stolen from somewhere else regarding the protests in Portland:


Watching the Moms show up is like watching the arrival of the Elves in LOTR

Take CA out of the equation and he won the popular vote.

Yes, he won a number of rust belt states narrowly, but he did win them. He did that by appealing to and getting the rural areas excited.

PA outside of Philly and Pittsburgh is Northern Alabama, and the same could be said of backwoods MI and MN. So. Illinois fits the category as well, but there are not enough people in the state to outweigh Cook County and the Chicago suburbs.

Banking on the rural areas to bail you out when they are shrinking is a losing game long term.

and when you've made an ass of yourself for 3.5 years. There are plenty of people in those areas who won't support him again, simply because he's too much of an ass.

If we look at the three states that basically won it for Trump (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Trump didn’t significantly outperform Romney in Michigan or Wisconsin. I don’t believe he energized the rural vote so much as people didn’t show up for Hillary.

What's the point of taking CA out of the equation? How much would he have lost by if you take Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky out of the equation - which have the combined population almost exactly as California?


No, actually. The main problem Clinton had wasn't the rural areas, it was that she badly underperformed expectations in working-class suburbs, narrowly winning in areas that are traditionally strongly Democratic and decidedly not rural. For example in PA, if she had equaled Obama's performance in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre alone she would have easily won the state.

On the late-deciders point, among people who decided their vote the week before the election Trump was +17 in Pennsylvania, +11 in Michigan, and +27!! in Wisconsin. Without that, he doesn't win any of those states. When you're excited and enthusiastic about a candidate, you don't wait until the final days of a campaign to make up your mind.

The excitement level for either Trump or Clinton should have been non-existent in this country.

I feel the same way about the Twilight movies.

This is a pretty strong argument that the Comey announcement won it for Trump.

There's also going to be very few late deciders in this election and while the enthusiasm to vote for Biden isn't exactly stellar the enthusiasm to vote against Trump is off the charts.

I haven't seen anyone not wearing a mask in this area, but I do see way too many the pull their mask down to have a conversation.

The OH Speaker of the House was arrested today by the Feds on a 60 million! dollar bribe scheme.

Please continue to believe this. The Sanders folks did and Biden ate Bernie's lunch and blew him out of the water.

One bad sign for Trump is the primary numbers show Biden more popular in areas where Trump beat Clinton. I looked at Wisconsin data. The three biggest counties Trump won in 2016 are Racine, Outagamie, and Winnebago.

Racine

2016 General: Trump +4
2012 General: Obama +3.5
2020 Primary: Biden +38
2016 Primary: Sanders +2

Outagamie

2016 General: Trump +12.5
2012 General: Romney +2
2020 Primary: Biden +31
2016 Primary: Sanders +20

Winnebago

2016 General: Trump +7
2012 General: Obama +3.5
2020 Primary: Biden +30
2016 Primary: Sanders +23

As you can see, all three counties had 7.5+ swings towards Trump. All were won by Bernie in 2016. And all were won by Biden in a landslide in 2020.

This is why Bernie overestimated his support and didn't think he needed to expand his base. Many of his primary wins were due to dislike of Clinton rather than huge support for Bernie. Biden doesn't have that same problem.

And I'd argue Trump is doing the exact same thing Sanders did in the primaries. Mixing up dislike for Clinton for support for himself.

So Rep Ted Yoho (R-FL) accosted Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the Capitol yesterday calling her disgusting and a "F*&*ing B&*^h. She says she's never even spoken to him before.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...pitol-n1234465

This isn't exactly a high bar.

In fairness to him, she is a Hispanic woman who contradicts his negative stereotypes of both Hispanics and women. Her existence kind of undermines everything he believes in. You can see why he might be a tad upset.

The fact that it was such a blowout, and that Sanders gracefully bowed out when he was cooked, has really muted the Bernie Bros this time around. I guess they're occupied with other things. But I remember when it was a pretty commonly held belief that the Democrats rigged the whole process for Biden. Remember the app in Iowa? It was a Democratic party conspiracy. Those people sure shut up as the results of the other states rolled in.

The the idea Bernie Bros had in 2016 that there's no real different between Trump and a non-Bernie candidate also proved to be spectacularly wrong.

AOC being more vocally supportive of Biden than Bernie was for Clinton helps too. If she and others like her are going to replace Bernie as the face of younger, far-left part of the Dem party, they'll be in much better shape.

If the Dems can't win a blowout election this time around, or at lest a comfortable one, it will be the greatest of their many failures.

This is....staggeringly ignorant and criminal.

Missouri governor on kids getting coronavirus at school: 'They're going to get over it' | TheHill

You still have the true believers on places like Twitter ("red rose Twitter" - who have, btw, even turned on Bernie), though yeah, I think some are chastened. I think AOC and Bernie going full on pro-Biden has helped (Bernie and Biden are pretty good friends as well IRL so Bernie's support is genuine)

The whole, they are going to go home and get over it.. um, does the Governor know that there tend to be older people at home?

Part of what's weird is that the messaging isn't "COVID is super serious and dangerous, but so is shutting down society and school, and in a world of bad choices, we think this is the least bad."

The messaging is that people who are worried about COVID are wrong.

I think that the former message would turn off less people.

In addition to the domestic issues we face, there is also serious trouble brewing on the international front. Russia and China are becoming increasingly bold and aggressive. I just can't shake the feeling that there's a war coming. It'll start in Asia, then spread rapidly.

Yet my right leaning facebook friends constantly go on about civility and treating Trump and other with more respect.

I can't fathom why the message "your kids will 100% get Covid in school" would, ya know, make people question if kids should go back to school.

It's just blows my mind that people are so focused on how Covid can hurt them and not on the spread to others (both who it is spread to and if the spread becomes so pervasive that it overwhelms the system).

This is just a variation on the mask thing - "I don't need a mask because I'm not sick." "Kids will get it and recover because they are young and less susceptible." No concern or acknowledgement that people don't just get Covid in a vaccuum.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was trumpian effort by Trump's campaign to draw attention to AOC, so later they'll tie Joe Biden to her far left ideology (ie a vote for Biden is a vote for socialism).

Or he's just an asshole.

It’s how the world has become: an increasing proportion of people just don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves

I don't think people are getting worse; it's just not as hidden as it has been at some points in the past. There's still a lot of altruism and kindness around but it's always easier to focus in on the negative - i.e., we talk here about how bad it is that some people don't wear masks or don't care about kids getting COVID. Those who do care about those things pass unnoticed.

I will say that in my day-to-day life out now, people are all pretty much wearing masks when I go out. But that kind of kindness does not go viral on twitter like the people screaming at store clerks.

Nor should it. It's like rewarding people for wearing seatbelts or washing their hands after taking a shit. We shouldn't reward things you should be doing anyway, and it certainly isn't altruistic, that requires some level of sacrifice.

I went to the grocery store yesterday for the first time since March. Everyone but one person had on a mask, the one person looked to be a third party vendor of sorts. There were a handful of nose people and I wanted to scream in their faces. The more frustrating ones were the people who completely ignored the one way signs on the aisles.

I was a kid in the 80s so maybe take that decade out. But in the 90s, 00s, and 10s - I never felt a World War was even a possibility. I mean, was there some rando chance of someone accidentally launching missiles and triggering War Games? Sure. But not like a deliberately planned WW3. It feels like the pieces are falling into place now. Russia is emboldened and has already taken land in a way that seemed unfathomable for a while. China's fine with just playing the long game to do stuff in the South China Sea or places like Hong Kong. Even they've been tangling with India. Nationalism is on the rise across the globe in places as disparate as Brazil and Poland. It's not even that we're standing by and doing nothing about it, we're actively joining in. And that's a scary proposition.

I have no idea what the time scale looks like. But I'm certain I don't want to see a World War in my lifetime.

SI

I honestly don't think there will be a nuke Armageddon. The next "war" will be more of a technological (e.g. hacking) or economic war or lower intensity conflicts (e.g. war by proxy). All 3 are happening now albeit on different levels/scale.

China worries me more than Russia. Compared to China, Russia is declining and we always have NATO, EU (what's left of them) to help as it's in their vested interest.

With China, they are emerging and no one wants to confront them (much) because of the economic impact.

Well this seems to wrap up the Den Hollander/Salas attack pretty neatly:

I've always assumed the idea that world powers have more to lose than to gain from a world war. I think that's still true. I'm not sure it will be true in the next couple of decades.

SI

I'm with SI, except I think it will still be true for a while yet. There may come a point, particularly if we don't act more quickly with regards to climate change, that the incentives change.

There were very few late deciders in the last one either (if by "late" you mean within 90 days of November). Assertions to the contrary fly completely opposite of any data I've seen on the subject since the election and smacks of revisionist history frankly.

This election is already decided, same as the last one, all that matters is turnout.

Data showed 13% of voters were still undecided on election day and 18.5% were undecided 100 days out. Both numbers were the highest since the '96 presidential election.

Yep. The primary reason that fivethirtyeight was not as confident in the outcome as other pundits was the historically high number of undecideds, and they were talking about regularly through the runup to the vote. For example, here from October 25th .

Glad to hear that on July 21st the Trump administration is "developing a strategy" to combat Covid-19.

Yeah I'm sure it won't have any questionable advice/miraculous cures in it

It didn’t need one before because until yesterday it was a hoax.

Now it’s not a hoax, beginning to develop a strategy within 24 hours is pretty damned impressive IMHO

I guess Chuck Woolery was the wake up call he needed.

I wish her well.

Trump on Ghislaine Maxwell.

.

The Orange Shit gibbon was in rare form today.

There's probably a little dirt there. Timing for a pardon doesn't work ... unless he wins a second term.

She is the link to a lot of people being thrown under the bus, I imagine. I dont doubt she "commits suicide" as well.

A lot of people are dirty in this Epstein case. And stuff tends to leak these days.