If I could open a window and show people the what-if world where Trump won, I’d do it. All of the terrible things he wants to do probably seem abstract. A concrete experience would help.
Also, politics is a team sport. If you’re getting worn out, you can take a few days off and know that others are still working. Exhaustion can be fixed.
Judging from Trump’s rallies with empty seats and people leaving early, it appears as though the Trump train has been running out of steam. I admit I have suffered from Trump fatigue syndrome. After a few years of Trump nonsense, I rarely get particularly angry or shocked by anything he does. I still recognize his behavior as wrong, I don’t mind telling Trump suppoters they’re full of garbage, and I was resolved enough to vote against him this election.
I think a lot of the Trumpers have to be suffering from “Trump fatigue syndrome”.
Look at how a lot of us had to defend Biden’s recent “garbage” comment, explaining that he’d been taken out of context and all that.
Now imagine having to do that several times a day, every day, for years on end. And just as you’ve finished explaining why “That’s not what he really meant!”, the guy doubles down on it, “Yeah, I meant to say that!!!”
That shit has to wear on you after a while.
It’s looking like the person who wrote that piece cited in the OP turned out to be wrong. Harris might still very well lose. But it won’t be because the anti-Trump voters stayed home. If she loses, it’ll be because the fake news believing MAGAs have grown in number and now outnumber the rest of us.
I better lay down a marker. The odds may be in the region of 50-50, but that does NOT imply that it will be a close race. That’s not how probability works. Kevin Drum:
Most political polls have a margin of error around ±3 percentage points, but that’s just the potential sampling error. When you account for model error, weighting errors, differential response rates, and so forth, the real MOE is probably closer to ±5-6 points.
So if a poll shows a race tied, there’s a roughly one-third chance that the winning candidate will win by three points or more.
In other words, we just don’t know. Anybody could win and there’s nothing more that polls can tell us at this point. It might not even be close once all the counting is done.
Anybody here ever play Monopoly? Remember how often doubles came up? That’s a 1 out of 6 chance: it happens a lot during the game. But not during most rolls.
Everyone has to brace themselves for both outcomes. We should not assume that the race will be close. Both are true. I would be surprised at a blowout though, where all 11 swing states go to one candidate. Surprised, but I wouldn’t give anybody 1:100 odds or 1:50 odds. Nate Silver’s model puts the odds of a double digit popular vote margin at less than 2%. I think it’s higher than that, though I couldn’t peg a number: small changes in the middle of the distribution lead to larger changes in the tails.
I think that’s just a quirk of the electoral college system. To use a sports analogy, it would be like if one baseball team swept the other in the World Series, with every game ending 5-4. It’s still very close, it just wouldn’t seem that way based on the way the scores are reported.
A coin flip is 50-50. But a coin flip isn’t “close”; it’s the opposite of close. The result will be fully heads or tails.
I’m not saying the election is the same, but it’s an easy example of how close odds are not necessarily equating to close results.
It’s a quirk of polling. Polls vary based upon the pollster’s likely voting model. Polling averages miss every election. But! The direction of the miss isn’t predictable, by which I mean one election’s error doesn’t predict the next election’s error. So a race can be 50-50, but the result can easily involve a poll average miss of one percentage point or more. That’s even expected.
My take is that GOP get out the vote (GOTV) efforts collapsed when Trump decided that the RNC would pay his legal bills and their super-PACs would take over door knocking. My other take is that pollsters haven’t taken this into account adequately: how could they? My third take is to watch out if the RNC takes back GOTV efforts in future elections.
All of that is conjecture and I haven’t quantified the miss in any kind of way. And a 60-40 race is basically 50-50: you would need to flip a 60-40 coin 140+ times to be 95% confident that it’s a biased coin. If you are not a superforecaster, you won’t be able to reasonably calibrate your predictive capabilities to that resolution.
It’s definitely not the Harris supporters who are exhausted.
Is he referring to a VP Harris rally? Or just some random community get-together? My Google-fu says she was in Arizona on 9/27.
Perhaps you didn’t read the tweet, so I’ll post the text;
Ok I got it now. It was another Trump rally held there on September 27th. That was the part I was “reading past”. Thanks.
Or, the opposite outcome: the 1960 World Series. The Yankees outscored the Pirates obscenely, but the Pirates won the series four games to three.
It’s probably worth pointing out that the OP (and presumably the cited article) dates from February.
Totally different circumstances and dynamic (even if not quite AS different as it should be).
(For the record, the Steelers won 21-10.)
Exhausted? Nah. It’s knowledge. Knowledge that you can’t turn a MAGAt around. No point talking to them.
Anyone that has fallen for his bullshit likes his bullshit. Only Trump can sink his ship, and even though he drills more holes in it every day, it seems to still be afloat.
But maybe, just maybe, the weird one will disenfranchise himself from his own supporters. Hopefully some will stay home.
Just the other day in a podcast, an interviewer had talked to a woman a year ago as she was miscarrying and was refused medical help. She very nearly died and after surviving the horrific ordeal is now unable to have children.
The interviewer went back to see her. She is voting for Trump.
If she loses, it’ll be because of a 6-3 vote.
Sometimes I don’t think we fully appreciate just how much MAGA is integrated into these people’s lives. For many of these people, I suspect much of their social support network is made up of MAGA types. For them to repudiate Trump would mean repudiating their friends and family, and that’s tough to do for anyone.