US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2784

On October 26 2020 00:44 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:


Is it hate or just simply exerting power? Your blue or red state going from winner takes all to electoral districts is ceding power to the other party potentially. Also seems like something that is impossible to do at the federal level because elections are run by the individual states.

On October 26 2020 01:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


I think one interesting factor here to consider is, weirdly enough, Texas. Texas is slightly leaning towards Trump at +2.6 in this election [1], and I honestly don’t see Texas swinging to Biden, but compared to California’s +26 for Biden, the fact that Texas is only up +2.6 for Trump is interesting to me, for the long term. It could be the case that Texas actually flips to blue in a future presidential election over the next two decades, and if the Democrats can consistently secure Texas, then Democrats will basically be guaranteed the executive branch, as that would signify an astonishing 76-vote swing from red to blue. Ironically, this sequence of events happening would probably be the most likely way for Republicans to be on board with changing the voting system from electoral vote to popular vote – not because they think the popular vote is fairer, but because they’d automatically lose the electoral vote.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/tx/texas_trump_vs_biden-6818.html?fbclid=IwAR20V0xzXuXilgh-5HEey3gdE2Cl481-XxTY2zMUbI9s4U6XPkhcYsLg2QU#polls

On October 25 2020 14:49 Introvert wrote:


just to reiterate, court packing is nowhere near the same as filling a vacancy near an election, and voters know it.

I never said Kavanaugh was popular overall. It was EXTREMELY important to GOP voters, however. I don't know if she's right (in fact I think she's wrong) but Claire McCaskill seemed to think it was the kavanaugh affair that sank her.

what im saying is that saving the filibuster for later would have put way more pressure on Rs, maybe forced them to withdraw or vote down the nomination (thanks to people like Flake), and make the base angry. Maybe the would have held seats they ended up losing. what is clear is that pushing as far as they did with Gorsuch was a move with almost no upside, although the Democrat base would have revolted? it would have been a full 2 years until the next election though, plenty of time for the anger to subside, espeically since the Court doesn't seem to be the issue for Democrats it is for Republicans.

On October 26 2020 01:24 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Some thoughts on the November elections:

At this point in time, the Democrats have about an 87% chance of winning the presidency [1], 74% chance of winning control of the Senate [2], and a 96% chance of keeping control of the House [3].

House first:
“Ballotpedia has identified 41 of the 435 House races (9.4%) as battlegrounds. Of the 41 seats, 20 have Democratic incumbents, 20 have Republican incumbents, and one has a Libertarian incumbent … In 2018, Ballotpedia identified 82 U.S. House battleground races: 73 Republican seats and nine Democratic seats. Democrats won 43 of the Republican-held seats, and Republicans won three of the Democratic-held seats.” [4] Currently, there are 232 Democrats, 198 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian in the House, which means that nearly every battleground House election and/or others would need to flip/stay red for the Republicans to retake control [5]. Again, 538 only estimates a 4% chance of this happening [3].

Senate next:
Currently, there are 53 Republican senators, 45 Democratic senators, and 2 Independent senators [6]. The two Independents, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, tend to vote alongside Democrats, rather than Republicans, so the (admittedly oversimplified) party-lines dichotomy is most likely to currently be 53 conservative / conservative-leaning voters and 47 liberal / liberal-leaning voters [7] [8]. 23 Republican seats and 12 Democratic seats are up for re-election. Of those 23 Republican seats, 6 of them (CO, AZ, GA, ME, NC, IA) are likely to flip to blue; of those 12 Democratic seats, 1 of them (AL) is likely to flip to red [2]. If all 7 predicted seats flip, then that would change the expected voting dichotomy to 52 liberal / liberal-leaning senators and 48 conservative / conservative-leaning senators. Keep in mind that if a Senate vote is split 50/50, the tie-breaking vote is cast by the Vice President (Pence or, more likely, Harris), as per Article 1, Section 3, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

The Presidency:
The TL;DR is that Trump almost certainly needs both Florida and Pennsylvania to win the election, and it’s extremely unlikely that he wins Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has been polling as a win for Biden for literally all of June, July, August, September, and October [9]. Biden is likely to win the presidency by at least flipping PA, MI, and WI.

There are reasonably close races in the following 10 states: AZ, FL, GA, MI, NC, PA, WI, IA, OH, TX [10] [11]. Keep in mind that Donald Trump won all 10 of these states in 2016, so if even a few of these states flip to blue in 2020, it’ll be a significant advantage for Biden over Trump.

Of those 10 states, the Rust Belt is particularly interesting. MI is a solid +7.8 for Biden [12]; PA is +5.1 for Biden [13]; WI is +4.6 for Biden [14]; OH is a virtual tie [15]. All four of these states were won by Trump in 2016, and represent an extremely significant 16+20+10+18=64 electoral votes (Trump’s 2016 electoral map win was essentially due to him carrying the Rust Belt, which Biden looks to win in 2020).

Biden doesn’t need any of these other battleground states, but they could still swing, regardless:
AZ is slightly leaning towards Biden at +2.4 [16].
NC is slightly leaning towards Biden at +1.8 [17].
FL is slightly leaning towards Biden at +1.5 [18].
GA is a virtual tie between Biden and Trump [19].
IA is a virtual tie between Biden and Trump [20].
TX is slightly leaning towards Trump at +2.6 [21].

Even though FL ties with NY with the 3rd-most electoral votes (29) after CA (55) and TX (38), and even though it’s slightly leaning towards Biden, I’d prefer to err on the overly cautious side of not simply assuming that Biden will win FL. Let’s ignore FL completely for the path to a Biden victory. Disregarding FL, I’m particularly looking at these 3 states: PA, MI, WI. These represent 20+16+10=46 electoral votes (which more than cancels out TX), and most importantly, all three of these were won by Trump in 2016 but are all very likely to flip to Biden in 2020. I’m still going to be clicking refresh like a madman every hour (every day?) that the results trickle in, but if Biden secures these three Rust Belt states, it’s all-but-certain he becomes president. If Clinton had won these 3 states instead of losing all of them, she would have become president too. In fact, the Rust Belt and Florida will likely be the deciding factors of the next few presidential elections too.

[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
[2] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/senate/
[3] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/house/
[4] https://ballotpedia.org/U.S._House_battlegrounds,_2020
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives#Current_standing
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate#Current_party_standings
[7] https://ballotpedia.org/Bernie_Sanders
[8] https://ballotpedia.org/Angus_King
[9] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_biden-6861.html#polls
[10] https://www.270towin.com/
[11] https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_battleground_states,_2020
[12] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/mi/michigan_trump_vs_biden-6761.html
[13] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_biden-6861.html
[14] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/wi/wisconsin_trump_vs_biden-6849.html
[15] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/oh/ohio_trump_vs_biden-6765.html#polls
[16] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/az/arizona_trump_vs_biden-6807.html
[17] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nc/north_carolina_trump_vs_biden-6744.html
[18] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/fl/florida_trump_vs_biden-6841.html
[19] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ga/georgia_trump_vs_biden-6974.html#polls
[20] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/ia/iowa_trump_vs_biden-6787.html
[21] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/tx/texas_trump_vs_biden-6818.html#polls

At least three top aides to Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive for the coronavirus in the last few days, people briefed on the matter said. The test results raise fresh questions about the safety protocols at the White House, where masks are not routinely worn.

The vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, has tested positive, according to Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Mr. Pence, who leads the White House coronavirus task force. A person briefed on Mr. Short’s diagnosis said it was received on Saturday.

“Vice President Pence and Mrs. Pence both tested negative for Covid-19 today, and remain in good health,” Mr. O’Malley said. “While Vice President Pence is considered a close contact with Mr. Short, in consultation with the White House Medical Unit, the vice president will maintain his schedule in accordance with the C.D.C. guidelines for essential personnel.”
The statement did not come from the White House medical unit, but instead from a press aide. Two people briefed on the matter said that the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had sought to keep news of the outbreak from becoming public.

On Sunday, in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Meadows denied that he had tried to suppress news of the outbreak, saying he had acted out of concern about “sharing personal information.”

A Trump adviser briefed on the outbreak, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the Pence adviser Marty Obst also tested positive this week. Mr. Obst’s positive test was first reported by Bloomberg News.

Mr. Trump, at rallies over the past two days, has insisted the country is “rounding the turn” on the virus, even though the single-day record for new cases was shattered on Friday. The United States has averaged more than 68,000 new cases a day over the last week, the country’s highest seven-day average of the pandemic.

On October 26 2020 03:05 Simberto wrote:


Sorry to respond to your very nice summary so briefly and not very on point to the summarized things, but I found this "Ballotpedia has identified 41 of the 435 House races (9.4%) as battlegrounds. " to be impressive. Because it effectively means that in 90.6% of the cases, your vote for parliament doesn't matter. That is horrendous.

On October 26 2020 03:51 Gorsameth wrote:
I mean it should be obvious that 3200 representatives isn't viable and that the system wasn't designed to work with the population numbers of the latter centuries.

Its not just gerrymandering tho, a part is also the belief that the other members of congress are the problem, not their own representative.
I remember a quote from a few years ago that despite Congress having the lowest approval rate on record there was a re-election rate of something like 90+%.
So apparently Congress is garbage, but its always someone else's fault.

On October 26 2020 03:57 Nevuk wrote:

Why is 3200 too large? China has 3000. Not to endorse China's political system, but having too large of a parliament is the last place I'd start on criticisms of them.

The original constitutional numbers (it establishes a cap for lowest# that can be represented per rep but no upper limit on how many can be represented per rep) would be even more ridiculous : 1 for 30k.

That'd be 10,940 representatives.

It's mostly just absurd that the UK has a bigger house equivalent than us, despite having <1/5 the population.

On October 26 2020 02:15 plasmidghost wrote:

I'm one of those people hyping up blue Texas but yeah, I'm thinking there's a great chance Georgia goes full blue in the presidential vote and both Senate races. Ossoff has done well and Warnock looks like he can definitely take it

On October 26 2020 04:33 Liquid`Drone wrote:


Norway's ratio of representatives would translate to 10200 for the US.

While I'm not gonna claim that there exists an ideal ratio, I'm more inclined to think that 435 is definitely too few than that 3200 is too many. It's not like you can immediately go from 435 to 3200 - that I can agree is 'obvious', but having more politicians is imo a sensible way of reducing the power of each individual politician. Also makes each individual race a bit less crucial, gives more options for 'more fringe' politicians to represent the people (again giving a larger % of the population a politician they can identify with, in turn increasing political interest)..

I see a bunch of positives through increasing the amount, and no real negatives, other than 'how do we increase the amount without the current ruling party setting some criteria likely to favor them'. But that problem seems pretty ubiquitous for everything relating to the US.

On October 26 2020 03:57 Nevuk wrote:

Why is 3200 too large? China has 3000. Not to endorse China's political system, but having too large of a parliament is the last place I'd start on criticisms of them.

The original constitutional numbers (it establishes a cap for lowest# that can be represented per rep but no upper limit on how many can be represented per rep) would be even more ridiculous : 1 for 30k.

That'd be 10,940 representatives.

It's mostly just absurd that the UK has a bigger house equivalent than us, despite having <1/5 the population.

Last Sunday this section was turned over to essays making the case against the re-election of Donald Trump. I read all of the pieces, and found more than a few points with which I disagreed. But my commitment to contrarianism only goes so far: Fundamentally I agree with my colleagues that Trump should not be …

Heyyyyyy — you aren’t even going to let me make a case here?

Excuse me?

Oh, you know who I am. You let me slip out during the Covington Catholic controversy, remember, when the media that puts on kid gloves around Hunter Biden decided a random teenager with a smile they didn’t like was the face of white supremacy. Well, I’m back.

Ah, sure — you’re my right-wing id. And let me guess — you want to make the case that I should vote for Trump? I figured the coronavirus experience had shamed you into silence.

Shame is what you should feel, sellout. Look, I get that you’re a lost cause. But someone needs to tell you that you’re going to miss Trump when he’s gone.

Am I indeed? All right, go ahead, make the case.

I mean, it’s not particularly complicated. I read your columns about the Republicans, even your long-ago book (and I saw its sales figures, so I know I’m in exclusive company), and all these years you’ve wanted — what? A populist G.O.P. that helps working families, something like that, with a more restrained foreign policy than the Bush era and a pro-life, religious core? Do I have that right?

You do.

That’s what Donald Trump has given you, you bloody ingrate, to the extent you ever get what you want in politics.

Oh, you mean the economic populism of a corporate tax cut and an “infrastructure week” that’s just a running joke.

No, I mean that Trump did two big things that no other president would have done together. He actually cut immigration rates and he backed a looser monetary policy.

You mean he ran an inhumane family separation policy and he appointed a bunch of hard-money cranks to the Federal Reserve.

The inhumane policy was abandoned quickly, and the cranks weren’t actually confirmed. I’m talking about results, not problems with particular appointees or policies. Why do you think the economy ran hot for so long, and low-wage workers did a lot better under Trump than under Obama? Loose money, tight borders. A Democrat might have given you one; Ted Cruz might have given you the other. Only Trump could deliver both.

The inhumane policy is still having awful consequences, and Jerome Powell deserves more credit for loose money than Trump’s jawboning.

Obama signed off on plenty of inhumane policies — those detention centers went up on his watch, remember, and he had record deportations, too. And, yeah, Powell deserves credit, but who appointed him? The economy under Trump was the best for the working class in two decades. And kicking him out means we go back to mass low-skilled immigration, back to wage stagnation …

Most economists think immigration’s effects on wages are pretty minimal.

Most economists these days have liberal biases that make them elevate weird case studies over simple common sense. Look, we just ran the policy experiment! Tighter borders, higher wages. You won’t talk me out of this.

I thought you were the one talking me out of my …

… your anti-Trump pieties, yeah, I am. Because then there’s foreign policy. No new wars! The Islamic State routed! At least the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan! A bunch of Arab-Israeli peace agreements that would have won a normal president the Nobel Peace Prize!

No new wars except the ones we almost stumbled into with North Korea and Iran, and the ones percolating in regions where the United States has abdicated its superpower role. A non-withdrawal from Afghanistan because Trump can’t execute on his own positions.

“Percolating” is a word people use to describe things that aren’t actually that bad. Trump almost went to war with Iran, yeah, but in the end he left John Bolton at the altar. Put the Democrats back in and we’ll get the kind of “humanitarian” interventions and “fund-the-moderate-jihadists” gambits that ravaged Libya and made the Syrian situation worse.

Biden had a decent Obama-era record of opposing unwise escalations.

Personnel is policy, man! All the liberal hawks are coming back! You’ll see. And speaking of personnel, there’s nowhere you’re more ungrateful than the Supreme Court, where Trump has given you exactly what you wanted …

Neil Gorsuch, culture-war hall monitor?

Come on, no Republican president would have done better. Your big complaint was choosing Brett Kavanaugh over Amy Coney Barrett, and you’re getting Barrett, too.

And I support her elevation …

… but not the president who put her there. Oh, your hands are so clean!

Better than wading in corruption and demagogy and mass death, yeah. Can I offer some comebacks?

That wasn’t one?

I mean, it was a distillation. There are some ways that Trump has been better than I feared, and things he’s done that I wholeheartedly support. But he’s also the most corrupt American president of modern times: The liberals are wrong to see him as a dictator, but that doesn’t make his web of self-enrichment and pardons for cronies and Ukrainian abuses a good thing. He’s a bigot and an aggressive liar, he winks at violence, and he’s exacerbated one of his party’s worst tendencies, its obsession with the minor threat of voter fraud and its eagerness to throw up impediments to voting. What he’s given to cultural conservatives with the courts, he’s taken by making us seem like hypocrites and making embarrassments like Jerry Falwell Jr. the face of conservative Christendom. He’s radicalized young people and empowered some truly terrible tendencies on the left that will reshape American institutions deep into Amy Coney Barrett’s old age. And I haven’t even gotten to the coronavirus.

We’ll get to it. But you know, because you’ve written about it, that there was self-enrichment in Washington long before Trump. It was just laundered through respectable channels rather than the Trump hotels. I’ll concede that Trump is more naked about it, more impeachable. But sometimes you have to vote for the corrupt candidate when the policy stakes are more important.

And the birther candidate.

And the — look, Trump says racially offensive stuff, but he’s going to win more minority votes than he did last time, more than Mitt Romney did. You write skeptically about white liberals who have become more “anti-racist” than African-Americans, but you’re doing the same weird thing: If Trump is expanding the G.O.P.’s appeal to minorities, who are you to say he’s too racist?

He’s benefiting from larger trends toward class and gender polarization, and he’s emphatically not expanding the G.O.P.’s appeal overall —

Right, because wimps like you won’t support him! All this stuff about how he’s “radicalized” people and hurt religious witness — that’s just self-serving intuition, with no hard data behind it. It’s a convenient excuse.

No more convenient than you ignoring all the Americans who have died from a pandemic on Trump’s utterly incompetent watch.

You yourself have written that Trump can’t be held responsible for all those deaths. You said our response had a lot in common with Europe’s — and look at their case numbers lately. You were right!

I also said that we were modestly worse in ways that can be attributed to Trump’s terrible crisis management, which is not improving as we head deeper into the fall. So that “modestly” could add up to 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 dead. That’s the worst excess-death fiasco for an American president since the Vietnam War.

And Joe Biden could repeal the Hyde Amendment, fund abortion with public money, and preside over an extra 60,000 abortions every single year.

Which is why I want Republicans to hold their position in the Senate and prevent that from happening — and I’m not the one dragging them downward, Trump is!

You know, liberals always say that pro-lifers don’t really think that fetuses are human beings, and you’re proving them right. You think pandemic deaths are worse than the possibility of hundreds of thousands more abortions. Your concern for the unborn is fake news.

No, I think the pro-life movement isn’t going to win a long-term victory if it becomes a political suicide pact, where any anti-abortion politician, however incompetent or malevolent, merits our support. What if the pandemic had been a little worse? What if it had killed children in large numbers? What if some even greater peril comes along in Trump’s second term? What if there’s a great-power war? 2020 has been a lesson in what it means to have a totally incompetent president in a crisis. We should heed it.

I’m sorry to see you revert to fearmongering.

And I’m sorry that you can’t look at this situation the way a lot of Trump supporters did in 2016, when they conceded they were gambling, putting an unfit figure in the White House, because the stakes with the Supreme Court were so high. Well, guess what — you won the judicial part of the gamble, and in the pandemic you also got a taste of what can go wrong when you play dice with the presidency. So why not just take your high court winnings and walk away from the table, instead of going double or nothing hoping that the next disaster isn’t worse?

And let you be a free-rider on our wager?

Is it all about me?

I’m in your head, how could it be otherwise?

Then you know that it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if, by some miracle, Trump won one more time — if his presidency is part of a bipartisan chastisement, and God isn’t finished with us yet. But if God wants that, He doesn’t need my vote to do it. And the last year, in all its misery and chaos, has vindicated almost all of the reasons I withheld that vote last time.

You’re giving yourself —
The last word, yes. Talk to you on the other side.

On October 26 2020 04:58 Danglars wrote:
The NYT had a good column by Ross Douthat recently. He's one of the paper's token moderate Republicans, sometimes centrist, that regularly writes opinion columns for the New York Times. He's up with the internal dialogue between the pro-Trump argument from Republican principles, and the anti-Trump argument from Republican principles. It's useful to hear the push and pull from the Republican/social-con viewpoint, which doesn't get too stuck in the bumper sticker arguments that the left uses against the Republicans.