If his deranged views don’t bother you or even worse if you agree with them, you won’t think that another Trump term is the end of the world.
For anyone else, it’s quite the opposite.
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This is where I honestly struggle. How can anyone think that way?
Ground we’ve covered before on here but i still shake my head in disbelief.
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That’s what I’m trying to find out. Unfortunately Trumpists don’t like to engage beyond sneering and sidetracking.
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The national average on 538 is not really useful. The real value there is the aggregation of the state level polls. The swing states are indeed incredibly tight, widest margin anywhere right now are Trump up 2 in AZ and GA.
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I think @SBYM is referring to the probability model rather than the average of the national polls.
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The odd thing about that one is how the probability distribution has two peaks with strong wins for either, rather than a single peak slightly off-centre. In part, that is a function of the lumpiness of the electoral college, but I suspect that it is not at all the only driver.
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I’m guessing it’s because it’s essentially saying that the outcomes are correlated, so it’s rather likely that e.g. all the Rust Belt states go the same way, rather than one or two falling for one and the others for another. Given how many electoral votes there are up for grabs there, that’s how you get the peaks on either side.
Other interesting quirks are their Senate model, which has Montana as much less likely than Texas and Florida. Yet in 2018 Tester won his race, while O’Rourke and Nelson, both considered strong candidates in their own right, especially the latter as an incumbent, both lost. While you can argue that the demographic changes in Texas may suit the Democrats, I find it hard to understand the optimism for Florida.
Florida demographically is a genuinely purple state. There are short term trends that have made it look less so in recent years and Dems havent won a statewide election there since I think 2012. But this is mostly organizational mismanagement of the Florida Democratic party rather than loss of voters. Until they sort that out, and they havent yet, they should expect to keep losing winnable races (see Rick Scott somehow keep winning despite being shit and unpopular). But there are the voters still here to make many normal races look like a reasonable contest, and for those where there are some favourable factors in play, it is reasonable to think a bad Republican could be in trouble in a one off race. Don’t expect it to happen, but there are some smart people out there suggesting FL is more likely to go Blue in the presidential this year than GA.
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The moment of realization 
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At least there was one.
This is a great explanation of one of the most popularly misunderstood aspects of polling. Polling is not just a case of talking to a couple of thousand people and reporting what they said. It is talking to a couple of thousand people, digging into who those people were and statistically transforming their data to account for how different your sample is from what you think the group of people who will vote will be.
https://x.com/johnmsides/status/1850930405395886579
Lots of nerdy details, but the take home here is that within the scope of the normal set of assumptions pollsters make to transform their raw data into results, this one guy was able to swing his top line numbers by 8 points.
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To those people who continue to misunderstand the debate on the abortion ban. The reason why legal abortion limits are bad is not because of elective “abortions” late in a pregnancy, that already almost never happen, but because of the impact it has on healthcare, sometimes life saving, even when supposed exceptions for the life of the mother exist.
https://x.com/charlesornstein/status/1851577324145111103
When an abortion at that stage of pregnancy is illegal all miscarriages must be treated as a potential murder, and that drastically changes the way medical providers go about treating women who need their help. The result is women die. And all this just so we can prevent a class of elective abortions that just dont occur in any notable number, and so reactionary centrists can smugly criticize both sides for being extreme in a self satisfied tone.
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It’s the GOP platform: We care about babies…until they’re actually born.
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This whole election is a bit of turkeys voting for Christmas or Thanks Giving. Take your pick
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Wow, a friend is headed to DC from Montreal on business this evening through Friday - his company had a travel advisory about risk of violence related to the election.
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Essentially the Kubrick stare, but when you’re not sure where the camera is
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Fucking hell.
A fairly obvious but insightful comment from Oliver Darcy on the miscalculation Republican apologist media moguls are seemingly making
This is a perfect illustration of the mistake people make when they paint republicans who opposed Trump’s coup in 2020 as being on the side of democracy. Their issue was never a devotion to democracy, but just not cheating in such a clownish way.
https://x.com/joshgerstein/status/1851625929467924546
This action from Youngkin is straight up, unambiguously illegal. It is old school GOP election cheating to use the rules in place (cleaning voter roles using a systematic approach) to preferentially obstruct votes being cast from Democratic demos. They normally get challenged on the merits, but here he clearly started the process long after the clearly articulated deadline for doing so because they know doing it that late will not give time for people incorrectly flagged to do anything to get their vote back.
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