to say 230 was ancillary to the whole thing. The central frame of reference was the policy considerations around sex trafficking and sex work, whatever you happen to think about them.
I'd also be very wary about investing too much any "too big a stick" train of thought for myself or anybody I cared about. I suspect that when push comes to shove, there are going to be some software developers, product managers and internet execs who are going to go to jail for it, and deserve to. Given the culture at many of these firms, they are not going to accept that they are in real peril until it's too late to prevent it.
For me at least, the real solution involves guarantees of access and service. We can view this as anti-trust, regulation of public utilities, both, or something entirely new. I assume this is largely Sen Hawley's motivation as well, though tbh I don't really know for sure. My own idea is a digital/internet Glass-Steagall divide where you can provide logistics or curation with respect to a particular service but not both. 230 is in there is well, but it's not necessarily the main ingredient.
"
I wish I could say something good about this post, but at least as it pertains to the title thesis the pickings are pretty slim. On that score, the OP is wrong and banal.
"While I personally dislike what Twitter does every so often, it is a private company that is allowed to have whatever policy it wants as long as it isn’t breaking the law."
Well yeah. When Sen Hawley passes whatever he intends, what Twitter and Facebook did to the NYPost Burisma corruption story is going to be illegal, that's the point, obv. And on that score, Sen Hawley is right. What they did ought to be illegal. It ought to be illegal precisely because it violates our expectations of the free and open internet, which has been clearly heading for the worse for the last say, 5-10 years.
Section 230 is not holy writ. More specifically, the terms of Section 230 are not holy writ. Section 230 is intended to create a safe harbor for internet entrepreneurs to be immune from certain kinds of liability, if certain obligations are met. Well, the particular obligations codified by Section 230 are no longer working for us, as seen by by the examples of the NYPost and a thousand other things. Therefore, Section 230 ought to be updated to require considerations of access and the like in order to move the internet towards a free medium and away from being walled gardens owned by tech oligarchs with substantial commercial interests in collaboration with icky regimes and the worst of American identity politics.
And it's not just Sen Hawley either. I'm pretty sure Liz Warren has a set of beefs with American tech that substantially overlaps Hawley and others on the Right, so at least to some extent it's not a partisan cause.
On “Vote Like Your Life Depends On It, Because It Does”
This is a great point.
Along these lines, I'm vaguely interested in contemporary Israeli politics, mostly because I don't care about the outcome.
Given the trust issues involved, I'm not completely convinced that the continuous support for "unsuitable" officeholders or candidates is completely irrational. Binyamin Netanyahu has tried to convince the Israeli voters that they can't have mainstream Jewish-centric policy in Israel without him as Prime Minister. And a number of the voters believe him. And of course, a different set of Israeli voters don't believe him. And other voters oppose mainstream Jewish-centric policy on the substance.
From an outsider's perspective, I'm still not sure who's right.
"
This is a great point. Better than the OP's argument, I think.
"
Yeah, this is a weird one. I want to agree with the OP, but I don't.
I do agree, I think, with the logic of voting for a GOP or Demo vs minority party or not voting but I'm not sure it applies here. Part of the idea of voting R/D is that the voter wants to assert some measure of control over the outcome. Even allowing for hedging and caveats, I don't think we should say Trump is "my guy".
The lesser evil thing is mildly persuasive, but it assume that we know who the greater evil and the lesser evil are, and I'm not at all sure we do.
The other thing worth mentioning, I don't think the 1859 analogy is overblown or overstated at all. But, the antagonism is not fueled by the GOP or Demo political establishment. It comes from the grass roots a little bit, but mostly from the activist class. So the point about voting to send a message to the politicians really doesn't work.
On “The Unbearable Lightness of Veeping”
Comments like this make me want to cry. George, are you familiar with politics in the UK over the last say, 1-5 years?
"
Yeah, yeah, Pence won, lovely. Now Trump/Pence loses Arizona by 5.4% instead of 5.9%.
whoop-dee-doo.
On “Maybe Just Bet Chalk This Time, I Tell Myself Again”
"Will they patiently follow the logical and time-worn procedure you listed above, or do you think they’ll start torching cities yet again? Do you think they’ll push for the West coast to secede? Do you think they’ll try to use every legal and illegal means to oust the illegitimate Trump regime?
As I said, the election aftermath has the potential to make 2020 seem tame."
Most importantly perhaps I wonder why are you supposing that this represents a good outcome for you?
I've got a radical plan. How about instead, we run a good candidate, on good issues, with a good campaign, and just win the normal way?
Have you followed UK politics over the last year or so at all?
"
"And now many Democrat politicians have done a 180, panicked about all those mail-in-ballot schemes they pushed. The Republicans are all going to show up at the polls and vote in person, which is better than 99% successful. The mail-in-ballots are often less than 90% successful, with 10% or more being rejected as invalid, tossed aside, or what have you."
There's some juice in these sorts of issues, but less than you're arguing, I think.
Like you said, the Demos are panicking about votes-by-mail being thrown out. They are telling their voters to vote in person, or vote early in person where that's available.
As the lawsuits about counting mail-in votes go, the Demos will probably win some of them. The Demo percent captains/gotv people will probably get their voters to vote in person. Only some of the states extensively use vote-by-mail and only a fraction of those are competitive.
So instead of losing 10% of their votes, they end up losing .1%. Or maybe even they end up winning, if their vote harvesting schemes actually work.
"
"One of the reasons the national polling was fairly close in 2016 is that they blew the Trump surge in the critical states, but were even worse the other way in some blue states, which helped cancel the errors out."
Well yeah, that's the way it works. The point being is that Trump could 4 points ahead in Pennsylvania than he does nationally _and carry Pennsylvania_.
Point being, Trump already bottomed out that well in 2016. Maybe a point or two more, tops, in a wildly optimistic scenario.
It seems ridiculous to me to think we should be maneuvering and litigating our way towards scratching out some eyelash-margin win.
We should just try and earn more support instead, so all these other silly scenarios become irrelevant. Our albatross for winning that support is clearly Trump, so let's dump that albatross.
"
"In the same sample the polls have Biden up by between 3 and 16 points. Do you really think that in a sample of a thousand statistically random people, you can get 14 points of variation?"
Maybe not, but that's not the issue here. The three point margin poll is an outlier, and it's also stale after the events of last week.
Specifically, some of the respondents may have been interviewed after the debate, but I'm pretty sure that it predates Trump's post covid recklessness.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.