Long opinion piece and I don't agree with everything he wrote but do agree with the overarching idea - BLM and everything that seems attributed to BLM protests is going to be more of a negative for Biden than positive through the elections.

Biden should continue to speak out for legit BLM but some of the more questionable protests & actions are muddied with BLM so it's hard to delineate between the 2 sets.

Not sure how he should do it (and he probably won't be 100% successful ala Portland) but he needs to do something to win/not lose the approx 4-10% of undecided & independents.

Trump law-and-order campaign would deflate without BLM street protests

Really good poll for Trump. Marist/NBC (A+ rated by 538) shows the candidates tied in Florida.

That's a tightening over the last few weeks. Shows that Trump is still very much in Electoral College striking distance.

Another strategy is to just get Democrats to vote for him since they far outnumber Republicans in this country. But maybe chasing those non-exisrent people on the fence will work this time.

Could always change more but RCP has Biden +7. His lead hasn't been over +8 in over a month. I read it as a slight tightening in August and no more movement since. That's also five points better than Clinton was at the same point in '16. In early September Clinton's +2 and change exactly mirrored her eventual margin in the popular vote. If Biden can say the same the EC won't be close. Granted that is still an IF and I do wish it were +10 or +12. Trump's approval being at it's highest level since late May is one troubling sign, but about the only one I see.

The 'non-existent' undecideds very much exist; they appear to be about 5% or so right now.

Gotta be honest - I've always assumed Florida will go red. I feel like DeSantis will make sure of it.

SI

On another bright note, I believe that's far less than the undecides in 2016.

The great American experiement:

Basically everyone agrees that Biden is somewhere between 5-8 points ahead at the moment.

Basically everyone agrees that even if the polls don't tighten, a combination of COVID, voter supression, and the electoral college gives Trump a very real chance of victory.

I'd rather get the other people to show up and vote. The group you have a massive advantage with.

There is this mythical group of voters who need Biden to cater to the center we keep hearing about. The guy is as moderate as it gets with practically no progressive credentials at all. He gave more time at his convention to Republicans than progressive Democrats. If some so-called centrist doesn't believe that, there is not much he can do. They were likely voting Trump all the way anyhow.

The response to Trump's law and order play is to point out practically everyone who works close to him gets arrested. His people are constantly breaking laws and under investigation. Shit, the head of the post office just openly admitted to committing felonies like it was no big deal.

And most importantly, he has no control over protests. He holds no position of power. This is Trump's country. A simple "I stand against any criminal actions by people. A President who has shown no regard for the law himself sets an example for others." works.

Except Biden has already done the simple "I stand against any criminal actions" and no one heard it.

I don't disagree, tho. I think he has more to gain from Dem turnout than he does to lose from going "off center".

SI

Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I just don't buy the pessimism on the electoral college for Biden. Hillary won the popular vote by just over 2% and lost the electoral college due to severely small margins in multiple states. Are people thinking the election will get closer than 2% or thinking Biden will be a worse electoral college candidate than Hillary was? There's zero evidence of the latter.

I just don't see the math for a 4-5% popular vote victory and an electoral college loss. He's not the type of candidate that will run up the score in blue states and underperform in swing states. That's more what you would expect if Warren was the nominee.

I expect a lot more cheating in close states. That said, I think it's entirely possible that Trump doesn't cheat enough in, say, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas and somehow loses those despite rigging, say, Florida, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

SI

I think the assumption is some combination of voter suppression on a scale not seen before combined with inaccurate polling and then a Trump lead the night of the election leading to an attempt in the courts to throw out postal votes in as many states as needs to carry the election.

I mean if the second part is true it probably doesn't matter what Biden's lead is in the polls but still, this doesn't sound like an unlikely scenario to me at all.

My biggest worry is the mail in votes. Trump will lead on election day, declare victory and file a lawsuit to stop the counting. It goes up to the Supreme Court and they rule 5-4 to stop counting using Bush v. Gore as precedent.

A little more on undecideds from a Newsweek article. The article is right that many of the 10% undecideds are "leaning" one way or another so it says probably just 3% are truly undecided.

Undecided Voters Were Key to Trump's Win in 2016. Will They Deliver Again?

For whatever reason, there are people who vote reliably D or R who just hate the idea of being labeled and will tell everyone that they are independent, even if they haven't voted for someone in the other party in 20 years.

I don't buy Roberts (or Gorsuch) voting that way.

I think trying to figure out turnout with the virus and mail-in voting is damn near impossible. And then, yeah, the GOP is going to do all sorts of shit to reduce minority voting. We haven't had an election without the RNC consent decree in a long time.

I think Roberts would be more than happy to send Trump packing

SI

Yes me too and I think we would have bigger protests/riots everywhere then we have seen. Trump would unleash his federal goons, police, national guard riot troops and right wing militia to try to crush the protests. I think we would see it continue until something gave (impeach, he resigns) or it continues for his whole term.

White House says reducing record debt will be 'big second-term priority' for Trump

I wish I could believe him.

ETA: No I don't, because believing in Trump to do something positive like this makes you a gullible fool.

I don't diagree at all that's the best strategy. I do think though, that all available evidence strongly indicates they have every intention of doing so. Other than a small group of ticked-off Bernie Bros (who would be acting the same way under any candidate aside from Bernie) I've yet to see anything showing an enthusiasm problem on the Democratic side. If the issue was alienating those people you'd have a good point, but there's no indication that's happening in anything I've seen. They're mad enough at Trump (rightfully) that I think Biden could declare himself a Republican a week out and he'd still be elected POTUS as a Democrat.

Interesting thread here. In summary, the idea of the "shy Trump voter" doesn't really pan out in one way, but it might in another. There are not Trump voters saying they are voting for Biden in some polls because of shame. There might be (and would say most likely is) a large percentage of Trump voter who would never participate in a poll.

If we're going to talk about 'shy Trump' voters, it's worth being clear about what we're really talking about. The old version of the theory just doesn't make sense, but there are others that can't be discounted.

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) September 10, 2020

I don't know if it affects this election (and, to be clear, neither does Nate Cohn).

But, as people's political attitudes become more intertwined with trust of the media and institutions generally, it does not seem far-fetched that "willing to be polled by a media organization" would become a politically-relevant factor. And one that, axiomatically, would be almost impossible to catch in polls.

South Carolina not even trying to be bipartisan:

SC adds Democratic Biden-Harris ticket to sample ballot after it was initially left off | Palmetto Politics | postandcourier.com

But if this is the case, wouldn't they be getting vastly different results in their demographic sampling?

I am a bit over my head with this, but here's how I understand it.

Pollsters have a pretty good estimate of who shows up to vote, broken down by race, gender, education level, age, etc.

Those numbers differ from the people who tend to answer surveys. So if you know, for example, that Hispanics tend to make up 10% of likely voters, but your poll ends up having 20% Hispanic respondents, you then weight their answers less to bring it back down to 10%.

Of course, we draw these boxes based on what we think are politically relevant factors. We know that certain groups of people tend to have similar political opinions. One of the lessons of 2016 is that, at least in Trump elections, education is a pretty big factor.

This thought experiment asks the question of what if likelihood of responding to a poll becomes a relevant factor for which you need to control.

That's kind of an unfixible problem if it ever comes into being.

There's a part of me that wishes for polls to become inaccurate to the point of irrelevancy and go away. I don't think that ever happens, but what albionmoonlight is talking about is probably already a factor, just not one with a strong enough impact to greatly matter yet. A society in which we didn't really know what most people thought about issues until we went and voted would be campaigned for, governed, and supported differently. In some ways better.

My son is having issues with online schooling and stress.

I realize that this might be a political hot take, but I am strongly considering voting for the party that is proposing to do literally something to bring the pandemic under control and against the party that is currently split between doing nothing and making the pandemic worse.

I think that I have become an anti-pandemic voter.

The Dept. of Education could have made re-opening schools better. And then imagine if the Senate was willing to help funds efforts to make schools safer.

Also, speaking of the frog boiling--the West Coast of the country is burning. And the President isn't marshaling any federal resources to help it. Or asking for money from Congress. Or doing anything at all. And we all just don't even blink.

The GOP has gotten us accustomed to a startlingly high level of incompetence. But it does not have to be this way. "The government is the problem" can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We can choose a better path.

Town where I used to live. My neighborhood is the upper left https://m.facebook.com/1451888850/po...s8Lca3sYhl&d=n

10% of Oregon's population is under some level of evacuation order.

All a giant Antifa/BLM plot to make Trump look bad.

Biden and Pence elbow bumped at the 9/11 Memorial and shared a few cordial words. Trump and Biden won't overlap in Pennsylvania it seems, but I doubt you'd see the same reaction if they did.

Sadly doing so forces some people to acknowledge that black people are human beings whose lives have value. Given that, burn baby burn.

Gender reveal parties want in on this.

I LOL'd

SI

They're already comprised. They've been infiltrated by Antifa.

In all seriousness, that's what's going around Facebook. My wife's stepfather tried to pull my wife into a Facebook argument to confirm someone was arrested a mile or so from here trying to stsrt multiple fires on the side of the highway as proof this whole thing is staged by Antifa/BLM.

The problem is the guy was a methed out, homeless looking white guy. I guess it could have been a disguise.

Even a dude who ran for Senate in OR is out here spreading that Antifa crap....don't worry tho, he lost the primary to an open QAnon supporter.

Douglas County Sheriff Rebukes False Claims About Antifa Arsonists That Spread With Oregon Wildfire - Willamette Week

Imagine Trump trying to do anything close to that.

He would've signed that picture and told her it was worth $10K now.

and an aide would come by with a credit card machine for the lady to use to pay for the flower.

:lol:

I'm not sure I like Biden's 401k-and-like plan but the end goal is to reward & give more incentive to lower-middle income people to save more and I'm all for that.

Will that really happen when lower-middle income already don't have a lot of disposable income to put into 401k-and-like plans? I can see how this will help some in the upper-middle of the bell-curve but plenty will still be left behind.

https://taxfoundation.org/bidens-pro...-tax-benefits/

I agree. I like this idea. No reason not to do it.

But it does sound in this pervasive myth that poor people actually have all this secret money that we just need to encourage or trick them into using properly.

Still, a step in the right direction is a step in the right direction. So let’s take it.

And establishing the framework & mechanism for the government to make direct cash payments into people’s private retirement accounts is good as well.

This might help a bit:

This is a really big deal. Thank you @MikeBloomberg. Florida is winnable. If @JoeBiden wins Florida, which he will, he will be the next President of the United States. https://t.co/Puljb1Jf2F

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) September 13, 2020

When do the "crazy, radical, fascist right" with famous fascist dictator ads start to run?

Why is Trump running commercials during the Jets/Bills game?