The 2024 U.S. Presidential race

[Aeon Jiminy]

flock together

 

[Aeon Jiminy]

"oh, Auntie Em - there's no place like home!"

More than 200 former Republican presidential staffers sign open letter endorsing Harris over Trump

More than 200 staffers for four previous Republican presidential nominees have endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris' White House bid.

apnews.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Interesting insight into the conflicting priorities of right-wing media incentives vs right-wing political incentives. It certainly echoes our recent experience in the UK, where one of Labour's biggest fears during the election campaign was that their supporters would see the election as a done deal. As a member of the Labour Party, I regularly received two or three fundraising emails a day that tried to convince me that the election was on a knife edge, with the result dependent on Labour supporters sending still more cash, along with digests from my subscriptions to both The Guardian (left-wing) and The Times (generally Conservative) telling me that opinion polls were --correctly, as it turned out -- forecasting a Labour landslide.

R-pilled Polls Are Bad For Rs…and This Week’s Writing 9/7/24

Nate Silver's a grifting dope, plus! what I published this week.

www.everythingishorrible.net

Evernote Link



I'm a bit puzzled, though, by the reference to "GOP pollsters." Over here, we have both public opinion polls, commissioned by various newspapers and broadcasters, and private polls commissioned by the various parties, for their internal use. The latter are far more granular than the former, and generally kept secret, since campaign managers use them to help shape their decision-making about committing resources, and obviously don't want to provide their opponents with insights into their planning.

In both cases, the commercial polling companies responsible for the polls -- particularly the public ones -- have a strong incentive to be as accurate as possible, since they make most of their money by running polls to assist regular commercial advertisers in their sales and marketing strategy, and don't want to be known for getting the General Election results embarrassingly wrong. Different pollsters results regularly show small biases one way or the other, but this is a result of their sampling strategies, which are regularly discussed and compared when their results are published. There's no sense in which any particular polling companies are seen as deliberately pro-Conservative or pro-Labour.

This, by a senior British policy wonk, explains rather a lot about the polls and answers some of my questions

State of Play

Assessing the US election with two months to go

samf.substack.com

Evernote Link

It's hard for Brits to fathom how it can be so close. It made some sense for Biden to be struggling, given his obvious infirmities, even against a candidate as flawed as Trump. But Harris is (relatively) youthful and articulate. Even if one doesn’t agree with her policies they’re well within the mainstream and she represents no threat to America’s international reputation. Trump meanwhile is, well, Trump. A man who still regularly implies his opponents are trying to rig the ballot; who encouraged an attack on the Capitol to which seven deaths have been linked; whose commitment to NATO is shaky at best; who seems openly dismissive of the rule of law and regularly “jokes” about dictatorship.

Election forecasts drive most of the horse race commentary in the US, filling much the same gap that MRPs did here. There are endless iterations – including Nate Silver’s, which is probably the most closely watched; 538’s (which confusingly used to be run by Silver but now isn’t); and the Economist’s.

I agree with maths professor Oliver Johnson that obsessing over small daily changes in these models is not very useful. They are all showing it’s close and beyond that we’ll never be able to distinguish which one is more precisely right as the election is only run once. The intensity with which people furiously debate various adjustments that Silver, in particular, makes to his model, which is currently the most positive for Trump at around 60/40, is frankly unhealthy.

And, somewhat startlingly

The other issue is that, even if the polls are broadly accurate, there aren’t very many of them, or rather there aren’t many good ones. Nate Silver’s database includes 516(!) different US pollsters but only 21 get an A+, A, or A- rating. At state level this causes a real dearth of good data. For instance in Pennsylvania, the state most likely to be the critical tipping point for the whole election, there has been one A rated poll since mid-August. Naturally the models give extra weight to these polls but they still include most of the lower grade ones. So there just isn’t enough good information to be sure what’s going on.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

flock together

Richard Cheney is about as far from being a liberal constitutionalist as one can imagine, at least in terms of theory and principle.

But.

Once upon a time, liberals worried about the wide powers of a Vice President Cheney – and of a President Bush.

And now, in turn, illiberals like Vice President Cheney are worried about the undemocratic pretensions of a President Trump.

Supporting Donald Trump is too much for Richard Cheney

7th September 2024 Back in the halcyon days of that golden age of when politics seemed kind of normal, there was no greater illiberal pantomime villain than Vice President Richard Cheney. (Of cours…

davidallengreen.com

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

flock together

What point do you think you're making? The fact that Trump is so horrible he scared Cheney isn't something liberals need to apologize for. You need to just accept that your brain can't understand or form arguments.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

People are living much longer. Politicians are staying in office much longer. We are going to see a lot more politicians who are suffering dementia without knowing it themselves. There are multiple examples of heads of government concealing their medical conditions from the legislature and the public. Neither parliamentary nor presidential systems of government have shown any capacity to deal with this problem.

It's not a tenable argument against fire insurance to argue that your house has not burned down yet.

My point, though, is that, in the UK, Churchill, Eden and (possibly) Thatcher were all replaced within months of their various illnesses becoming apparent, without any need for mandatory medical examinations, as more recently were May, Jonson and Truss when their own parliamentary party lost confidence in them.

In the US, there's already a constitutional procedure to remove a president because of infirmity, but it's set up so it's well nigh impossible to remove a president who doesn't want to go (e.g. Trump) so long as he's still conscious.

Your proposal seems to me unnecessary in the UK, since the present system already seems perfectly capable of removing PMs when their supporters lose confidence in them, and unworkable in the US without a constitutional amendment.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

Good to see the discussion of policy slip into Trump's campaign.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Besides the fact that I think he's losing it, I suspect he tests material with people who are terrified to ever tell him something won't work. It's a common pitfall for powerful people. But maybe I'm also being generous by assuming he tests some material at all.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

"oh, Auntie Em - there's no place like home!"

More than 200 former Republican presidential staffers sign open letter endorsing Harris over Trump

More than 200 staffers for four previous Republican presidential nominees have endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris' White House bid.

apnews.com

Yeah?

And?

Was there a point to that, or are you just blowing shit out your ass again?

 

[Dirran]

My point, though, is that, in the UK, Churchill, Eden and (possibly) Thatcher were all replaced within months of their various illnesses becoming apparent, without any need for mandatory medical examinations, as more recently were May, Jonson and Truss when their own parliamentary party lost confidence in them.

In the US, there's already a constitutional procedure to remove a president because of infirmity, but it's set up so it's well nigh impossible to remove a president who doesn't want to go (e.g. Trump) so long as he's still conscious.

Your proposal seems to me unnecessary in the UK, since the present system already seems perfectly capable of removing PMs when their supporters lose confidence in them, and unworkable in the US without a constitutional amendment.

My point, though, is that, in the UK, Churchill, Eden and (possibly) Thatcher were all replaced within months of their various illnesses becoming apparent, without any need for mandatory medical examinations, as more recently were May, Jonson and Truss when their own parliamentary party lost confidence in them.

In the US, there's already a constitutional procedure to remove a president because of infirmity, but it's set up so it's well nigh impossible to remove a president who doesn't want to go (e.g. Trump) so long as he's still conscious.

Your proposal seems to me unnecessary in the UK, since the present system already seems perfectly capable of removing PMs when their supporters lose confidence in them, and unworkable in the US without a constitutional amendment.

None of those removals had anything to do with medical conditions that were unknown to the parliamentary parties. Churchill’s most serious stroke in office was on 23 June 1953. He did not resign until 5 April 1955. Eden was forced out because of the Suez catastrophe, not health issues. Thatcher’s condition was unknown at the time she was removed.

 

[Isabeau]

My kind of spice place.

Mike McMahan (@mikemcmahan.bsky.social)

I order spices from a place called Penzey’s in Wisconsin, not just because the blends are great (they are! Especially BBQ 3000 and the sandwich sprinkle!) but also because they’re loudly anti-GOP.

bsky.app

If you need some spices,

HomePage | Penzeys

www.penzeys.com

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Seems their website's down.

 

[Noodles]

My kind of spice place.



If you need some spices,

HomePage | Penzeys

www.penzeys.com

I actually was just recently looking for some new taco seasoning

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Penzy's is amazing.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Seems their website's down.

It's working for me.

 

[Soen Eber]

Penzy's really is the place. My former Mistress expressly ordered me that if I were to send her any food items, it should be Penzy's spices, and not the "Mrs. Olsen's Lefse" i had the year previous.

 

[Free]

Vance is now coming out as a defender of cats. And a racist shithole against Haitian immigrants.

Vance pushes false accusations of Haitians eating pets

GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) on Monday amplified a false claim that Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, despite the city’s police department denying any such incidents.

In a post on the social platform X, Vance published a video of him at a July Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing, reading a letter from Springfield city manager Bryan Heck detailing the city’s challenges in keeping up with housing for a growing Haitian immigrant population.

Vance added a reference to a now-debunked social media post.

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote.

Those reports are largely based on social media postings that were picked up by national figures including Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk over the weekend.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Vance is now coming out as a defender of cats. And a racist shithole against Haitian immigrants.

Vance pushes false accusations of Haitians eating pets

Just when you think he couldn't get any weirder, he says, "hold my beer!"