POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

Hmm, they do a tremendous job of not promoting that aspect. On the national level it is hard to really shake the assertion that Democrats love to bring attention to Big Bills once they are in power and spend everything they have on these Big Bills.

Really? One of the major left criticisms of the Democratic Party is exactly that it doesn't publicize it's accomplishments.

For example (read a couple pages):
https://books.google.com/books?id=oi...page&q&f=false

Both Obama and Clinton would have done better to spend their political capital on less controversial, efficiency driven improvements rather than harping on universal health care for the past 30 years.

Uh, the ACA? I think you may be talking about something else. You're not referring to how Democrats advertise/message their record in government, but on their framing of tentpole priorities in elections?

So what exactly have Dems done, cause as far as I can tell the Veterans are still struggling to get healthcare, the Post Office is broke, funding for research and development in some fields is not being expanded, and the IRS is still trying to move beyond computers older than me.

Incremental improvements.

There are already plenty of radicalized socialists spending all their time talking theory over the internet, radicalizing other people. They never leave their room though, so there is a missing component beyond being part of a grassroots organization. Anyone can stand in a march with friends for a day. Some can march in the streets for a few weeks. Few actually carry out their lives as political agents, despite the strength of their opinions.

That's why one priority is reestablishing labor militancy, since labor is both a major component of people's lives and a locus of the expression of power in real-time.

I don't think the situation we find ourselves in was part of anyone's Grand Plan. Evangelicals of the 1950s would have balked if you said they would be defending someone with the record of Donald Trump.

Maybe not if they saw the man firsthand, since ultimately Trump really is an expression of everything they admire (ignore what they claim to admire, that's always been a put-on). It's not a conspiracy dude, it's just ideology congealing over time. You really have to understand the deep movements and philosophies influencing the Republican Party and its base over the past century if you want to understand the past decade.

Even slight degrees of public attention can change things, especially on the local level, even more especially for purple districts.
My understanding is that socialists continue to lose on national and state levels in primaries or in the general elections when compared to moderates and neoliberals. It's great if progress is made within cities, but those by definition are the easy pickings for a socialist candidate, once in the suburbs and rural areas they seem to fall apart although I can't explain why.

Well, I'm not sure there have been many socialist candidates trying to run in rural areas. The bench isn't exactly unlimited or evenly spread across the country, so putative electoral support isn't the only limiting factor. Here's a relevant article.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/onli...-rural-america

The most important thing is not to run a shitty campaign (e.g. Eliot Engel), after that your program or ideology is almost an afterthought. On the local level retail politics and institutional cooperation (e,g. endorsements) is key.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Really? One of the major left criticisms of the Democratic Party is exactly that it doesn't publicize it's accomplishments.

For example (read a couple pages):
https://books.google.com/books?id=oi...page&q&f=false

I will take a read, maybe my perception is incorrect.

Uh, the ACA? I think you may be talking about something else. You're not referring to how Democrats advertise/message their record in government, but on their framing of tentpole priorities in elections?

The ACA can be said to be an improvement in the sense that more people are now covered under private health insurance...but as far getting to end goal, this ended up being a terrible waste of effort. Midterm backlash, catering to private insurance companies, lack of public option. Then the inevitable sabotage from SCOTUS (either that or Robert's had to toss the whole thing) which allowed much of the Medicaid expansion to be withheld by GOP Governors. Then the GOP removed the mandate which was one of the key components of the policy, and basically tinkered with the requirements for coverage to the point where I don't know how well of a metric insurance coverage even is anymore.

Yeah I think I am more talking about priorities. It's not so much "let's upgrade department infrastructure and increase R&D to maintain competitive advantages" it's "we need to dismantle entire systems and we promise that the replacement will be better". Whether or not you actually agree the gov can and will do some things better, it feels like Dems are always asking for these priorities and big issues to be accepted on faith that execution will go well.

Incremental improvements.

But improvements could have been much better and less costly to achieve, I think.

That's why one priority is reestablishing labor militancy, since labor is both a major component of people's lives and a locus of the expression of power in real-time.

What does leftist theory say about the acceptance of militarist mentality among manufacturing vs service vs other types of jobs.

Well, I'm not sure there have been many socialist candidates trying to run in rural areas. The bench isn't exactly unlimited or evenly spread across the country, so putative electoral support isn't the only limiting factor. Here's a relevant article.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/onli...-rural-america

The most important thing is not to run a shitty campaign (e.g. Eliot Engel), after that your program or ideology is almost an afterthought. On the local level retail politics and institutional cooperation (e,g. endorsements) is key.

I think that could be said on any level. Bernie certainly could have used some of the endorsements he threw away. I'm not a campaign manager, but to my eyes it seems it comes down to voter engagement and turnout, at least for a purple/swing district. Finding friends in the establishment is probably the way to go for NYC where a single party is dominant.

[Montmorency]

I will take a read, maybe my perception is incorrect.

The point is that the Obama Dems (and I believe pre-Obama as well) were very reluctant to 'toot their own horn' or emphasize what government was accomplishing for people, believing either that it would be unseemly and counterproductive to do so, or that people would just recognize good government on their own.

The ACA can be said to be an improvement in the sense that more people are now covered under private health insurance

Well, it includes regulatory improvements relating to scope, quality, or reliability of coverage. And of course Medicaid expansion, though I grant that in theory a Medicaid expansion would be an easier 'lift' than the ACA package - but then again just look at the recent history of Republican opposition to Democratic priorities. So does it really make sense to charge Obama with trying to deliver less than the ACA? Since that is what is implied by prioritizing lower-profile and more targeted policies. Obama gained 60 votes for the ACA, but he should have settled for 60 votes for just Medicaid??? Or Bill Clinton, who passed what he did with the votes he had, and it's far from clear that he would have accomplished more or better by being less ambitious.

TBH the only available venue for sub rosa tinkering is the executive or judiciary, and both branches have processes that are protracted and detailed, with many opportunities for public apprehension.

Whatever your theory is, it doesn't seem relevant.

Then the GOP removed the mandate which was one of the key components of the policy,

It turned out the mandate, one of the most legacy-Republican ideas in the ACA, wasn't worth jack, so whatever. The most deleterious development surrounding the mandate is that it has been and still is used by Republicans as a lever to try to get the whole program declared unconstitutional.

and basically tinkered with the requirements for coverage to the point where I don't know how well of a metric insurance coverage even is anymore.

For most people the coverage standards and subsidies still apply, you're thinking of a small minority of plans on the exchanges for "catastrophic" insurance that have been promoted and authorized by the Trump admin.

Yeah I think I am more talking about priorities. It's not so much "let's upgrade department infrastructure and increase R&D to maintain competitive advantages" it's "we need to dismantle entire systems and we promise that the replacement will be better". Whether or not you actually agree the gov can and will do some things better, it feels like Dems are always asking for these priorities and big issues to be accepted on faith that execution will go well.

No one actually cares to hear "let's upgrade department infrastructure and increase R&D to maintain competitive advantages", it's already part of what Biden is saying, and "we need to dismantle entire systems and we promise that the replacement will be better" is not something you ever hear from Dems at the presidential level other than Sanders. Maybe Kucinich or Dean were like that, I don't know anything about their rhetoric. I just don't accept your characterization of the Democratic Party as it is.

But improvements could have been much better and less costly to achieve, I think.

As I was saying, there just isn't evidence for this, that adopting the least-ambitious platforms would generate greater electoral success at any point in recent history.

Here is the Dukakis platform from 1988.
http://www.4president.org/brochures/...88brochure.htm

What does leftist theory say about the acceptance of militarist mentality among manufacturing vs service vs other types of jobs.

I don't know what you mean by "militarist mentality," but what you'll generally hear from the intersectional left today is that the women and POC of the service sector are the "real" modern working class.

The more culturally-conservative anti-anti-Trump horseshoe theory kind of leftists might be more bullish about the white working class (WWC), but they seem moribund to me.

I think that could be said on any level. Bernie certainly could have used some of the endorsements he threw away. I'm not a campaign manager, but to my eyes it seems it comes down to voter engagement and turnout, at least for a purple/swing district. Finding friends in the establishment is probably the way to go for NYC where a single party is dominant.

Uh, sure. But orgs and endorsements on the local level are important not just because they can give you money - which of course you probably also need - but because they can activate the networks of people that they mediate. At the local level people are also especially likely to be checking endorsement lists because they have no idea otherwise who the candidates are; this person is supported by the NRA, this person is supported by a teacher's association, etc.

[Strike For The South]

I mean at this point a Biden win is a foregone conclusion.

What we are looking at now is who he surrounds himself with to pull the levers. Will it be the "Bernie" wing or the "Biden" wing?

[Montmorency]

I mean at this point a Biden win is a foregone conclusion.

What we are looking at now is who he surrounds himself with to pull the levers. Will it be the "Bernie" wing or the "Biden" wing?

Just to quickly jump in, check out the revamped climate action plan produced by the Sanders-Biden unity committee. As Eric Levitz points out, a moderate presidential candidate doesn't tack left during the (effectively) general election, having defeated his leftist challenger, unless he puts stock in the substance of the policy.

[Papewaio]

I thought Brexit II was a foregone loss. It turned into a landslide and reinforced Brexit. Now they have more COVID cases in UK than USA.

Like a herd animal, right wingers keep their identity publicly quiet hence polls around the world being skewed to the left, also right wingers vote as a herd.

Left wing is like a bag of cats, so I expect a lot of hissing and scratching and then a lot of protest votes. Donkey votes match the mascot after all.

[Montmorency]

I thought Brexit II was a foregone loss. It turned into a landslide and reinforced Brexit. Now they have more COVID cases in UK than USA.

Like a herd animal, right wingers keep their identity publicly quiet hence polls around the world being skewed to the left, also right wingers vote as a herd.

Left wing is like a bag of cats, so I expect a lot of hissing and scratching and then a lot of protest votes. Donkey votes match the mascot after all.

I mean, Labour started the 2019 election season about 10 points behind in polling, were about 10 points behind on election day, and secured 32.1% to 43.6% at the ballot box.

There's just not much evidence for the second sentence that I can identify, past or present. Now, it's possible that in the future all our cohort of old right-wing people for the pool of respondents will die and the rest will systematically reject engagement with polling as an arm of The Evil Medias, resulting in a permanent uncorrectable skew towards left or liberal parties, but that's not manifested yet.

[Hooahguy]

Civil rights legend John Lewis has passed away.

I knew this day was coming since he got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year, but I am absolutely devastated. Not only was he my congressman when I lived in Georgia, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet him a number of times, and each time he was the single nicest person in congress. And he remembered my name when I met him for the final time last year which was extremely touching. He was the definition of a living legend and whoever takes his seat next will have very large shoes to fill.

[Papewaio]

Polling around the world tends to be more left than the results. UK, USA and Australia all showed stronger shifts to the left in polls vs the actual election results.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Civil rights legend John Lewis has passed away.

I knew this day was coming since he got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer last year, but I am absolutely devastated. Not only was he my congressman when I lived in Georgia, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet him a number of times, and each time he was the single nicest person in congress. And he remembered my name when I met him for the final time last year which was extremely touching. He was the definition of a living legend and whoever takes his seat next will have very large shoes to fill.

I've been dreading the day I read Alex Trebek's obituary, as he too has Stage IV pancreatic cancer. However, his most recent update has him with a new beard and "good numbers". It's amazing what modern medicine can do nowadays.

[Montmorency]

Polling around the world tends to be more left than the results. UK, USA and Australia all showed stronger shifts to the left in polls vs the actual election results.

Why do you think there is a systematic tendency across elections?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...partisan-bias/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...te-polls-been/

If you skim through those articles, you will see that in US presidential elections the national polling bias changes every election, often toward alternating parties, and state polls may have their own bias divergent from national polls' bias.

The 2012 Obama-Romney election was the latest episode of significant Republican bias in polling. Usually problems with polls can be explained in methodological terms. For example, in 2016 it was found that a major factor underrepresenting Republican support in polls was nonweighting of education (i.e. non-college voters, especially non-college whites). These and other oversights have been adjusted for this cycle.

Partisan bias in sub-presidential races also constantly fluctuates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ard-democrats/


Another recent non-American case, but where the polls were off:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-were-way-off/

Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. ... The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points.

Sorry, but this just seems like one of those common political myths.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I don't pay much attention to polls, just a big distraction, IMHO. What bodes dire for Fearless Leader is that since 1900, only one president has ever won a second term when a recession started in the last term of presidency...William McKinley in 1900.

https://www.newsweek.com/heres-all-p...ssions-1493467

Since then, the four presidents who ran for a second term during such an economic downturn—William Taft in 1912, Herber Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992—were unsuccessful.

Old article, but the warning is the same...nothing sways voters like a recession.

Similar article in Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...year-recession

The sudden turnaround in the labor market raised the possibility that the economy could grow fast enough between now and November for Trump to defy the historical record and win another term.

I don't know which Kool-Aid Bloomberg was drinking to make that statement, as it took at least four years to climb out of the last recession in 2008, and the economic situation in the US is tied to the pandemic like flies on on dung heap. And it isn't getting better anytime soon.

[Montmorency]

I don't pay much attention to polls, just a big distraction, IMHO. What bodes dire for Fearless Leader is that since 1900, only one president has ever won a second term when a recession started in the last term of presidency...William McKinley in 1900.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/17/polit...ump/index.html

The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago.

White House tradition calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement, in the entrance of the executive mansion, visible to guests during official events.
That was the case through at least July 8, when President Donald Trump welcomed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two stood in the Cross Hall of the White House and made remarks, with the portraits of Clinton and Bush essentially looking on as they had been throughout Trump's first term. But in the days after after that, the Clinton and Bush portraits were moved into the Old Family Dining Room, a small, rarely used room that is not seen by most visitors. That places the paintings well outside of Trump's vantage point in the White House. In their previous location, the pictures would have been seen daily as Trump descends the staircase from his third floor private residence or when he hosts events on the state floor of the White House. Now, they hang in a space used mainly for storing unused tablecloths and furniture. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The portrait of former President Barack Obama is not expected to be unveiled for a formal ceremony during Trump's first term, a sign of the bitter relationship between the 44th and 45th presidents. Trump has accused Obama of unsubstantiated and unspecified crimes, and has questioned whether Obama was born in the US for years.

The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation's 25th president, who was assassinated in 1901, and the Clinton portrait has been replaced by one of Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, three people who have seen the portraits this week tell CNN. Trump has shown more of an affinity for those predecessors than his more recent ones.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation's 25th president

You can bet your a$$ he knows the significance of William McKinley

[Papewaio]

Why do you think there is a systematic tendency across elections?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...partisan-bias/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...te-polls-been/

If you skim through those articles, you will see that in US presidential elections the national polling bias changes every election, often toward alternating parties, and state polls may have their own bias divergent from national polls' bias.

The 2012 Obama-Romney election was the latest episode of significant Republican bias in polling. Usually problems with polls can be explained in methodological terms. For example, in 2016 it was found that a major factor underrepresenting Republican support in polls was nonweighting of education (i.e. non-college voters, especially non-college whites). These and other oversights have been adjusted for this cycle.

Partisan bias in sub-presidential races also constantly fluctuates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ard-democrats/


Another recent non-American case, but where the polls were off:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-were-way-off/



Sorry, but this just seems like one of those common political myths.

I wouldn't use French politics as the basis. They have a very strong united but small right wing base, and a very broad disjointed left. In the first round it is quite common to have the right wing candidate poll higher than most if not all of the left wing candidates. Then in the final round all the left wing voters rally around a single choice.

What works differently in the USA is that it isn't a two round system nor a preferential voting system. Nor is there compulsory voting either, and by all means it seems stacked with gerrymandering (straight out corrupt in most nations) and making it difficult to vote. So whilst the polls are of a random sample of the voting age people, it doesn't reflect how many are going to actually vote.

UK has a slightly different issue where it is difficult for the younger lefter crowd to take time off to vote at the elections.

Australia - election boundaries are set by an independent commission, voting it is on a weekend, postal votes are common, preferential voting is (technically) compulsory with a fine for not attending. The votes still tend to be more right voting than left than indicated in polling. This might be due to the preferential voting and the more extreme right wing groups with a smaller base not getting polled (literally had an idiot Senator from One Nation in on 12 votes - need a massive sample size to capture that in a poll).

[Idaho]

The tactics seem pretty clear from trump and pompeo: attack China/communism and conflate those with "enemies within".

I've become slightly obsessed with watching right-wing nut job YouTube and Twitter. The level of detachment from reality is terrifying. There is a clique of people who genuinely think trump is some kind of moral genius who is the only defence we have to communism (the latter being I'll defined other than is being "Stalin" and "bad").

[ReluctantSamurai]

The level of detachment from reality is terrifying. There is a clique of people who genuinely think trump is some kind of moral genius who is the only defence we have to communism

What's actually scary is that these people are too stupid to realize that if he gets re-elected, what you're seeing in Portland Oregon (and coming soon to a city near you), will be repeated as long as he can get away with it. Won't hear these morons bitching about a loss of personal freedoms until such tactics involves them. Republicans should also be concerned as this is definitely not the kind of federalism they espouse. But it's not surprising since Fearless Leader admires such people as Putin, Kim Jong-un, and others like them.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

What's actually scary is that these people are too stupid to realize that if he gets re-elected, what you're seeing in Portland Oregon (and coming soon to a city near you), will be repeated as long as he can get away with it. Won't hear these morons bitching about a loss of personal freedoms until such tactics involves them. Republicans should also be concerned as this is definitely not the kind of federalism they espouse. But it's not surprising since Fearless Leader admires such people as Putin, Kim Jong-un, and others like them.

It is not the kind of federalism conservatives such as myself espouse. Max Boot, George Will, P.J. O'Rourke, Jennifer Rubin...conservatives true to their principles have great trouble supporting that yutz.

But make no mistake, Trump has taken the reins of the party and the GOP now embodies -- overtly or tacitly -- has own brand of Demagogic Pseudo-fascism. Trumpers want to kick ass and ignore the names because they have to oppose the people who are really destroying America -- liberal socialists.

The GOP needs to be handed a soup-to-nuts electoral debacle that keeps the party out of power for the better part of a decade. THEN, perhaps they will re-think the "kill the left at all costs" mantra crap that is gutting American conservatism.

[Hooahguy]

I give credit to the Lincoln Project for actually committing to not turning around to oppose Dems after the election if Biden wins:

The group is preparing to vehemently oppose efforts by GOP senators to obstruct and stymie Biden’s agenda, should he win the presidency, Weaver confirmed.
...

But will the Lincoln Project remain committed to concrete expansions of voting rights after Trump is gone? Weaver said yes, noting it will keep advocating for automatic voter registration and a restored Voting Rights Act, and continue fighting efforts to “make it difficult for black people or poor people to vote.”

Even though I love their ads, Ive been wary of the LP. If they actually follow through with this then maybe Ill begin to trust them a bit more. I think having two main parties that operate in good faith is good for America, so if they can rebuild the GOP (or something else) into a party that doesnt want to turn us into a dictatorship, then more power to them.

[Montmorency]

I wouldn't use French politics as the basis. They have a very strong united but small right wing base, and a very broad disjointed left. In the first round it is quite common to have the right wing candidate poll higher than most if not all of the left wing candidates. Then in the final round all the left wing voters rally around a single choice.

Why was the polling gap in 2017 France greater than in all national elections since at least 1969? 10.2% compared to a prior average of 3.9%. The nearest polling gap was in 2002 between Chirac and Le Pen pere. What's the theory here?

And further down in the article, a look at other Euro elections:

Some analysts have argued that people are afraid to admit that they are voting for a far-right candidate such as Le Pen because they don’t want to give a socially undesirable response. That theory was bolstered twice last year, both when the “leave” vote in the U.K. referendum over leaving the European Union did slightly better than polls suggested and when Trump outperformed his polling. But the “shy insert-far-right-candidate here” theory doesn’t hold up when you look at a larger sample of European elections. And it didn’t hold up in France: There was no systematic bias in the polling against the far-right candidate (Le Pen).

As my colleague Nate Silver has pointed out, right-wing populist candidates and parties (in local and parliamentary elections) have, on average, pretty much matched their polling averages3 in European elections since 2012.

Indeed, the French presidential election is the sixth consecutive European election in which the populist right-wing candidate or party underperformed its polling.

None of this is to say that there aren’t “shy voters” in the electorate. It’s just that we may be thinking about them in the wrong way. Instead of undercounting conservative support because people are afraid to give a socially undesirable response, the polls may simply be missing unenthusiastic supporters — people who aren’t excited about their candidate enough to answer a poll but still vote. In fact, when the idea of a “shy” voter was originally formed in 1992, it had nothing to do with right-wing populists. Instead, pollsters were underestimating the strength of the mainstream and relatively milquetoast Conservative Party in the U.K.
[...]
Maybe we should talk less about “shy” voters and more about “apathetic” voters or “reluctant” voters.

What works differently in the USA is that it isn't a two round system nor a preferential voting system. Nor is there compulsory voting either, and by all means it seems stacked with gerrymandering (straight out corrupt in most nations) and making it difficult to vote. So whilst the polls are of a random sample of the voting age people, it doesn't reflect how many are going to actually vote.

Here is the Florida GOP and the federal courts conspiring to suppress the votes of ex-felons, upon whom the former have been striving to impose an unconstitutional poll tax in the form of conditioning voter registration on payment of fines. They've been at it for 1.5 years, since the Florida electorate approved reenfranchisement in a referendum. For extra Kafkaism, Florida does not even maintain proper records on what fines a given applicant owes, with the cherry on top being that the backlog of applications cannot be completed before the 2024 election at current staffing levels. Of course, trying to vote without the satisfaction of the state would be another felony...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-poll-tax.html

You all might recall that I was much more sanguine about the success of reenfranchisement in early 2019.

Process factors beyond the immediate scope of polling, such as Democratic-intending voters going through more trouble voting or getting suppressed by the government, can certainly skew results in theory, assuming pollsters don't try to correct for it. But does it in practice? And to the extent it does, it would have to - in the US - manifest in specific states where these are extant factors. They wouldn't be in all or even most states. You would expect it in Southern and midWestern states in particular. Supporting evidence might be the polling in 2018 that had Dems as mild favorites for the Senate and Gov seats in Florida, but turned into narrow Republican victories. For most recent presidential elections Florida polling has indeed had a Democratic skew. On the other hand, Florida polls - like state polls in general - had a Republican skew in 2012 (when Obama won the state again). This occurred in the context of a national Republican skew in polling that cycle, which implicates internal polling design and not government action.

At all levels, the valence and magnitude of bias change every election, and tends to be associated with identifiable methodological choices that can be adjusted. If one simply assumes a particular static bias, their predictions of electoral outcomes will not be very accurate going by history. Systematic polling bias for left parties has to be measured and analyzed, not just hypothesized.

Australia - election boundaries are set by an independent commission, voting it is on a weekend, postal votes are common, preferential voting is (technically) compulsory with a fine for not attending. The votes still tend to be more right voting than left than indicated in polling. This might be due to the preferential voting and the more extreme right wing groups with a smaller base not getting polled (literally had an idiot Senator from One Nation in on 12 votes - need a massive sample size to capture that in a poll).

The problem is that in the second-party preferred vote the mainstream center-right and center-left parties each typically pull about 50% of the vote. That means polling in aggregate will fall within a single polling error at least. Every election. These are close elections. From what I can see on Wiki Australian polling is precise.


Bottom line is, Biden is multiple polling errors (MOE) ahead of Trump currently, and if that continues to hold until November then going by the entire history of polling a Trump victory would be a vanishingly-unlikely event. The real bias might be the lure of licentious, if often relevant, speculation on tail-end probabilities.

(I will admit that there is clearly an elevated vulnerability in this cycle to unprecedented "rigging" measures, but almost definitionally polling cannot account for lawlessness on such an unprecedented (in our context) scale, so that's kind of beside the point of just how such a hazard might manifest. No poll can weight for a coup, for example. And in practice, as I've been saying, to the extent the electoral process functions semi-normally, sufficient key states to do not have Republicans in charge of the electoral apparatus that the threat remains a mostly-rhetorical one.)

[a completely inoffensive name]

I give credit to the Lincoln Project for actually committing to not turning around to oppose Dems after the election if Biden wins:

Even though I love their ads, Ive been wary of the LP. If they actually follow through with this then maybe Ill begin to trust them a bit more. I think having two main parties that operate in good faith is good for America, so if they can rebuild the GOP (or something else) into a party that doesnt want to turn us into a dictatorship, then more power to them.

They arn't looking to take back the Republican Party 'after Trump', they have crossed the Rubicon so to speak they can't return. They are looking to bolster a conservative faction within the Democratic Party.

Once Trump is OOO and the Dem coalition is in power they will be running campaign ads targeting moderate and conservatives Dems to push out Progressive agenda. They are still neocons at heart.

[Idaho]

BBC News - Donald Trump suggests delay to 2020 US presidential election

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53597975

So surprised by this development. Really didn't see this coming

So the election (if he loses) will be put down to fraud by the trumpians and conspiraloons.

Get ready US - full scale fascism is on its way, all orchestrated by Putin.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

OF COURSE he wants a delay. He isn't a reader and has the attention span of a gnat apparently, but he can read a poll summary. And they ain't pretty.

But he will not achieve his sought-for delay.

The only delayed election ever was the first one in 1788 (actually 10 Jan 1789). None have since been delayed regardless of natural disaster, pandemic, or wars both foreign and domestic.

He has about 100 days to change the predicted results.


And full fascism will not be coming any time soon. Any actual attempt to impose it will generate a civil war and Trump's cadre, however ardent, would lose.

[drone]

Theory is that Trump brought up delaying the election to distract from 2 pieces of bad news: the report that we had the worst GDP decline (32.9%) over Q2 in history, and that he killed Herman Cain. Trump does this all the time, "bad news coming? say something outrageous!" He floated it to see the reaction, but he would do it if he thought he could get away with it.

[Montmorency]

Tangentially, I have been informed that I should not use the terms "skew" and "bias" interchangeably, as bias is a systematic statistical error whereas skew refers to the mathematical asymmetry of a statistical distribution. A statistical bias might not involve skew, and a statistical skew might not be biased.


Op-ed by former Republican operator:

I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party.

I saw the warning signs but ignored them and chose to believe what I wanted to believe: The party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the others guys were worse. Many of us in the party saw this dark side and told ourselves it was a recessive gene. We were wrong. It turned out to be the dominant gene.

As always, who already knew this 4, 10, 20, 40 years ago? Why weren't they listened to?

Racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. While many Republicans today like to mourn the absence of an intellectual voice like William Buckley, it is often overlooked that Mr. Buckley began his career as a racist defending segregation.

In the Richard Nixon White House, Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips wrote a re-election campaign memo headed “Dividing the Democrats” in which they outlined what would come to be known as the Southern Strategy. It assumes there is little Republicans can do to attract Black Americans and details a two-pronged strategy: Utilize Black support of Democrats to alienate white voters while trying to decrease that support by sowing dissension within the Democratic Party.

That strategy has worked so well that it was copied by the Russians in their 2016 efforts to help elect Mr. Trump.

In the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, on which I worked, we acknowledged the failures of Republicans to attract significant nonwhite support. When Mr. Bush called himself a “compassionate conservative,” some on the right attacked him, calling it an admission that conservatism had not been compassionate. That was true; it had not been. Many of us believed we could steer the party to that “kinder, gentler” place his father described. We were wrong.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced. I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought they were actually beating the market.

Mr. Trump has served a useful purpose by exposing the deep flaws of a major American political party. Like a heavy truck driven over a bridge on the edge of failure, he has made it impossible to ignore the long-developing fault lines of the Republican Party. A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patriotism.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

Conservatism is always nothing more than an elite legitimating casuistry. It's just that in the America of our lifetimes it shed the semblance of an intellectual core for the plain guttural shriek.

Only fear will motivate the party to change — the cold fear only defeat can bring.

From the comments:

There is nothing so bracing as the foxhole conversion of a Republican who manifests a convenient crisis of conscience.

Sadly, Mr. Stevens’ mea culpa comes just a bit too late, and only after polls have begun to indicate that the nation is turning against Republicans, generally, and some of them specifically. Many of us saw the disturbing trends of party policy long ago, courtesy of clearly visible immorality and selfishness that has long characterized its true raison d’etre. It’s faux fiscal responsibility, bootstrap policies and morality ploy has been nothing more than a long-con, designed to feather its own nest. Many of us saw it long ago. Not, apparently, Mr. Stevens.

It’s more than time for his likes to own up to Republicans’ sorry evolution toward totalitarianism, racism, ultra-nationalism and selfish irresponsibility, not to mention his own part in it. That he waited, however, until the handwriting was on the wall, courtesy of a roused public which has increasingly had enough, should best be viewed as yet another example of too little too late.

The GOP’s self-immolation has been apparent to many of us before Donald Trump expropriated it for his own political purposes. Instead of claiming that “we lost the battle” and hiding behind NYT opinion piece, let’s see whether Mr. Stevens rises to the occasion and demonstrates some true bravery by meaningfully walking his nascent talk. As Donald Trump would say, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I like the photo of Trump embedded in the article.

OF COURSE he wants a delay. He isn't a reader and has the attention span of a gnat apparently, but he can read a poll summary. And they ain't pretty.

But he will not achieve his sought-for delay.

The only delayed election ever was the first one in 1788 (actually 10 Jan 1789). None have since been delayed regardless of natural disaster, pandemic, or wars both foreign and domestic.

He has about 100 days to change the predicted results.


And full fascism will not be coming any time soon. Any actual attempt to impose it will generate a civil war and Trump's cadre, however ardent, would lose.

The military leadership already told him following the Lafayette Square incident during the height of the BLM protests, in so many words, to jog on.

Without the military all Trump has is a few thousand sicherpolizei and the hypothetical ardor of his militias. He's done.

One of Trump's saving graces is that, though he's a fascist, he's too lazy and stupid to actually attempt to suborn the whole bureaucratic apparatus to a long-term agenda, of which he has none other than 'steal whatever I can.' The same applies to his functionaries. The closest he's come is with immigration and border security, but even there he could have accomplished more with some dedication and legal suavity. Everything Trump does is ad hoc and oriented toward short-term satisfaction of personal corruption or his perception of the media cycle. All told, Trump's fascism is therefore defensive (rather than ambitious) and someone without his astonishing medley of personal and mental defects could be much more dangerous in office. I mean come on, what kind of proper fascist utterly bungles a served-up opportunity in the form of a public emergency to consolidate personal control over the central government and central control over daily life? If even Tucker Carlson were switched out for Trump immediately following impeachment, his approval rating would be 52% (though trying to repress civil rights protests would be an inexorable loser for these people).

None of this is to diminish or dismiss the unprecedented damage done by Trump to our institutions and cultures of governance, only to point out that there can be (will be?) even worse with just a little, normal, non-debility at the head.

[Montmorency]

We will never reach a full understanding of how bad at politics Trump is, following from his total inability to act as something other than a dumb criminal bigot.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020...-cost-him-2020

If Donald Trump loses in the fall, the first week of June might have marked the beginning of the end. On June 1, with the country consumed by historic protests against racism and police brutality, some of them violent, Trump decided to position himself as the “law-and-order” president, made clear by his tweets and his now infamous march that evening across Lafayette Square, outside the White House. His path cleared by the National Guard and D.C. police who used chemical agents on lawfully assembled protesters and roughed up journalists, Trump walked across the street to stand in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church for an inscrutable and buffoonish photo op, in which he held up a Bible and said nothing much at all about the cities on fire and the country’s dismal legacy of racism. “We have a great country,” Trump said. “That’s my thoughts.” The moment was an emblem of Trump’s presidency: attention-seeking, bereft of empathy, gut over strategy. It was so embarrassing and borderline anti-American that one of his generals, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, apologized for participating in the walk and reportedly considered resigning. Like so many of Trump’s decisions, it was a sugar-high tactic designed to please his base and get TV ratings, with almost no thought about the larger sweep of American history, let alone his reelection campaign.

Politically, it was a disaster. In the days that followed, Trump’s approval ratings tumbled to their lowest point in over a year, and their lowest point of the coronavirus pandemic, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker. The first two weeks of June also saw Trump fall even further behind his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Before June, Biden steadily held a four-to-six-point lead over Trump in national polls, fueled in part by massive support among the independent voters whom Trump won in 2016. Shortly after Lafayette Square, though, Biden began to open up an even bigger lead, a nine-point average lead over the president, with a Washington Post–ABC News poll this week showing Biden winning by as many as 15 points.

Trump’s reaction to the protests was not the only reason for his summer collapse. Most pollsters say that Trump’s continuing inability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic havoc that’s come with it, has been the dominant factor. And last week, for the first time, polls began to show Biden beating Trump on the question of who would best handle the economy, the only decent card left in Trump’s deck. But if Trump loses in November, the nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that erupted in early June have to be seen as a significant breaking point. Not just because they threw an exhausted nation into even more chaos, and not just because they forced Trump into the most astoundingly dumb photo op in presidential history, surpassing George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished!” blunder. In fact, new polling and research provided to Vanity Fair suggests that the protests themselves changed America’s opinions about race so quickly, and so profoundly, that Trump unknowingly planted himself even further on the wrong side of public opinion than previously understood.

Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Democratic research firm Avalanche went into nine battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania—to measure how segments of Americans were reacting to the protests. Unlike most pollsters at the time, Avalanche surveyed two large back-to-back samples of 6,986 registered and unregistered total voters—one on June 1 and a second on June 10 and 11—allowing it to track how sentiments changed during what might have been the most consequential chapter of the protests. Like most polls, Avalanche found widespread support for the protests by June 11, with 68% of respondents saying the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right.” But rather than measuring responses by self-identified partisanship—Democrat, Republican, independent—Avalanche measured by vote choice. It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.

Avalanche found resounding support for the protests not just among Biden supporters, but among persuadable voters and even soft Trump supporters. The hardcore Vote Trump respondents were against the protests, with 56% opposing them. But among the softer Lean Trump set, an eye-opening 59% said the protesters were “completely right” or “somewhat right”—probably not what the president had in mind when he commandeered Lafayette Square. And 72% of Americans with Mixed Feelings about the presidential race—precious undecided voters—said the protesters were right too. “There’s not a lot of issues where you get even a strong majority of Americans on the same page,” said Michiah Prull, the CEO of Avalanche. “It speaks to that historic moment, and it speaks to a degree of national alignment on something that's honestly pretty rare these days.”

But just as remarkable were the shifts among those persuadables in the 10 days between June 1 and June 11, a window that opened with burning cities and Trump’s march to St. John’s Church, but concluded with mostly peaceful demonstrations nationwide. During that period Avalanche found that support for the protests grew 10 points among Mixed Feelings voters, 14 points among Lean Biden voters, and a head-spinning 25 points among Lean Trump voters. “I had never in my research career seen public opinion shift on the scale in this time frame,” Prull said. “When we look at this from electoral context, when you see a 25-point swing in Lean Trump supporters from disapproving of the protests to at least somewhat agreeing with them, that’s just a scale of public opinion shift you don’t see in this line of work very often.”

[a completely inoffensive name]

Theory is that Trump brought up delaying the election to distract from 2 pieces of bad news: the report that we had the worst GDP decline (32.9%) over Q2 in history, and that he killed Herman Cain. Trump does this all the time, "bad news coming? say something outrageous!" He floated it to see the reaction, but he would do it if he thought he could get away with it.

How sad is it that it was considered "smart PR" for a President to make fascistic statements that undermine the democratic process rather than god forbid talk about the economy.

The efficacy of this strategy is directly tied to the degree that American culture among the white middle class has become indulgent and narcissistic.

[Hooahguy]

I mean when even one of the co-founders of the Federalist Society says calling to delay the election is fascistic you know you are starting to lose people.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

What I think is needful: Punitive anti-GOP voting come November. Aside from those GOP'ers who have consistently opposed Trump (3? fewer?) we should pick the Dem and fire for effect.

[Pannonian]

What I think is needful: Punitive anti-GOP voting come November. Aside from those GOP'ers who have consistently opposed Trump (3? fewer?) we should pick the Dem and fire for effect.

On a related note, would you say that proponents of the Second Amendment as the guarantor of liberty who have also supported Trump's violations of constitutional norms have lost all authority?