I completely agree that the Russian thing needs to be shouted to the roof by we, the electorate, and this is the tact that I’m taking with the Repubs I know and on Facebook:
[Quote= A Facebook post I recently made]
A message for Republicans who will not vote for Hillary.
Trump is somehow in thrall of the Russians. We don’t know how or why yet, but from his hidden financials and tax records, to denying he met Putin when he hosted the Miss Universe contest in Moscow a couple of years ago, to Putins timed revelations designed to help his candidacy… compared to this, “60 year-old lady makes bad computer security decisions” is small potatoes.
But if you can’t vote Hillary, and I completely understand that - you are Republicans after all - please, look at the Libertarian guys… Gary Johnson and William Weld are experienced governors and they have many positions which match what attracted you (and me) to the Republican Party in the first place.
[/quote]
So, depress their vote and point out alternatives.
So you think Johnson and/or Stein are going to add up to 19% like Perot did in '92? Because that’s the only way this statement is merely farfetched rather than dumb.
OMG, you are so right! I was thinking “Is this the best fact to make my point? What if I mention that 18 Presidential races were won with a popular vote of less than 50%? What if I am supplying the wrong stat to illustrate my position?”
But then I relaxed, knowing that CarnalK would have my back, pointing out irrelevant details while leaving me free of having to actually, you know, discuss the point.
It’s not remotely irrelevant imho but please, what was your point in bringing up Bill’s popular vote numbers and finding it odd people are worried about Hillary’s polling?
The problem isn’t the raw number, since of course early in the race there are undecideds and votes assigned to minor parties that will migrate to the big parties.
The problem is the difference between Clinton’s number and Trump’s number. Specifically, that they are pretty much the same number, and Trump’s has been rising.
Here’s what I don’t quite understand: why are people who are involved in blatant mischief writing about it and documenting it forever in emails? I mean, I don’t believe in being Alex Jones paranoid, but it’s like when criminals involved in bribery talk about it over the phone or write about it in emails. You have to assume you’re being watched (and now, hacked).
I don’t think it would be a good for the democrats to engage in cyber-plumbing. The bricks-and-mortar version of it went awry and resulted in a sitting president being forced to resign from office, and I doubt they’re any more competent than Gordon Liddy’s gang. However, I do think they have to be ready for anything. If I were Clinton’s handlers I’d be grilling the hell out of her right now with mock opposition research squads digging up every centilla on the Clinton Foundation and I’d be asking Hillary and Bill very pointed questions and demanding to know about ANYTHING that could even remotely be problematic.
Scientists have pretty much proven climate change is caused by human activity, but a fairly significant portion of the population (the same people who vote red) make up reasons not to accept the science. We had pretty solid proof that the war in Iraq was premised on manipulated information and that there were no WMDs or terrorists in Iraq, but almost 4 in 10 believe Saddam had WMD stockpiles despite them never being found (this is 2015, we’re talkin’). Trump has been absolutely lying his ass off in this election and the same number – about 4 in 10 – remain committed to voting for him. You’ve got 4 in 10 who will support a candidate who has a history of engaging in dubious and deceitful business practices, suggests repeatedly that he will rape the Constitution, and knowingly disseminates lies or ideas that have absolutely no basis in fact. We could have Donald Trump on an FBI wiretapped conversation conspiring to commit treason and 4 in 10 will probably say “Oh yah, well what about Hillary’s emails?!”
Well, he did. Sorta. So it depends on how the poll is worded. He used them vs the Iranians and against his own people. The UN destroyed thousands of tons of them after the Persian Gulf War, but not all were found.
BUT by 2003 there was really nothing left. Maybe a few prototypes left in those mysterious trucks Saddam sent to Syria. And afterwards they found the missing tonnes that were left over from the pre-Persian Gulf War, but they were highly degraded and more of a danger to the environment than any possible targets.
So yeah, Saddam* had* WMD- at one time. But GWB lied to Congress. What little was left was no danger to world peace.
Yeah, a lot of the non-FiveThirtyEight models still show Clinton at a 75-80% chance of victory–this is because they primarily use polls that exclude Gary Johnson and Jill Stein (i.e. they’re just head to head Clinton-Trump polls.) FiveThirtyEight has taken the position that they’ll incorporate tracking for any third party candidate with enough support to be statistically relevant. Johnson at 8% could be a serious influence on the election.
I don’t think the reason Clinton is stuck as low as she is is because of Jill Stein–in fact Stein still appears to have almost no support (she’s also, unlike Johnson, probably not even going to be on the ballot in 50 states.) If you look at the projection on 538 98.7% of the popular vote is accounting for between Trump/Clinton/Stein; but I don’t think this model captures true “undecideds” at all, and I’ve heard undecideds have been historically high.
He could win. I would never have believed it even a few years ago, but I believe it now, the effect of Cable TV and now Internet has been overwhelming, the general public does not distinguish between reality and a fantasy world.
I do believe he will do a lot of damage if elected, and the aftermath will be democratic domination for years, expect perhaps in the judicial if he is able to stack that.
Provided we survive. He have avoided a nuclear exchange since 1949, but don’t count on that going on forever. I know a lot of you delude yourself into thinking that could never happen, but the key word here is delude. If it happens, it won’t be where someone wakes up one morning and says “I am going to start a nuclear war”. It will result after a sequence of events, where some bumbling fool who thinks he knows what he is doing and has the power to make the decisions, makes bad ones, and a scenario develops where the potential for a mistake to occur become a strong possibility, that one mistake, or one loose cannon out there that sets it all off.
Trump has already set this into motion. He has given Russia and China the signals that he will not defend territory, they most certainly will move aggressively once he is elected. As other countries now will not feel confident that we will defend them, they will scurry for cover, takes other steps to do so themselves. The world becomes a very dangerous place on the day he is elected. ISIS, forget it, you think that is danger? Blowing up some people here and there. You don’t know what danger is if you think that is danger. Danger is what you try to pretend does not exist, 10’s of thousands of nukes, each one of them capable of incinerating every human in NYC.
I think Saddamn needed the ambiguity, to keep Iran from getting ideas. Neat dilemma: how to convince America that he didn’t have any without Iran finding out he wasn’t lying.
Anyone here believe that it never occured to the “neo-con” baboons what a great thing another war between Iran and Iraq might be? Corpses, sure, but mostly brown.
As I’ve mentioned in another thread, the nowcast is a particularly flawed tool when one convention has finished and the other hasn’t yet started. It’s like predicting the winner of baseball’s home run derby when only one batter has been up to bat.
Clinton, as noted, is back ahead, having gained 14 percentage points as this writing. The bulk of the major polls will be appearing in the next day or two and those should move her even farther ahead.
Really, Silver should simply suspend the nowcast for the couple of weeks of the conventions. It can’t do any good, and at worst it leads to confusion among those who don’t fully understand the bigger picture and propaganda from those who can so easily exploit the temporary change.
Silver has been critical of Wang’s methods in the past.
I’m pretty well convinced Silver is right here. In particular, the fact that Wang (who uses a polls-only method) claims much higher confidence than you’d get by simply asking “How often has a polling lead this strong held up in the past?” seems pretty damning. I would also note that while Wang is a highly successful neuroscientist, he’s not a professional statistician. In my experience successful scientists don’t always have broad expertise in statistics, particularly with statistical considerations that may be more relevant in other fields (like election forecasting).
In short, Silver’s polls-only predictions may disagree with Wang’s because of how aggressive they are in responding to the polls, but the reason they’ll disagree by a lot is because Wang claims an unjustified level of confidence.
Exactly, a recurrent tension between people spinning against or for a particular candidate (almost all one way around on this forum AFAICT but in general it can apply either way) and those seeking to analyze a campaign with some degree of objectivity, though of course few are able to leave aside their own bias entirely.
Among the reasons not to suspend model operation between intra convention is a point one of Silver’s recent posts touched on in discussing the trade off between tuning a model to ‘ignore noise’ on one hand but make it less sensitive to change in trend on the other. There’s been evidence of a trend in favor of Trump: it’s not clear the recent deterioration of Clinton’s position was just because of Trump’s convention. We’ll see how future date clarifies that, as opposed to stating some pseudo-certainty that everything will be alright for Clinton in order to not ‘confuse’ anyone.
