• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

2020 Presidential Election

Status
Not open for further replies.
Meadmaker said:
Today I read a story about what kind of alcoholic beverages people drink, and how that correlates with how they vote. (Biden wins among people who drink wine and liquor. Trump wins with teetotalers. Beer is a swing state.)

What TV shows people watch is correlated with voting patterns. What kind of cars people drive is correlated with voting patterns. What time people eat dinner is correlated with voting patterns. All sorts of behavioral characteristics are related to voting patterns.

Now, your cell phone rings. It's an unrecognized number. Do you answer it?

The answer is correlated with voting patterns.
Click to expand...

And I still don't buy it. "Why" you might ask? Because there is a lot more to getting representative samples. Age, gender, location etc.
 
Meadmaker said:
One thing that makes me think Biden will win is that I can't picture what sort of person who voted for Hillary in 2016 would vote for Trump in 2020. However, I can picture plenty of people who voted for Trump in 2016 but who will vote for Biden in 2020.

In terms of polling difficulty, though, what I see in 2020 is that poltical discussions ahve grown to be perceived as even more toxic than in 2016. I can see a whole lot of people just saying, "I never talk about politics with anyone". and sticking to it so much they won't talk to a pollster.
Click to expand...

This might be true, but unless you can show that factor is more relevant than their age, sex or where they live, what does it matter? By simply using those three factors I can get an extremely reliable representative sample.
 
Meadmaker said:
One thing that makes me think Biden will win is that I can't picture what sort of person who voted for Hillary in 2016 would vote for Trump in 2020. However, I can picture plenty of people who voted for Trump in 2016 but who will vote for Biden in 2020.
Click to expand...

I think with the large voter turnouts we're seeing this year it's not so much people who voted for Trump last time switching to Biden, but people who didn't vote at all showing up to vote (hopefully for Biden). Last time it didn't seem as high-stakes; this time, we've had four years of madness and an ongoing global pandemic. I think people are less likely to sit it out this time.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I think with the large voter turnouts we're seeing this year it's not so much people who voted for Trump last time switching to Biden, but people who didn't vote at all showing up to vote (hopefully for Biden). Last time it didn't seem as high-stakes; this time, we've had four years of madness and an ongoing global pandemic. I think people are less likely to sit it out this time.
Click to expand...

That is going to be big for Biden. I've talked to a number of people who never or rarely vote, and this year they are voting for Biden. They don't care about politics. They just want to stop hearing about dumb stuff from Trump.

Trump's personality can work well for some kind of reality TV show contest where he can bully people and demand the most attention. But an awful lot of people just want to change the channel to anything else.
 
Obama in Flint,
"He's accusing doctors of profiting off this pandemic. He said doctors are overblowing it because they're going to make money off of it. He cannot fathom, he doesn't understand that somebody would risk their life to save others without trying to make a buck"


On trumps obsession with crowd size "When a country's going through a pandemic, that's not what you're supposed to be worrying about. That's difference between Joe Biden & Trump right there. Trump cares about feeding his ego, Joe cares about keeping you and your family safe"

"Canada identified its first [coronavirus] case the same week that the US did. Our mortality rate is 2.5 times higher than Canada. If we had the same percentage of folks dying in Canada as we do here, nearly 90,000 would have died instead of 230,000."
 
Last edited:
Trump

On likelihood that election winner won't be known on November 3.
"This is a terrible thing that they've done to our country. And that's the US Supreme Court that I'm talking about. That's a terrible, political, horrible decision that they made, you're gonna have bedlam."


"If Biden wins, there will be no fracking, no oil, no natural gas, no jobs, and no future"
 
Trump Tweets

I ran for office 4 years ago because I could not sit by & watch any longer as a small group of Washington Insiders continued to get rich bleeding America Dry. No one embodies this betrayal & treachery more than Joe Biden. Joe profited from the misery he unleashed on PA workers!

Pennsylvania is where the story of American Independence began – it is the state where the American Constitution was signed – and 3 days from now this is the state that will SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM! A great RED WAVE is forming! http://Vote.DonaldJTrump.com
 
On NPR’s “The Marketplace” show yesterday, they mentioned a metric that has held true for many past election cycles... If the DOW is down over the last 3 months prior to the election, the challenger wins.
And.... It’s down.
 
The Atheist said:
Yeah they are. Me, for one, and here's another:



And money says he loses as well.

Paddy Power, the bookie, has Biden to win the electoral college - with a 48.5 handicap - at odds on. That's quite astonishing.

That means that most people think Trump will not just lose, but lose by 320 - 220 or worse.

He is ******* toast.

The only question remaining is what he does when he realises he's lost. Does he try to create armed rebellion? Does he refuse to accept the result and challenge it in court?* Does he storm out of the White House in a typical toddler tantrum, leaving Pence to transition?

Somehow, I don't see "waiting for Biden to kick him out in January" being a very viable option.


*I think this is incredibly unlikely. He doesn't have the money to pay lawyers and I don't believe any law firm would do it on credit.
Click to expand...

Skeptic Ginger said:
Who says Trump has to hire these lawyers?

Center for Media and Democracy: Secretive Council for National Policy Closely Tied to Trump

That council would be ALEC. They are well funded by people like the Koch family. They are ecstatic with the pro-corporate make up of the SCOTUS. They've gotten all they wanted in Trump when it comes to slashing every environmental regulation that came across his desk.

They are funding every voter suppression tactic they can in swing states.
Click to expand...

Ginger is correct. Trump didn't get where he is by spending his own money. The Republican Party and groups like ALEC will be happy to do it for him in order to stay in power.
 
I keep hearing about huge turnout of younger people. I'll believe it after a full analysis of the election. They never turnout.

But if I lived in any of these states where there are huge lines for early voting I would find out who is responsible for causing those long lines and vote them out. I live in Washington State and no one has to wait even to drop a ballot off in secure ballot boxes.
 
Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out 100,000 ballots in Harris County cast through curbside voting.
They drew Judge Andrew Hanen a notoriously partisan Republican judge

He has already scheduled an emergency hearing for Monday morning without giving Harris County a chance to file a response brief.
It looks like he may be rushing to throw out 100,000 disproportionately Democratic votes.

Texas Republicans are deploying the theory that only state legislatures have authority over elections.
Because the Harris County Clerk implemented drive-through voting, Republicans say all 100,000 ballots must be tossed.
 
acbytesla said:
This might be true, but unless you can show that factor is more relevant than their age, sex or where they live, what does it matter? By simply using those three factors I can get an extremely reliable representative sample.
Click to expand...

There was a link in this thread to a 538 article discussing exactly the deficiencies of that method, but the solution to that problem, which plagued the 2016 estimates, is to include a fourth factor, which is level of education.

I've read that explanation several times this year. I don't know if it originated uniquely with Nate Silver and has propagated, but it was observed last time around that middle aged white men from Michigan that had no college degrees voted differently than middle aged white men from Michigan with a college degree. Their samples included more college educated folks than non-college educated folks, which skewed results toward Hillary, and did so in a systemic way, as opposed to just being "random". (I put that word in quotes, because it's not really about randomness, but rather the distributions of the random variables, but that's a bit esoteric.) So, this year, they are making sure to include level of education in their surveys.

Will it work? We'll find out on election night.
 
Trump Tweets

Biden & Obama owe a massive apology to the People of Flint. The water was poisoned on their watch. Not only did they fail them, Biden proudly accepted the endorsement of disastrous Gov Rick Snyder! Unlike Biden, I will always stand with the People of the Great State of MICHIGAN!

Biden’s plan to Abolish American Energy is an economic DEATH SENTENCE for Pennsylvania. A vote for Biden is a vote to BAN FRACKING & send PA into a nightmare of poverty & depression. Gas prices would explode & family incomes would plummet—I will always defend & promote PA energy!

Our ECONOMY is now surging back faster, better, bigger and stronger than any nation on earth. We just had the best quarter of ECONOMIC GROWTH EVER recorded - a 33.1% increase, and next year will be the GREATEST ECONOMIC YEAR in the history of our Country! http://Vote.DonaldJTrump.com
 
Captain_Swoop said:
Texas Republicans have asked a federal judge to throw out 100,000 ballots in Harris County cast through curbside voting.
They drew Judge Andrew Hanen a notoriously partisan Republican judge

He has already scheduled an emergency hearing for Monday morning without giving Harris County a chance to file a response brief.
It looks like he may be rushing to throw out 100,000 disproportionately Democratic votes.

Texas Republicans are deploying the theory that only state legislatures have authority over elections.
Because the Harris County Clerk implemented drive-through voting, Republicans say all 100,000 ballots must be tossed.
Click to expand...

The ploy might work. There's a certain degree of legal logic to it. I would hope, though, that a judge would consider a whole bigger picture and decide that the ballots were cast according to the law, which includes declarations of the executive branch, as opposed to some blind reading of the law. Perhaps it is true that the clerk had no authority to change the rules, but what is the proper remedy? I would hope that throwing out ballots wouldn't be chosen as the way to fix the problem.

However, as you note, it's a partisan judge. Unfortunately, I think we'll see a lot of that this year. It's very disturbing. I hesitate to talk about all the possible hypotheticals that could plague this election, because some of them are not just bad, but are actually the sort of bad that results in riots and civil unrest. I never thought that could happen in America, but until this year I never even considered it as a possibility.
 
Meadmaker said:
The ploy might work. There's a certain degree of legal logic to it. I would hope, though, that a judge would consider a whole bigger picture and decide that the ballots were cast according to the law, which includes declarations of the executive branch, as opposed to some blind reading of the law. Perhaps it is true that the clerk had no authority to change the rules, but what is the proper remedy? I would hope that throwing out ballots wouldn't be chosen as the way to fix the problem.

However, as you note, it's a partisan judge. Unfortunately, I think we'll see a lot of that this year. It's very disturbing. I hesitate to talk about all the possible hypotheticals that could plague this election, because some of them are not just bad, but are actually the sort of bad that results in riots and civil unrest. I never thought that could happen in America, but until this year I never even considered it as a possibility.
Click to expand...

It's incredibly disturbing. How a ballot is delivered is irrelevant. The real question is are the ballots of registered voters? A proper remedy could not be tossing legitimate regardless if they were put in a box inside the County building or outside to county employees.
 
Just listened to the latest Trump Inc. podcast episode Radiolab:What if?).
It's about the blue/red exercise about the 2020 elections that were done early this year.

Short version: it's quite possible that we will need the Joint Chiefs to make the final decision if neither side decides to admit defeat.

Trump's distain for the Generals might still bite him in the ass.
 
The other side of the vote in your car:

Statesman: New challenge seeks to void thousands of Harris County drive-thru votes
The new petition asks the all-Republican Supreme Court to confiscate memory cards from voting machines at drive-thru locations and reject any votes cast in violation of state election laws.

The petition argues that drive-thru voting is an illegal expansion of curbside voting, which state law reserves for voters who submit a sworn application saying they have an illness or disability that could put them at risk if forced to enter a polling place.

“Hollins is allowing curbside/drive-thru voting for all 2.37 million registered voters in Harris County. This is a clear and direct violation of his duties,” the petition argued.

But Hollins has said drive-thru voting is just another polling place with a different layout and structure, and that it was approved by the Texas secretary of state’s office before being adopted.

Vehicles form lines and enter the voting area one at a time, where a clerk checks each voter’s photo ID, has them sign a roster and hands over a sanitized voting machine. Voting typically takes place in large individual tents, and poll watchers can observe the processing of voters no differently than in traditional voting locations, Hollins has argued.

Abhi Rahman, spokesman for the Texas Democratic Party, said the petition was filed by “cowards.”

“They are a disgrace to our state and our country. They are so afraid of losing this election because Texans are rising up,” he said.
Click to expand...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom