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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   27977 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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With Harris shaping up to receive 10-15 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020? This graph is floating around Twitter: https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081

Is Harris truly so unpopular that 15 million Democrats just stayed home? Or was the overwhelming shift to mail-in ballots in 2020 the key to Biden's victory, giving barely motivated Dems an opportunity to fill in a ballot and mail it out rather than drag themselves to the polls? Republicans in several swing states managed to pass legislation tightening voting laws -- maybe that helped? Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?

Yeah, Harris is more naturally unpopular today than Biden was in 2016. Plus 2020 happened during a high point for widespread public political involvement, activism and debate in modern America, probably the high point since the 1970s, plus everybody was at home and on the internet. Easy to see why turnout peaked.

Most people are mostly unaffected in a visceral, immediate way by politics. In 2020, the lives of most Americans were directly affected by government in a way more major than at any time since…the Second World War, maybe? Hard to know exactly, but certainly in a long, long time.

I hate to be that guy but source? I simply cannot take such a just-so explanation at face value without something to substantiate it. Especially by the margins we are talking about here. 20 million votes out of 150 million cast? 13% of the electorate just checked back out? Especially when the conventional wisdom is that once you get a person to start voting, they generally keep voting. This study even says the effect is magnified in "high salient elections" which 2020 most certainly was?

Voting for the first time for a high-salience election should have a higher effect on turnout in subsequent high-salience elections

Edit: Let me put it like this. Show me the people who didn't vote this time that voted in 2020. Show me a poll, show me on the street interviews, tell me about people you know. Anything at all that points to this massive hypothetical dark matter voter that hadn't shown up at all in any of the polling this year. Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year. It wasn't even on the radar. Don't just default to it being the only possible explanation because the alternative is unthinkable.

Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year.

I did.

https://substack.com/@sethinthebox/note/c-73271569

40% confidence isn’t very confident

Yeah, I was under-confident, as persistent problem. Still, I made the prediction...who else did?

Nate Silver predicted "a total turnout of 155.3 million, with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million", which is something like 73% odds for lower turnout than 2020 (158.4m).

Nice. It's gratifying to know my gut is aligned with the most sophisticated prediction matrices and gurus on the planet. I probably would have taken the under though.

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