US Elections 2020

[MrFanti]

But the Atlantic article that I linked concerns the way in which some Conservative and more extreme White Americans view Black Americans, rather than what Black Amercans think of themseves. I understand the GOP has had a solid 10% of the Black votee in recent years and I think we can agree that yes, it is wrong to lump all Black Americans together. But I do wonder if even that 10% truly agrees that the 45th President has done more for Black Americans than any President since Lincoln. I assume he has heard of Lyndon B. Johnson, but with this guy, you can't be sure.

You would be quite surprised at what that 10% believes......
And to say 90% vs 10% isn't an accurate representation either as there are also a number of Black Americans who ride both sides of the fence (so to speak) depending on subject.

[Stavros]

You would be quite surprised at what that 10% believes......
And to say 90% vs 10% isn't an accurate representation either as there are also a number of Black Americans who ride both sides of the fence (so to speak) depending on subject.

You mean, like Vernon Robinson?

"Robinson holds a number of views which many would consider outrageous – “The UN is possibly the greatest abuser of children on the planet”; the World Health Organization “subscribes to a far-left ideology”; Sweden has a high suicide rate because “everything is free except the citizens”; the abortion rate in the US is a “hidden holocaust” of “black babies”; too many progressive-leaning sportspeople these days are “Lenin’s useful idiots,” transgender-inclusive policies will stop black girls from getting track scholarships to college; people born to illegal immigrants in the US shouldn’t get citizenship; people are being fired from their jobs in Dallas because they don’t speak Spanish; “The Democrats want open borders because they need new voters” – but it’s worth noting that most are in line with what the president has said himself. Indeed, Robinson was doing shock tactic conservatism long before Trump: in 2006, one of his campaign ads for Congress attacked feminism, same-sex marriage and “aliens” who “come across our unguarded Mexican border by the millions”. In the same cycle, he made waves by climbing that if his opponent had his way, “America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal immigrants and homosexuals”. Little wonder he has embraced Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” with unbridled enthusiasm."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...n-b420765.html

[broncofan]

Trump did get a bit of a post convention bump in his numbers. All polls have some margin for error and it's possible there is systematic error. But if you give Trump every state that is within two percentage points of current polling averages (up or down), he still loses the electoral college right now.

Of the states that are close, we have Texas, which is historically a red state and in which Trump is up in polling by less than a percentage point. I have to assume Trump probably carries Texas but if he lost it, I can't imagine he'd win the election. There's Florida, which always seems to disappoint the Democrats, where Trump is down by 2.8% points. He is up by close to a percentage point in Ohio, and I assume maybe he really will win Ohio given that the margin of victory was close to 500,000 votes in 2016.

But it bears repeating that he could win all of these states, by no means a certainty and still lose. That would happen if he loses Michigan, where he's down 7.4%, Wisconsin, where he's down 7.1%, Minnesota, where he's down 6.4%, and Pennsylvania, where he's down 5.1%.

I know people don't have a lot of faith in polling but I have trouble seeing Trump winning any of the states I list in the last paragraph except for Pennsylvania. And if he does, he still has to make sure he doesn't lose Florida, Ohio, or Texas.

Biden should continue campaigning hard in swing states and take nothing for granted. But let's hope there's nothing that really shakes up these results by November.

The margins by which Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016 should give Republicans pause. Hillary was reviled by large parts of this country (unfairly in my view), but people do not have really strong negative reactions to Biden.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com.../pennsylvania/

[broncofan]

The above assumes Biden doesn't get any surprise negative results in states that Hillary won. The thing is, of the states I've looked at, he's consistently doing better than Hillary was. He's up by 6% in Nevada and 11% in Colorado. Shit, he's up in North Carolina and Arizona, which Trump won by margins of 2.7% and 4% respectively.

Long story short: if you can believe that Trump has suffered any loss of popularity from 2016 or that Biden is slightly more popular than Hillary, Trump's margins of 23,000, 44,000, and 11,000 votes in the decisive states of (all else equal) Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan give lots of reason for optimism.

[Stavros]

There are a few reasons. I always vote in person but I don't think it should be necessary when there's a pandemic even though I'm not super high risk. I think that requiring the vote to be in person is intended to suppress the vote rather than protect against fraud.

I was curious about the process as well. I am already registered to vote, but I had to go through the additional step of filling out an application for a ballot, which is then processed and if approved a ballot is sent to the address at which you're registered.

One ulterior motive I have is that I want to convince my parents who are in their late 70s to get a mail in application. My mother believes it is her responsibility to show up at the polls on election day and cast a ballot against Trump. I haven't been able to convince her that getting a mail in ballot is safer, is legal in Pennsylvania without the requirement that anyone have a reason. If I can give her a sense of how long it takes and how easy it is, then maybe I demystify it for them.

Finally, if my state has provided a process to vote by mail without any qualifying reason, I thought why not do it if I can get a ballot in advance and make sure I deliver it well in advance? I'm not certain I made the right choice here but a ballot is on the way and I will be sending it back well in advance of the deadline.

Thanks for this- I understand your point about voting in person in the midst of a pandemic -I have never had to queue up to vote and dont believe it has ever happened in the UK but I might be wrong on that. Perhaps in US districts - I think I mean Precincts?- there should be more polling stations per head of populaton?

Here are some weird and wonderful polling stations in the UK
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/st...s-chosen-71006

Re: your posts on States and Stats:
Do you or does anyone else think the Revelations of St Bob will impact voter choice, notwithstanding the fact that many Americans have already voted and can't change their minds now?

And what was Bob doing all this time, sitting on such explosive information while Americans have been falling ill and dying? I was struck by how feeble his first book -Fear- was, his complete lack of interest in the President's pre-history as a rent collector for dad, his multiple failed businesses, his financial ties to Felix Sater, the extensive ties to the Russians and the illegal assistance the campaign received from Russians in 2016- as Bob is a Republican, I suspect he laments the slow death of his party but is reluctant to use the President to kick it into its grave.

[broncofan]

My sense about polling stations is that there's inconsistency. Some places it's sufficient and there's no wait and some places there are long lines. I've never had a super long wait, the kind I've heard about on the news, but that shouldn't happen.

I'm a bit puzzled by Woodward's revelations because it doesn't seem to tell people much that we didn't know. The Chinese government has experience dealing with pandemics that we don't and they weren't able to suppress it. They have good emergency care and good doctors who were using both condensed oxygen and ventilators to keep people alive. They were also trying every drug that is currently available to us, including antivirals and steroids. Despite all of this we were getting reports of case fatality rates not that much different to what they are now. They had thirty year and forty year olds who were dying, including a doctor who was a whistleblower.

We also know at this time that experts inside the cdc and HHS were exchanging emails about how this was a pending disaster. I guess the only thing we now know is that Trump subjectively knew what we should have expected a normal functioning person to know given the information he had available to him. At every step of the way he played down the virus and gave bad advice. His insistence on testing hydroxychloroquine beyond the point of failure has had the effect of draining participants from other clinical trials that were more likely to be effective. In total, his egotism and desire for political advantage not only cost lives but he almost explicitly traded human lives for political advantage. I suppose now we know that not only would a well informed person have known the risk but even a dullard surrounded by talented health experts would know and he did.

I do think little by little some of the information is seeping through. There is a percentage of the public who probably can't be reached as long as he keeps up the culture wars. I think he'd survive an audio tape of him admitting to not caring that people are dying better than a picture of him wearing a pussy hat.

[blackchubby38]

The longest I had to wait on line to vote was about 2.5 hours back in 2008. It was early in the morning before people were going to work.

In 2012, 2016, and the last NYC mayoral election, I voted in the afternoon and I was in and out in about less than 10 minutes.

The polling stations are in the community centers of the my co-op. It will take a little doing, but I can see them being able to follow social distancing guidelines. But as long as everyone is wearing a mask, things should be okay. So even though I do have the option of mail in voting, I plan to vote in person.

[Stavros]

Next question: the 'youth vote'-the article in the link argues the youth vote was a jey factor in the Democrats taking back the House in 2018, but does it mean that the same cohort of voters,plus new voters will vote for Biden/Harris, when they may have been attracted in 2018 by their local candidates? And, one must assume, not all 18-25 yar olds are Democrats. In addition, the list of third party candidates linked below includes the Green Party, and Maverick candidates likes Kanye West, probably better known than Texas-based concert pianist Jade Simmons, also linked below.

That complacency, that specific groups of people will vote a certain way, may not be certain -but can the 'youth vote' play a decisive factor?

The youth Vote
https://www.voanews.com/student-unio...20-us-election

Third Party Candidates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_...lectoral_votes

Jade Simmons
https://jadesimmons.com/

[filghy2]

Trump did get a bit of a post convention bump in his numbers. All polls have some margin for error and it's possible there is systematic error. But if you give Trump every state that is within two percentage points of current polling averages (up or down), he still loses the electoral college right now.

You may have seen it already, but FiveThirtyEight currently give Trump a 24% chance of winning, although that has been declining recently. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...tion-forecast/
Incidentally, they give Trump a 38% chance of winning at least one state he didn't win last time, so you might be taking that possibility too lightly.

Nate Silver has also calculated the probabilities of a Biden victory for different margins in the popular vote. If the margin is 2-3% then the odds are a bit less than even, but they rise strongly as the margin gets larger. (The margin in 2016 was 2.1%.) A system that gives one side a 2-3% head start is clearly not very democratic.

[broncofan]

Nate Silver has also calculated the probabilities of a Biden victory for different margins in the popular vote. If the margin is 2-3% then the odds are a bit less than even, but they rise strongly as the margin gets larger. (The margin in 2016 was 2.1%.) A system that gives one side a 2-3% head start is clearly not very democratic.

I'm guessing that's a function of margins of victory being bigger in Democratic states. Still, it doesn't make sense to have a federal election apportioned by states. It already feels like there's inertia trying to get Republicans to vote against really extreme figures like Trump. It would be nice if we had two parties in this country devoted to our founding principles and rule of law, separated only by reasonable differences in policy. And I don't delude myself into thinking policy differences ever feel civil or anything less than life-changing but there is a qualitative difference in what the GOP has become and I wonder if our system's lack of sensitivity to the popular vote has reduced accountability enough to cause it.