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On November 08 2020 04:55 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 04:40 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2020 04:19 LegalLord wrote:On November 08 2020 04:12 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2020 04:06 LegalLord wrote:On November 08 2020 04:00 ChristianS wrote:On November 08 2020 03:55 LegalLord wrote:
Congrats on a "media official" Biden win! Certainly an incremental improvement over the previous president. Guess you can put away your notebook of permutations on “delectable electable” for another four years Well, "electable" wasn't the magic word this election, so that's long gone. Good thing too - turns out that even with the coronavirus debacle, he was only very barely elected, so it wouldn't have been the best argument anyways. Is this... true? It certainly felt like it at points, but if we’d just gotten all the results at once would we be saying this? Obviously we still don’t have all the results anyway, and it’s pretty clear down-ballot dems did pretty bad. But for President specifically, it kinda seems like as big a win as you can get under modern polarized conditions. Trump currently has 214 "media official" electoral votes, and that'll be up to 232 when he's finally given NC and Alaska. At best, that margin will be as good as the narrow victory that Trump won in 2016, which is already one of the narrowest margins in history. A percentage point more favorable for Trump, maybe one or two less major debacles, and the overall result would've been reversed. Damn right that's "barely elected" by any meaningful measure. EC margin is a weird way to judge closeness, and anyway that was the metric in which Trump’s win looked least close. And again, in modern polarized conditions comparing to historical margins doesn’t make sense. 1984 isn’t possible any more. It's the metric that judges who actually wins. Maybe you think some other system should be the one that determines who wins the presidency, such as the popular vote, but it isn't. So even though it gives Trump what looks like an unfair advantage relative to his actual popularity... it's what determines the winner. If you don't win the EC but win by whatever other metric you like, that's little more than a consolation prize.
EC decides who wins, EC margin decides nothing. Whether popular vote should decide who won is irrelevant, because we’re not arguing over who won, we’re arguing over how to judge how close it was. EC margin seems kinda irrelevant for that, no? If someone won with 270 but the tipping point margin was +10, that’s not a close election. If they won every state by a single vote, that’s an extremely close election.
Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 04:40 ChristianS wrote:
We’ll see what the tipping point margin winds up being. Off the top of my head it’ll probably be... idk, WI? That was pretty close. PA will probably be a decent margin by the end, AZ and GA are obviously very close, NV probably not actually very close. There’s math I’m not bothering with because we don’t have final numbers anyway.
But we’re likely to end up with a pretty big popular vote advantage, a decent EC margin, and maybe more importantly, competitive results in a pretty wide range of states, which makes the tipping point margin math less meaningful since the whole country never moves 1 pt left or right lockstep together.
Don’t get me wrong, you and I probably share cynicism about the future of the Dems, both in terms of meaningful policy achievements and in electoral success. But the “barely scraped by” perception seems path-dependent to me. If we do a Great Take Audit of people’s election analysis once we have final results, I think most of the analysis will seem like a function of the order votes were counted. WI or PA would be the tipping point, judging by current results. All of WI, PA, AZ, and GA are at a <1% margin right now. Biden has pretty respectable results on popular vote and turnout - high turnout, decent popular vote margin, high number of total popular votes. EC is a mediocre result, down-ballot is about as favorable for Republicans as it possibly could be for a presidential loss. A win is a win, but a narrow one at that by most measures that matter. That's with ~95% of the results in nationally, so it's probably not premature to judge it as much.
Yeah it’s probably better to consider all of these metrics rather than try to pick the One True Number to measure closeness. Ordinarily I think tipping point margin is best since it denotes how much of an equally distributed national swing was needed to change the result, but that doesn’t work very well here. The reasons he won AZ aren’t the same as why he won GA or PA or WI, so that equally distributed national swing is a pretty artificial hypothetical.
It also probably depends what purpose we’re judging it for. To compare to a hypothetical Sanders run? To predict future Dem electoral chances? To decide how much of a “mandate” he has? You’d probably draw pretty different conclusions for each of those questions about what the closeness of this result means.
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On November 08 2020 05:10 Gorsameth wrote:
How is a small margin in 3 states determining the winner not a close victory?
like 100k votes the other way in the right places and Trump would win.
How is that not close?
Fat Donny won 2016 by 70k votes and he called it the biggest in history
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On November 08 2020 05:11 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 05:10 Gorsameth wrote:
How is a small margin in 3 states determining the winner not a close victory?
like 100k votes the other way in the right places and Trump would win.
How is that not close?
Its a close technical victory, but winning by 4 million is what matters. Its what shows the state of the culture/perspective of the country. At the end of the day, people are what matter.
A ~3 point popular vote advantage isn't exactly "hearts and minds" either, if you want to look at it that way. Trump probably got a solid 8-10 million more votes this time around than in 2016 as well.
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On November 08 2020 05:11 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 05:10 Gorsameth wrote:
How is a small margin in 3 states determining the winner not a close victory?
like 100k votes the other way in the right places and Trump would win.
How is that not close?
Its a close technical victory, but winning by 4 million is what matters. Its what shows the state of the culture/perspective of the country. At the end of the day, people are what matter.
People are what matter but the popular vote doesn’t determine the election and spinning this as a huge Biden win is the kind of complacency that Hillary and the DNC at large frequently exhibit to their detriment.
They REALLY need to be asking why they had to scrape this win out, and what they’re going to do going forward to prevent losing to candidates without a ton of hate behind them and without a catastrophic pandemic.
Or they won’t, they’ll lose a bunch, and anything they might do in office will get reversed and regressed on when the Republicans win again.
If they keep fucking up it’s hard not to see it as intentional at some point...
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On November 08 2020 05:14 CorsairHero wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 05:10 Gorsameth wrote:
How is a small margin in 3 states determining the winner not a close victory?
like 100k votes the other way in the right places and Trump would win.
How is that not close?
Fat Donny won 2016 by 70k votes and he called it the biggest in history
Yes but he was obviously wrong. I was pretty frustrated actually how everybody talked about it like some huge decisive victory when it was obviously so close and contingent.
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On November 08 2020 05:01 Nevuk wrote:Politico has a pretty nice writeup on the various issues with Trump's campaign and some of the Turmoil with Biden (Biden's was mainly that his campaign really didn't want him to go out publicly much until late in the campaign due to COVID). Some short snippets. Long, deep dive. Show nested quote +
[...]
“Sir, regardless, this is coming. It’s the only thing that could take down your presidency,” Parscale told the president.
Trump snapped.
“This fucking virus,” Trump asked dismissively, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange, “what does it have to do with me getting reelected?”
[...]
• Communication between the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee broke down for much of the final stretch, and the two sides clashed over strategy. The RNC thought Trump’s ads were of such low quality that it created its own commercials.
• A pro-Trump super PAC took months longer than expected to materialize, prompting anxiety at the highest levels of the president’s cash-poor campaign. At one point, former top Trump strategist Steve Bannon was in discussions about helping to steer the group, an idea major donors would have rejected. By the time casino mogul Sheldon Adelson stepped forward to fund it, the president had been swamped by pro-Biden ads.
• Trump offered to cut his campaign a check heading into the final week of the race. His advisers told him it wasn’t necessary — the campaign had enough resources. While people close to the president defended the decision, it ensured he would be overwhelmed by Biden on the air as voters headed to the polls.
• Senior campaign and GOP officials vented that Trump’s finance team, led by former Fox TV host and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, underperformed and was an HR nightmare. Trump couldn’t compete with Biden’s small-dollar fundraising machine, and some donors were horrified by what they described as Guilfoyle’s lack of professionalism: She frequently joked about her sex life and, at one fundraiser, offered a lap dance to the donor who gave the most money.
[...]
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/07/this-f-ing-virus-inside-donald-trumps-2020-undoing-434716
Interesting read. It's clear that nepotism hurt him, putting Don Jrs girlfriend in charge of campaign finance...I'd love to see a financial breakdown of Trump/Pence campaign funds in the future, the amount of misuse and/or grift with that money must be insane.
His own pollster thought he should support mail-in ballots and fight the coronavirus. If he'd just listened he'd probably have won. That's crazy.
Others were warning the president he needed to change his tune.
Tony Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, penned a 79-page memo, distributed to White House and campaign officials July 21, urging Trump to reverse course on an array of issues. Trump should be encouraging supporters to vote by mail rather than bashing it; he should first focus on addressing the coronavirus before opening the economy; he ought to issue an executive order mandating the use of face masks rather than mocking them. So at the same time the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, was calling for mask use, the Trump campaign’s top pollster found it was good politics.
“The president’s overall numbers are down significantly across the board, hitting the lowest point in many months on a number of core measures,” Fabrizio wrote, adding that Biden led by 9 percentage points nationally.
“There is still a massive disconnect between what the public thinks POTUS is focused on — the economy, Fabrizio wrote, “and what they want him to focus on — fighting coronavirus.”
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What is this about the supreme court in PA? Does it matter?
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On November 08 2020 05:22 lowdice wrote:
What is this about the supreme court in PA? Does it matter?
no
even if he gets the votes that he wants thrown out, Trump still loses PA
even if Trump wins PA (hypothetical, it won't happen tho), he still loses the election
Republicans need to focus on the run off in Georgia in January, that's the biggest thing at play now. Blue wave or split.
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United States10402 Posts
On November 08 2020 05:11 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 05:10 Gorsameth wrote:
How is a small margin in 3 states determining the winner not a close victory?
like 100k votes the other way in the right places and Trump would win.
How is that not close?
Its a close technical victory, but winning by 4 million is what matters. Its what shows the state of the culture/perspective of the country. At the end of the day, people are what matter.
uhh.... no. This isn't how our elections work. Until popular vote or some other metric is involved, the electoral college makes the decisions, and therefore this was still a very close race. Biden will win GA, PA, WI, AZ all by less then 2%, with Michigan and Nevada close behind by another couple %. This was not an easy victory by any means and it tells Dems that they either need to press states to join the National Popular Vote Pact or fix their message to keep those swing states in 2022/24.
Not sure what you mean by the PA supreme court, do you mean Justice Alito's injunction against the PA votes to be segregated?
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On November 08 2020 04:19 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 03:40 Nevuk wrote:On November 08 2020 03:27 DucK- wrote:
Hi all.
I've got a question and I'd like simple answers for a dummy.
Many are not that convinced over Biden, but still just wanna get Trump out. Given this, what's so bad about Sanders that Biden was chosen over him for this election vs Trump? Basically people were more against Sanders than were for Biden. 1. Older black voters preferred Biden, which kept him in the race. They are moderates and prefer the safest choice, always. 2. All of the other moderates dropped out at once so that Sanders couldn't win (this was unprecedented, some of them dropped out while AHEAD of Biden), while the other progressive in the race stayed in so that the vote for her and Sanders got split. Point 2 is kind of over played. The reality is that Warrens votes actually ended up getting fairly spit between the two. And also there are just way more people that prefer the moderates in the Dem Party. That there was 6 moderates and 2 progressives was a advantage for Bernie as long as it lasted because the moderate larger vote would be split. But it is not some sort of scandal that they dropped out. It would be the minority of the party having control, which if you like Bernie is obviously a positive, but not exactly what you want from the system, the same way people don't want the president losing the popular vote by 20% or something. The reality is that Bernie lost because no enough people support him. He has not found a way to get other demographics then white middle class college educated and young. Whoever takes the torch from him needs to figure that out because if the next person is just equally popular they will also lose in primary. They need to get more progressive votes than moderate ones which right now is not happening, it is more like 2/3 1/3. Which is way better than it was and a great job by Sanders to get it that far. But pretending like there was some sort of conspiracy against him just stops you from from analyzing the actual issue which is he just was not able to get enough support, especially from certain demographics.
Bernie did exceedingly well with Hispanics this time around, and young people of color. The death of his campaign is really because he could never change older black voters minds, the wave of endorsements before Super Tuesday, and COVID. Sure, there are legitimate criticisms of his campaign, but stop acting like he was only popular at hipster coffee shops
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Tbh I predict Dems lose hard next election
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United States10402 Posts
On November 08 2020 05:32 Zambrah wrote:
Tbh I predict Dems lose hard next election
TBH I expect this to happen to. Biden most likely, in all honesty, will resign after 2.5 years and let Harris take over, then have her run for re-election that way. There's no way that Biden is going to survive another election cycle (figuratively not literally, though his age is already an issue).
Dems MIGHT be able to do something about immigration, they might be able to get some better COVID policies through EOs and the such. They'll rejoin climate change organizations and America will look better in the international lens. But the main things people want are jobs and a strong economy. It really will depend on if Biden can get McConnell to work with him. If McConnell decides, nah we're not gonna work with you, suck it up, then Dems are looking to be in a split government with nothing to get done, Republicans will blame Democrats for doing nothing and we'll see those same swing states that won Biden the election go back to being red.
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On November 08 2020 05:14 ChristianS wrote:
EC decides who wins, EC margin decides nothing. Whether popular vote should decide who won is irrelevant, because we’re not arguing over who won, we’re arguing over how to judge how close it was. EC margin seems kinda irrelevant for that, no? If someone won with 270 but the tipping point margin was +10, that’s not a close election. If they won every state by a single vote, that’s an extremely close election.
That honestly seems like little more than a "well actually" point. Sure, if Biden had 270 ECs in the bag with a 10 percentage point margin, that'd be valid. But he doesn't, nor is that a very historically common occurrence anyways. Some tens of thousands of votes in a few key areas and Trump would be the winner here, and the EC margin is a very good proxy for that.
On November 08 2020 05:14 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On November 08 2020 04:40 ChristianS wrote:
We’ll see what the tipping point margin winds up being. Off the top of my head it’ll probably be... idk, WI? That was pretty close. PA will probably be a decent margin by the end, AZ and GA are obviously very close, NV probably not actually very close. There’s math I’m not bothering with because we don’t have final numbers anyway.
But we’re likely to end up with a pretty big popular vote advantage, a decent EC margin, and maybe more importantly, competitive results in a pretty wide range of states, which makes the tipping point margin math less meaningful since the whole country never moves 1 pt left or right lockstep together.
Don’t get me wrong, you and I probably share cynicism about the future of the Dems, both in terms of meaningful policy achievements and in electoral success. But the “barely scraped by” perception seems path-dependent to me. If we do a Great Take Audit of people’s election analysis once we have final results, I think most of the analysis will seem like a function of the order votes were counted. WI or PA would be the tipping point, judging by current results. All of WI, PA, AZ, and GA are at a <1% margin right now. Biden has pretty respectable results on popular vote and turnout - high turnout, decent popular vote margin, high number of total popular votes. EC is a mediocre result, down-ballot is about as favorable for Republicans as it possibly could be for a presidential loss. A win is a win, but a narrow one at that by most measures that matter. That's with ~95% of the results in nationally, so it's probably not premature to judge it as much. Yeah it’s probably better to consider all of these metrics rather than try to pick the One True Number to measure closeness. Ordinarily I think tipping point margin is best since it denotes how much of an equally distributed national swing was needed to change the result, but that doesn’t work very well here. The reasons he won AZ aren’t the same as why he won GA or PA or WI, so that equally distributed national swing is a pretty artificial hypothetical. It also probably depends what purpose we’re judging it for. To compare to a hypothetical Sanders run? To predict future Dem electoral chances? To decide how much of a “mandate” he has? You’d probably draw pretty different conclusions for each of those questions about what the closeness of this result means.
EC margin, or tipping point if you think that shows something meaningfully different, is the best way to judge how close someone was to winning the presidency, yes.
Seems like the vast majority of the reason people are arguing for other metrics is to establish to themselves that Biden's win was historic and significant, or that 'twas never in doubt that he'd win (despite how alarmed they were about the possibility three days earlier), and so on. Which seems silly in light of how close it was by the metrics that actually determine the winner. To be fair, the same could be said about anyone who concluded that Trump > Clinton in 2016 was anything more than squeaking past the finish line; said people include Trump himself.
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We don't know how close the election is going to be in yet in quite a few states. We know that Biden's victory margin is going to grow in pretty much all of them, though, due to the remaining votes all being mail in ballots.
Silver was projecting that it could be 3% or more for Biden in PA still, which wouldn't really be exceptionally close and would indicate it's a R+2 state.
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Yeah, another session of Do Nothing Democrats isn’t going to win hearts without a boogeyman to rely on.
I also predict a ravenous Republican base looking to dethrone the people who dethroned their weird little god king, and a complacent Democrat base to be out to brunch.
I think the only branch of anything Dems will hold is the House
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On November 08 2020 05:32 Zambrah wrote:
Tbh I predict Dems lose hard next election
Republicans had a lot to lose this election, what with a very large number of their Senators up for reelection in contested races. They managed to hold on to almost every one, and narrow the margin in the House by a respectable number of seats.
2022 is a lot more balanced on that front, and 2024 will have Democrats facing the same conundrum. It's not the best situation to be in.
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On November 08 2020 05:38 Zambrah wrote:
Yeah, another session of Do Nothing Democrats isn’t going to win hearts without a boogeyman to rely on.
I also predict a ravenous Republican base looking to dethrone the people who dethroned their weird little god king, and a complacent Democrat base to be out to brunch.
I think the only branch of anything Dems will hold is the House Republicans are going to run on how Biden hasn't fixed everything in 2 years and 'win' the mid-terms off of that.
What happens in 4 years is more up in the air.
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I'm not sure. If Trump's misdeeds actually get investigated fully, his worst acts are going to be dragged into the public conscious for at least two years. Many of his worst acts were covered up and never actually investigated.
The GOP also won't run cover for him.
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EPT
