Ding Dong.....the US Politics Thread (Part 1)

Shocked, shocked I am.

Casablanca Shocked GIF - Casablanca Shocked Gambling ...

I particularly like the fact that the refugees in question weren’t even in Florida to begin with. Your tax dollars at work.

In one of his press conferences earlier in the week he said he had to go to Texas to get them because we dont have enough of a problem in florida to have enough people to round up.

He looks and sounds like someone who is long overdue a good ass whooping

Democrats are very likely to lose their majority in the House of Representative? What happened?

This almost always happens in U.S. politics. If a new president is fortunate enough to have a majority in Congress, he will surely lose it two years later. Happened to Trump, Obama, George W and to Clinton. Just normal service here.

Yeah it would be more remarkable if the Democrats gained in mid terms than the GOP gaining. Having said that it seems like Democrat loses could be relatively small compared to a normal mid-term cycle.

Nate Silver is a wanker but 538 are pretty good aggregators, they have it as a 31% chance for both Republicans and Democrats to control both Chambers with most likely outcome being Democrat Senate, Republican House,

I read a Politico article that forecasted the same.

House results cannot be discussed without gerrymandering. Like the electoral college in the presidential election, there are structural disadvantages for the Democrats that give them a handicapped 3-4 points on the national vote, meaning simple national voting majorities are not enough to win an electoral majority.

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Political forecasting in the US has been severely discredited in the age of Trump. I don’t think it would really surprise anyone if the Republicans took both Houses in November.

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It has but I don’t know why. 538 gave him more than a 1 in 3 chance to win.

Yeah , but they also had Biden winning states by ten points in 2020 when he barely scraped through. I think it’s accepted now that it’s virtually impossible to account for those voters who say they won’t vote Trump/Republican when polled in person , but end up doing so so when they can vote in the privacy of a polling booth.

There are few who study this who believe this is the real source of the polling errors. The so called “quiet Trump” voter was hypothesized as being a problem for polling leading up 2016, but this was mostly by a DC and NYC based press corp completely disconnected from the rest of the country. Anyone who lived in an area where Trump got significant votes knew full well that Trump voters were not remotely shy about telling you about it. When Trump won this explanation seemed to solidify in the conventional wisdom, and even among section of the DC and NYC press who are so difficult to shake from their preferred narrative, but experts were pretty clear this wasnt the issue. The issue is in 1) finding trump voters with your outreach, and 2) properly modelling what the voting population will look like so you can correctly extrapolate how well your sample of less than 2000 people models to the entire country.

Basically, the issue is that people who conduct the polls are not finding enough Trump/GOP people in their samples and are not correcting enough for how biased their samples then are.

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You’d think they might have figured it out though in the four years between elections , but still their forecasts were way off in the crucial swing states. It’s no wonder their reputation is shot.

And also , wasn’t it about the time they started predicting a Biden landslide that Trump fired up the whole ‘rigged election’ narrative ? Maybe if their polling had been more accurate then he in turn might have been a little more circumspect with his pre-emptive claims and the whole stolen election bullshit might not have gained so much traction.

Part of the issue is that identifying that you’re not reaching Trump voters with your outreach efforts doesn’t give you the answer for how to fix that. You can make your best effort to fix it, but you have no opportunity to test that, or your assumption about how well you fixed it, until the next election. Ultimately you always end up modelling based on old assumptions and election cycles don’t happen often enough to keep those assumptions well verified or fine tuned.

As for Trump, he was already calling 2016 a rigged election before he won it. He won and continued to say it was rigged. What he did in 2020 was really only different in terms of what he did behind the scenes to act on it and what he did in the aftermath of losing.

There’s a widespread historical thinking because of the way US politics works with the three branches of government that when you have a President (executive branch) then you want the House of Representatives (legislative) to be run by the opposition party so they can use balances and checks to keep the Prez from abusing power.

It sort of made sense when the opposition party were a bit more normal, but I don’t know why anyone would do it this time around considering the way the Republicans and the Supreme court are thinking.

all I hear is “Shooter” when that phrase comes along.

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A rare piece of good news. You can imagine the reaction from the Republicans. ‘Tokin’ Joe’ etc.

:roll_eyes:

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I don’t know much about him but it seems that he fought the blob and the blob won…

He is considered a moderate because he accepted the election results and had previously spoken out about Trump. It’s pretty remarkable really when you look at his voting record that we’ve reached a point where Ben Sasse is considered a moderate Republican.