The General US Politics Thread

I think the Trump Campaign plan right now is to invalidate enough votes in Republican controlled swing states that neither candidate will have an electoral majority, and then win it in the Supreme Court.

For the record, I don't thing this thing is even going to be close. It's going to be an electoral landslide in favor of Biden. The popular vote will be closer than expected, though.

We're in the middle of a pandemic; I would be shocked if Biden doesn't make his inauguration a virtual event. Trump would be likely to hold an inauguration event if he got reelected, which I'd imagine to be a massive super-spreader event.

Again, I'm honestly not trying to violate the pinned rules on doomsaying, but I have heard this before.

I mean, it IS true that Biden's lead in Wisconsin/Michigan/Pennsylvania is currently around 6 points - outside the range of a normal polling error - which, assuming no blue states from 2016 flip (and that does seem likely) is enough to give him 278 EC votes. But that's anything but a landslide.

Edited by nrjxll on Oct 16th 2020 at 9:38:38 AM

You can have a landslide in the popular vote that doesn't translate into the Electoral College. Even then, he could even end up with a landslide in the Electoral College depending on how things go.

It's hardly guaranteed but it's also hardly impossible if polls are to be believed.

Edited by LSBK on Oct 16th 2020 at 9:41:58 AM

The most likely average result is currently that Biden will have ~350 E Vs to Trump's ~192. That would be a landslide.

(And if we want to speculate about the single most likely outcome, then it's actually a peak around 420:110)

400+ electoral votes for Biden is based on him winning Texas, which I think is unlikely. So is him winning Georgia.

Those states could be close if Black and Hispanic voters were able to vote at the same rates as white voters, but that’s not the actual state of affairs.

Edited by Galadriel on Oct 16th 2020 at 10:43:48 AM

Well, 538 gives Georgia as a 50/50, and Texas at 31% chance for Biden.

The most likely outcome is probably neither of them going for him, but, again as things stand either of them doing so isn't particularly outlandish.

As far as Republican states go, Texas, and especially Georgia aren't that red.

Edited by LSBK on Oct 16th 2020 at 9:47:40 AM

That's the odd thing about running simulations, though. Flipping Texas is a relatively uncommon event (3/10, by 538's model), but when it does happen it means a big shift in the overall totals and similar enough races falling the same way you end up with a tight cluster.

So the single most likely totals involve shifting Texas (i.e. that 3/10 chance), but the median outcome is closer to an even split where various states might fall one way or the other.

Though the other way of looking at it is that a Biden landslide where Texas flips is currently more likely than Trump pulling a win in the election itself.

Edited by RainehDaze on Oct 16th 2020 at 3:49:21 PM

The thing with Texas and Georgia is that there’s not a lot of swing voters. There’s one group of heavily right-wing conservatives (white) and another group of liberals (mainly minorities, and some higher-educated urban white liberals in, e.g., Atlanta and Austin). Winning those states depends on substantially increasing turnout among minority communities, and voter suppression and disenfranchisement put a lot of roadblocks in the way of that.

So even if you’re only losing by 5 points, improving your vote share enough to win can be very difficult and unlikely.

(538 discussed this in the context of South Carolina in particular.)

Of course, Trump is doing his best to force away seniors etc., which is what makes it a lot weirder. Normally inelastic groups are also responding.

I'm aware. Saying something isn't implausible isn't the same thing as saying it's very likely to happen.

After Trump won I feel like we should have moved on from conflating those things.

Edited by LSBK on Oct 16th 2020 at 10:07:28 AM

I'm in rural Pennsylvania right now, and very surprised at the number of Biden/Harris signs I've seen. Not that many, but slightly less than the number of Trump/Pence signs. One was even displayed pretty prominently on a business, some farm named American [Whatever] with an American flag on its business label.

I also passed a large billboard saying "200,000+ Coronavirus Deaths. _________ Americans Unemployed. Vote him out." (I forget the number of people unemployed.)

Very pleasantly surprised to see this, especially considering how prominent the Trump signs were the last time I came up here, which was a little over a month ago.

I get that you want to dismiss worries from people on the internet, but that's harder to do when foreign governments start having these fears.

Ditto. There's been a sprinkle of Biden signs in my neighborhood, which is more than I thought I'd see. Me and my bumper sticker aren't alone anymore. I also have a Biden Aviators tank top and button than I wear when I run with my dog, so I'm a walking yard sign every day for about 20 minutes.

In fact, this reminds me of an article I saw the other day. Democrats in Trump Country: They’re Not Shy Anymore About Liking Biden/

Apparently, this show of support for Biden in conservative areas is a trend across the country.

For the first time, Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) is up in an Internal by 1 (48%-47% against Tuberville). Until now, even with Jones' internals, Tuberville had been up.

While I doubt Jones wins, the fact that we finally have something with Jones over Tuberville shows momentum is with the Democrats, even in a state like Alabama. Still going to vote for the man come November.

Jones has always been a longshot, but I think the Democrats are up enough elsewhere to win in the Senate if the polls are right.

Still, I really hope there is a place in politics (if not electoral politics) for Jones if he wants to stay in. He'd make a great AG.

I would assume that the man is a likely candidate for AG if he loses the Senate election, being both relatively prominent and a former federal attorney.

Huh

Edited by RainehDaze on Oct 16th 2020 at 6:58:53 PM

But... Reading too much into early voters was, IIRC, another 2016 problem, and this year they're almost certainly going to skew heavily Democratic.

I maintain that all the polls were mostly right about Trump and Hillary. She lost by like 50,000 votes in a few key areas while blowing him out in many others.

But yes, I wouldn't be surprised if he wins just out of general disgust.

Covid-19 is what I think it took to genuinely shake the Trump voter block.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 16th 2020 at 11:42:40 AM

Not the part of that line that's interesting.

And whilst "but that might be misleading" isn't doomsaying, it's really annoying when every last person new to the thread will respond to literally any polls or numbers with "but 2016". We argued 2016 to death in 2016, it would be nice to not have to do it again every time any numbers look even slightly interesting.

Because, as has also been done to death, the numbers in 2016 weren't that wrong and we already worked out where they went wrong.

Reading too much into early voting or being overly confident based on polls is a problem, yes, but it's also a mistake to overcompensate for the lessons of 2016 and ignore the changes that have happened since then.

Early voting/mail-in-voting is different from 2016 because so many states have quickly expanded them due to the pandemic (many states also increased early/absentee voting between 2017-19). It makes up a much bigger proportion of the vote (there are some counties in Texas that have already gotten 1/3 of their 2016 total vote in already). Current numbers likely do lean heavily Democratic, so it shouldn't be cause for premature celebration, but we should be able to accept good news as good news without needing to conjure up the worst case scenario or add pages of disclaimers each time.

CharlesPhipps wrote: I strongly recommend you back from this view because it implies that malice is greater than stupidity. Both go hand in hand here. The idiots really do believe Democrats are vampires.

As got pointed out before i could, Qanon switches beliefs on a pretty much daily basis. It started with the basic premise of a certain Q fighting a war against the deep state. The vampire pedo cabal internationalist stuff came later. And it continues to morph day by day, absorbing other beliefs into it. The reason Flat Earth isn't such a big deal anymore is because they all went to Q.

The constant however is the same old: you're being lied to, you're being lied to by evil globalist forces, and the only solution is to lock all of them up. Only we see the truth.

In the end, it's a reactionary force that will adapt on the fly to the specifics but the basic endgoal remains: lock them up.

You can see the same type of reasoning with Trumpists: censorship is bad because the dems do it, censor the dems. Cancel culture is bad, cancel the cancellers. Rioters are bad, so we riot against the rioters. Investigations are bad, investigate the investigators.

On the surface it makes no sense, but the end goal isn't ideological purity but rather to kick out the people they don't like. They don't care they're being inconsistent or hypocrites because the end goal was always Supremacy.

Edited by devak on Oct 17th 2020 at 9:36:40 PM

Okay, on second thought, I wouldn't have made that post. This thread moves fast, but there's no reason to repeat the same thing twice on one page.

That said: yes, I know about the differences between polling/predictions this year and in 2016. I've probably read most of the same things as you have. And I certainly have no worries about overconfidence actually affecting people voting. But I cannot overstate the degree of fear I'm experiencing every moment of the day. I literally can barely function. So it is extremely upsetting to see the exact same thing I've seen before in terms of buying into optimistic media narratives and analyses of incomplete data.

Like, in the end I don't think Doug Jones specifically is a big deal (which is not to discourage those of you who live in Alabama for voting for him). He was always a long-shot and the most plausible routes for Democracts winning the Senate involve flipping other seats more than they do saving his. So making guesses about how that race is likely to turn out doesn't really matter than much. But it's still very... I hate to use this word, but 'triggering' is the only thing I can think of, to see talk about Democratic momentum that looks very similar to what I saw in 2016 - especially when basically everything besides polling that's changed has done so for the worse.^note Which is why I'm so frightened to begin with - the whole idea of Trump being this Diabolus ex Nihilo figure who's ruining an American democracy that was healthy up to then, and if we can just get rid of him everything will go back to normal, is just completely inaccurate centrist fantasy, and yet it isn't even clear if that very basic first step of getting him out of office is possible. Which makes the whole idea of life being able to change for the better at all to seem very questionable. I mean, look at that article about the EU: I'm pretty doubtful of panic about Trump taking dramatic extralegal steps (beyond the usual Republican fuckery) to stay in office, yes, but his staying in office at all is going to encourage other national leaders who are also doing their best to roll back democracy. It's why leaving the country, even once the pandemic ends, seems pointless.

I'll try to avoid posting here in the future. (The only reason I'm even in OTC in the first place is because I'm too anxious to go about my normal routine. I'm not interested in this section normally.)

Edited by nrjxll on Oct 17th 2020 at 2:42:57 PM

This thread is not the place for you to work out anxiety.

Seriously, if your anxiety over election possibilities is actually interfering with your life, the solution is not to go into a politics thread and freak out at people for showing anything other than pessimism at political news.