I very passively voted for John McCain, but was OK with Obama(and actually believe he was an excellent president.)
I am very happy and pretty enthusiastic for Biden to become president. I think he should have been already and he is one of the few “good apples” in politics.
I am also freaking absolutely intense about defeating Trump. I did and do not like H. Clinton, but I smiled voting for her over loser-Trump.
I want Biden to win. But even more, I want to see Trump lose badly. Like, 10 million or more votes bad.
Based on the recent, extremely scary Wisconsin and Pennsylvania decisions, my prediction is that if the election comes down to one swing state with a GOP legislature, they will find a way to award Trump the state’s electors regardless of the actual vote count, and that SCOTUS will uphold that decision.
I don’t think they can sure as fuck hope they can’t pull that off in multiple states.
My fear is that massive numbers of Republicans will attempt to double vote, and whip up a scandal in a process. Trump once told rally goers to vote twice. Mike Huckabee tweeted about voting both by mail and in person.
In their effort to manufacture fraud, they are faking a stunning ignorance as to how voting works. You can’t get two votes by submitting two ballots anymore than you can get two tax refunds by sending in your return twice ( and for the same reason ). Even though your ballot has a number of some sort rather than a name, it’s linked to you.
But I think the rejected duplicate ballots will be spun up into a scandal — 95% of rejected ballots are Republican, or some similar crap.
In terms of predictions, I just don’t know. Honestly, I don’t really trust the polling. Not because I think they’re biased, but because I don’t know how they get an accurate sampling. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t have caller ID of some sort and I don’t know many people that answer unknown calls. I also don’t know anyone that’s been contacted by anyone conducting a poll.
Some days I’m optimistic and some days I’m not. Anecdotally, one reason for my optimism is the number of people that I had pegged as Trump supporters that turned out not to be. My cousins in rural Kentucky, the blue collar guy that was the son of my Mom’s nursing home roommate, the more conservative members of my own family, my older financial advisor that lives on a farm in a rural county. My suburban NC neighborhood is pretty dark blue — but this is largely because it is a new development and most of my neighbors are transplants from the Northeast.
But anecdotes are not data.
It’s going to be long week.
I share the concern that Huckabee and Trump’s flagrant attempts to encourage voter fraud is a deliberate effort to muddy the waters. In Trump’s world he wants chaos. The bigger the mess, the longer it takes to unravel, and the more complicated it is the more it will play to his advantage. The public will with disturbing rapidity grow impatient and anxious waiting for the contest to be decided and be more willing to go along with ‘aw hell, flip a coin’ mentality, or worse - aw hell let SCOTUS flip that coin.
If things get to that point, we would be in a constitutional crisis that could potentially end up as a Civil War. Let’s hope for the sake of all of humanity that doesn’t happen.
I’m sure not a statistician, but I have a (very) basic understanding of how representative sampling works, so it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t know anyone who’s been polled. (As a basis of comparison, my sister, like many Americans, doesn’t know anyone who’s had COVID, despite the almost 9 million Americans who’ve had it. I know seven (and one died).) I know some pollsters use better methodology than others, so I rely on fivethirtyeight’s pollster rankings.
I’m sure a lot of people with Caller ID/cell phones don’t answer, but unless there’s a statistical correlation between the likelihood of not answering and political stance–if, say, Trump supporters were less likely to answer such calls than Biden supporters*–it would simply mean having to make more calls. I think that’s why some pollsters use robocalls, but fivethirtyeight ranks those pollsters lower.
*which I assume would be recognized and methodology adjusted accordingly.
Here is my final prediction. Most if not all of this has been mentioned here before, but I thought putting it all together might cause me, and maybe others, to stop despairing
-at this point in 2016, Hillary was losing ground rapidly, her graph was going straight down, Biden’s lead has been consistent for months
-the few undecided voters will mostly go to Biden. Trump isn’t giving them a reason to vote for him, and his continued insistance that we have rounded the corner on COIVD can only hurt him, all the COVID deniers have already made up their mind
-much higher turnout of black voters, possible higher turnout of young voters
-Biden leads suburban white women by 20 points
-voters, especially in PA, who cast a “let’s see what happens” vote in 2016 and regret it will cost Trump at least 20,000 votes; voters who did not vote in 2016 because they did not like or trust Hillary will give Biden at least that many more, and that makes a tie race in PA even if the polls are even, if they are off by 4 points Biden still leads by 1
-energized Democrats voting against Trump
-COVID COVID COVID
-Trump’s approval rating is still at 43%. The last Presidents below 50 at this point were Bush I and Jimmy Carter
-the ecomony, still usually the determining factor
Incumbent don’t win elections under these circumstances. Biden will win by so many votes that stealing the election won’t even be attempted.
One other thing that encourages me is the coverage on FOX News. They aren’t talking about COVID ending, of course. Or about polls showing the race getting closer or that they are manipulated by Dems to discourage voting (sure you will find an occassional pundit saying those things). They mostly talk about Hunter, and if they don’t have a new headline about that they talk about protests. Laura Ingraham literally said the protesters have burned down our cities. The other Fascists are almost as bad. And finally they talk about the coming a socialism revolution, led by Joe Biden! They know Trump is losing badly.
Re: The Hunter Story (which is no story) is enough to sway idiots (at least 50% of the US voters) to probably stick with the orange fuckstick.
The emails were a completely lightweight factor in comparison to the Hunter fabrications. Listen to a channel, a radio show that repeats Trump saying “they’re crooks” over and over again. If you do, you might think they’re right.
Prediction: Close election. PA, NC, FL and WI will stay red.
Except Harry S Truman was in similar territory when he bumped off Tom Dewey. Truman, though, did spend a large part of his presidency in net-positive territory, while this guy has not seen net positive for around 45 months and has never been over 48% approval. Ford, Carter and Bush all started out in net-positive territory and then saw declines into the negative while Individual-ONE is around 6 points higher than his average rate through '17 and his line has been remarkably consistent for almost all of his term.
I will ask my mother if she can remember anything about the Truman election, when she was a teenager.
I am trying to remember when Bush lost to Clinton. I had just turned 30. Bush’s approval rating was in the mid-30s! I don’t remember a great depression. I think maybe Bush only got elected because the Dems ran Dukakis. The country has flipped from Democrat to Republican going all the way back to Truman. Hopefully Trump is the Jimmy Carter of this century, there are certainly some similarities.
Not really. Carter was a soft-spoken man of respectable intelligence, going up against a loud, blorting idiot, so that part of the equation is vastly different (inverse, if you will). Carter had challengers in the primaries (Ed M Kennedy, for one, whose yearning for the WH cost us all a real chance at UHC in the '70s – perhaps, ever). And, finally, there was John Anderson there to throw a wrench in the works (a sort of safety valve for people who disliked Reagan but were disappointed with Carter).
I recall in ‘76 some of us (I was in the local high schoolers’ Mock Democratic Convention) thought Carter was a bit too conservative for our liking. And he really was. Reagan got some blame for the S&L crisis that was caused by deregulation signed by Carter. Research might turn up a few other things.
So, in a way, many Democrats were a little uncomfortable with Carter, which is kind of similar to the Lincoln Project situation, but in a slightly different way. And, yes, we had foreign interference, in the form of the Iran hostage situation, which arguably did have a major effect on the election.
But at least Carter was a man of honor who was not actively trying to fuck up the process.
During the primaries here in Kentucky, I had requested an absentee ballot. I subsequently misplaced it, and it was Election Day before I knew it.
So I drove to my voting place, explained the situation to the people, and had to drive to the courthouse, sign an affidavit that I hadn’t already voted (and that I understood the penalties for voter fraud and perjury), and was only then allowed to cast my vote.
If I wasn’t so determined to vote out Trump and McConnell, I might well have said to hell with it.
Great post! Makes sense in terms of support for Joe, differences from 2016, etc.
BUT…can you factor into your optimistic narrative the obstacles to votes being counted, namely, voter suppression, ballots being accidentally or intentionally discarded, ballots not making it to the Post Office by deadline, etc.
I have no doubt that Joe has the votes. But he will win on the votes that are counted. How about helping us with anxiety about that part?
