I expect that you, and the Democrat collective, will be gravely disappointed. 
If the American voting public is such a cesspool of deplorables and morons, how in the heck did Obama win? Twice!
(post shortened)
That’s what I’ve been saying. And we (you and I) are not the only ones who have noticed that.
Yeah, but American undecideds are apparently uniquely stupid, racist, and reactionary, or something.
Here’s the part you omitted:
Do all those tax returns reveal that (1) Trump’s much poorer than he pretends, (2) he pays almost taxes, or (3) he’s in hock to Russian gangsters?
All the Presidential & Vice-Presidential candidates have been releasing their tax info for years. Your guy? He’s “special.”
You just described the Howard Stern show.
Can you point me in the direction of any story that Maddow has done on any politician expectorating?
You’re taking that too broadly, and more broadly than I specifically said ‘credibility to comment objectively on the state of the race’ emphasis added second time around, not general credibility as a person or even on political issues. I think the statement as made is pretty self evident actually. And it doesn’t just apply to you. A number of commenters here obviously very much want Clinton to win (nothing particularly non-credible about that), but it really shows in their comments about the state of the horse race. Obviously that’s just my opinion, like any such statement.
I have NO dog in this particular fight. But let me throw this out.
If I HAD to bet, on average the gungho I support candidate X person will generally be biased towards X and anti Y. And they won’t recognize this bias.
Its the person that IS for X and/or works for X YET is willing to say how X is fucking up/whatevers that is more likely to be right about the reality of the situation (statistically speaking).
As an anti-Hillary person, it is funny to see how much of an echo chamber/preaching to the choir this thread/place can be at times. Not so say that if I went to some right leaning board about went to a Trump just the election thread I wouldn’t see the same ole thing.
Funny none the less.
I think it’s way too easy for non-normals like us who post about politics on a message board to create some caricatured image of the electorate that votes based on what their astrologer had for lunch.
The vast majority of people vote because of big stuff. They trust Trump to look out for people like them. They think Clinton is dishonest. They think Trump is in over his head. They think Clinton knows how to fight smart. That kind of stuff. And they may have irrational or empirically incorrect assessments. But they really don’t tend to vote based on small stuff unless it gets connected to the big stuff. I fail to see how pneumonia connects up to some larger question about Clinton. At most, it connects to her secrecy. But it’s even weaker on that than it is on her fitness to serve, so I just don’t think it’s likely to change things. The same goes for the Newsweek cover this week about the Trump Organization’s foreign connections. It doesn’t tie into any big issue, so it doesn’t really matter.
She didn’t say “the American voting public”; she said Trump supporters. They probably didn’t vote for Obama.
That’s a useless test IMO for at least two reasons. First you don’t have to post on this board for long to realize it’s very far from generally representative of the electorate. And second it assumes people would say, or even entirely know, what affects their vote or willingness to vote.
If we judge politics in general by what people say motivates them, we’d have a pretty distorted view. The many people here who constantly claim all, most, half or whatever large proportion of people saying they will vote for Trump are ‘racists’ are implicitly accepting this point every time they make that claim. Very few of the near plurality of ‘likely’* voters now saying they’ll vote for Trump ‘say their own vote or willingness to vote is affected by this’ when it comes to race or ‘racism’.
On your larger point, that the change in the race is a relatively longer term trend not about ‘deplorables’ or illness, it’s probably some of both IMO. And things often interact, eg. it’s perhaps more of a factor Clinton sounds like a stereotypical snobby coastal liberal speaking of a mass of ‘deplorables’ in Middle America at Barb’s fundraiser, or brings again into focus her own particular dishonesty issue with the handling of the illness, if Trump has been acting (at least) like a less completely unacceptable choice for some weeks prior.
*which is another factor in the change in the race, shift from mainly RV to more LV polls at this stage, which often favors normal GOP’ers but also seems to benefit the unconventional Trump; fallible formulae for determining 'likely, but still seems to be a factor in what the polls say.
Hundred bucks? If he were confident he’d fly to London and make thousands.
I’ve toyed with placing a wager on a (D) November. But Occam’s razor keeps telling me that the reason betting markets give Trump a 35% chance is because … he has a 35% chance! :eek:
Recalling Evil Economist’s recent remark in another thread (“I wouldn’t get on a plane that had a 37% chance of crashing”), I think we should all be very worried by now.
And only half of those.
But I think she was just being generous.
Both points are true and correct, but that doesn’t make it a useless test.
A poll of this board would be useless in describing the approximate amount of support for candidates. And, indeed, any poll’s topline numbers would be badly distorted by the various unrepresentative aspects of this board. But the complete absence of even a single poster who says they will vote different is still meaningful, just as it would be meaningful if no one on this board said they were going to vote for Trump.
Similarly, it is correct that people fail to accurately describe their motivations. Even if health were a big issue, most people likely wouldn’t identify it as deciding their vote. My point was that people mostly accurately identify the big issues in the election. In this case, honesty, temperament, racism, hawkishness, who has the interests of the white working class at heart, etc. I don’t think candidate health is on that list this year, thought it has been in last years. And I think one non-usefulness measure of that fact is that you cannot find anyone saying it affects their vote.
Well, sure, but say 35% of the voting population is batshit rutabaga deplorable. Resolutely, adamantly, and entirely beyond appeals to reason. And say 55% is moderate, centrist, thoughtful, and immune to herd hysteria. And one party always runs a fanatic meth-addled baboon and the other always runs a calmly dull but reliable centrist. And since we are being hyperthetical, lets say that these ratios remain stable for a generation.
Then for that generation, the Batshit Baboon Party will always have a one in three chance of winning, but never will.
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Maybe we should leave that as…‘maybe’, that a test at extreme has some relevance even in biased sample, ie ‘nobody’. But the example of nobody supporting Trump doesn’t support it very well. I can easily imagine internet communities where nobody at all supports Trump, though I think I’ve seen a very small handful of Trump voters here. Again, maybe it’s a bit more relevant if no one at all in even a highly skewed community will say something more general like candidate health is affecting their decision.
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But the health issue as it’s arisen lately for Clinton is partly about honesty. And while I applaud you listing a relatively realistic set of big issues (not pablum like ‘education’ and ‘the economy’ where most voters have absolutely no idea how they’d address such issues, especially those who aren’t ideological but most of those who are ideological are just repeating what they’ve heard). But by the same token the issues you list are relatively vague things so it’s harder to say perception of physical weakness wouldn’t find its way into such a decision. That’s in contrast to say a quasi-single issue gun rights, say, voter. OK that person’s thought process is probably really about the position of the person on the issue more than the person. But the people at this stage still changing their minds about voting or for whom to vote aren’t typically that type of voter.
I seriously doubt any polling “company” / political research institute is using anything like the simplistic and logically wrong methodology you have outlined when they say Trump has a 35% (or whatever) chance of winning.
Which should be blindingly obvious since Clinton isn’t polling at 61%, Trump is not polling at 38% and Johnson isn’t polling at <1% but that is currently their 538 polls-only odds.
The key words on the post you’re questioning were “…but the level of overconfidence I’m seeing from many in this election…,” which clearly points at no one in particular. How you managed to take that personal is beyond me. It wasn’t intended that way.
And, the 538 numbers are moving again
Hillary Clinton
61.0%
Donald Trump
38.9%
That’s a -1.6 since this morning. I suspect much of this is Hillary’s absence from the campaign train for the past 4-5 days. Plus the health issues and the “deplorable” comment.
Even Clinton spokespersons, speaking right now on MSNBC, are predicting this going down to the wire.