Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
![]()
Trump has had multiple Trumpghazis ever since taking office. "Benghazi! Benghazi!" is just an excuse nowadays for Magaturds like "But her emails!".
Also, in response to McConnell having no empathy for liberal judges, Biden should make McConnell's life a living hell while in office in retaliation for confirming Amy Covfefe Bidoof.
"Wow, no Mega Togekiss in Legends Z-A. Or any non-Froslass new Sinnoh Mega Evolutions. Round of applause, everybody." - DawnPolitico: It Wasn't Ideology That Sank House Democrats. It Was Bad Strategy.
This is basically what's been said earlier in this thread: Campaigning weaknesses were a much bigger cause for weak Democratic congressional performance than the whole centrist vs progressive distraction.
It wasn’t ideology that this year sank seeming Democratic shoo-ins like Gina Ortiz Jones, a first generation American and Air Force veteran who, when she first ran in 2018, came only 927 votes short of winning her longtime red south Texas border district. (We endorsed and supported her in 2018 and again in 2020.) Nor were too-progressive politics what sent highly regarded first-term members of Congress like New Mexico’s Xochitl Torres Small back home to traditionally Republican districts, or that consigned other high-performing freshman incumbents like Lauren Underwood of Illinois into painfully protracted ballot counts—the latter of whom we’ve endorsed and worked with for the past two election cycles as well.
It was weak strategy, based on bad polling information and poor decisions from the national party that left Democratic candidates in swing districts—and candidates of color in particular—unable to hold their own in the face of a massive, and massively underestimated, Republican voter surge. The fact is: If you’re going to win a campaign, you’ve got to campaign, which means getting in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing that Democrats running for Congress could not do this year, upon orders from the party’s campaign arm in Washington, DC.
Every election cycle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (the DCCC), along with the Democratic National Committee (the DNC) and their biggest and most influential allies, wield disproportionate influence through the weight of their endorsements and their power of the purse. Often operating in concert, and inspiring big donors to follow, they decide which candidates are “viable,” who is worthy of full financial support, how their campaigns should operate and which consultants they can hire. And this year, the direction set by D.C. Democrats proved to be a very big part of why House Democrats fell far short of a hoped-for 2020 blue wave, instead diminishing their hard-fought majority won in 2018.
Their data was bad—the result of polling that vastly underestimated how many Republicans would turn out to vote and how their ever-strengthening fidelity to President Donald Trump would cause them to back GOP candidates all the way down the ticket. Their understanding of very specific voter beliefs in very different local districts was even worse—which is why Hispanic voters, lumped together into a non-differentiated, assumedly pro-immigration and anti-Trump bloc, provided the party with such disastrous surprises in south Florida and border areas of Texas. While the party isn’t solely to blame for using bad data, it should have known better than to use polls as the main indicator of future success and voter preferences. Indeed, 2016 had offered ample warning that polling was unreliable.
I could see why Democrats wouldn't want to campaign out in the open though, so they wouldn't have to risk getting infected. Republicans have always dismissed the virus as a "hoax" though, so they think going outside to campaign and risk catching the virus is no big deal. Indeed, more GOP representatives and senators have caught the virus then their Democrat counterparts.
Edited by clemont107 on Nov 25th 2020 at 8:52:11 AM
"Wow, no Mega Togekiss in Legends Z-A. Or any non-Froslass new Sinnoh Mega Evolutions. Round of applause, everybody." - Dawn![]()
Should note that's an opinion piece.
Edit: And my opinion on the matter is that I still think Democrats were right to scale back in-person canvassing efforts. It's not just about optics or how voters feel - the safety of campaign staff and volunteers is important too.
And I'm definitely open to seeing further data on whether Democratic candidates with in-person campaigns did better than ones who didn't, but I would like to point out it's not as simple as they paint it. Sara Gideon, for example, resumed in-person canvassing and still lost by a lot.
Edit 2: Also, the DCCC explicitly refused to back candidates this cycle (unlike the DSCC), and the DNC, AFAIK, doesn't endorse at all.
Will agree that Democrats need to broadly rethink strategy and messaging, though.
Edited by nova92 on Nov 25th 2020 at 6:25:40 AM
The lack of in-person campaigning hurting the democrats is a broadly plausible narrative, but saying that they 'should have known better than to rely on polls because 2016' doesn't really hold up. Trying to predict the direction- or magnitude- of polling error is a sucker's game. If it could be reliably predicted, the pollsters would just account for it. And it's not like there are other sources of data out there that reliably do better than the polls.
Edited by Gilphon on Nov 25th 2020 at 10:53:21 AM
You know guys I just thought of something. Anita Bryant was a Right-Wing singer in the seventies who campaigned against gay people. But a lot of places dropped her the second she got divorced and actually cancelled her political career and her ministry work didn't reach as wide an audience. I wasn't alive at the time, but I've read a bit about it and contrasting it with Modern Conservative Christians and I wish Amercian Fundamentalists still pretended they had cared about their stated beliefs and weren't just doing it to hurt people.
Putin definitely won't, that's for sure. If anything, Russian civilians would be more happy that Biden could actually counter Putin and do something about him instead of being one of his fellow nutcases like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Re: relying on polls after 2016
Saying the Democrats shouldn't have relied on polls already shows that a lot of people still don't know how polling works. The polling errors in both 2016 and 2020 were pretty normal.
Saying the Democrats shouldn't have relied on polls already shows that a lot of people still don't know how polling works. The polling errors in both 2016 and 2020 were pretty normal.
That's because the polling errors in 2016 had catastrophic results. The polling errors in 2020 were less catastrophic, but Democrats still came out of 2020 looking much worse off than the polling had led them to believe - especially in Florida, where an entire key demographic shocked everyone by actually turning out for Trump instead of Biden.
People are worried because they see catastrophic polling errors that keep throwing or nearly throwing elections to Republicans. Republicans seem to consistently do much better at the ballots than the polls suggest, to varying degrees of detriment for Democrats. Telling them that those catastrophic polling errors are "normal" does little to raise their faith in polling.
Appealing to normalcy just isn't a great defense. If I was shopping for a Honda and the car dealer told me, "Don't worry about the steering column vibrating weirdly; it's totally normal for one in five cars to explode randomly within the first few months off the lot." I wouldn't be like, "Oh, okay, as long as that's normal." I'd probably reconsider even buying any car at all. Scary things being "normal" magnify the perceived problems rather than defusing them.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 25th 2020 at 8:22:24 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Except that polling errors don't consistently favour Republicans. The direction of polling error is a 50/50 split.
Like if a coin happens to land on heads twice in a row, it doesn't make any sense to say 'well, it was obviously stupid to not to bet on heads the second time, after what happened the first time.'
Edited by Gilphon on Nov 25th 2020 at 11:23:41 AM
@rationalInsanity: Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil also still hasn't acknowledged Biden, but I'll grant you Brazil is nowhere near the same league as Russia and China.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Thing is the polling isn’t a system of the election as much as it’s a insight into what the result will be.
To steal the car analogy, the speedometer is normally off by up to 6 points in an unpredictable direction, as it’s the only car available we need to learn to give ourselves a about 7 point margin if we want to avoid breaking the speed limit.
Now there’s an argument to be made that polling results/averages shouldn’t be a number so much as a range accounting for the margin of error. So instead of reporting that Biden is up 5 in the polling average, report that the average has a range of Trump +1 to Biden +11.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI think there's a middle road here, where it's possible that while polls were about as reliable as they usually are, Democratic strategists made the same mistake as laypeople and gave them a degree of unwarranted confidence, causing them to make strategic errors.
Like, while a 2.4% margin in total House vote (where Democrats are now, with most of the vote in) may be within the margin of error of the 6-7% predicted by the generic ballot, a 6-7% national margin is enormously different from 2.4%. A 3-4% swing towards Democrats from the current vote would have been the difference between breaking even and the net 10 seat loss they're looking at right now. A similar swing in the other direction from the polls, meaning a 9-10% lead in the generic ballot would have meant Democrats picked up about 10 seats.
So "accurate" and "inaccurate" polling could mean the difference between an offensive strategy and a defensive one, and the range of "normal" polling margins the difference between a terrible and great night for Democrats.
Edit: One thing I'd like to see is a deep dive into the reliability of down-ballot polls, which seem to be "worse" than presidential polls. 538 has quantified the average bias of presidential polls but hasn't done the same for Senate and House races, to the best of my knowledge.
Edited by nova92 on Nov 25th 2020 at 8:34:07 AM
I suspect that the way races/states get categorised is part of the problem, rather than tossup-tilt-favoured-safe you should have, within normal Mo E-outside of normal error range-safe.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranMy understanding of Benghazi wasn't that the Attack itself was Hillary's fault, just her response to it. She didn't send/okay any assistance at all, which is why those retired Special Forces folks had to step in.
As an EVE Online player, this is something I'm quite familiar with, as a member of Goonswarm by the ingame name of "Vile Rat" was someone posted at that Embassy, and happened to be on Voice Comms with them when it happened. He was one of the casualties of that night, and his death led to an unprecedented Ceasefire between every major power in the game, with reps from every one of them being invited onto Goonswarm's comms for a Wake, and a Vigil of spawned Jump Points that lit the entire map up.
The point is, Hillary was detested for her INACTION towards the situation in Benghazi, not that she somehow caused it, or her politics. Much like how Trump is detested now for his inaction to the Coronavirus.
Semper Fi. Semper Paratus. Vigilo Confido.

The most prominent "issue" I've seen regarding her is her supposed involvement in Benghazi.