Speaking of marriage, if Newt is the VP it will be then the Henry the VIII ticket.
As in having 6 wives in total in their history.
You like the taste of an LCD screen?
It’s ironic that the Mormon guys in the 2008 and 2012 races each had only one wife.
Trump turns down an invite to speak at the NAACP convention. Story from his favorite newsgroup:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/naacp-trump-declines-offer-to-address-civil-rights-group/2016/07/12/8ccf7fc4-489d-11e6-8dac-0c6e4accc5b1_story.html
This should really help him with the African American vote. After what he’s done for his Latino support, is Trump actively campaigning to diminish his total vote count? That’s quite a unique strategy.
That’s fine, but it’s not what the polls tells us.
The analyses of the polling analysts like Wang and Silver are correct. They were bang on in 2008, bang on in 2012, and there is no reason to think they aren’t bang on now. Going up to both the 2008 and 2012 elections everyone had some reason to explain why the Nate Silvers were wrong; this demographic, that demographic, this reason for this demographic to turn out lower, this bias in the polls, that bias, blah blah blah. In the end the polls were right, when analyzed correctly. What the polls say is that it’s very close. The polls defy your claims.
Everyone’s got a prediction. The polls, however, tell the true story.
I’ve been chewing on this for a little while, and I think part of it is that your definition of “close” is different from mine. If someone has a 70% chance of winning, that isn’t “close” to me. Ain’t no birds appearing on that one.
A long-term three percent movement of the polls as a whole would be a big change. Convincing one person in thirty to switch political candidate is hard, especially when there’s such a huge difference between them. That’s what my post was about, after all: Bush versus Gore in 2000 wasn’t much of a choice, and everyone realized it. Trump versus Clinton is a massive distinction.
True, but that’s where advertising comes in, and that’s where GOTV comes in. Clinton smashes Trump so thoroughly in both those realms it isn’t even close.
A tick isn’t going to save Trump. He’ll need a secular improvement, not a cyclical bump, and there’s little evidence he has it in him. Hence the 70/30 split.
I agree with your analysis, actually, but I’m reminded that Regan was called The Great Communicator, Carter is still widely seen as a moralizing fussbudget, and getting under Trump’s skin is just pathetically easy.
Probably the worst husband of the lot was McCain, but that didn’t seem to come up a lot, thanks to Carol McCain’s discretion and sense of dignity. Trump and Gingrich are scoundrels and neither can look down on a jackal as far as morality goes.
Guiliani is a drag queen wannabe and I think Republicans aren’t anxious to have him be both president and first lady.
I’m not sure that schizophrenic is the correct term, I think sociopathic comes closer.
IIRC, Friday is Mike Pence’s deadline for deciding whether he will run for governor or VP, as he cannot run for both under Indiana law. I think Pence is the most likely person to be selected.
Actually, Christie has the same “eh, screw it, my career’s over anyway” “advantage”: The countdown is on: Bridgegate trial set for September
“Schizophrenia” can be treated, “batshit” has to be shoveled.
How can a prediction of 22% likelihood of winning be “bang on”? Silver’s analyses were great on the day of the election, but its impossible to say whether his prediction of a given liklihood of winning 4 months before hand was accurate.
According to Nate, the polls say that if the election were held today, Clinton would win in a land slide 328 to 208 EV. But he acknowledges that a lot can change and that the polls this early out are not all that reliable at predicting the final outcome, hence the large error bars. Nate’s analysis is entirely data driven, which is good when the data is good, but this far out, when the data is poor, his predictions are not particularly informative. In that case other non-polling methods may be better.
The 23% likelihood that Nate is positing isn’t necessarily evidence that Nate thinks that its close but rather Nate himself acknowledging that at this point his predictions aren’t very good.
It’s quite logical that Hillary has a 78% chance of winning and can still lose - all Nate is saying is that if people voted today, 4 of 5 times HRC will come out on top and 1 of 5 times Trump comes out on top.
I don’t see where you get the conclusions drawn in that last sentence, unless you don’t understand the subject matter. No stat person worth their salt is going to go 100% - 0% 4 months prior to voting.
I agree. ‘Hypocrite’ is the most overused word in politics. Neither Trump or Gingrich are ‘hypocrites’ wrt to their marital history. Having the two together though might draw more attention to shortcomings in both their personal lives, as in the circumstances of the divorces.
And I also agree that the biggest change in this campaign is in the GOP over ‘not conservative enough’. I think it’s some combination of tipping point reached in a significant redefinition of ‘conservative’, or alternatively a lot of people in the ‘GOP base’ were nodding yes to ‘not conservative enough’ when stated by pundits, but having something different in mind all along than the pundits saying it.
It is somewhat mind bending at the margin though that some (of the relatively few) GOP notables firmly in favor of Trump were excoriated for ‘not conservative enough’ but agree with Trump while not having really changed any of their positions, or are still more conservative than Trump. And the strong point of support for Trump seems to largely (not entirely*) overlap the portion of the GOP base most devoted to talk radio’s ongoing inquisition of previous years about who wasn’t ‘conservative enough’.
*some previous fans of Trump-friendly talk radio icons are turned off by it AFAIK, and some talk media icons are anti-Trump.
Trump, no - he’s never made a claim to family wholesomeness (as his comments on his daughter make obvious).
Gingrich, on the other hand, led the attack on Bill Clinton’s infidelities while at the same time carrying on an affair himself. Gingrich had also, in a previous affair, reportedly kept sexual interaction to oral sex so that he could maintain that he was not having sex with that woman. On that basis, he wins the title of hypocrite.
I’d just nitpick to say Silver’s model purports to project the November outcome based on current polls. When he wrote his first piece using the 80%-ish number (a week or two ago) he clarified that if the election were held then, Trump would have a much lower chance. The model assumes, or in this case finds in anyway, some projected tendency for the race to get closer.
And a new group of Quinnipiac state polls shows Trump ahead or tied in the states with which he could win (assuming he could hold all Romney states, and NC was the only state Romney won narrowly in 2012). OH, FL, PA: Trump up 3, 0 and 2 head to head, Trump up 5, 1 and 6 including Johnson/Stein. It’s just one set of polls (by a generally respected polling org) and the FBI director saying you were ‘very careless’ with classified info probably hurts, and some of that effect might wear off, but hardly consistent with a view of literal 0% chance for Trump.
Anyway many people don’t think probabilistically. People saying ‘Trump will certainly win’ are further out there than people saying ‘Clinton will certainly win’, because it’s still reasonable to believe it more likely Clinton wins. But both IMO are just making the likely or preferred outcome in their view a pseudo-certainty, when in fact there’s no way to be certain.
70% is really, really close. It’s hard to get closer. Look at it this way; are you comfortable with the idea that Donald Trump has a 25% chance of being the President of the United States?
If the polls were not close, his chances, according to Nate Silver, would be zero percent in the “Now-cast” (e.g. if the election happened tomorrow) and one percent or something like that in the forecast, which assumes the election is held in November and that things that change. That’s what the same analysis would have shown at this point in, say, 1984. Had we had analysis like this in 1988, it would have given Michael Dukakis something like a five percent chance of winning, a number that would have dwindled to single digits in November.
To use a sports metaphor, it’s not a safe lead. The Little Rock Clintonistas are winning 5-3 over the New Jersey Yuuuge Sox with two innings left to go, and they’ve got a pretty good bullpen, but all it takes is a mistake here or there and kaboom. This is no 14-1 blowout.
That may be true, but I will believe the advertising claim when I see it change the polls. As of now, there is no evidence advertising is expanding her lead.
I am being totally honest here; were I Trump’s advisor, I would strongly advise him to take some sort of drug prior to the debate. Maybe even do a practice debate on the drug to see how it works out. What would make someone less angry but not knock them out too bad? Does Valium do that? I’m not sure.
Trust in Clinton continues to deteriorate, but it’s not really helping Trump much because where else are voters going to go? Johnson and Stein seem to be doing okay but I’m not seeing a big increase in their support. The swing state polls are interesting but we’ll have to see if other pollsters see the same thing.
I’d partly grant that. Picking Gingrich gets into re-litigating the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, and not all positively for Gingrich/GOP. However the hypocrisy charge is based on ignoring the actual charge against Clinton, lying in a court proceeding, and instead pretending the whole thing was just moralizing about marital infidelity, which is debatable.
But saying Gingrich was hypocritical in that case is plausible, it has a gut feel of some validity at least.