There have been various reports on imminent shennanigans regarding vote counting, including Individual-ONE himself saying that he does not need your vote.
Some election officials in the maga camp are likely to refuse to certify their counts. This could have strange effects. If a failure to certify results in a state not being able to send their electoral votes to the capitol, then those votes would simply not count.
If the votes are not counted, the are not part of the total, so it would take fewer EVs to win. Or, if a county is not certified, its votes are simply excluded from the totals.
The Republicans seem to have a cunning plan. Like Baldric, the seem to be very skilled at fucking things up. There is cause for dread and cause for hope.
The idea that what Trump is really saying “we have a secret plan so we don’t need your votes” was a big part of Rachel Maddow’s show last night. Recommended viewing! And scary.
Which is still stupid of Trump, because most of those plans are a lot easier to pull off with a close vote tally. Not impossible with a big gap, obviously, but he’s just making things harder for himself for no apparent reason (assuming there is some kind of plan in place and not just speculative dreams on Trump’s part; that wouldn’t surprise me).
The only “Solomon’s judgement of the baby” story comes to mind. If Democrats win this because Biden was able to give up his hold on the presidency and Trump wasn’t, that’s gonna be pretty fucking delicious.
It’s stupid but not unprecedented. Don’t forget that Trump spent a lot of time convincing his followers that the vote system was broken and rigged, which led to a loss of turnout in Georgia’s runoff election. Here is a story prior to the runoff votes that cost the Republicans two Senate seats in the end.
And the Washington Post printed this once it seemed clear that the Democrats were going to win both seats.
Plenty of Republicans fretted in recent days and weeks that President Trump might cost them the Senate. They suggested Trump’s continued, baseless undermining of the legitimacy of the state’s elections would harm GOP turnout. If Republicans believed the whole thing was rigged — as most of them did, according to polls — why even show up? They also worried, on a smaller scale, about Trump’s rather needless highlighting of the congressional GOP’s opposition to $2,000 coronavirus relief checks, briefly reneging on a deal agreed to by his administration and allowing Democrats to seize on the issue on the eve of the elections.
Republicans also had a poor showing in 2022, and I wonder if lingering doubts about the election process were a factor.
It reminds me of the Monty Haul Problem.
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
I know it’s far from perfect, but it has a whiff of similarity. Assume Trump is Door #1, Harris is Door #2, and Biden is Door #3. Of course, voters didn’t have a choice of 3 doors, they only had 2, and they only had another choice after one of those doors became unavailable to them. But it does have a feel of, “Hold on, let me change things a bit and let you pick again.” That could factor a bit into how people feel about the election.
This is an interesting point. However, I’d like to see the statistics. There have been many women Presidents in countries with presidential systems. So how strong is the relationship between having a parliamentary system and the likelihood of a female in the highest leadership position?
Positive for the possibility of Harris winning is former Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen. Taiwan is in some sense like the U.S. in there being a national security doctrine that requires credibly threatening to engage in arguably irrational warfare (mutual assured destruction, in the U.S. case, and war with mainland China in the Taiwan situation).
The system that got Maggie into #10 is as messed up as the electoral college. There are usually 3 or more parties contending for a district (county, riding, whatever they call them), so the MP from there usually gets about 35% or so of the vote. Scores of seats in Parliament can change on a shift of a few percentage points, giving a party a large majority in Commons based on a pretty close popular plurality.
Big seat swings based on small vote swings is a relatively new feature of UK politics, as are multiple viable parties standing in a seat - Thatcher’s first two constituency elections were two-way fights, and she won her first seat as MP with over 50% of the vote while her two opponents got less than 30%.
In more relevant news, Harris has made a good showing in new swing state polls (but it’s a long way to the election, don’t get carried away etc. etc.)
The poll of 11,538 registered voters show Harris comfortably ahead in Michigan (53 to 42 per cent), with smaller leaders in Wisconsin and Arizona (both 49 to 47 per cent), and Nevada (47 to 45 per cent).
Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania (50 to 46 per cent) and North Carolina (48 to 46 per cent), while the candidates were tied in Georgia (both at 47 per cent).
Some of those polls are crazy – there’s no way Harris is ahead by 11 in Michigan while simultaneously behind in PA by 4. But overall Harris is looking much, much stronger than Biden.
The 538 model had given Biden roughly 50 50 odds despite his stuck poor polling based to some degree on the economy actually being good. Problem with that was that the public overwhelmingly wasn’t perceiving it that way.
The public now starting to believe that economy is good is a tailwind for the Harris campaign.
It’s a very short article, so I’m not sure how much is safe to quote, but the gist seems to be what I’ve included below.
The Conference Board, a business research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 100.3 in July from a downwardly revised 97.8 in June.
The index measures both Americans’ assessment of current economic conditions and their outlook for the next six months.
The measure of Americans’ short-term expectations for income, business and the job market rose in July to 78.2 from 72.8 in June. A reading under 80 can signal a potential recession in the near future.
Consumers’ view of current conditions dipped in July to 133.6, from 135.3 in June.
I have no idea how to interpret these numbers so this excerpt is offered without comment.