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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Roosevelt in '36 got 523 Electoral College Votes. Biden isn't getting that, even if the sky falls down. But I can see him getting >400 on a good night + Obama '08 popular vote margin.
IMO, it's hard to definitively predict how mail-in voting will effect the election. Shenanigans are going on, true, but mail-in voting could lead to much higher turnout, especially for Democrats. (I heard something like 80% of registered voters in Maricopa County (?) in Arizona had requested ballots.) The problem is it could go either way.
Edited by nova92 on Oct 1st 2020 at 5:40:20 AM
Religious group scrubs all references to Amy Coney Barrett from its website – People of Praise, a tiny charismatic Catholic organization, admits removing mentions and photos of Trump’s supreme court pick
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/30/people-of-praise-amy-coney-barrett-website
Debate-watchers say Biden won first debate, but most felt "annoyed" — CBS News poll
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- 48 percent declared Biden the winner, 41 for Trump, and 10 for a tie.
- 83 percent considered the tone of the debate to have been negative.
- How did the debate make viewers feel?
- 69 percent said annoyed.
- 31 percent entertained.
- 19 percent pessimistic.
- 17 percent informed.
- viewers were pretty much evenly divided on whether they thought better (38), worse, (32) or the same (30) of Biden, but a substantial part (42 percent) thought worse of Trump against only 24 percent better, and 34 the same.
While people generally did not like the debate very much, Biden seems to have made the most gain out of it.
Edited by Redmess on Oct 1st 2020 at 3:26:31 PM
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesFrom that Guardian article:
Barrett, a federal appeals judge, has declined to publicly discuss her decades-long affiliation with People of Praise, a Christian group that opposes abortion and holds that men are divinely ordained as the “head” of the family and faith. Former members have said the group’s leaders teach that wives must submit to the will of their husbands.
Makes sense, an attempt to defictionalize the Republic of Gilead works better when nobody notices what you are planning.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanI'm thinking that I really can't imagine an alternative debate strategy for Trump that would go better for him. Like, since going dirty and destroying all coherent discourse ended up giving Biden a narrow win when Trump really needed a clean victory, that's definitely not the strategy he wants to go with next time. But trying to make the debate focus on policy is clearly an even worse idea for him, and so is trying out-polite him.
So I really don't think Trump's gonna be able shake up the race in any meaningful way in the other debates. Really the way the first debate went is Trump's best case scenario; his optimal strategy becomes more about stop Biden from making significant gains than actually narrowing Biden's lead.
I don't think Trump ever had any chances at the debate other than undermine the very framework of a debate itself: he can't possibly win at a debate, so he must make everyone think debates are worthless (because he shat all over a debate).
A mute button will change this.
The risks I see are the following: The news networks, in their appeal to "fairness" will not add a mute button and just make Trump pinkie promise for realsies he won't interrupt this time, for truthsies! And then Trump will do it ''again'.
With three Presidential Debates total, and him having shat on two, that means he would have effetively held long enough for just one to have an effect.
The best shot Trump has is to pull a Reagan and steal Biden's notes but even if he achieved that he simply does not have the mental acuity to put it all in practice anyways. But with only one out of three debates being effective about estbalishing anything he would have ameliorated the damage the debates would do to him the most.
But overall I hink it was foregone conclusion for the Republican Strategists that Trump's best bet at debates was to draw them to a stalemate, and in the election, to rely on Voter Suppression and the Supreme Court.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesI think a better strategy is probably something similar he did in 2016, appeal to his base, appeal to the working classes, especially those that have been displaced by green technology and automatisation. That is clearly where the majority of his appeal lies, outside of the racism. The idea that Trump can somehow turn around the decline of the coal mining and manufactory industries.
In that regard, I think there is an opportunity for Biden there to appeal to those same groups, to provide them a road map to real change and improvement. He would have had an edge there because he could point to Trump and tell them he hasn't really done much for them, and has rather harmed than helped them. That goes for jobs as well as health care and taxes. I think Biden could make more gains if he pushed harder on these areas in his next debate.
And Biden really needs to grit his teeth and crack down on police brutality publicly. I feel he cannot get away with playing it safe for long without hurting his standing with black voters.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesBiden just being Biden may work. I mean. Bg advantage in 2016 is that he was facing Hillary Clinton, who had a lot of story to gun for.
And she was a woman And That's Terrible.
Edited by Aszur on Oct 1st 2020 at 8:50:36 PM
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesAnother big advantage is that he was the outside candidate. Note that he still profiles himself as the outside candidate, while Biden is the insider (and there is certainly some truth to that). This appeals to a segment to his base (part of the same group I mentioned before) that feels forgotten by both Democrats and the establishment in general. Clinton not visiting Wisconsin was not just a mistake electorally, but also a mistake of image: once again, the establishment ignores that particular group of people, at least in their eyes.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesFareed's news letter highlighted something important behind the Trump tax returns:
“Remove Mr. Trump’s current job from the picture, and what remains is a story that still demands attention,” the paper writes. “The portrait of a man who earned hundreds of millions of dollars, lived a life of comic excess and yet, in many years, paid nothing in federal income taxes is an indictment of the federal income tax system. It illustrates the profound inequities of the tax code and the shambolic state of enforcement.”
As the wealthy play legal chess to limit their payments, “real estate investors have long enjoyed a particularly sweet set of loopholes,” the paper writes—while an underfunded IRS will leave $7.5 trillion in taxes uncollected over the next 10 years and seems to spend more energy auditing lower earners. At Vox, Emily Stewart concurs that the other scandal is a tax code that reportedly allowed Trump to pay so little, as it does other wealthy people and corporations with the resources to find a way. “We essentially have a two-tiered system in this country,” University of Pennsylvania law Prof. Natasha Sarin tells Stewart.
As for negative reflections on Trump’s business record, it’s not the first time they’ve come up: In 2016, Vox’s Matt Yglesias chronicled Trump’s “stint as chair of a public traded company”—Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—finding that Trump “ran the company into the ground, immiserating shareholders while walking away with enormous bags of cash for himself.”
I think he has a point there. This scandal is bigger than Trump. It reveals some real systemic problems in US taxation.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times

Yes, but a shift towards Biden increases the chance of getting a huge win in the Senate, and that's the most important thing after winning the White House.
Edited by Fighteer on Oct 1st 2020 at 8:29:52 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"