Scrutable

Those MI guys have issued a statement that gives Trump a thumping.

"Have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan."

And reading between the lines is fun for: "Michigan's certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation."

 

lpm wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:00 am

Those MI guys have issued a statement that gives Trump a thumping.

"Have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan."

And reading between the lines is fun for: "Michigan's certification process should be a deliberate process free from threats and intimidation."

While I don't believe anyone deserves any particular credit for not taking part in a coup, in the context, it's good to see.

Two Covid cases related to different bits of Republican campaigning.

Rudy's son was at the utterly mad press conference some are calling the "Four Treasons" conference, unmasked in a confined space. He has now announced he has COVID. Some journalists wisely refused to go in, others wore N95s under their cloth masks.

Rick Scott (R), Florida Senator, was at a campaign meeting for the crooks Perdue and Loeghler in a low ceiling windowless room with mostly unmasked, undistanced attendees. Again, many journalists made the right decision not to cover. Florida Senator now has COVID.

Will any of these f.ckers actually self-isolate, or will they just keep spreading the plague?

Donald, Jr also has COVID-19.

Maricopa County - containing about 3/5ths of Arizona's electorate - just certified. Board of Supervisors Rep 4-1 Dem, but certified unanimously after mocking and critising the lolsuits and whining.

Is anyone else seriously surprised (pleasantly, obviously) by the lack of violence? Given all the nutty second-amendment QAnon supporters Trump supposedly has, you'd think that at a few of them would have shot something or someone by now. And yet all we see are transparently pathetic lawsuits filed by a billionaire in one of the most litigious countries in the world, as if decent lawyers were impossible to find.

Let's hope the bathetic implosion and he goes out not with a bang but a whimper. I'm just finding it very hard to trust the silence.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:23 am

Is anyone else seriously surprised (pleasantly, obviously) by the lack of violence? Given all the nutty second-amendment QAnon supporters Trump supposedly has, you'd think that at a few of them would have shot something or someone by now. And yet all we see are transparently pathetic lawsuits filed by a billionaire in one of the most litigious countries in the world, as if decent lawyers were impossible to find.

Let's hope the bathetic implosion and he goes out not with a bang but a whimper. I'm just finding it very hard to trust the silence.

While it's been a relief there's not been significant actual violence, there has been some street brawling, a foiled plot to abduct and murder the governor of Michigan, and some degree of similar plotting against the governors of Ohio and Virginia.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:23 am

Is anyone else seriously surprised (pleasantly, obviously) by the lack of violence? Given all the nutty second-amendment QAnon supporters Trump supposedly has, you'd think that at a few of them would have shot something or someone by now. And yet all we see are transparently pathetic lawsuits filed by a billionaire in one of the most litigious countries in the world, as if decent lawyers were impossible to find.

Let's hope the bathetic implosion and he goes out not with a bang but a whimper. I'm just finding it very hard to trust the silence.

The big violence will come when the election is certified. The Trumpist supporters right now think they are winning in the courts. If and when it becomes clear they are not, that is the danger point.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:23 am

Is anyone else seriously surprised (pleasantly, obviously) by the lack of violence? Given all the nutty second-amendment QAnon supporters Trump supposedly has, you'd think that at a few of them would have shot something or someone by now.

TBF nutty second-Amendment QAnon types tend in reality to be mostly sad pathetic incels who are happy in their fantasies of pwning the libtards online but are incapable of actually following through with anything*.

Which is worse in some ways. Hypothetically if us middle class European liberal types lived in a society where we were convinced the ruling elites were genuinely raping, murdering and eating children on an industrial scale for twisted religious reasons and with complete impunity, like some bad cyberpunk novel, I’d hope we’d be a bit more pro-active in exposing and bringing down that system, it would be a moral imperative. Rather than say impotently ranting on obscure Darkweb forums between all the cat memes, gore pics and child p.rnography**.


*although as history has repeatedly shown us the tragic warping of a “well-regulated militia” into “any pathetic loser can have an AR15 if they want one” means even the AV Club rejects of QAnon can commit mass murder on occasion.

**yes I can pronounce QAnon’s irony bypass was a complete success.

EACLucifer wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 1:43 am

Maricopa County - containing about 3/5ths of Arizona's electorate - just certified. Board of Supervisors Rep 4-1 Dem, but certified unanimously after mocking and critising the lolsuits and whining.

I hope that the implied operator precedence there translates to "(mocking and criticising) (the lolsuits and the whining)".

I have the impression that even if some percentage of Republicans might have been tempted to go down the party loyalty route, they will have worked out that their expected return on investment is negligible. Pro: (a) Trump will tweet that they are fine people, (b) local frootloopers won't demonstrate outside your house. Con: They might go to jail if the coup fails. You'd have to believe that the coup was about 99.99% likely to work to take those odds. (There is of course another possible con, namely that the frootloopers might shoot you, but I suspect that the louder ones are mostly going through stages of grief rather than actively planning to bump anyone off. They might also calculate that the elected officials will have access to police protection; cf also BoaF's comment about the lack of violence.)

Assuming the coup fails, I think it raises an interesting question: Would the coup have succeeded if Trump had been less of an idiot, or would someone who was less of an idiot not have got involved in the first place?

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:07 pm

Assuming the coup fails, I think it raises an interesting question: Would the coup have succeeded if Trump had been less of an idiot, or would someone who was less of an idiot not have got involved in the first place?

That is the biggest, most worrying take home message from the Trump maladministration.

If nothing else he has demonstrated that even a cartoonish level of villainy and incompetence, delivered by shrieking coke-fuelled lunatics, in the midst of bungled pandemic with a death toll approaching a hundred 911s in the space of less than year and a pancaked economy STILL got 48% of the vote in a high turnout election.

Subtract even one of those factors and we’d be looking at 4 (or 8 or 80) more years of the Trump dynasty in the WH.

A vaguely more plausible candidate, a slightly more favourable electoral landscape, a bit more dysfunctional opposition and the US could end up in a very dark place.

Trumpism needed to be completely repudiated at all levels to completely kill it, that didn’t happen, the Presidential vote was closer than it should have been, the Senate is likely to be virtually unchanged, the Repugs even picked up seats in Congress and are favourites in 2022 and the SCOTUS is packed for a generation or more. A Trump 2024 or at least Trump.v.2 2024 (from his kids or some other populist tw.t) run looks almost certain now,

They’ve stepped back from the abyss, time will tell if that’s just them getting ready for a running leap.

Chris Preston wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 1:22 am

Donald, Jr also has COVID-19.

Thoughts and prayers for COVID-19

Little waster wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:27 pm

sTeamTraen wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 12:07 pm

Assuming the coup fails, I think it raises an interesting question: Would the coup have succeeded if Trump had been less of an idiot, or would someone who was less of an idiot not have got involved in the first place?

That is the biggest, most worrying take home message from the Trump maladministration.

If nothing else he has demonstrated that even a cartoonish level of villainy and incompetence, delivered by shrieking coke-fuelled lunatics, in the midst of bungled pandemic with a death toll approaching a hundred 911s in the space of less than year and a pancaked economy STILL got 48% of the vote in a high turnout election.

Subtract even one of those factors and we’d be looking at 4 (or 8 or 80) more years of the Trump dynasty in the WH.

A vaguely more plausible candidate, a slightly more favourable electoral landscape, a bit more dysfunctional opposition and the US could end up in a very dark place.

Trumpism needed to be completely repudiated at all levels to completely kill it, that didn’t happen, the Presidential vote was closer than it should have been, the Senate is likely to be virtually unchanged, the Repugs even picked up seats in Congress and are favourites in 2022 and the SCOTUS is packed for a generation or more. A Trump 2024 or at least Trump.v.2 2024 (from his kids or some other populist tw.t) run looks almost certain now,

They’ve stepped back from the abyss, time will tell if that’s just them getting ready for a running leap.

Counterpoint (we need some optimism): Maybe some of the 48% won't go for someone who is less personally awful than Trump? That is, what does the successor to Trump look like? His kids, especially Don and Eric, have the same idiocy without most of the chutzpah. Trump senior allows Billy-Bob Fuckwitt to say "Hell yeah, I like this guy, he's literally a bigger a..hole than me!" --- not just in a way that Mitch McConnell is an a..hole, but in the way that David Brent is an a..hole, but times 100.

Of course, the counter-counterpoint is that with a candidate who is less of an a..hole than Trump you would have some of the never-Trumpers coming back. But I wonder how many of them there are; apparently people voted pretty much along regular party lines here.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that the Senate and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College are configured to ensure that there will likely always be a Republican on top of at least one of the House/Senate/WH trifecta, almost regardless of what demographics occur. But that's within the context of the rules. In one sense I don't really care if there is a Republican congress and President, if they are elected by the rules and following the constitution; it's not my country (even if, like most Europeans, I would prefer to see Democrats in power). I do care that the guy with the nucular™ button and the ability to say "Nahhh, can't be bothered to defend Estonia" is too busy deploying the military against his own people to care what happens anywhere else in the world (and yes, I accept that US foreign policy under any President is rarely entirely an exercise in distributing cuddly toys).

dyqik wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 20, 2020 10:17 pm

Meanwhile, Fox is claiming the deep-red Upper Peninsular of Michigan is actually in Canada, rather than Minnesota.

https://twitter.com/SteveHofstetter/sta ... 66528?s=20

Presumably this means that a whole bunch of Trump votes should be discarded in Michigan </sarcasm>

I wonder if that was a nod to a hoax article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... insula_War

Chris Preston wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 1:22 am

Donald, Jr also has COVID-19.

Trump arse kisser Richard Grenell, the former acting Director of National Intelligence tried to make political capital by telling the press that they needed "to stop announcing protected health information" and that it was a "violation of HIPAA* rules".

He entirely failed to spot that news had in fact been released by Trump Jr's own spokesperson.

CF

*(HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which created national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient's consent or knowledge).

So all those polls and models that people were obsessing over 0.1% shifts in, that turned out to be quite badly wrong - has there been any decent post mortem yet? Why can all these super smart well paid high profile people not assess voting intentions?

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:59 pm

So all those polls and models that people were obsessing over 0.1% shifts in, that turned out to be quite badly wrong - has there been any decent post mortem yet? Why can all these super smart well paid high profile people not assess voting intentions?

There won't be a post mortem possible until all the votes are counted. Biden should pick up another 3.5 million votes by then.

But the biggest issue that's been getting worse is that pollsters can't get people to respond, and people who do respond are not typical.

ETA: massively high turnout on both sides also changed the balance a bit.

dyqik wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:43 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:59 pm

So all those polls and models that people were obsessing over 0.1% shifts in, that turned out to be quite badly wrong - has there been any decent post mortem yet? Why can all these super smart well paid high profile people not assess voting intentions?

There won't be a post mortem possible until all the votes are counted. Biden should pick up another 3.5 million votes by then.

But the biggest issue that's been getting worse is that pollsters can't get people to respond, and people who do respond are not typical.

ETA: massively high turnout on both sides also changed the balance a bit.

Were the polls wrong though? They were off for Congress but ok for the presidential vote weren’t they?

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:21 pm

dyqik wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:43 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:59 pm

So all those polls and models that people were obsessing over 0.1% shifts in, that turned out to be quite badly wrong - has there been any decent post mortem yet? Why can all these super smart well paid high profile people not assess voting intentions?

There won't be a post mortem possible until all the votes are counted. Biden should pick up another 3.5 million votes by then.

But the biggest issue that's been getting worse is that pollsters can't get people to respond, and people who do respond are not typical.

ETA: massively high turnout on both sides also changed the balance a bit.

Were the polls wrong though? They were off for Congress but ok for the presidential vote weren’t they?

Hard to say until all the votes are counted.

Well, plenty of places have finished counting, or are 99% of the way there. Enough counting has been done to know that, say, Florida was way off. But why?

Pollsters and modellers must have known that getting responses is tricky, and that this would be an unusual election for turnout - surely they weren't so feckless as to do nothing about it when producing their estimates.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:21 pm

dyqik wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:43 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 2:59 pm

So all those polls and models that people were obsessing over 0.1% shifts in, that turned out to be quite badly wrong - has there been any decent post mortem yet? Why can all these super smart well paid high profile people not assess voting intentions?

There won't be a post mortem possible until all the votes are counted. Biden should pick up another 3.5 million votes by then.

But the biggest issue that's been getting worse is that pollsters can't get people to respond, and people who do respond are not typical.

ETA: massively high turnout on both sides also changed the balance a bit.

Were the polls wrong though? They were off for Congress but ok for the presidential vote weren’t they?

I ran an election sweepstake thread for fun, but in the end the guesses that were closest to the poll predictions were the wrongest. The polls overestimated Biden's EC votes enormously, and we don't need to wait for the last handful of votes to see that.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 5:50 pm

Well, plenty of places have finished counting, or are 99% of the way there. Enough counting has been done to know that, say, Florida was way off. But why?

Pollsters and modellers must have known that getting responses is tricky, and that this would be an unusual election for turnout - surely they weren't so feckless as to do nothing about it when producing their estimates.

High turnout for low propensity voters is hard to predict, and pollsters likely weren't getting responses from the Trump supporting ones.

Remember that state polls are inherently noisier than national polls, and you should expect ±6% errors on the horse race there.

They weren't that bad, if you treated them as indicating a probability distribution rather than a point estimate. The problem is that people read >50% and think "sure thing" and then decide the polls were crap when the outcome they anticipated doesn't happen.

Also, US elections recently have tended to be really close. A poll that says the vote will be between 55-45 and 45-55 isn't actually any worse than one that says it will be between 70-30 and 60-40. Although it is less useful if all you care about is who will win.

It'll be interesting trying to hindcast the actual results from poll data with added fudge factors. Maybe assuming that x% of "would not say" should be assigned to Trump/GOP helps.

Maybe old-fashioned polls just don't work any more, and we can do a better job with search data from Google and/or PornHub, truck sales figures and demographics.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 5:53 pm

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:21 pm

dyqik wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 21, 2020 3:43 pm

There won't be a post mortem possible until all the votes are counted. Biden should pick up another 3.5 million votes by then.

But the biggest issue that's been getting worse is that pollsters can't get people to respond, and people who do respond are not typical.

ETA: massively high turnout on both sides also changed the balance a bit.

Were the polls wrong though? They were off for Congress but ok for the presidential vote weren’t they?

I ran an election sweepstake thread for fun, but in the end the guesses that were closest to the poll predictions were the wrongest. The polls overestimated Biden's EC votes enormously, and we don't need to wait for the last handful of votes to see that.

There was a very narrow margin between Biden just creeping over 270 by doing no more than flipping MI/WI/PA, and blasting past 400 Evs in the polling. Biden's win comes with one of the biggest disparities between electoral vote and popular vote we've seen for a while. The only thing that made it even appear close was an electoral map that massively favours the Republicans, and some people's perception was further influenced by one of the biggest misses - Florida - announcing its results very fast, while MI/WI/PA took much longer due to deliberate Republican chicanery. Ultimately, 538 polling averages only got two states wrong - Florida and North Carolina - and North Carolina was quite close, and about the only state where the Republicans really put more effort in across the board.

ETA: When I say only got two states wrong, I mean who won them, not by how much