US Elections 2020

[Stavros]

Oh cheer up, it might be a resounding success.
It'll do you good to get out in the fresh air, digging patriotic turnips for the soup kitchens...Assuming there's any of us left alive on Plague Island, that is!

Turnips? Soup Kitchens? I will probably just leave the country, if I can persuade my sister to let me stay at hers...

[Stavros]

Some thoughts on the above posts-

Polls -the polling organizations got the UK election badly wrong in 2017 because they decided there would be a low turnout by young people and re-distributed their votes. In France, polls are not allowed a week before the election, and in France, they vote in two rounds over two weeks on a Sunday.

Voter suppression has surely been a factor in Florida, Texas, and other Southern States, while jerrymandering of Districts must make it harder for Democrats to win in Texas which allegedly has more Democrats than Republicans, indeed as Filghy2 pointed out some time ago, most Americans vote Democrat but Republicans pick up more seats. This suggests to me that if the Democrats want to be bold they must focus on electoral reform, as well as amending the Constitution by making it clear that a President cannot use the Office to make money.

The saddest thing to me, is that it appears there are a lot of Americans who don't care if people fall sick and die from Covid-19. The President, and some Republican Governors, in Florida in partiular, have been reckless and indifferent with regard to the virus, but it seems many people prefer the illusion of an 'open economy', which also begs the question, do Americans want a 'National Health Service' or something like it?

It appears there has not been a Third Party candidate taking votes away from either of the two main antagonists, though I read somewhere Kanye West is mulling a 2024 run.

Lastly, for now, the results suggest the US remains a bitterly divided country, that Biden has failed to sweep away the most obnoxious, corrupt and pompous liar ever to have been President. It says a lot about the country that they would even vote for such a preposterous moron who some think is terrified of spendng the next 10 years in court fighting one case after another, mostly on tax. But even if he goes, the lunatics are still in the asylum, from sneering Mitch McConnell to the QAnon woman. It looks ugly, it sounds ugly, and I wonder if he wins, how much Biden can do.

[Stavros]

I forgot to note that Sarah McBride becomes the first Transgendered Representative in the House, but I don't know much about her, or Delaware, except the State has zillions of registered companies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2020-54806677

[Stavros]

Oops, Senator. I was typing it while on the phone, coincidentally correcting someone's English...and just back from a day out in Birmingham too -the last concert at Symphony Hall before a new lockdown- so a tiring day.

[blackchubby38]

1. Biden lost Florida by 3%. I don't know how you come to the conclusion that's insurmountable in future elections. It is now a red state but certainly a fairly close state in total vote.

2. There is no other guide than polling and however much error there is, refining polling methodology and accounting for uncertainty will continue. It's also possible that a lot of the error we are seeing is accounted for by ballots that were not delivered by USPS even after an order by a federal judge to sweep facilities for ballots. It's one thing to say you don't trust polls and another thing to have some alternative. Tea leaves?

Finally, let's see what happens when final tallies come in. It's close right now. Of course Trump doesn't want all votes to be counted because what remains in the midwestern states are mail in votes which went overwhelmingly for Biden.

1. https://www.yahoo.com/news/miami-cub...080048101.html

Until the Democrats find away to win over Cuban voters again, Florida is going to remain a red state for quite some time.

2. Nice sarcastic answer about the tea leaves. If I come up with an alternative to polls, you will be the first to know.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/samstein/status/1324011567759921154

You can look for news articles about what the Postmaster General Louis Dejoy did. He was ordered by a federal Judge to sweep facilities and process remaining ballots and he defied that order. There are some states it probably had an impact on.

Of the votes that are in right now it looks like Biden won Arizona narrowly, Wisconsin narrowly, Michigan narrowly, Nevada and NE2 district narrowly which would reach the magic number of 270. When the remaining ballots come in for Pennsylvania, mail in ballots that had arrived before November 3rd, Biden will likely have won Pennsylvania. These votes aren't legally contestable. Pennsylvania has sequestered ballots that were postmarked by the 3rd but will arrive late in the case of challenge. The margin will be even bigger if those votes survive subsequent challenge and can be added to the total. The outcome is not certain but betting markets went from Biden being a 2 to 1 favorite at the beginning of the night to Trump being a 1.6 favorite by about 1 am to Biden now being about a 5 to 1 favorite. Lots of things can still happen.

Wisconsin is within the range that Trump will be able to request a recount, which is fair in my opinion. At a 20,000 vote deficit it is unlikely the result will be overturned (recounts often lead to changes of a couple hundred votes). We will see what happens in the coming weeks but the legal challenges Trump can make would not even survive a Republican Supreme Court if he lost the vote when ballots that arrived by November 3rd are counted.

[broncofan]

I feel zero percent confident about any result except that it's unlikely votes that arrived by November 3rd will be invalidated no matter who the Judge is. As for votes, ABC just retracted its call of Arizona for Biden because it made it too early. Even if it ends up going for Biden, Fox and AP should probably retract the call as well since it's very close.

With respect to polling, I agree they had a ton of systematic error. I just don't know what people mean when they say they won't use them or take an interest in them. In the sense that people will be interested in what's going on there's nothing other than the election day vote that could tell them anything. So anyone interested is going to look at polls.

[blackchubby38]

[broncofan]

Even if people don't trust polls, which might be the case, they will still want to know what they say to anchor their beliefs. People might look at them and believe there is systematic error that favors one candidate and then estimate how much. It will not be the end of people using samples from a population to make inferences about the tendencies of that population. The alternative is that we try to divine what's going on simply by what our close friends say or what some random pundit says. Which is a form of sampling but is a smaller and even more biased sample than was used in this election.

Anyhow, Trump is absolutely shameless. He has declared himself the winner of states he didn't win. He has sent Rudy Giuliani to Pennsylvania to threaten lawsuits but it's not even clear what their cause of action is. Really pathetic and dangerous stuff.

[filghy2]

There's an old saying that you can ask an expert or you can ask your uncle. Experts are obviously fallible, but I suspect they are much less fallible than your uncle.

Polls exist because there is a demand for them, especially from media organisations and political parties. I can't see that changing, as the media will still want to write stories. Without polls they would be reduced to asking a sample of voters, which is just a low-grade poll.

The big problem pollsters have is that hardly anyone responds to them these days. I read somewhere that the response rate is down to a few per cent. Unless I'm expecting a call I never answer an unidentified caller because I know It's likely to be somebody trying to get money out of me. So we can thank phone scammers for the failure of polls.

In theory, pollsters can correct for any biases if they know how the characteristic of respondents compare to the overall voter population. The problem they have this time is that much of this info comes from exit polls, which may be skewed because so many people voted early or by mail.

Interestingly, it looks like Trump's chances of retaining Arizona depend on late mail-in votes skewing to him. It will be super-ironic if the result hinges on this after his all his lies about mail voting. https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blo...ults-coverage/