POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

Aphorism for the day: "It's easier to be the conservative in a liberal church than a liberal in a conservative church."

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true."

And Fearless Leader will continue to bang his drum of "Law & Order" and more and more stupid people will believe him because they see the scenes of burned-out businesses promoted by news media to garner ratings, or they are afraid that he might be right about those "Marxist, Left-Wing Radicals" disguised as Democrats. Look, I know many folks see through Trump's BS, but I'm talking about taking the offensive and use a variation of Reagan's 1980 catch phrase by asking Americans: Are you safer today than you were 4 years ago? 184,686 Americans can't even answer the question because they're dead. I'd venture that the over 16 million unemployed would probably say they aren't. Three months of this pandemic cost more people their jobs than two years of the Great Recession. Ask the over 12 million who have lost their job-related health insurance if they feel safer today than 4 years ago.

All I'm hoping to see is to attack Fearless Leader where he believes he's strong---Law & Order. Don't let the Law & Order battleground be simply daily pictures of riots and looting, which is the drum Trump will constantly beat. Tie his worse than abysmal pandemic response, the accompanying economic catastrophe, the fact that he is actively stoking racial tensions by calling on right-wing radicals to 'defend their cities', (and as I pointed out in an earlier post [https://www.vox.com/2020/6/16/212866...ng-the-police] it's actually Trump who is defunding the police) and start asking the American public---Do you feel safer today than four years ago?

Voters, it's been shown time and again, don't base their behavior on concrete policy; they care about values and feelings. In the abstract it's helpful for Biden to convey the impression that he can be trusted to competently administer on X issue (besides the decency/empathy schtick).

On the bold count we're aligned insofar as I think it's costless for Biden to explicitly say "Our approach will reduce unrest now and in the future by building trust and healing wounds; Trump's only increases it. Trump isn't for law and order, he's pro-brutality and pro-riot and pro-greedy old men stealing everything they can in the bust out while he waves at the messes he made to distract you." Or insert whatever you please. I just don't think it has an additive electoral value. Trump's net support basically hasn't budged since the tax reform was signed into law. The set of persuadables has been absorbed by the set of the persuaded. This can be hard to swallow - and, no offense, harder for people of your generation - because it goes against everything mainstream political culture and theory and media presentation has inculcated into the popular consciousness throughout living memory; indeed, past elections really just were more fluid.

and start asking the American public---Do you feel safer today than four years ago?

Biden seems to be hammering just this point a lot.

https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1299164296329523200
https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/stat...98329852280832 [VIDEO]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhMz4dEytE
https://time.com/5885180/biden-speech-pittsburgh


See, here's the thing. I think you overestimate the persuadability of voters, any voters. Persuadable voters have long been persuaded by now, and the cohort that remains - maybe as little as 1% of people who vote - are habitual late deciders because they have no coherent ideology or grasp of issues; their vote, if at all, is decided by essentially random stimuli at the last minute. There's no systematic or reliable means of communicating to those people. So sure, we can watch the polling, but what really matters is if the underlying factors are changing. If the underlying factors are changing they'll drive changes in polling anyway (i.e. a supervenient relation). But this post basically captures my thinking on the issue so well that I have to reprint it in whole.

Smart money, dumb money, and dead money all say, nine weeks before Election Day, that the presidential race is pretty much a coin flip:

President Donald Trump continued to gain ground on Joe Biden over the weekend in betting odds on the U.S. presidential election, which now appears to be a toss-up.

Democratic nominee Biden dipped from a -130 favorite over Trump to -118 on Thursday following the Republican National Convention. But the election is now a pick’em at offshore sportsbook Pinnacle (-108/-108) and at William Hill sportsbook in the United Kingdom.

“It’s a coin flip,” William Hill U.S. sportsbook director Nick Bogdanovich said.

How is this possible? After all, the polls have for many months and with great consistency shown Biden with a big lead at both the national level and in terms of the situation in the swing states that will determine the actual outcome.

My friend JJ is a very successful gambler, and he has a theory:

My gambling site has Trump as a slight favorite, with Biden as an even money bet. You’re so sure of the polls? Get rich!

Or do you hate money?

*Nobody* doubts the polls. In any remotely kind of fair democratic election, Biden walks.

It’s not going to be that.

We’re not “on the path to fascism” – we’re there. The election is going to be a joke on order of a banana republic. It should be monitored by the UN, for as exactly little as that always achieves.

The polls literally mean nothing to me. This isn’t going to be like the election of 1980, or aught-four, or that other time we had something like democracy. We elected a fascist, and now our country is fascist.

Their side hasn’t even *begun* to pull out all the stops – it’s all going to happen in the last few weeks, when it’s too late to appeal to the referees (which, right now, is THEM!!!) Our side will win all kinds of court cases in 2021 that set future precedents, they’ll have won the presidency.

The people betting on Trump aren’t stupid – the polls are baked into the line. And he’s still a fucking favorite.

This, I think, is the best explanation for why the betting markets are predicting at a minimum a far closer contest than what the polls currently reflect. This election is going to be rigged by the ruling party, because the ruling party has zero commitment, as in none, to holding anything even vaguely resembling a fair election. Fascists don’t do fair elections, any more than communists do. They don’t believe in them. Indeed, democracy is affirmatively bad, because unless it’s a herrenvolk democracy the wrong people — people who this country doesn’t belong to — often win. And that’s wrong.

That’s why Obama was an illegitimate president. That’s why the birther stuff — the key element in Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence — was always the most sincere reflection of the actual beliefs of Republican voters. Birtherism was always more of a metaphor than a literal belief: it didn’t matter where Obama was actually born, because he and what he represents aren’t really American.

And why should people who aren’t really American rule America? The answer is they shouldn’t, and that cheating to stop them from winning elections isn’t even cheating: it’s actually protecting America from the ultimate form of cheating, which is how the Left is even now stealing America from Americans, via the unfair bias of the media, the education system, the woke corporations (the NFL is going to put social justice messages in the end zones!), and via the biggest and most systematic fraud of all, which is the constant importation of yet more non-white people to pollute our blood, while the queers keep doing God knows what to the soil.

When I say the election is going to be rigged, I’m referring to a spectrum, that runs from an actually free and fair election on one end, to a fake election on the other. In a fake election, the outcome is preordained, and the election process is pure kayfabe. We’re not there yet. What we have is a rigged election, in which the process is heavily weighted by illegitimate factors in favor of one party, but not in a fashion that literally guarantees that party victory.

Some of those factors, such as the Electoral College, are even legal.

But make no mistake: if we were having a free and fair election over the next nine weeks, Donald Trump would have as much chance of getting re-elected as I have of winning the gold medal in the next Olympic 100 meters. This is not hyperbole: Donald Trump has never been supported at any point during his presidency by a majority of American voters. He’s the only president in US history — or at least in the 70+ years since the advent of modern polling — that anything even remotely like that could be said about. And now the course of events, mostly notably a plague and the economic crisis it has caused, should make it completely impossible for him to win this election.

But from crippling the USPS to blocking election reform to functionally overturning the Voting Rights Act to welcoming election interference from foreign sources, the Republicans are not going to allow anything even vaguely resembling a fair election to take place. They are now cheating and will continue to cheat at every turn, because again, they don’t see it as cheating: they see it as saving their country from the invaders who are stealing America from Americans. It’s the castle doctrine as applied to the whole culture, basically.

That doesn’t mean it will work. Again, a rigged election is not a fake election. But make no mistake: the refs are being worked and bought every day. We’re going to have outscore the other team by three touchdowns just to win by a last-second field goal. And if we don’t, the next election will be fake.

See also:

Chance of a Biden Electoral college win if he wins the popular vote by X points:

0-1 points: just 6%!
1-2 points: 22%
2-3 points: 46%
3-4 points: 74%
4-5 points: 89%
5-6 points: 98%
6-7 points: 99%