The union has said they'd enjoin the strike for election day of it hadn't been resolved by then.

Looks like Melania is using FLOTUS's speeches again:

I think a lot of people over the past weeks, those that have changed, have gone to the 'lesser of two evils' argument(fallacy, IMO). Utah is a good example, where it was even between Clinton and Trump for a long time, even though Republicans usually clean up there. The Mormons, and other highly-committed evangelical groups, have not been strong supports of Trump. They seem to have changed their mind though, not just there but elsewhere. He's now up 10 in Utah over both Clinton and McMullin, and has as mentioned taken quite a bit of Johnson's supporters. The whole 'vote for McMullin/Johnson is a vote for Clinton' concept taking hold is my best explanation, along with the number of people that only really 'tune in' late in the process.


Agree completely. They tried to go in other directions, and the party said NO, loudly and clearly. I'm essentially an elitist in this, which is very rare for me, but there's no question in my mind that the establishment's choices were much more sound -- the people chose otherwhise though. They got what they wanted, as terrible a choice as I think it was.

By our culture she means her husband, right?

Well, it's getting close to the floor in that case, because it's now down to 63.6%.


Gotcha. I only half-listen to the news during lunch so I must have missed that.

re: turnout. This story covers what I think is a big part of the outcome one way or the other

Log In - New York Times

Headline doesn't appear to be coming up so I'll add it:
Black Turnout Soft in Early Voting, Boding Ill for Hillary Clinton

That's one example of what I mean when I say "whims". It's not just turnout, I've seen at least one recent mention of her poll drops (ABC / Wapo IIRC) being noticeably attributable to a decline in black voter numbers among "likely voters". As I read it, it wasn't a change in support so much as people moving from likely to unlikely to vote.

I haven't seen anything in the campaigns that would account for this. And I reject the whole "it's been made too hard" notion as well. It seems far more reasonable to point to it being a simple decrease in enthusiasm for one candidate vs another. Some of that is very likely racially based, some is also likely about the two candidates simply not being the same person with the same situation. But I don't feel like that's a perception driven by the campaign season, it's more like a lifetime achievement deal IMO.

She could offset it by raising Hispanic turnout, a demographic where she's doing well. She could be sunk by it IF the white evangelical protestant turnout is high. (a demo where Trump has an even larger edge than HRC has with black voters).

No, not tough to imagine that a large number of the bipartisan people in charge of voting are trying to rig the election, but it was wrong and dumb when Trump alleged it could actually succeed, and it's equally so now when the shoe's on the other foot. There are corrupt individuals, but I trust the courts and watchdogs to weed them out or keep them in line, just as they're doing in the 3 counties.

(FTR, I was going off JPhillips initial post "Under state law, any voter can challenge another county resident's registration, resulting in a hearing where the challenger presents evidence, according to a state legal filing. If local officials find probable cause, the challenged voter is notified of a subsequent hearing. A voter who doesn't rebut the evidence can be removed." and it appears that challenged voters aren't actually being given notice before removal, so that makes a huge difference in how I see this. Purging them within 90 days of the election is also blatantly illegal, and will make it an easy case to rule on. But the actual concept of allowing citizens to challenge voter registration I have no problem with, and know if it was implemented where I live would require a much higher burden of proof than one returned mass mailing, so the problem is with partisanship/incompetence at the heart, not the core concept.)
Not sure if it was national or local due to NH being part of the Boston market, but she had an ad during the World Series last night filled with Trump bluster we couldn't tell was from the Trump or Clinton campaign until the end with her tagline. The people who hear "I'm going to be tougher on/bomb the shit out of ISIS" and recoil are probably in her pocket and not the ones I'd be targeting, and it's viewed very positively by a significant slice of the electorate. Since it looks like if this race stays close, Trump will most likely need to flip PA/MI/WI, I'd be focusing on what (I think) matters a lot there and hammering things like Trump Corp buying Chinese steel. (I'm not sure what a similar issue would be for Colorado voters, and I don't think NH voters agree on anything.)

Btw, none of us thought it was going to tighten up this much either, but the hubris to assume a blowout and start allocating resources and time to Arizona, Texas & Georgia a couple weeks ago is also looking really bad right now.

The interesting thing to me is the other polling aggregators, who are far more confident talking about a Clinton victory. There is a list of them at NY Times' Upshot:

Log In - New York Times

The biggest rival to Silver is Sam Wang, who runs the Princeton Election Consortium, who is also considered a political statistical darling (he's been close to as accurate as Silver - in 2012 he missed 1 state, but called the popular vote on the money). Wang has had Clinton at 99% for a while now and kind of makes fun of Silver's model's volatility.

It'll be interesting to see what happens - but the reason I initially looked is to see New Hampshire. And with the Granite State we have 538 with 64% chance of Clinton, The Upshot (NY Times) with 89% Clinton, HuffPo with 99% Clinton, Predictwise with 83% Clinton, Princeton Election Consortium with 84% Clinton.

With recent polling in OH and the poor early vote numbers in NC and FL, it looks like it may come down to NV.

She can lose all 4 of those - just not another firewall state. And the latest early numbers in NV don't look good, R's up about 1% on 2012 and Dems down close to 2%.

Trump would still need one former blue state assuming he wins Ohio, NC, Florida, and Nevada. It might come down to New Hampshire. That looks like her weakest of those states Trump would need to bring over.

(Edit: If that's how things went down, he'd get exactly 270 with New Hampshire + the Maine 2nd district. That'd be wacky)

Nevada early voting, however, is looking REAL good for Clinton. 538 even put up an article about how it could beat her polling:

The Early Vote In Nevada Suggests Clinton Might Beat Her Polls There | FiveThirtyEight

Few others:

Early voting in Nevada looks very good for Democrats - Vox

Hillary Clinton hopes early vote will seal Nevada victory - CNNPolitics.com

Even if Trump wins OH, NC, FL and NV, he still comes up short unless he can turn a state like NH, PA, MI, CO or WI. I think he'll need a big surprise in one of those states to pull off a victory.

edit: dang, I type slow. I feel like I am piling on when a dozen people posted the same thing.

It's going to be a late night if Clinton needs to rely on Nevada.

Though, possibly an early night (effectively) if she wins NH and PA... barring any massive surprises.

As far as Wang goes, my .02 is that he doesn't extrapolate enough and Silver too much; I'd say the best option is probably between the two. It appears that Wang gives a snapshot of where things are with the latest polls and assumes they aren't going to move; Silver assumes momentum will continue in whatever direction it's going for a while longer. In a static race they'll end up showing similar numbers, but that's not what we have right now. I think both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks.

Cool. I read a less rosy summary this morning, and the 538 one is a few days old, but the CNN is pretty current

Yeah, I think 538 is awesome and I trust their stuff but it seems excessive to add +2 to Trump polls across the board because of trend, when that trend line is already in the polls.

That being said, he's knocked it out of the park before so who knows. I definitely agree with you that the truth is likely somewhere in the middle, and I think those pollsters smugly predicting a 99% chance of a Dem victory have a chance to look very stupid indeed.

Things are very fluid as in the 538 polls only just shifted a bit more to Clinton because a few North Carolina polls that pushed NC to 50.1% for Clinton in polls only.

Only a few more days of polls to go (IIRC, they don't release numbers on the weekend).

As a longtime Man Utd fan, I love this reference so much. :D

I've not really seen Hillary counter attack with anything new. Surely her opp research coffers can't be empty, she has to find something(s) to egg him on to slow/stop his momentum.

Yeah, NV won't go to Trump. I would even be willing to put money down that she wins this state, if I get to a sports book before Tuesday that offers it.

I keep seeing posts in my various social media feeds about how voting for a third party candidate is "really" a vote for such and such despicable opposite party candidate.

Every time I see that stuff I feel like responding with a massive FUCK YOU. No, asshole, I won't vote for one of the two jack holes the two main parties have put on us, juat because y'all think it's a wasted or meaningless vote.

That's the kind of sheep thinking that has us in this situation in the first place. I will vote for the candidate that most represents my values, even if he or she is the nom for Donkey Kong Monkey Feces Party.

I can't really say that out there on social media feeds with family and all, so I am putting it here.

I think there was something new (well happened a few years ago) but it was quickly drowned out in the Comey "surprise". I didn't really pay it much attention.

Video shows Trump grabbing, kissing former Miss Universe - Business Insider

Yes and no?

Like, obviously, your vote is a vote for whatever candidate best represents your values, whoever that is.

But you don't vote in a vacuum. You cast your ballot in a world where somewhere between 80-90% of the active electorate are going to vote reflexively based on who has the right letter next to their name. That's the floor. Donald Trump may or may not get the floor wiped with him next week, but he also isn't going to draw much less than 40-45% of the national popular vote, either. The same would be true in reverse.

So if you're casting your vote for a third party, that's the environment in which you cast your ballot.

In California, New York, and (probably) Texas, your third party vote is not going to swing the election to "such and such despicable opposite party candidate." In much of the country, that's true, really. A world where Hillary Clinton wins Kansas is a world where Donald Trump got so thoroughly rejected that Gary Johnson's electoral support is a wet fart from a sloppy butthole.

At the same time, there ARE states in play; in those states, if you have a 'lesser' evil between the two major candidate, a vote for a third party is, de facto, a vote you're taking away from that 'lesser evil.'

It's a vote that narrows the gap (or makes it harder to close the gap, depending on the candidate and the direction of the gap).

And, y'know, until/unless third party messaging is such that it manages to capture a greater swath of the electorate than it has done, that's an uncomfortable truth. This should have been the year, as others have pointed out, for Libertarians (or SOMEBODY) to take a major step forward, as the Republicans and Democrats nominated perhaps the two least popular Presidential candidates in modern electoral history.

And, as I noted above, you're STILL seeing 90% of the country reflexively support one or the other because of social engineering.

That isn't going to change in a week's time. There isn't going to be a massive repudiation of the major parties that winds up with a surprise President McMullin, Johnson, or whoever else.

And maybe there's a movement in the ensuing four years that MAKES that a plausible scenario. But the opportunity for that to happen in this election came and went over the summer as so little of the electorate expressed support for an alternative that Johnson (or whomever) couldn't even make it to the debates.

So, I mean, I get where you're coming from, but your social media feeds aren't wrong, either - voting third party, in the current electoral climate, is sort of a shadow preference ballot if you live in a battleground state. You're marking that ballot 1) Third Party, 2) Greater Evil, 3) Lesser Evil.

Which is, ironically, the only way to cast a preference ballot in federal elections.

A vote for who you want is just that.

Voting in anything but the smallest of small local elections has no impact at all. Hillary really appreciates the 0.000033% that my individual vote is worth towards the 50% or so total it will take to win my state.

It's not whether they are factually right or wrong. It's the fact they are sheep and they apparently just accept that fate. I'm railing less against what they're saying and more against their attitude.

They don't vote for what truly represents them and probably doesn't much help them. They don't take the time to understand. They're lazy--they don't want to think. They want to be led. By people with their own agendas.

And if they want to be lazy and go about their day without valuing the choices they have in the society in which they live, that is their vote and their choice, no matter what I think of them.

But when they choose to litter my life with their delusions, and try to change my way of thinking through their own deception and flawed world view, that pisses me off. I don't force my thinking on them; I don't want to see theirs forced upon me.

So yeah fuck them. They deserve the life they will end up with.

But that's the problem. Under the system we have now, the kind of coordination necessary to make a third party candidate viable is beyond-belief extraordinary.

Voting for the person who most represents your belief system is great, and ideally it would even be viable.

But there are a dozen third parties, and none of them have the national cohesiveness to pull off any kind of viable candidacy for the Presidency. The Reform Party managed something like 20% of the national popular vote in '92, but no electoral votes, and its presence fizzled out within maybe a decade.

The Libertarians SHOULD have been poised to be a force in electoral politics this year, because of #NeverTrumpers if nothing else, and it never materialized.

So with the balloting system we've got, the only way you get a viable third party is with some sort of herd mentality. You call them sheep, but that's what the Libertarians (or anybody else) are going to need a little bit of - a self-fulfilling prophecy. And you don't get that with the intelligentsia "taking the time to understand" - because the people who do that have different agendas themselves. So they dilute the impact of their movement by spreading themselves out among three or four different parties, and at the end of the day it's the same game.

Some kind of preference ballot could actually change that game. Then you don't necessarily need coordination. Just be the second choice on enough ballots, and suddenly you're on the map.

Not POTUS, but General Election related...

Early voting today, so I researched all contested races on my sample ballot with which I'm not very familiar. Came across this:

NC GOP AG Candidate Tells HB2 Fans: 'Keep Our State Straight!' (VIDEO)

I voted.

I'm not a Trump guy at all (AT ALL), but that article looks like the same sort of reach that I saw on my Facebook feed today from a Hannity "article" about Hillary being indicted "any minute now" by the DOJ from the latest email stuff.

What I see there is a couple of entertainers being entertainers. It's not exactly good political theater, but it wasn't meant to be. In the time frame of that speech, Trump was an entertainer doing what he was being paid to do.

Nice, makes me wish I was voting in NC. Blacks were held in slavery and then discriminated against, so we should just accept that's the way things have always been in that state?

I'm not sure I'd describe that as 'entertainment' - he brought her up there to show he 'could' and what power he had over her in my opinion, I don't get much entertainment watching someone being humiliated myself ....

I don't know if I agree with this. I totally get the mindset of not liking to be told what to do. Trust me, I am *Mister* DO NOT FUCKING TELL ME WHAT TO DO. That said, the system is what it is - a two party system. Nader siphoned off votes from Gore in Florida and it tilted the election. Perot probably helped swing the election for Clinton. Where do you think we would be if there was a legit 3rd party progressive candidate like Bernie? Trump would have a commanding lead right now. Again, everyone should vote their conscience. However, I do think it is naive to think that if you are in a swing state that your vote doesn't matter. And no, I do not think there is anything approaching equivalence between the two main candidates.

For those following 538, it appears Clinton is slightly bouncing back up. Trump is back down to 32.3% in polls only. It appears news polls from North Carolina and Florida have it now in the light blue zone and New Hampshire is back to 64% for Clinton.

Log In - New York Times

Speaking of Hispanic vote mitigating potential lower African-American turnout...

So what I hear you saying is that you're not a reality television fan? :lol:

I'm not saying it was couth. I *am* saying that it's consistent within the entertainment genre that he works. It was essentially a live performance of the role he played on The Apprentice.

Hillary's numbers will improve once they add the PPP polls that were just announced...

NV: Clinton +3
NH: Clinton +5
NC: Clinton +2
PA: Clinton +4
WI: Clinton +7

If anyone cares, Christie's aides were found guilty of all charges related to Bridgegate.

State of play in NV:
Dems build Clark firewall to 61K.
Trump path very narrow here. Needs HUGE Tuesday GOP turnout.https://t.co/1pS7nvPBhm

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 4, 2016

Hillary slightly behind where Obama was 4 years ago in Nevada early voting, but it still looks good for her given Obama won by almost 7 points there.

What he said.


I disagree on that part. It kind of seem to ignore how the two current major party choices were chosen by their respective supporters.

The current pair -- like it or not, no matter what we might think that says about the voters -- are considerably more representative of their parties' voters than the 'net luminaries like to admit.

Me too. Glad to be an American!

If Hillary Clinton didn't send an email about it 5 years ago, no one will care.

Hey! That information is CONFIDENTIAL!

It was a secret code hidden within Podesta's risotto recipe.

Given they cracked the code on the Scalia assassination I'm surprised no one caught this one.

Those on Twitter going through the latest batch of leaked emails are wondering why the main stream media isn't picking up on the new revelation of Podesta taking part in satanic rituals.

I detest reality TV partially for that reason - it seems to be largely based around uneducated people debasing themselves in return for paychecks (at least I hope they're well paid for the spectacle they make of themselves) ... I am also hopeful that none of it is real as the little I've seen of it would make be very concerned for humanity if it is ...

I'm going to pick on this -- not on Marc, just on the quote -- simply for an example of something I was kind of trying to say earlier. This just gives me an illustration better than what I felt like I was managed to say earlier.

This is, well, pretty elitist stuff. And that's fine, we're all entitled to that.
BUT ... that works okay as long as you realize that you're doing it. The teeming masses in the middle exist whether we like it or not.

And a great deal of them are dumb as fucking hammers. Imagine how bad it gets in the bottom quarter or so.

We forget that at our own peril.