Agreed.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate the candor.
Your intuition may be spot on. My question was less about this specific case than the more general process, which you’ve nicely answered.
I was curious because I’ve been watching political predictions at places like 538 and cable news media where there’s a veneer of the findings as numbers based or evidence based, but they’re really not. There’s a heavy dose of what they probably consider intuition which changes the narrative away from the straight numbers.
I think that predictions based on history are more reliable when the current atmosphere is stable. I would venture to say that the current political atmosphere is less than stable. But maybe it’s always that way when you’re in the middle of it. And of course, things do tend to revert back to the status quo, so maybe relying on history is the best indicator of intuition.
Still, it’s helpful when people can separate the more evidence based part of the prediction and the more intuition part of the prediction.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. To my mind, there is only one reason ever to gamble on a horse or a politician or a team or whatever: you think that the person or entity you are betting on has a better chance to win than the oddsmakers are giving them (regardless of whether they are a favorite or a longshot). So if you don’t think Warren is actually the favorite to win but the oddsmakers have her as a favorite, how can it make any sense whatsoever to bet on her? 
Speaking of odds, here is another place where not only the estimation of odds of a single thing happening, but how much you weight the positivity or negativity of multiple outcomes, is crucial.
I do believe it’s quite likely that Trump would lose to almost any Democratic nominee. But there are two other factors to consider here. One is that Trump’s small chances of winning are greater against certain candidates even if he would still be an underdog, and I find him so odious that I want his chances to be as small as possible.
The other factor is that we aren’t necessarily just choosing our nominee for 2020. If that nominee is a favorite, and I agree that they are, then we are also choosing our 2024 nominee. And they will most likely not be running against Trump. Less electable candidates can beat Trump, but they might be quite weak indeed against the 2024 GOP challenger.
On the other side of the ledger, this probably is the best chance in the foreseeable future for the left wing of the party to get one of their own into the Oval Office. Some left-wingers may see this as such a golden opportunity that it is worth increasing the chance that Trump holds on to power and also increasing the chance that a different Republican wins in 2024. I don’t think that’s a good and worthy risk at all, both because a more moderate Democrat will still be plenty progressive and also because the ultimate impact of the presidency will be blunted by the courts and Congress anyway.
So my honest view of it is that progressives would get the feel-good moment of having one of their own take the oath of office, but would then find the actual results in policy terms to be deeply disappointing. Definitely not worth the downside risks.
There is also a smaller gap between Pete and Beto than between Pete and Kamala, and that gap is also shrinking. So if you are going to include Pete you better add Beto as well, which is fine by me.
Yeah, he should be ashamed of himself. The only way I could see possibly justifying that is if you think the result is really weird, so you run another one to see what’s going on. Then if the other one says something different, you run a third one as a kind of tiebreaker. And in any case, you report all the results of every poll you commission.
Huh. Do you realize you are being a contrarian in this opinion? Every pundit I have heard from shares the opinion I hold, which is that 11 would be ideal, so we get twice the debating time and smaller fields. When they do ultimately cut it down to one debate, I hope it is not nine or ten but five or six.
This is from Yang’s twitter feed a few minutes ago.
He’s been saying that it will be 2 nights, so we’ll see if he’s right about this. I’m thinking he got some kind of official word, but I don’t see any attached to this tweet.
Interesting. I wish they would just break it up into two nights until it gets down to seven or eight, but it is what it is.
Ever since I stopped having a subscription to a physical newspaper back in 2009, I’ve had to actually seek out the usual op-ed pundits, rather than coming across them as a matter of course. And I was already of the opinion that while a few of them had worthwhile contributions to make to the discussion, most of them were full of shit. So I stopped reading them altogether at that point. And I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, so I don’t have that source of standard punditry either. So most of the time, I have no idea what subjects they’re yammering about, let alone what the conventional wisdom is.
But I’m a Warren supporter, and how the debates have played out so far pretty much informs my opinion of one debate versus two.
In the first debate, she shared one stage with a bunch of also-rans, while Biden, Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg were in the other debate. Being stuck at what was effectively the kiddie table didn’t hurt her at all, but it didn’t provide any opportunities to help herself the way Kamala Harris did in that first debate.
I couldn’t help but think at the time that instead of Harris taking on Biden over a vote on busing from the early 1970s, that should have been Warren taking on Biden over the 2005 Bankruptcy Act. But she wasn’t even on the same stage.
And then she wasn’t on the same stage with Biden in the second debate either. She got to share a stage with Sanders (and since Warren is really a more substantive and practical version of Sanders, not a lot to debate there) and Buttigieg (who has good ideas but his star was already fading by then), while Harris got to share a stage with Biden a second time.
So yeah, I’ve been consistently unhappy with the way the candidates have been divided in the first two pairs of debates. If they’re not going to do a main stage and a kiddie table (which is what they should have done from the get-go), everyone needs to be on the same stage.
More time for each candidate doesn’t do much good, if your candidate never has the opportunity to debate the person who is both (a) consistently leading in the polls, and (b) is her main philosophical adversary. It’s a waste of her time to shoot down another Delaney.
The NYT: It’s Official: September Democratic Debate Will Be One Night Only
ETA: In addition to the eight candidates averaging over 2% in my average (Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, Yang, Booker, and Beto), Castro and Klobuchar also qualified.
Very glad it will be just one night – finally, a chance for every candidate with a chance to compete directly with the other candidates with a chance.
The field of 10 for the next debate is now set. Realistically, anyone not in it is out of it, whether or not they’re prepared to admit it yet.
I think you’re right. Let the culling of the herd begin… er, continue!
Realized my understanding was kind of muddled there. Sorry. You’re right that’s interesting. I can only guess that since the betting markets like PredicIt work more like a stock market, Warren’s momentum got people bullish on her stock.
Vice have run a very mean spirited attack on Biden titled : “Joe Biden: It Would Be an Insult to My Dead Son for Everyone to Have Healthcare”
Obviously he did not say that.
But because his healthcare plan is a public option not Medicare For All they are using his personal story told in his ad regarding Beau (the car crash in 72’ and his death due to cancer in 2015) to hit back. He was making the point healthcare is personal to him. The ad generally was well received.
Shit like that is why I can’t abide with supporters of Bernie Sanders. They can be so vile and obnoxious. The ACA was an improvement. Biden and everyone else who supports a public option (Beto, Buttigieg, Klobachar…) want to take the next step to make healthcare better. They’re not the enemy.
One point that a number of people on the left have made is that (a) the various elements of the medical/insurance industry are just as geared up to fight a public option as they are to fight Medicare For All, and (b) a public option with the filibuster in place is a heavier lift than M4A with a simple majority requirement.
While I think that’s basically true, I also think enough people who have decent-to-good insurance are leery of M4A that it would be a heavy lift regardless. As Jefferson said, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
I kinda like getting rid of the filibuster to pass Buttigieg’s “Medicare for all that want it.”
No, they are not.
In the public option option many of them, especially the most powerful players, will play well in the public option space, administering Medical Advantage (MA) plans and Medicaid ones as well. Their share of that space is already significant, has been growing, and is expected to grow even faster over the next several years. Expansion of current Medicare and Medicaid programs is not anywhere near the threat to them as a Canadian-style system would be. It may even be attractive to the biggest players who have already built decent MA programs as they would get more of the share of that book of business.
FWIW I also like the one night. Viewership and interest will be higher for one night than two. I look forward to one night with only four or five on the stage though …
There aren’t any Delaneys this time, and still wouldn’t be if they had 11 over two nights.
I am OK with everyone who is being kept out except one: Bullock. The 538 politics podcast is usually good, but the most recent one (released on Monday) is one of the best ever, particularly starting at about the 20 minute mark and going until the segment is over, at which point they even acknowledge explicitly what an unusually enjoyable conversation it was.
There were many interesting points made, but one of the most important ones in my view is Nate Silver’s proposal that there should be two ways to qualify for debates: either the popularity metric they are using now but with a more stringent standard, or a qualifications metric which would automatically qualify any governor or senator or former vice president. There’s something fundamentally wrong with saying six months before Iowa that Yang gets to debate but Bullock does not.
++. Especially since this early, the election is far-off for many voters. What are polls measuring now? Name recognition, Facebook pizazz.
Then again, America’s whole political process is just a series of kayfabes. The Romans had their gladiator-vs-lion fights; we have our elections.
Bullock, after months of campaigning and having already appeared in two debates, was at 1% in the Quinnipiac, CNN, YouGov, and Morning Consult polls, and at 0% in Monmouth, Emerson, Suffolk, and HarrisX. His argument was that he could win in red states, but there have to be more than enough Democrats in red states to do better than that, and he didn’t.
You seem to be arguing that present and former Senators and governors should get a free pass to all six debates no matter what, and clutter up the process as long as they damn well please. I’m quite disappointed that Inslee had to call it quits because he wasn’t going to get into September’s debate, but if the price of his being included is that we have an interminable number of these two-night dealies, well then screw that.
A sitting Senator or Governor who can’t do as well as small town mayor or even as a previously unknown test prep tycoon has no business being in the process.
He’s a fine man and a fine public servant, sure - and so are many of the other also-rans and didn’t-runs. But what does he bring that none of the Final 10 don’t? Bullock started too late, did too little ground work, and offered too little reason to support him other than “Hey, why not me?”
The nominee is being decided early this time, probably on Super Tuesday, and he just didn’t want it enough to prepare for it. See you in the Cabinet, or maybe Senate alongside Tester, Steve.
I was wondering the other day how Yang managed to get himself portrayed as the “tech entrepreneur”, thereby giving his robot apocalypse theories more legitimacy.