This dude thinks EVERYONE is thinking what he’s thinking and we just don’t say it out loud. He thinks ANY of us are one drunk post away from spewing the same garbage. In his mind he’s just guilty of posting under the influence because of that.

This is a junk comment. She’s the VP, so what you’re suggesting is that she just try and take control she doesn’t have right now. Either you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about or you’re just talking shit.

Yeah, it’s a terrible strategy for a number of reasons. The big one isn’t even that they can’t be courted - they CAN. It’s just that the thing that courts them isn’t “we can be really Republican, too!” - it’s actually progressive policy.

It turns out that being stridently pro-worker, pro-healthcare, pro-education, pro-small business, and pro-social safety are all incredibly popular stances with broad support. Time and time again, openly supporting these things draws Republican support. The noise that emerges online and in the outrage merchant pundit class is just that - noise, made up to try and steer the conversation.

Which is the big risk to doing any of this pro-worker stuff - it’s mostly about Fox News or the talk show host nutjobs branding it as evil and starting a propaganda war about it, and the rest of the media world just following along like insipid stenographers.

It’s a branding war, basically, the Overton window doesn’t need to shift further right at all.

She’s repeatedly said that she wants a ceasefire, and even said she’s trying to help press for one right now. Literally one rally after the one you’re talking about she paused her talk during a protest and spoke about it to talk about driving for a ceasefire, before resuming the rally.

There’s only so much that is going to happen during a campaign. I understand a degree of general mistrust for politicians overall, but it’s honestly out of her hands unless she gets elected.

Meanwhile the other guy is definitely pro genocide. No room for doubt at all there.

“Unilaterally halt 70 years of treaties, force a foreign country to obey your will, seize unlawful control of our military, and do it all in a few weeks while campaigning, all as VP” is quite the tall order to all of anyone just in exchange for votes that, let’s be honest, you weren’t going to give anyway.

If you’re going to threaten to stand aside and allow someone way worse to take over, and those are your criteria, then this is just online noise you’re making and not genuine at all.

If you’re looking for something less, such as statements - she’s made them. They’re pretty clear about being about stopping the genocide. So even in that direction, if it isn’t enough, then again this is just online noise you’re making, and not genuine at all.

You just don’t care.

The really optimistic-for-Harris forecast I’ve cited a few times has even odds for Harris and Trump on NC. Basically if we don’t see huge turnout numbers it’s Trump’s. The best we can hope for is that Robinson really, really put people off of voting.

According to some of the forecasts I’ve seen that suggest a strong chance for a Harris win (as in, 77% chance) she only has a 3% chance to turn FL blue. So, not really plausible, but there are a few scenarios that see her winning it.

Yeah, every time I wind up looking deeply at polls I find more questions than answers. I recognize they’re a snapshot of a segment, not representative of the whole segment but sort of a sampling of it.

For example, the 3 polls there from Franklin, and the 4 from Morning Consult: the same methodology and around the same sample size, conducted at the same time frame. Each poll with different outcomes from their sample set.

I also recognize that as long as X% are “undecided”, the poll can’t really show anything other than trend motions. And these polls are actually kind of static. Like if you plot them all out, they don’t seem to have an upper or downward trend trajectory.

It’s frustratingly ambiguous stuff.

Oh shoot, sorry, I meant 18-29. The groups are:

• 18-29 (Harris down 10 from Biden 2020)
• 30-39 (Harris up 10 from Biden 2020)
• 40-49 (Harris up 1 from Biden 2020)
• 50-64 (Trump up 4 from 2020)
• 65+ (Harris up 10 from Biden 2020)

It’s worth mentioning that these groups are not equal! 18-29 is usually a very low representation, where 40-49 is pretty big, and 50-64 / 65+ are huge.

Watching early vote exit polls is kind of a tough game to play prognosticator on, but it begins to give us a sense of what the polls mean, because the info is a lot more concrete than polls. Basically, polls have a segment of responses that are undecided, meanwhile exit polls don’t. The idea as I understand it is that you can contrast exit polls with polls in order to discern what that undecided vote really seems to be breaking for.

In 2016, that undecided segment broke hard for Trump. It hasn’t in any election since.

Here’s what exit polls so far say about Trump (vs 2020) and Harris (vs Biden & Obama):

• Trump’s support isn’t showing any major improvements on exit polls at this time except with non-college educated white folks, specifically ages 50-64. His support in that same demographic actually has lessened in a bunch of other age groups, with a small boost in 18-39. This is, however, only with men.
• Harris has met or beat both Biden and Obama 2012 numbers in most every demographic, with the exception of hispanic women / younger age groups, which have gone down a little bit. Most notably her support with white folks is strong, and her support with white women is at historic levels. She’s overperforming dramatically with independents.

Obviously, again, exit polls are subject to swings and changes over time and so it’s all contingent on this continuing, but right now the early votes exit polls are at severe contrast with the aggregators. Like, embarrassingly severe.

One remaining thing from the exit polls worth mentioning - the last minute surge of support for Trump in 2020 was largely because the Republican leadership was stalwart in telling everyone to vote only on election day. That isn’t happening this year, though, which means that Republicans aren’t going to be able to expect the same kind of last-minute surge this year. Meanwhile, the opposite seems true for Harris: a lot of early votes for Harris are first time voters or infrequent voters, and not from the pool of 2020 early voters.

So, at this point the early vote is around 40m, or 25% of total votes in 2020. In order to get back to the “surprising Trump upswell” that we’re all worried about, this trend would have to not only stop, but AGGRESSIVELY reverse course. Either that or all the exit polls are horribly wrong.

Arkansas?

Bezos is rich and we enshrine that in a lot of ways in the US, but it’s irrelevant to someone like Putin, who’s demonstrated time and time again his willingness to kill billionaires. The reality here is that Bezos is just a person and he can be a coward, and still command media empire. And right now there’s a lot for him to be afraid of.

Unfortunately the election isn’t about whether or not the USA stops supporting Israel. There is no vote for that.

It’s about whether or not you want USA to be doing what it’s doing right now under control of people who will dialog with you about it (Democrats) vs. people who are just waiting for a chance to annihilate you entirely so you’ll shut up and they can get more real estate (Republicans).

I think we might actually agree more than you imagine - I also think Harris is doing pretty damn amazing right now, and I also think it looks good for her.

I’m not suggesting the forecasts for things like the amendments were correct, they definitely missed, and hard. I’m saying they were wrong because they took in a lot of clearly biased inputs.

There were other polls that actually had a lot of this data in them, and showed a clear lean in the odds post-Roe. However, these polls were being weighted by aggregators against stuff like Rasmussen, and Trafalgar, which are absolute trash. The forecasters were applying weights they themselves invented to these polls and including the trash data, meaning it was trash data AND it was deliberately turned into something that biased the sample set towards a middle average.

What I’m saying is that cutting that chaff out of the results, and then being realistic about what a “+2 margin” means (it’s actually pretty good) results in a wholly different picture than the aggregators are giving us. One where Harris is more or less the clear pick.

Anyway, having said all that - it really, really does come down to turnout on this one. Trump’s base doesn’t really falter, and it’s around 65m votes every time. That can get flooded out but not without people showing up.

The (independent) polls were generally good in 2022, it was the polls with a bias and the big aggregators who totally missed. Several of the aggregators who ignore clearly biased polls called a few races, like Fetterman, with high accuracy.

This time around they show Harris with a 0.5-2pt margin in PA, MI, WI, and NV. Trump with that same margin in NC, GA, AZ. I think that means that Harris is favored for the EC, but that we need turnout.

Consider this: given two options,

• 10 polls with no bias, weighted by only past performance
• 20 polls, half biased, weighted by an arbitrary secondary metric to remove bias (which only trends the data towards an average)

Which do you suppose would be more reliable?

I’m not sure if this is the explanation, but Republicans weren’t discouraged from early voting this year. In prior years, they were, and so there’s been a big boom of Republican votes at the last minute.

According to exit polls, these numbers are return voters, which would suggest there will be no last minute Republican vote surge this year.

Could be copium, obvs, but getting psyched up by early votes has been a real disappointment for me in every election.

I think in a lot of cases this is just a big rabbit hole for anyone who wants to fix it or prove it even happened.

• The best option is to start over and start canvassing again from scratch.
• Proving and then holding someone accountable can’t be automated in a trustworthy way, so you’d have to invent that process and then run everyone through them.

Both of those are just expensive, in both time and money terms. I think it’s got to be damage control, and then maybe some attempt to round people up and find the fraud after the election?

But the bottom line is that it’s the PAC that shoulders the entire cost, for now, and the Trump campaign just has to eat the damage for now. These aren’t federal crimes or really even actual crimes, so any eventual outcome is most likely to just be lawsuits or legal threats against supposed fraudsters?

Are you familiar with toxoplasmosis? The disease that mutates into different forms so a bunch of different animals can host it and pass it along.

This is a long article but it’s really good, it’s worth a read and it predicted a lot of the discourse of the last decade: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

The sort of gist of it is this: the more grey area / ambiguity in a topic, the more we pop our own identity into our stance on it. And so if that thing is controversy, we argue about it so much more if there’s room to self-insert our identity in that grey area. It spreads and spreads to a bunch of different hosts. It becomes a meme via argument by infecting a bunch of hosts to pass it along.

And that’s Monk.

Pretty early on, it was very clear that they had no actual understanding of the topics they were talking about. I tried in their first few weeks to engage with them and so did others. Only to find nothing there. No opinions, and all counter-arguments were clearly copy & pasted off of Wikipedia. Things like “we have X amount of members in Maine”.

Please.

Eventually they stopped trying to engage altogether, and instead moved into a deliberate pattern of line-toeing retorts. None in good faith. But, more importantly, never with enough substance to interrupt the ensuing argument, while simultaneously always enough comment traffic to perpetuate the thread.

Monk is a memetic toxoplasmosis source vector. Through pure ineptitude or irony, I think they’ve accidentally turned more people against third parties than for them, but maybe that isn’t their goal.

Even now there’s an undercurrent of “I don’t think I even disagree with them”. Well, how could you? They haven’t said anything worth disagreeing with, have they? What have they said, though? Not much. Nothing recognizable as an opinion in defense of the third party articles. Often, just enough to establish a veneer of plausible deniability.

It’s a sophisticated form of trolling and it’s recognizable to anyone with a long history of community management online. There are some people who never seem to be directly at fault for things, yet every single time you remove them, the temperature goes down.

You don’t need to actually build a case against these people to know that the equation is simple: when they’re around, everyone is angry. When they aren’t, people get along better.

Anyway, my point is this: you can tell who is contributing in good faith and who isn’t, because they will attempt to say what’s on their mind. It might be the worst take you’ve ever heard in your life, but it has a concretion to it. Monk has no concrete substance, they simply like to stir the pot.

Thanks for linking something actionable!

Also: it’s wild how many brands are just outsourced to these folks. It’s got to all be the same waffles, right? But I know the price difference between some of these brands is a stark one.