2020 U.S. Presidential elections

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Even if the voting yields a Biden win, there still is anxiety about the horseshit that follows.

Heck yeah. If Biden wins Trump has two and a half months to burn down the White House, figuratively or literally.

 

[Govi]

Say what you will about them, at least the Soviets counted votes efficiently.

The vote count is very efficient when votes are not accurately counted and the result is predetermined.*


*the whole sentence also applies to Putin's Russia.

 

[detrius]

I requested CTO (vacation hours) for Wednesday weeks ago. I know that I'm going to be absolutely wasted because I'll be following election results all night long. We've laid in a stock of popcorn and dip, essential comfort foods, and if I could drink, I'd have laid in substantial quantities of alcohol, too. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to get through this stone-cold sober.

Did I mention that I have a Rancilo Silvia espresso machine in my kitchen?

I'm not going to be able to sleep anyway, so I might just as well load up on a gallon of coffee and spend the night playing computer games.

 

[Salome]

"Only one or two other cases"...right, like, Texas for instance successfully restricting early-voting drop boxes to one per county?

You mean the red state of Texas where everything’s currently a toss up?

Yeah that might be "just one case"; but do you seriously want to act like that "one case" hasn't successfully repressed at least tens, and conceivably hundreds, of thousands of votes all by itself?

They are so desperate they are openly trying to cheat IN TEXAS. That’s what I’m seriously looking at, yes.

And that's just the pre-show. We already know that the Main Event is scheduled for after Election Day proper, as far as court challenges go.

Follow the court rulings. Dems have been winning on these overwhelmingly. We have been preparing for this. It isn’t 2016.

My only insight is that they were spectacularly wrong four years ago, and that all by itself is enough to stunt my confidence that this time around they definitely have it all figured out because Reasons.

You didn’t quote some vague “they.” You quoted 538. In 2016 538 was literally the only pollster who was insisting there was noise in the data. Their final projection in 2016 gave Trump between a 1:4 and a 1:3 chance of winning. That wasn’t spectacularly wrong at all, it was about right for a situation where a candidate lost the popular vote and got a shocking, unexpected boost in the 11th hour and had a ton of unknown interference going on pollsters had no way to account for.

538 is currently giving Trump a 1:10 chance on the sole basis of possible unknowns. In theory anything can happen, but every known factor we have says this race is not close.

I'll happily go around spiking the football about a landslide when the votes are actually in and the election gets called. Until then, this is still the fight of our lives against an opponent that stands a good chance of beating us, especially if breathy exclamations about "90% chance!" results in voter complacency on Election Day like it did four years ago.

There is zero indication of any complacency. But studies show being overly defeatist is actually more damaging than having hope. There is such a thing as a bandwagon effect where people like to be on “the winning side” and can be motivated on that basis. Always insisting the sky is falling when there’s nothing to indicate it has consequences, too.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I think the only reason they were wrong in 2016 is that the election was stolen with foreign help - we -know- this.

Are the pundits factoring in the likelihood of a repeat of that? I would hope so.

I do know though that there are -0- signs in this area for Gaetz - not even at the wall of signs that marks polling places. Not a whole lot of Twitler signs this go either, and a whole lot more Biden signs than there were Hillary signs. Sure, could mean nothing, but... I have to have hope right now. If I didn't then I'd have wasted going out every weekday for 8 weeks and having a megnet 'tap' at my brain. I'm prepared for it to go south again, but I'm unwilling to give up hope that its just a very vocal minority who have ever actually supported him, and that the reason he won against HRC is a combination of misogyny and gullibility that as a non-politicain, that he'd actually drain the swamp.... instead of adding more corruption than the first 200+ years of American history.

eta or Salome could beat me to my point.

 

[Salome]

Salome, you know as well as anyone that we're all suffering from 2016-inspired PTSD.

Honey, I hear you. We‘re all stressed. There is too much at stake not to be. But there’s a huge difference between saying “I’m worried about what we don’t know” and using faulty logic and comparisons to insinuate there’s evidence that this race is close.

 

[Salome]

Even if the voting yields a Biden win, there still is anxiety about the horseshit that follows.

This is a whole other thing that I don’t think a lot of people are prepared for, yes.

 

[Sovereignty]

Honey, I hear you. We‘re all stressed. There is too much at stake not to be. But there’s a huge difference between saying “I’m worried about what we don’t know” and using faulty logic and comparisons to insinuate there’s evidence that this race is close.

With risk analysis there are two main factors to consider.

1. The severity of the risk.

2. Probability of the risk.

Even if the probability is low, a high severity is cause for concern and action.

 

[Sovereignty]

One benefit of all the early voting should be reducing election day crowds. That's awfully good.

ETA: tweet links to Tips for voting safely during a pandemic

 

[Salome]

Even if the probability is low, a high severity is cause for concern and action.

Absolutely. And we have every indication that concern is high and driving people to take action in record numbers.

But there’s no reason to invest in false narratives to drive home the importance of the moment.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

I'm probably going to call in sick on Wednesday, and I'm not even American.

I requested CTO (vacation hours) for Wednesday weeks ago. I know that I'm going to be absolutely wasted because I'll be following election results all night long. We've laid in a stock of popcorn and dip, essential comfort foods, and if I could drink, I'd have laid in substantial quantities of alcohol, too. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to get through this stone-cold sober.

I will be working the polls, so hopefully won't have too much time to fret, though this location is usually on the quiet side. After they close and the remaining work has been done, I intend to NOT turn on the news in any fashion for the remainder of the evening. I *might* check in here, not sure. I'm going to watch Enola Holmes on Netflix and tune out the world, if only for a little while.

As to the fuckery that is going to happen in the following days? We shall see.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I think the only reason they were wrong in 2016 is that the election was stolen with foreign help - we -know- this.

No, that's not the "only" reason. Although it may well have been a contributing cause at some level, it was just one minor cut among many. Clinton bled out because of:

• Lower Dem turnout due to complacency and/or lack of enthusiasm for Clinton
• Misdirected campaigning efforts that missed key states
• A high degree of solidified, decades-long hatred of Clinton that motivated Republicans to vote for Trump, even when they didn't like him all that much
• Generalized misogynist dislike of any woman candidate, not just specific hate of Clinton
• Voter suppression (which probably hurt more at the local level, since most of the reddest states were never going to go for Clinton)
• The damn emails and Comey's asinine disregard for long-established policy concerning announcements near an election

I'm sure there are easily another half-dozen missteps/influences at work, but the important take-away is how different Biden scores on these same issues.

• Record-level Dem turnout
• Better campaign focus on key electoral states
• General likeability of Biden
• He's a guy.
• No scandal that has gained any traction

The voter suppression is still there (although we appear to be better prepared for it this time around) and Russia is still there whispering its litany of lies, but you need to weight their influence proportionately.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Some 2016 deja vu for you


Don't believe it. The race is a whole lot closer than this. A LOT closer.

At least according to this, just before the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight put Trump's chances at about 1 in 3:

To be honest, I’m kind of confused as to why people think it’s heretical for our model to give Trump a 1-in-3 chance — which does make him a fairly significant underdog, after all. There are a lot of ways to build models, and there are lots of factors that a model based on public polling, like ours, doesn’t consider.3 But the public polls — specifically including the highest-quality public polls — show a tight race in which turnout and late-deciding voters will determine the difference between a clear Clinton win, a narrow Clinton win and Trump finding his way to 270 electoral votes.

Election Update: Don’t Ignore The Polls — Clinton Leads, But It’s A Close Race

This time round, they're putting the odds of a Trump win at about 1 in 10.

Politics News | Breaking Political News, Video & Analysis-ABC News

ABC News is your trusted source on political news stories and videos. Get the latest coverage and analysis on everything from the Trump presidency, Senate, House and Supreme Court.

fivethirtyeight.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I'm going to watch Enola Holmes on Netflix and tune out the world, if only for a little while.

I watched Doctor Strange that night four years ago.

Sorry.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

No, that's not the "only" reason. Although it may well have been a contributing cause at some level, it was just one minor cut among many. Clinton bled out because of:

• Lower Dem turnout due to complacency and/or lack of enthusiasm for Clinton
• Misdirected campaigning efforts that missed key states
• A high degree of solidified, decades-long hatred of Clinton that motivated Republicans to vote for Trump, even when they didn't like him all that much
• Generalized misogynist dislike of any woman candidate, not just specific hate of Clinton
• Voter suppression (which probably hurt more at the local level, since most of the reddest states were never going to go for Clinton)
• The damn emails and Comey's asinine disregard for long-established policy concerning announcements near an election

I'm sure there are easily another half-dozen missteps/influences at work, but the important take-away is how different Biden scores on these same issues.

• Record-level Dem turnout
• Better campaign focus on key electoral states
• General likeability of Biden
• He's a guy.
• No scandal that has gained any traction

The voter suppression is still there (although we appear to be better prepared for it this time around) and Russia is still there whispering its litany of lies, but you need to weight their influence proportionately.

Oh, I'm pretty sure the pundits figured in all the rest of those reasons. I wasn't say she lost because of that, but that their odds were off because they didn't figure in something that's completely illegal [even if we deserve it, as much as we've interfered in other countries' elections, but that neither here nor there.]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

It's not about being defeatist. It's about not being Red Guy.




Don't be Red Guy.

That's literally all I'm saying.

 

[Salome]

 

[Eunoli]

Wow. What third world country is this they speak of?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

'You are no longer my mother': A divided America will struggle to heal after Trump era

When lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump in Tuesday's presidential election, he cut her out of his life.

www.reuters.com

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Yeah, this time around I am not allowing myself any hope. I am incredibly frightened, something which I was not in 2016. In 2016, I was dubious that he could win. In 2016, I thought a whole lot more of my fellow electorate. In 2016, I knew what kind of man he is, but thought there wasn't really a way that America would put such a man in office. I was angry about his Russian fuckery, and fearful of what he may do if he was elected, but I didn't believe that was going to happen.

This time? We've seen how he rules, and brothers and sisters, it is terrifying. It's 10x that now. There's a reason he isn't even pretending to lay out a plan for his next four years, and that reason is because it is so fucking awful that he dare not tell the voters before election day.

I see the masses of people at his nazi rallies. I see them everywhere, from social media to out and about in the public to their blocking highways and I see numbers; numbers that might make this much closer than we expect. If that happens and Biden is still the winner I fully expect him to steal it.

Yeah, I don't dare hope.

This. So much this!

The Republicans will do anything and everything to try to steal this election, even send it to their newly stacked Supreme Court! No, I don't dare hope. Not yet.