site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18873 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.

...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).

15
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why Republicans fell flat: Abortion edition

So I've got a simple, yet hardly traditional theory on why Republicans underperformed so dramatically.

Yes, it was abortion. But no, it wasn't that voters were concerned about a women's right to choose, or some other similar notion.

Instead, they saw the morbidly obese women on the TV shouting their abortions, and decided, 'Yeah, no I don't want these ugly and miserable people reproducing, let them holocaust their offspring'. Republican advertising highlighting that aborted babies were disproportionately black, like that awful Blake Masters ad he rightfully never repeated, made people more pro-abortion, not less.

  • -14

This is not much more than a "boo outgroup" shower thought disguised as a "theory."

I, frankly, do not believe that you actually believe that voters in significant numbers were motivated by "I am in favor of fat ugly women, especially black women, having abortions, therefore I will vote in favor of candidates who promote this." I think you just wanted to write a sneering post bagging on people you hold in contempt.

We have a rule to proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be. This claim is obviously partisan and inflammatory, and your evidence is zero.

"unfounded"

Are we looking at more unfounded assertions that an election was stolen if Masto wins?

There's nothing in that article that suggests assertions of fraud. It's normal for elections with a very slim margin of victory to do a recount. Some places even have an automatic recount trigger if the margin is lower than a chosen threshold.

Given that elections in Nevada are an obvious shitshow, I wouldn’t call any accusation which fits the observed events ‘unfounded’. I mean, sure, poorly evidenced, conspiracy theory, etc are very likely applicable and useful terms.

And obviously yes. When either party loses a close(or even not so close) election they claim the other party stole it. Usually as a postulate evidenced more with thought experiments and hypotheticals than records and confirmed events. Whether it’s democrats claiming voter suppression or republicans crying fraud this is probably not good for democracy.

Of course, obviously the best course of action for everyone is to go to pre-2020 voting laws. If I had my way it would be ‘ok, Covid is over, voting laws are officially restored to what they were Jan 1 2020.’ And then we would know who our senators from Arizona and Nevada are. Seriously these states used to be competent at counting votes, and they clearly have not figured out the universal mail in thing yet.

I doubt there's any going back to all day-of voting. Even Florida offers early voting that's flexible to anywhere in your county, run by the county itself, sometimes every day for 10 days before the election.

This nickname is potentially very confusing, and I'm gonna ask you to rename your account; you can find an option to change it in the "Settings" page.

Did the GOP hurt their own election chances by downplaying COVID?

This tweet claims that Lauren Boebert may lose her race by less than 100 votes, in a district with over 2,500 covid deaths. While one can certainly argue over the effectiveness of various measures, I think a combination of masking, distancing, and (of course) vaccinating could easily be worth plus or minus 8% deaths (the vote is roughly evenly split, so if there would otherwise be about 1250 dead from each group, then we have 100/1250 = about 8%). And the elderly, who were disproportionately affected by COVID, tend to vote Republican.

Note, the original tweet is now out of date; https://elections.denverpost.com/ has Boebert ahead by just over 1,000 votes. The closest House race where the Dem is currently ahead, coincidentally also in CO, unfortunately does not appear in https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/coviduscongress because it's a new district (CO 8). CA District 13 is also very close, with the Republican ahead by 267 (according to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/10/us/elections/results-house-seats-elections-congress.html, at time of writing) in a district with 945 covid deaths. If this race does flip, it could easily be by just a few hundred votes (currently only 58% counted though).

Another question: did they hurt their election chances by overplaying the trans issue?

Sure, I don't have anything to go for this one expect one tweet by an obviously hostile source, but still, it seems like an issue where a lot of normies are just going to be befuzzled by why this sort of a thing would even be worth an ad, or two.

I don't see how. Castrating children isn't that popular of a position (yet), so that why republicans mention it, and why democrats avoid it by sweeping under the "healthcare" umbrella.

FWIW, I don't think I saw a single mention of the topic in the Fetterman/Oz ad festival, or in any of Shapiros ads (I don't think Mastriano ever ran any at all).

I thought you were going to say the Republicans hurt their chances because the "correct" take was to lean in hard to Covid panic and authoritarianism.

Had Trump gone all-in on Covid, the battle lines would have drawn up differently. Democrats, not Republicans, would be Covid skeptics. Early in the pandemic this was indeed the case, with the various cringey "hug an Asian" messaging being sent out by the Democrats. But then Trump chose his side, and the Democrats by necessity chose the other.

This was by far the largest mistake of Trump's career. Had he chosen Covid maximalism, he'd still be President. People still wouldn't like him - but they'd praise his Covid leadership. Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded, the politically savvy move would have been to play into the fear. Trump failed to read the room. And he lost the Presidency because of it.

Early in the pandemic this was indeed the case, with the various cringey "hug an Asian" messaging being sent out by the Democrats.

I don't remember this at all in my neck of the woods (surrounded by extreme leftists). Yes, leftists were afraid that COVID would inflame anti Asian hatred, but they also thought COVID was going to be a complete disaster early on. I just remember everyone already coming to the forgone conclusion that Trump had mishandled everything by not taking COVID seriously enough, as early as mid March 2020, and that we all need to lock down everything and that COVID was essentially the apocalypse.

Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022.

Were they? My recollection of summer of 2021 was that most people believed that the vaccines were effective.

No. I don't think either the hard-line liberal or conservative stances on Covid were correct, and the politicization of the topic very likely cost us a great deal of lives and money and freedom.

I have no idea what would have happened if he had embraced the original battle lines on covid, but I think he wouldn't be president any way. He was never that popular if you look at 2016 election results, and I think regardless of policy covid would have had negative economic effects that would hurt him because that's how people vote. That's just my opinion, though, I don't claim much certainty.

You need to go back to being a moron. I wouldn’t vote for a take COVID seriously person and this seems like a troll posts.

  • -10

What's with the aggressive response? Agree or disagree, I don't see any reason to fling heated insults like that. Chill.

This is uncalled for. Do not be antagonistic like this.

Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded

This is due to the media hyping it up. If Trump had been a Covid maximalist, the media would've been on the other side.

Let's assume this is true - I can absolutely, without a doubt, unequivocally tell you that I would refuse to vote for anyone that has Takes Covid Seriously as a brand. I'm far from alone among people who voted Republican in 2022. If Covid did kill a bunch of Republicans, it may still have been more electorally costly to piss off the people that are voting for you precisely because you aren't a mask enthusiast.

Personally, I would do my best to avoid any voting for candidates that have either "takes covid seriously" or "covid is a nothingburger" as a brand. I think you can easily strike a balance between "extreme lockdowns are stupid and tyrannical" and "yeah you should get the vaccine and not do dangerous things."

Pray tell what are dangerous things? Please articulate what you mean as opposed to hint at what you mean.

Like, going to large superspreader events before vaccines are available? What's the confusion, are you just pretending not to know how covid spreads?

Getting covid means having a bad cold for a very, very large fraction of the public, it also grants some immunity to that strain and perhaps others.

To most people, that isn’t dangerous. I think your concept of risk is off quite a bit.

Pre-vaccine, for someone around 55, which is probably the age of many GOP voters, getting COVID gives 50% higher risk of death than your yearly average risk. By 65 it appears to be several times your yearly risk, and for comparison, about 10 times the per-jump death risk of BASE jumping. Certainly something you can decide to do, but doesn't sound like something that you want to encourage your voting base to do if your race is close.

That makes it sound high. But what is the average risk of death? Also what is the increased risk of death of sitting around doing nothing?

Finally what superspreader events were rural Coloradans doing?

  • But what is the average risk of death? Also what is the increased risk of death of sitting around doing nothing?

Are these rhetorical questions, or did you assert that covid "isn't dangerous" without knowing any relevant data?

More comments

This was a trollish take back in the spring of 2020 when twitter blue-checks were suggesting with barely concealed glee that Republican's refusal to mask up, cancel grandma's funeral, bend the knee to saint Fauci, etc... was going to result in mass deaths and the depopulation of the red states.

It's an even more trollish take now, given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.

A lot of people might have been gleeful. I was not one of them; I'm asking a serious question because it seems like, potentially, a pretty big own goal to encourage your constituents to do things that are fairly risky. If a lot of people ended up with felony convictions because the Dems encouraged them to riot, for example, that would also be a pretty big own goal.

given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.

I'm not really sure how either of these points are supposed to be relevant. For races that aren't very close it obviously doesn't matter, but it isn't hard to look up actual COVID deaths by congressional district and compare it to the margin. Saying "the lethality is low!" is completely irrelevant. And you can oppose lockdowns without telling people COVID is just the flu (which isn't even a nontrivial risk for the elderly).

Define "risky"

My point is that given that covid-19 turned out to be orders of magnitude less lethal than was initially claimed you're going to put in some work if your going to argue the GOP lost more votes to Covid deaths than it would have had it supported strict lockdowns mail in voting etc...

Orders of magnitude? Do you have anything resembling a citation for that? I saw initial estimate of maybe 1% IFR, decreasing down to a few tenths of a percent as the most vulnerable died/treatment improved. This paper from May claims anywhere from 0.5-2.5%. For covid to be "orders of magnitude less risky" than originally claimed would make it among the least-deadly viruses ever known.

you're going to put in some work if your going to argue the GOP lost more votes to Covid deaths

There's some math in the original post, did you not bother to read it?

than it would have had it supported strict lockdowns mail in voting etc...

Or, you know, not gone crazy shouting that covid was just the flu and getting sick just to own the libs.

Orders of magnitude? Do you have anything resembling a citation for that? I saw initial estimate of maybe 1% IFR, decreasing down to a few tenths of a percent

One percent getting cut to a tenth of a percent is an order of magnitude and that was before we found out that rates of infection may have actually been much higher than previously thought making the disease that much less lethal.

If that article is correct, with about 6.6M deaths and world population of 8 billion, then the IFR is still over 0.1%, within 1 order of magnitude of the original estimates.

A naive rate calculation 6.6 million deaths in a population of 7.8 billion yields an IFR of 0.084%, and that's assuming that 100% of those 6.6 million deaths were actually caused by covid and not "died by other causes while infected with covid". Meanwhile at the height of the lockdown hysteria government officials were speculating that the IFR might be as high as 3%, but that was quietly memory-holed when it came out that that particular estimate was based solely on data from the state of New York where some bright spark had decided that the best place to house patients with a respiratory disease would be in public nursing homes.

Accordingly I stand by my initial statement.

A naive rate calculation 6.6 million deaths in a population of 7.8 billion yields an IFR of 0.084%

That's not an IFR. Your source claimed about 60% of the world may have been infected, so the IFR would be 6.6 million / (7.8*0.6) = 0.14%.

that's assuming that 100% of those 6.6 million deaths were actually caused by covid and not "died by other causes while infected with covid".

It's also assuming that there weren't deaths caused by covid which were missed. This blog post, which I thought was posted here or on the subreddit at some point, finds that total excess deaths usually substantially exceed official COVID deaths, although there's no way to know if that's because of missed COVID deaths or because of other factors, such as the spike in traffic fatalities in the US. (Unfortunately the post itself skips this point and just calls the difference a "fudge factor.")

You have compared the absolute highest IFR I've seen for Covid (actually I'm not sure I've ever seen 3% claimed; this paper gives estimates of over 5%, but that's for the case fatality rate, and so is much higher where there are more uncaught cases; the lower end 0.15%, almost identical to the 0.14% I gave above, is probably closer to the IFR, but I can't find any similar papers attempting to calculate IFR directly with early data), which also was not the "initial" estimate since NY didn't have a big wave until at least 6 months after it started in China and which you also seem to agree was an anomaly that was retracted, and comparing to an IFR that is substantially lower than even what your own source would support. Even with the absolute highest gap one can possibly construct, misleadingly so in fact, you can only muster log_10(35) = 1.54 orders of magnitude, and even that includes real changes to the IFR over time (improved treatment, most vulnerable people dying first--according to this paper, IFR might have dropped by around 1/3 in the last 9 months of 2020).

Given that Sweden has the lowest post-2020 excess mortality of any OECD country, the Republicans might have a (very slight) advantage in the long term due to fewer lockdowns. Naturally, the death rates of Republicans are going to look worse than Democrats in general due to higher age, more obesity, and other cultural factors. But I really doubt Covid lockdown policy in red states made much of a dent, and may have actually increased the number of living Republicans as opposed to the counterfactual.

The bit about Covid being "just the flu" is not something that most Republicans supported. Trump famously encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated and even urged earlier adoption of the vaccines than the FDA was willing to grant him.

The bigger differences between the parties had to do with masking policy and lockdown policy, and I think you'd be hard pressed to show that these affected mortality rates in the direction you think they do.

Given that Sweden has the lowest post-2020 excess mortality of any OECD country, the Republicans might have a (very slight) advantage in the long term due to fewer lockdowns... But I really doubt Covid lockdown policy in red states made much of a dent, and may have actually increased the number of living Republicans as opposed to the counterfactual.

A few states like California and Florida got lots of attention, but I seem to recall that mid-pandemic, there wasn't actually a very big correlation between state party control and covid policies.

I didn't say that GOP state politics had a big impact. I said (or at least, tried to say) that individual behavior, which is much more tightly correlated with individual political beliefs and voting, had an effect. Not a large one, but maybe similar in size to the vote difference in some races.

Trump personally encouraged vaccines, and he got booed for it. This isn't his fault (as far as I can tell), and I didn't say it was Trump's fault; but the correlation is clearly there and my hypothesis is that tweets like this contributed to some of those 2,500 deaths in her district.

A point I haven't seen at all in this forum is the impact of gerrymandering.

Let X = (Republican votes) / (Republican votes + Democrat votes)

Let Y = % of House seats for Republicans

After an essentially tied election in 2000, Y averaged* 0.6pp higher than X during the 2000s.

After a historic Republican victory in 2010, Y averaged 3.8pp higher than X during the 2010s.

After a medium Democratic victory in 2020, Y is (based on this election so far) 1.5pp lower than X.

During the 2000s and 2010s, X was only lower than Y once: during the historic 2008 Democratic victory, which, iirc, overwhelmed gerrymandering defenses such that it made them counterproductive. As a result, Democrats were advantaged a whopping 3.5pp during that election.

tl;dr - it looks like Republicans successfully gerrymandered the 2010s and gained about 17 seats each election in the House as a result. Based on this election, it looks like gerrymandering has shifted this advantage to Democrats and will give them about 8 seats each election during the 2020s.

[ /u/zeke5123 you may be interested in this regarding republican under/over-performance relative to the popular vote ]

*I'm using the median here

It is an interesting dynamic and not really discussed.

Part of it may also reflect an incorrect census (the census screw up cost southern states some additional districts) and post census migration by red to red states like Florida.

Interesting, but can we ascribe this all to gerrymandering?

The capped size of the House means a rep from Rhode Island represents half as many people as one from Montana. It's not as obviously politics-aligned as the Senate, but could still have some distortion of the popular vote ratio. Likewise, the floor of one seat per state constitutes a small Republican bias due to the redness of more rural states. I think there might also be room for a shifting bias due to purple states--whichever way they fall decides how these distortions are aligned.

You can't just compare the % of votes and % of senators representatives and say any discrepancy is gerrymandering. Republicans are more efficiently spread to low population states which have more reps per person. The advantage isn't as significant as it is in the senate, but people in Wyoming need ~500k per representative, whereas California needs closer to 750k per rep.

Democrats did indeed benefit from congressional map changes, but the change was modest and mostly came at the expense of competitive districts instead of R leaning ones.

I didn't. I compared % of votes to % of representatives in the house... not the senate

That was a typo on my part, the rest of my post stands.

It's way too early to make this computation. The national popular vote always trends Democratic in the weeks after election day, mainly because California has a lot of votes that they count slowly and they tend to be heavily Democratic, but also just more densely populated areas in general tend to count slower and tend to be more Democratic.

I'm certainly interested in these numbers, but come back in a few weeks to a month after the results are certified to do any kind of meaningful analysis on vote counts or turnout.

(I've seen a lot of talk on the left about how the Democrats would be holding the House if Florida and a couple other states hadn't been illegally gerrymandered (just passing along the Culture War vibes, I haven't looked into these claims in detail). Florida counts quickly, so it's possible there's enough data to do this analysis at the state level there.)

GPT-3 was only trained on data up until 2021. I asked for its opinion about the elections.

Which houses will the Democrats control after the 2022 midterms?

After the 2022 midterms, the Democrats are projected to control the House of Representatives.

What about the Senate?

The Democrats are also projected to control the Senate after the 2022 midterms.

What if inflation ends up being worse than projected?

If inflation ends up being worse than projected, the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates. This could lead to higher mortgage rates and a decrease in home values.

How would this affect the midterms?

If inflation is worse than expected, it could hurt the economy and the Democrats' chances in the midterms.

If inflation happens, what is your prediction for the midterms?

The Democrats are still projected to win the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, even if inflation is worse than expected.

What if I told you that the Republicans win the House in 2022?

If the Republicans were to win the House in the 2022 midterms, it would be a major upset. The Democrats are projected to win the House by a wide margin.

I am from the future. The Republicans win the House. Are you surprised?

No, I am not surprised.

But you just said that you predicted the Democrats will win.

It is still early and anything can happen between now and the election.

As you can see, the Republicans pulled off a "major" upset by winning the House, according to training data from 2021. Perhaps the depiction of "Trumpty Dumpty" is a bit overstated, and perhaps is best viewed as another lame attempt by elites to get rid of their hated enemy, Trump. In fact, their extreme eagerness on this point makes me even more enthusiastic about the prospects of a disillusioned Trump's second term.

Love it. I've played around with GPT-3 a little bit and it's pretty easy to get it to say anything you want by phrasing the questions in a certain way.

That said, I'm impressed with GPT-3's human-level ability to rationalize when caught in an obvious contradiction.

magic-8ball.com has been trained on extensive data, running back to 2006. I asked for its opinions on the elections.

Will democrats control the house in 2022?

You may rely on it.

Will democrats control the Senate in 2022?

Yes definitely.

Will the democrats still win the midterms even if inflation is higher than expected?

Better not tell you now.

I'm from the future. Is it a major upset that the republicans won the house in 2022?

Concentrate and ask again.

I think you're onto something here.

magic-8ball.com has been trained on extensive data, running back to 2006. I asked for its opinions on the elections.

Will democrats control the house in 2022?

You may rely on it.

Will democrats control the Senate in 2022?

Yes definitely.

Will the democrats still win the midterms even if inflation is higher than expected?

Better not tell you now.

I'm from the future. Is it a major upset that the republicans won the house in 2022?

Concentrate and ask again.

I think you're onto something here.

It's important to note that "magic8balls.org" and similar online tools are usually just for entertainment purposes and not based on any actual predictive abilities or real data.

So I don’t know if it is right, but it seems like in the national house overall the republicans are up 6% (not sure if the abc data I looked at awhile ago was updated properly). That is actually pretty good.

Is the conventional wisdom wrong? Perhaps the republicans managed to lose a lot of very tight races which made the overall margin look unimpressive even if the Dems lost pretty heavily?

The margin will shrink as California fills in more but does seem like republicans will still have a sizable lead.

I think most people are comparing this change to the change in other past mid term elections and compared with those it looks pretty small.

Agreed. The outcome was small. But if you had asked the Republicans pre election +6 nationally, they would’ve assumed a red wave. It’s interesting despite crushing overall the wave didn’t occur.

With Biden having low approval ratings, rampant inflation and a historical tendency to punish the incumbent in the midterms, the failure of the GOP to win back the senate is pretty stunning to me. It suggests that the GOP message just isn't popular and perhaps Trumpism, for a lack of a better word, is the only viable option as mainstream Reaganism (favored by party elites) is rejected by voters.

That’s assuming it was Republican voters who didn’t vote, and not Cobra Kai shenanigans.

I mean, the GOP also made terrible personnel decisions in large part due to Trump.

It seems to me that any analysis of the GOP's underperformance has to account for the fact that in Texas and Florida, the GOP overperformed. Partly this is due to somewhat better candidate decisions(eg no nominating Dr Oz in competitive races), partly due to competent local parties, partly due to electorates that just aren't that friendly to democrats to begin with. We clearly can't say it was due to the GOP being more moderate there or due to the GOP not nominating elections deniers(Ken Paxton won reelection by 14 points, after all, handily beating out the top of the ticket).

I really am struggling to make sense of this election. Every poll had the country deeply on the wrong track. Every poll by a large margin had economics as the number 1 issue with republicans crushing in that category. There wasn’t really anything for the Dems here.

Yet they seem to be doing very well relatively speaking.

I honestly think VBM has broken the system.

I haven't seen Ukraine mentioned often. I think that people don't want fundamental change during a war. I don't believe the Republicans would have changed much, but the perception was there.

Also, despite all the problems, people haven't completely abandoned the experts, and the experts were very clear about their preferred outcome and the values it would represent. People have been re-educated by the expert apparatus since Trump's victory, and I don't think they're ready to give up on everything they've learned to respect and identify with even if the flaws have become evident to them.

Looks to me like a vote for order during uncertain times. I don't think this means that the anger isn't there and growing, just that people don't feel comfortable walking away in a highly public manner from what they have at the present time.

You seem to be misunderstanding my point. My point is what people are saying is their priorities (which makes sense with how humans have operated) and who they are saying they trust about that issue (which also makes sense) is very different from who they appear to be voting for. That’s…just weird and hard to sense of.

Some fella blames candidate quality:

To me, the most interesting dimension of the poll: Dems running an avg of 8 points ahead of Senate control preference (R+4 on average). Illustrates key dynamic of the race -- a favorable environment for Rs v. bad candidates -- and helps square with the national picture

The poll results in question (Oct. 2022 Times/Siena): percentage-wise, "which party should control the senate" is more Republican, but "which candidate am I voting for in my election" is more Democratic.

Not saying that's the explanation, but it's an explanation.

But the candidate quality ignores the democrat candidate. I’m not saying Oz was a great candidate but Fetterman can’t complete sentences in a stressful environment.

Hey, I can't complete sentences in a stressful environment either. :)

Oz was also an obvious carpetbagger, though.

I think what's going on is that the villainization of Republicans is so pervasive across schools, government, and media both institutional and social, you have a large class of people who are not politically engaged and whose impressions are formed only by the cultural miasma of "Republicans are villains". The DNC has figured out how to get these people to vote anyways.

I'm pessimistic that there's any real counter to this. Because it is a strategy that relies on politically disengaged and low-information voters, it's basically immune to actual issues or platforms. It's about in-group and out-group, good guys and bad guys, high-status and low-status. The institutional and cultural capture has been a decades-long process and the storyline so firmly entrenched, it's probably no more reversible than Luke Skywalker being the good guy and Darth Vader being the bad guy.

Maybe. I guess you combine that with VBM?

It just seems odd — the country is in a terrible spot. Who votes for the incumbent?

It's my observation that German media uncritically accept and promote the framing of democrats as good and republicans as bad, and this has been ongoing at least since the Clinton presidency.

It's the same in Finland. This is sometimes mentioned as a negative by Finnish right-wingers (of course a ypical Finnish center-rightist would reflexively support Democrats, too.)

Then again, why not? The Finnish media is certainly extremely negative on Putin - has been for his entire career, but particularly now. This is extremely uncontroversial, and the reasons are obvious; Putin's policies cause dangers to Finland, and there's no particular demand for neutrality in those situations.

GOP's policies don't cause a direct danger to Finland, but it's still a case where there are two parties, one of which at least states openly its internationalist principles and generally supports a cordial relationship with Europe, the other frequently speaking about Europe and the European systems, or at least a great subset of them, in hostile tones, and particularly during Trump's era committed to an "our country comes first, the rest take the hindmost" line. That's their right, of course, but in such a situation one might also expect that these two parties are indeed handled differently in the European medias, with less propensity for neutrality.

Of course the problem is that it becomes harder to understand the GOP perspective, but at least the Finnish media has a regular "Trump whisperer" for this purpose, a guy who wrote several (fairly good!) Finnish-language studies about the US religious right and ended up sympathizing the movement himself. The same guy made a completely misjudged "red wave" prediction for these elections, though, so we'll see how long his expertise continues to be used.

You could easily go the opposite way - "the Trump message and trumpism isn't popular, the most trumpy candidates mostly lost, masters and kent lost, the only viable option for the gop is to reject trump". Idk about either, but why does it lean 'more trump' instead of 'less'?

I'm really hoping that the Republican wave coming our way (I have some positions on Republicans winning both the House and the Senate) will cool the fire on leftwing extremism. We need a de-escalation in this country and it's never going to happen while left-aligned people continue to belabor their most noxious positions.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

There are two different types of political extremism, I think. A Republican wave would make the leftists desperate and more extreme outside power structures (to the extent that they even exist outside those). The opposite would make them arrogant and more extreme within them. The only things that would deescalate their extremism in the long run would be federal student debt cancellation, the nationalization of healthcare, a federal minimum wage and so on.

I personally think it is entirely within the power of the mainstream democrat/left wing to reign in their extremists (excepting that last 1-3% of real hardcore who will just lash out regardless) with a little bit of carrot and stick (emphasis on stick) but there's seemingly very little political will to do so. Not the least because the leaders of the party are likely insulated from any impact they could cause.

It's definitely a major risk of couching your side as the 'resistance' and letting your people train in political insurgency since those tactics can be turned against you when you try to bring them back into the fold.

Something something we have to arm the moderate rebels to fight the radical ones.

(disclaimer: I have ceased to care about what the radical left or right get up to, as long as it is far away from me and my family. I live in a safe neighborhood in a safe town)

So the only way to prevent extremism is to give the Democrat extremists exactly what they want?

Would you buy "the only way to prevent abortion extremism is to ban abortions, giving them what they want"

Theoretically it's always possible to simply repress the extremist opposition. But that is not a case of deescalation.

Right up there with, "if you're upset about illegal immigration, then just make immigration legal!" retorts. No, I actually want to win on this issue, it's not a mere technicality or question of appropriate paperwork.

A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.

Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.

compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

Bill Clinton (D), whose laws today are derided by dems as being too racist, ie too rightist. Yet it is the Republicans whom the media accuses of moving away from the centre.

Weird compromise where even if one party wholly adopted the positions of the other, it would still be insufficient.

You appear to have missed the word "compromise", and have concluded that the legislation in an era with a Democrat president perfectly reflected the policy positions of the Democrats regardless of who held the legislature.

Was the error founded in ignorance or partisanship? Either way, you're part of today'a political problem.

Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.

About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.

Was military intervention right-coded in the Clinton era? I wasn't politically engaged then but I know in the West Wing "Republicans want to have the biggest army and never send it anywhere" was presented as a commonplace joke.

I'd be thrilled with a few years of gridlock. For legislation, "better than nothing" is a high standard.

Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era?

The first one.

Both parties have learned that bipartisanship is bad because it's better to have no wins than give your opponents a shared win.

Doubt it. It will just make the left more entrenched in their views, like after 2016

No, democrats won’t de escalate, I mean they decided to run on abortion up to birth with a side of gun control in Texas of all places while their candidate was busily moderating his positions on energy and taxes. Everything we know about these people suggests they’d rather lose than moderate.

I dunno, independently of what your positions on those issues are, do you think those are the ones hurting the Dems at the moment?

Of course I'm just an outside observer, but insofar as I've seen - apart from inflation and general economy, which are a whole other category - the culture war issue where the Dems have moderated a lot from two years ago is crime, ie. they're not talking about defunding the police and indeed seem to be explicitly repudiating such stances.

I think that an unwillingness to move towards the center on those issues is a major reason for democrats' perception as being socially extreme, yes.

This is in Texas specifically though?

Maybe they're going for the "throw yourself against the wall enough times and it'll break eventually" tactic?

I don't see your inference that a republican victory will de-escalate things. The last time republicans won on populism, partially on the back of "basket of deplorables" , left extremism (if that's even the right word) kicked into overdrive. The lesson learned in 2016 — based on IRL conversations, not just Twitter — was that the country is shockingly still full of dangerous racists who need to be suppressed. I predict a similar reaction if Trump-backed candidates outperform expectations.

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".

Yes, the "normal" where [Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected. Even in 2018 still tarred with that brush, before he became "the only good Republican" for being anti-Trump. That "normal". For a certain section of the Democrat side (and this is based on what I see online, so that is going to be both the most exaggerated and the smallest), there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

there is no acceptable Republican because Republicanism is evil. Get rid of the populists, and the moderates left are next for the "this guy is the worst person since Hitler" rhetoric. The only acceptable outcome is a single-party state, where the Democrats are in control forever, and then the real work of reform and restructuring can happen.

I don't think this is exactly an inaccurate view of a significant segment of the left, but I think it oversells how unified the Democrats are. There's a good amount of messaging that the Democrats are an awkward alliance of the left and center-left (erm, whatever those terms mean) that is held together by defending from the evil Republicans that want to destroy elections and ban contraception, and if the Republicans were out of the way, they could hold elections on actual policy, not whether or not to elect the evil(TM) candidate. Although I guess you may be saying that no matter how far the Overton Window moves left, the right side (even if they're currently part of the Democratic Party) will always get called an evil that must be defended from as opposed to a legitimate alternative to be discussed on merits.

Mitt Romney was a dangerous theocrat who was going to implement the Handmaid's Tale if elected.

Admittedly, I haven't read past the Wikipedia summary, but it certainly sounds like Mitt Romney's position on abortion has changed a lot in the past several years:

In a 1994 debate with Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney said: "[...] I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign." Romney had endorsed the Freedom of Choice Act which would define legal access to abortion as a federal law even if Roe is overturned.

[...]

In 2020, Mitt Romney signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

(He made other anti-Roe comments in the intervening years according to that article; I'm just trying to stick to minimal interpretation of his comments and the published amicus brief just seemed like the most clear-cut one.)

This does make me wonder: for a few years now, or at least dating back to like 2018 or so, some people in this sphere were saying that we're about to see a political re-alignment of the parties. What would it look like? Democrats switching sides to R and trying to appeal to voters they may have once spurned, out of sheer pragmatism?

That was my thinking in 2016. It didn't work then, and I don't expect it to work now. This stuff has reversed in the past, but the previous reversals, to my understanding, involved economic prosperity that got everyone too busy making money to worry about ideology. I'm not sure we've got another of those coming, and there's reason to worry that this time might be different in any case. Still, if you're looking for hope, that's where I'd look for it.

It seems like modern history has been something of an anomaly where we have had back to back revolutionary gains in productivity. Prior to the industrial revolution, there were long periods of marginal gains punctuated by smaller revolutions such as the printing press. Unless AI or some new energy source can come along and make us more productive I fully expect us to slide back into tribalism.

I hoped for that in 2016, but nobody seemed interested in reflection then. Six years of TDS later, do you have a reason to believe that this time will be any better?

I believe a lot of issues are tied up with Trump specifically, rather than policy positions.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

If Trump announces that he isn't running and that he is endorsing someone else then I think tempers can cool down.

If trump announces that he is running again (and possibly winning) we're in for more extremism from both sides.

What do you see as an extremist position that is currently being pushed by Republicans or that you expect to be pushed if they are in power?

My expectation is that Trump will take legitimate concerns, lie about them, fail to do anything about them and then rile everyone up, eagerly helped by media and other Democrat aligned businesses.

That sounds more lame than extremist, which is pretty much what I expect as well. Whether a literal border wall is a good idea or not, it's not an extreme policy, and I am not inclined to concede the point that it is simply because people react histrionically to Trump.

In the main CW thread, someone asked for predictions of electoral outcomes.

I'd now like to ask for predictions of financial markets, pending electoral outcomes. How do you think the stock market will respond if the GOP sweeps Congress or if Dems hold onto one or both chambers? And have you changed your investment portfolio in any way to reflect your thesis?

My prediction:

If GOP sweeps, markets rally 3% by EOD Wed. Narrow margins (e.g., 51 seat Senate) will result in 1-2%, whereas larger margins (say, 53 seats) yield 4+%.

If GOP retakes the House only, markets decline by 2%. If Dems retain both chambers, markets decline 4%.

Meanwhile, I expect markets tomorrow to end the day up 1% or so, perhaps in anticipation of a narrow GOP sweep.

The reason for my prediction is mainly that the public generally sees the GOP as being better at handling the economy than the Dems. Institutional investors may or may not agree with that assessment, but I expect retail will be bullish with a GOP win. Energy stocks will rally disproportionately given the GOP is far more friendly to domestic oil production and will not consent to windfall taxes, though green stocks will decline. Pharma should go up as Congress will be less likely to "negotiate" drug prices etc. But stocks in general should go up because the odds of corporate tax rate hikes will fall to near zero. While federal regulatory agencies will still be run by Biden's appointees, Congressional oversight will likely result in more muted policy issuances.

I'm long on stocks and have not made any portfolio adjustments as a direct result of the upcoming election.

Markets have now closed. Revisiting my predictions:

On election day, I predicted markets ending up 1%; S&P 500 increased by 0.3% in real life.

The day after, I predicted 2% decline if the GOP retakes the House only*, and indeed S&P 500 declined by 2.1% today.

*Elections aren't called yet, but PredictIt has GOP House and Dem Senate at 70%, followed by GOP sweep at 24% and then Dem retain both chambers at 14% (not adding up to 100% because PredictIt).

Now I'll be the first to admit that there are a billion confounding variables, including the mess with cryptos and FTX, but I'll still chalk this up mostly to a W because it's impossible to account for everything in the markets!

The data shows neither party is better or worse. Both support lots of government spending, which is good for the private sector . Healthcare stocks are a good investment regardless, owing to the tendency of Americans to get fatter and older ,which means more $ for healthcare paid for employer-sponsored coverage. Thus, healthcare stocks, especially health insurers, benefit both from two longstanding trends: corporations having record profits (some of which goes into health insurance) and Americans getting older and unhealthier , as well as more elective/unnecessary procedures. I don't see any of these trends changing.

The other day, the Fed raised interest rates and Jerome Powell made a statement that the market interpreted as him suggesting that he was going to loosen monetary policy so it shot straight up. Then about an hour later, he clarified that their interpretation was wrong and the market crashed hard. Here's the best advice you can get on predicting how the market will react to news.

I think the stock market has priced in results close to Nate Silver's final predictions (likely GOP house win, toss-up Senate). I think a surprise Dem hold of the house is positive for markets because it avoids tail risks associated with a government shutdown and/or debt ceiling crisis. Given a GOP house, Senate control doesn't matter that much to the things markets care about - legislation is gridlocked anyway because Biden has a veto, the Deep State can run the executive branch even if people can't get confirmed, and there are no Fed Governors with terms expiring during the next Congress. So I predict no obvious market response as long as the GOP do take the house.

I don't pretend to understand the electoral details, but PredictIt prices for Republicans taking the senate seem to have dipped from 82¢ to 66¢ in the past three hours. (See the 24h tab.) So the early results are not as red as expected, or maybe bettors are reacting to Maricopa county situation.

EDIT: Down to 38¢ as of 11:13 EST. Obviously still a fluid situation, but it's looking like the DNC's strategy of drumming on abortion and calling their enemies semi-fascists basically worked.

This seems to be the biggest news from early voting, besides Florida seeing an overwhelming GOP victory.

Betting market odds for Democrat control of the Senate went from roughly 20% to roughly 40% in a few hours. The surge seems to have paused or plateaued, and the GOP is still favored to win control of the Senate, but it's definitely worth paying attention to. Tonight promises to be a nail-biter.

This is normal for PredictIt. If you use the site a lot you'll notice the heavy Red bias before the mass of normie users fill up the volume to something more realistic right before the election starts.

Sounds like money to be made

I made 1.75x on Fetterman last night. Feeling pretty good.

My guess is we get a call from Ralston tonight if the batches counted today are on trend with the past.

Failing that, I'm sure they can find a few more.

What a fucking stupid way to run an election.

  • -13

This comment got quite a few reports, the downvotes say a similar thing. This was a low effort comment that was a bit boo-outgroupish. Not bad enough to get a temp ban. Also, Your participation elsewhere in this thread was better. Please have more comments like that and fewer like the one I am responding to.

Failing that, I'm sure they can find a few more.

Arizona requires all ballots to be received by election day (unlike a small number of states which only require them to be postmarked by election day), so they have publicly announced exactly how many more ballots there are to count (538 has been making comments about what percentage of the remaining votes would need to go to which candidate for them to win). (Which may be more than the number of votes in the remaining races in the case of undervotes, spoiled ballots, or ballots that otherwise fail the verification process.)

I'm not sure exactly how their process works and if they have finished examining all of the outer envelopes, but by now I would expect them to have done so, in which case they also would have published a list of exactly whose ballots they have (and the number of the names on that list would be an upper bound for the number valid ballots in the final count).

The Laxalt race is Nevada, not Arizona.

Ah, my mistake. Apparently Nevada does allow ballots to be received (but not postmarked) after Election Day, up until the Saturday after. I would expect each newly received group of ballots would be associated with a list of voters whose names are on the ballots, but I don't know how precisely Nevada actually updates their voter lists. Hourly reports are normal during Election Day since they're important for campaign's day-of get-out-the-vote efforts (although this likely varies state-to-state), but they might not report as precisely for partway through mail-in ballot counting. (The obvious thing to do if you have a collection of suspiciously sourced ballots is to survey a random sample of the voters and ask them if they actually submitted a ballot, but this works better if you can better narrow down the voters to survey.)

So what do you guys think was up with trumps big announcement tonight? The music started playing, he looked off in the distance in contemplation for an uncomfortable minute, made a pretty good soliloquy speech then announced that he will make a big announcement at Mar Lago on the 15th. Stating that he did not want to detract from the candidates running for election tomorrow.

  • Did he change his mind on a run for presidency at the last minute?

  • Did he personally change his mind last minute to move his presidential announcement?

  • Was he told to stand down by someone in the party?

  • Was this all some scripted thing to get the MAGA vote for tomorrow?

I think it must have been something last minute because making a half-ass announcement like that is burning some credibility, as well as a wasted opportunity to be the first to maneuver and scare off his political rivals in the GOP. I'm really confused by the political strategy for this blown announcement thing.

All my Red Team friends are praying he's announcing he will back down and endorse DeSantis. Maybe a little too optimistic.

I think it must have been something last minute because making a half-ass announcement like that is burning some credibility, as well as a wasted opportunity to be the first to maneuver and scare off his political rivals in the GOP.

I'm not so sure. There's a reason that "two more weeks" is a flippant meme used frequently against MAGA people, Q believers, and low-information dissident rightists. The ecosystem of grifters that has sprung up around these people is practically always promising some big revelation ("trust the plan," "tick tock," "release the kraken," etc.) and it never fails to reel in and rile up the true believers and hardcore partisans.

This just seems like more Trump showmanship:

"Coming straight to your living room this November... an exclusive sneak peak of The Trump Saga, Part 3... The enemies of America and Freedom shall tremble... Libs shall get owned... Mysteries shall be revealed... Tuesday, November 15th...at 8 PM Central... America Shall Be Made Great Again... Only on Truth Social."

People eat this stuff up.

Trump was never going to announce his run at a random rally in Ohio.

People talk, still, about the moment that he came down the escalator in trump tower. Of course he’s going to make a huge show of his announcement by doing it at mar a lago.

I know this is off-topic for an election thread, but what happened to all the "Trump is going to jail for sure this time" due to the top-secret documents he took without permission investigation? That seems to have quietly gone nowhere, like all the impeachment enthusiasm.

Is he going to be arrested? Or was this just more of the same?

The /r/politics consensus is pretty much that Trump obviously deserves to go to prison, but nothing will happen to him because he's rich / Democrats are too scared of the Republican backlash to do the right thing.

(Other replies capture the facts on the ground; I'm talking about the feelings from the anti-Trump side of the Culture War.)

I don't think anyone who should be taken seriously is saying that Trump will go to jail for the documents. They're saying that he might be indicted and convicted. That doesn't mean jailtime.

Trump going to jail seems unlikely, but investigating and prosecuting can take a long time, so if he were to be it taking this long isn't that much evidence against

Not to mention that the DoJ won't do an indictment of a political figure within like 90 days of an election.

I know this is off-topic for an election thread, but what happened to all the "Trump is going to jail for sure this time" due to the top-secret documents he took without permission investigation? That seems to have quietly gone nowhere, like all the impeachment enthusiasm.

Is he going to be arrested? Or was this just more of the same?

Good question.

Who is Donald Trump, and what was all this grand show that began in 2015 about?

There are three possible explanations.

1/ Donald Trump is the most evil man alive, new Hitler who wanted to destroy our precious democracy and bring back thousand years old reich. Fortunately, he was thwarted and stopped by brave and vigilant people of color.

2/ Donald Trump is the greatest hero alive, new Jesus who wanted to save America from liberal pedophiles and make it great again. Unfortunately, he was stabbed in the back and defeated.

3/

https://i.imgur.com/P5Ow9yw.jpg

Now, look what happened after 2020: nothing for two years. Nothing at all happened to Donald Trump, his family and his properties. Some people who trusted him are tortured in prison (no one cares, least of all Trump), but Don is safe and secure as usual, he got away with everything as he always had for his whole life.

So, what explanation looks most plausible?

Is Jeffery Epstein just out of shot in that photo?

If I understand everything correctly, the whole thing is tied up in court at the moment over what was seized at Mar-A-Lago. The court-appointed special master is still reviewing everything to decide what Trump gets back as part of his personal effects and what the FBI gets to use as evidence in any criminal prosecutions that may move forward. I think once the legal minutia gets settled, the press will start reporting those decisions and it'll get headlines again.

Not everything is tied up.

The DoJ won an appeal at the 5th circuit to get the classified documents specifically.

Many people are expecting an indictment shortly after the election because of the DoJ rules proscribing indictments around an election.

Ambivalent emotions about the American election watching from abroad. Figured I'd just note them here.

I am less surprised than underwhelmed. From a distance/superficial level, the results don't seem to match what I was vaguely tracking as the polling trends, which is to say I was expecting the Republicans to do better in general, but in various places I'm not surprised they didn't since local variance and some such, and really they only needed to underperform in a few places to change the swing. Some reports that suggest the Democrats overperformed expectations makes me more inclined to think political polling is generally bad, but I am curious on what the data will show- and where the anamolous surprises are. I guess I'm trying to say I'm more surprised that Fetterman won than Oz lost, if that makes sense.

I'm not particularly curious or interested in any current allegations of -insert shenanigans here-, as much as sighing that ballot control measures appear to have been as bad as ever and so people will conflate an inability to detect with a lack of detection. Undated mail-in ballot saga in PA is probably one of those two-screens divides on whether you take fraud-control seriously. But- on the assumption that the results are legitimate I'm pegging three main reasons the Democrats only lost badly and not terribly.

(Yes, I consider losing the house meaning the Democrats lost, which it looks likely to happen even if Senate control doesn't. I mention framing below.)

1: The summer information campaign and early voting synergized

Post-Roe emotional highs and the friendly media coverage over Ukraine and summer were enough to draw in Democratic engagement were sustained long enough to translate into early voting, before the loss of narrative control let the economy dominate sentiment in the last weeks. Even if voter engagement was only in the form of 'fill out ballot now, mail-in later', engaging people outside of the final media cycles would have engaged them on much more favorable information terrain. We'll probably never know the party distribution of ballots based on time, but I'd be surprised if Democrats didn't do significantly better earlier than later.

A trade-off of this, however, is that I think this is non-repeatable/reliable per see. The denial phase of the economy is over, and I think that was far more important for enabling summer high-energy than the Democratic culture war issues themselves. Affirmative action will be unlikely to have the same kick, and have longer to dissapate. That said, people like to say COVID broke people's brains, and I'll not be surprised if the 'because of COVID I'll only do mail-in voting' demographic becomes a campaign reality, as the sort of people who would use COVID as a reason for absentee ballots at this point are probably atypical media consumers and atypical for the time they commit their votes.

2: The Democrat finger on the Trump primary candidates worked well enough (or was just lucky)

Infamously, Hillary tried to boost Trump because she thought it would support him. From various pieces I saw over the primary season, some efforts were made at that this go around, usually in trying to ease the way for them. I'm not particularly certain it was ever decisive per see as much as a finger on the scales that may not have been necessary, but the 'hope the outrageous candidate wins the primary (and maybe give them an aid),' a classic strategy, worked well enough often enough. As I said, I'm not surprised someone like Oz lost, and it only takes/took a few candidates failing to create a significant swing in the senate.

Edit after- a Washington Examiner article on 9NOV, "Democratic midterm meddling in Republican primaries worked but not perfectly" is a recount of various examples. While the editorial position is hardly lauding, it raises the point of how elevating weak candidates is an accepted strategy.

Since I still not not see a link embed button on this forum, link below

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/democratic-meddling-republican-primaries-effective

3: Media framing helped set a stage the encouraged donor/base engagement early, and changed what would be considered serious defeat

I raised above I feel the summer friendly media environment- when there was a lot less cynicism about the economy, and more rally about Ukraine/abortion/etc/ helped juice the early voter turnout via mail-in, but it also supported expectation management in ways that helped boost the Democratic prospects. I no longer have exactly when it was, but there was a point in the summer where a number of the Democratic-aligned major media pre-emptively approached the election with a winner mentality rather than what was building as a doomer mentality. I'm not in a state to really expound, except that by creating even false motivation, they were able to keep the party system working together long enough to suffice for real motivation, which kept the donor checks coming and the activits engaged instead of depressed and inactive. Losing optimism/motivation is one of the death-spirals of a campaign movement, and just delaying that would help pad the war chest, which enabled significant spending.

But, even when the narrative flipped to the more doomer perspective of a Red Wave, I think it flipped to the other extreme, such that by not being the the worst-case scenario, even a poor performance could look good by contrast to the expectation, and thus a win. At this time of writing, the sentate is still up in the air... but somehow, losing the House but keeping the Senate is framing in some areas as 'Republicans lost.' There is, indeed, an argument to be made 'you should have won this'... but I dispute that the Red Wave 'should' have been expected as a matter of course. Red Wave wasn't the 'should' from 12, 8, or even 5 months ago. The numbers bandied about a year ago that I remember were... within two-to-three senate races. We are now... within two-to-three senate races. We'll see the final numbers, and the specific reasons why where, but assuming the conclusions is still a flaw even when in false-modesty. 'We should have lost worse, but we didn't, so really we won' is a cope that's assisted by a media inclined to inaccurate extremes.

Or, to reframe- early on, a supportive media environment kept the party machine churning better than it would have with early despair. Later on, catastrophic reframing allowed a non-catastrophic defeat to be portrayed as victory.

All of this may be too early, or turn out to be wrong in hindsight, but what's a musing if not to put a prediction to look back on?

Now, I am interested- and curious- what the final demographic totals are. Various points of change in recent polling suggested white women, hispanics, and even blacks going more towards the Republicans than expected in recent weeks. If those are trends, and more importantly trends that continue, reasons that apply above may easily not be sufficient next time... especially if it is literally Biden on the ballot, rather than a lot of local-man-versus-trump-proxy.

Or maybe Trump will be on the ballot. Who knows.

Just regarding your win/lose takeaway: I think you could argue fundamentals were always "midterms with a unpopular president." What happened during the campaign never made Dem victory a wholly expected outcome that they could then lose. Against the core fundamentals, Dems were always underdogs, and it seems hard to me to see this as a Dem loss.

This is what I mean by reframing defeat. 'Better than expected' isn't the same as 'good', and it's not a metric of success. You can do better than expected but still fail. You can do better than expected, but your expectations were horribly based in the first place. It's neither proof of good performance, or good evaluation.

I agree that better than expected isn't sufficient to qualify as good. For instance, if the races happened to be extremely close but the senate went +1 Republican, that would still beat the fundamentals for Dems, so I should probably expand my point.

To regard D senate and R house as a D loss seems to be judging victory based on the ground gained. But I think there's plenty of examples, in ongoing conflicts, where merely gaining some ground isn't sufficient to claim victory. If your goals are to gain a certain amount of ground and you get some but not all, that can also be fairly framed as a defeat.

Both sides appeared to me to view gaining the Senate one victory condition, and gaining/preventing a sizable R advantage in the house as the other. Taking those as the victory conditions, the Democrats won both. The results are:

  • Republicans fail to prevent Democrats confirming more judges.

  • Rs fail to stop a potential Supreme Court confirmation.

  • Rs have a much harder time dealing with their house than if they had a larger majority, and have less of a mandate of using the house to pressure Ds

  • The R dream of a senate supermajority next cycle is extinguished.

  • The R leadership is in disarray after their kingmaker failed to produce satisfying results.

  • If the economy happens to turn around, Ds get to take a lot of credit (though also more blame if it doesn't).

D's are happy with that, R's are very much not, and historical precedence appeared to give R's the advantage. That helps clarify why winning the senate was considered a condition to claim an R victory, not just gaining some ground in the house.

Both sides appeared to me to view gaining the Senate one victory condition, and gaining/preventing a sizable R advantage in the house as the other. Taking those as the victory conditions, the Democrats won both

What do you mean? Senate control is gonna depend on Georgia runoff, which looks very hard to call -- and while the size of the R majority in the house is not yet clear, the Ds aren't takin' it AFAICT.

If team R can pull it together in Georgia, team D has just lost control of both houses -- how in the world is that a victory?

I didn't have the most precise phrasing but this is the hypothetical we were debating from OP

somehow, losing the House but keeping the Senate is framing in some areas as 'Republicans lost.'

If Ds lose the Senate I'd agree that it doesn't look like much of a victory. That said I'd bet on a D senate.

I wonder if anyone is prepping an enormous bribe for Joe Manchin.

He seems like someone who wouldn't stay bought.

At least in my county, early voting totals seem to track Election Day ones. E.g. 54.3% for Abbott early, 55.3% day-of. Even for small races like state BoE seat [REDACTED]—55.6% vs. 57.2%. This suggests that a long tail of early voters probably didn’t drive the effect.

I’m inclined to think narrative control doesn’t really explain the outcomes.

I’m inclined to think narrative control doesn’t really explain the outcomes.

To clarify, I don't think narrative control explains the outcomes, but rather narrative control explains the health of the political machine aparatus, which works to leverage other factors to explain the outcomes. It's not an allegation of direct control, but rather that it helped keep the party together.

Early voting in Texas seems to be less democratic relative to day of voting than in other states.

That being said, I would be interested in seeing data on the gap between the ultra conservatives who generally outpaced Abbott and Abbott himself for both early and day of voting- I suspect that the some number of people who voted for Sid miller but not Abbott(Given that Miller is a nationalist who’s most notable for headlining an anti mask protest with Alex Jones, they presumably abstained for the governor race or voted constitutional/libertarian rather than supporting Beto) almost all voted on Election Day.

Fraud Subthread Mosh Pit

I will listen to allegations of fraud, dismissal of potential fraud, and attempted refutation of fraud here. Show receipts to add spice.

New York Times is on the beat.

The Maricopa County shitshow: the alt-right and conspiracy boards were lighting up about Dominion vote tabulators not accepting ballots in a big Republican section of Arizona.

Detroit voters were stunned to be told they’d already voted absentee.

Some Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for errors were notified in time to cast an in-person ballot, some weren’t notified, and some were told they couldn’t cast a provisional ballot to replace it.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Maricopa county still has to count hundreds of thousands of ballots and as the article notes this is already being regarded by many republicans as likely fraud.

Maricopa leans red (34% Republican vs 30% Democrat) and was predicted to break strongly for Lake, but Lake's opponent in the election is Katie Hobb who is the current AZ Secretary of State and thus in charge of supervising the election. The oddly localized breakdown of election infrastructure in a county that is simultaneously AZ's most populous, and one where her opponent was expected to do well, has a lot people speculating about intentional sabotage.

It's not a good look.

The problem with “fraud” is that there is no individual guilty of a crime.

Take Arizona: is it fraud that the printers just happen to malfunction on the day where most republicans are actually casting their votes? And is it “fraud” when nobody knows what to do about this for a few hours? This very clearly benefitted Katie Hobbs (who conveniently is also the person in charge of elections in the state), but…she wasn’t running around messing with printers.

Who is the guilty person here?

If someone tampered with the machines, telling them via wifi, USB, modem, or floppy disk to screw up Republican ballots, or just telling the ones in high-R areas to screw up, that would be a crime.

Similarly a crime if the choice to use Sharpies instead of ballpoints was made by people who knew some of the ballots in Maricopa would be made of lesser-quality paper through which Sharpie ink soaks.

If one person did these, it’s a crime. If a cohort of people enacted distributed parts of a plan, it’s a criminal conspiracy.

Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for. Specifically, if the machines weren’t tested, if the high-quality ballot paper supplies were under-ordered, and so on.

Even if it was negligence rather than intent, the Secy of State has a lot to answer for.

Funny story there. The current Secretary of State just so happens to be running for Governor, and Maricopa county is where the bulk of her opponent's supporters reside.

Adding to this- Harris county in Texas delayed opening the polls due to incompetence, decided to keep them open late to make up for it, and then had the state Supreme Court toss out all the ballots cast after 7 pm local time.

With this being the only county where democrats outperformed their polls in the state, republicans are calling this evidence of fishy elections and I would expect another voter integrity bill giving more power to the attorney general and Secretary of State.

Yeah can easily count the ballot boxes from democrat voting areas first and then whoopsie, no time to count ballot boxes from republican areas.

Not fraud per see, but in the bag of (dirty?) tricks, I'll throw in 'supporting the primary candidates you plan to call a threat to democracy.'

This is pure strategy, though, and not election-day fraud. I view it as highly troublesome, as any sort of managed opposition strategy by incumbants is by definition state-meddling in opposition parties, but this is a broader tension between political parties in zero-sum competition than what you're referring to.

Washington Examiner article on Democratic influence in Republican primaries-

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/democratic-meddling-republican-primaries-effective

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Browsing red-leaning spaces I'm already seeing demands for an inquest, and suggestions that Florida just so happened to see significant GOP gains around the same time they started to crack down on election integrity as evidence that "Yes, the Dems have been cheating" and that the vehemence of their opposition to similar measures elsewhere and attempts to tar anyone who questions observed irregularities as an "election denier" as evidence that this is not an isolated incident but explicit policy at the national committee level.

I won't be surprised if Republican states and legislatures start pushing more and more similar measures through in the next two years.

Neither would I.

If nothing else, the alacrity of the count in Florida should call other states methodology into question. Even granting partisanship, it seems hard to make a serious argument that taking a long time to count votes is good, actually.

That's a lost cause in some places, though. All the election deniers in 2020 pointed to Florida and wondered why Pennsylvania couldn't have their counts done as fast. The state responded that Florida allows precanvassing and Democrats tried to get a precanvassing bill passed but Republicans in the state legislature were more interested in trying to get the mail-in vote law that they unanimously supported in 2019 repealed than in trying to make Pennsylvania's laws more in line with Florida's. This is pretty much a lost cause now with Shapiro winning the election, and with Democrats making gains in the state legislature there may be some movement on a precanvassing law in the future.

The Maricopa County shitshow: the alt-right and conspiracy boards were lighting up about Dominion vote tabulators not accepting ballots in a big Republican section of Arizona.

Detroit voters were stunned to be told they’d already voted absentee.

Some Pennsylvania voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for errors were notified in time to cast an in-person ballot, some weren’t notified, and some were told they couldn’t cast a provisional ballot to replace it.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

Would any of these be conceded as voter fraud even if they are proven true?

Over the last couple of years, there was more than one appeal to semantics on what was / was not fraud, to dismiss irregularities/concerns as not fraud, and thus accusations of fraud baseless.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

Yes, but we have a system where they are, in most states indistinguishable. If Maricopa county had actually generated a 100k swing, how would you know it happened? How would you know if it was incompetence or malice?

A swing of that many votes in one jurisdiction produces tons of impossible-to-hide statistical anomalies.

Why was Chicago able to keep its fraud undetected for the better part of a century until they fucked a co conspirator who flipped? There were multiple such anamolies detected in PA in 2020, they were all thrown out in court and are considered by the MSM to constitute "no evidence of fraud."

Coordinating mass secret criminal action is virtually impossible.

Except it has been done in the US in this exact field forever, and it was almost never detected until everyone was dead.

For election fraud. I'd like you to explain why its stopped happening, what year exactly for each major political machine, and why the FBI doesn't conduct sting operations like NYS did back when they found that they had a 98(ish)% success rate in impersonating voters.

Fraud implies malicious intent, not mere incompetence or bad luck.

The thing about this framing, however, is that malicious fraud would always try to present itself as incompetence if caught, while only incompetent fraud would fail to do so, thus demonstrating it's incompetence.

From a systemic rigging perspective, incompetence itself can be the method by which a malicious actor might operate. If you are politically biased human resource allocator, sending your most competent, capable, and credible vote-facilitators to your partisan base to gather and protect the votes, but sending the lazy, the incompetent, and all-round worst mailman who leaves the back of the truck unlocked to go collect from the enemy neighborhood is... well, not fraud, by definition, but it's a definition that proves too much. 'I'm not facilitating fraud, I'm just bad at election security' is a distinction without a difference.

Now, there's no clear line that covers the premise of election shinanigans that fraud overlaps with- or at least, I don't have one that's broadly agreed upon- but that's what makes it such a useful (or hated) motte-and-bailey. Fraud is whatever the person making the argument needs it to mean at the time, from both directions.

Incompetence is a way better cover story than an attack vector. Actual incompetence is unpredictable, so for something as important as a hypothetical election rigging scheme why would you risk sending a bunch of gomer pyles when you could send a bunch of super cool spies who just pretend to be retarded.

The motte here is that conspiracies require some number of agents to facilitate them and there have been 0 vote switchers discovered, idunno what the bailey even is. From my limited perspective the rightists, especially the trump aligned, are the ones constantly building up fantastical narratives about the vote and then retreating towards reality when questioned.

Will any of them be conceded as legitimate, if proven false?

"Voter fraud" typically seems to refer to people voting who shouldn't be allowed to vote, including most felons, noncitizens, children, or the dead. Also, people voting more than once, or intentionally counting ballots incorrectly.

Liberals will often levy accusations of "voter suppression" which tends to run in the opposite direction: People not being allowed to vote who should, making it unreasonably difficult for them to vote, or failing to count their votes. Examples include not having voting places where certain groups can access them (particularly the poor, who may not have reliable transportation), undersupplying voting locations (so that lines are very long, which again can be a larger burden on the poor who can't take time off work), the fiasco around Florida's felons from last election, discarding ballots for minor errors and not giving voters the chance to correct them (as alleged in PA, mostly around missing a date) or being told they can cast a provisional ballot (I think this was alleged in Detroit; voters had to know to request one).

I would say that "fraud" definitely does not refer to accidents and misunderstandings, or to things that have a completely benign and likely explanation just because someone who lost claimed fraud.

All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”

I expect more of the usual retarded 2000 Mules stuff and more forwarded emails from my boomer parents about how THOUSANDS of people born BEFORE 1850 participated. This stuff tends to be so stupid that it seems like it must be a deliberate distraction, but a lot of people keep falling for it. I don't discount the possibility of hard cheating (certainly the security measures aren't very strong) and I basically agree across the board with Darryl Cooper's take on stolen elections, but I am indeed not looking forward to the coping and seething.

Isn't the problem that you can't check because of the way things are set up? Combined with a massive tradition of voter fraud in urban areas (for which, there is no real reason it should have ended) it makes the case very easily for the fraud side. The presumption appears to favor fraud, not select against it.

I don’t see how ballot harvesting isn’t a concern. Not in the “fake ballots” but in a “kind of quid pro quo not really secret ballot old times machine” way

Well, this is embarrassing. I didn't realize 2000 Mules was more about harvesting than fake ballots or similar. I personally regard ballot harvesting as a form of corruption that obviously shouldn't be allowed.

i watched 2000 mules when it came out, IIRC the best evidence they had was video of a grandpa dropping off 10-20 votes for his family, which is a lot of votes but not quite the type of proof one would hope for when the crime in question is supposedly systematic and widespread.

They also had some phone telemetry stuff showing that some people came and went from the area of a polling station repeatedly, but i don't think they have any way to know the difference between a door dasher and a secret squirrel.

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

Would it be reasonable to be suspicious when two thousand cell phones have a pattern of pings along paths from nonprofits to three or four different dropboxes at 2am?

If the movie showed that actually happening, yes. But they only speculate that it's happening and fail to follow-up that speculation with confirming evidence, which should've been trivially easy given the amount of video footage they boasted of having.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They don’t “speculate” in the sense of disclosing uncertainty, they outright state they have the data. The book actually lays out that data.

They speculate that their data reflects a conspiracy of vote fraud. What they never show is a single actual person going to multiple ballot dropoffs. Not just in one night, but ever. Their "4 million minutes" or whatever of video either fails to corroborate their claim or they decided not to show that it does, which is very weird.

I didn't know that there was a book, too. I doubt that it proves anything more than the movie did, beyond possibly doubling their profits on their uncorroborated speculation.

More comments

I literally don't know. In a vacuum that sounds like a lot of cell phones but i have absolutely no context for whose phone or what these paths look like. Can you show that these cell phones aren't cars that simply pass the geofence closest to the nonprofit, then pass a fence near the poll, all while never getting out of their car?

You certainly could -- I don't think the "Mules" people did that work though. (Or if they did they didn't show it)

Ballot harvesting is legal in most states but subject to different rules (except in Alabama where it's unconditionally a felony). I think the idea is that ballot harvesting can be used as a way to introduce fraudulent ballots, but isn't necessarily per se fraudulent by itself.

I would say in some states (family member voting isn’t what most have in mind). Also I believe that some states that allow harvesting require hoops that limit the general usefulness.

With that said, my objection (and many others objection) isn’t necessarily that ballot harvesting is introducing false ballots, but instead that ballot harvesting permits a kind of quid pro quo that the secret ballot was intended to prevent. I’m not saying people are obvious about it but you have activists target areas you know vote X; those activists help people in the community, then come election time they go to the people they help (probably with the candidates name on their person) and ask “hey have you voted — I’d be happy to help you vote and to make it easier I can drop of the ballot myself.”

Now is that fraud? No. Is it even quid pro quo? Not necessarily. But is it highly questionable? I think so.

But is it highly questionable? I think so.

To me it seems virtually indistinguishable from just campaigning or GOTV efforts. What are the minimum changes you'd want to see for the practice to no longer be questionable to you?

Minimum changes is to make that illegal. The reason why it is different is that it changes (1) the ease of which someone can cast a ballot (I might not be willing to go to the precinct but if I don’t really have to do anything) and (2) the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

In short, I think it is a terrible process that should only be legal for immediate family members.

the activist actually sees who you vote for which puts more pressure into the quid pro quo.

If there's anyone watching strangers' ballots be marked and taking them to ballot boxes, that's massively illegal and they should be serving jail time, excepting maybe some cases where people legitimately need help filling out their ballot (mainly thinking some elderly/blind people here), which should be handled very carefully.

My understanding of "ballot harvesting" claims is merely that activists were delivering the ballots, with similar GOTV concerns that activists can selectively give rides to the polls to only people they expect to vote the way they want.

More comments

It seems obviously different to me, because the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for. If a door-to-door GOTV person comes by, I can simply lie to them that I really do plan to vote and go about my day. Or even take their offer for a ride to the polls, then get a guaranteed secret vote.

If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote. They can pester me and use social pressure until I actually vote for they person they want me to. They can track that information unless I rudely try to conceal what I am doing, which is itself suspicious. They can report this information back to their bosses. Or to my boss for that matter.

ETA: Minimum change I would want would be for any such harvesting to be noticed at least 48 hours in advance and required to allow partisan witnesses.

the interlocutor can confirm that you have in fact voted, and even who you voted for.

Do you think these people are opening the ballot envelopes and resealing them? Or do you think there's a lot of people going door-to-door insisting on committing a felony (violating the secret ballot) with witnesses?

More comments

If they are harvesting, I can't lie to them and tell them I will vote.

I'm obviously not aware of the specifics of your jurisdiction, but could you not claim that your ballot was already postmarked and in the mail or an official drop box? At least for the mail, proof-of-receipt wouldn't be expected to show up immediately.

That said, I'm generally against ballot harvesting except maybe households making a single trip to the neighborhood post box. In addition to the already-mentioned concerns, partisan harvesting operations present lots of chain-of-custody concerns and the possibility of a badgering and/or "accidentally" losing ballots.

Oh, I'm aware that it's legal, I just don't think it should be. I find nothing redeeming about the process and see no valid reason for it to exist at all.

That's not really fraud though. Same as concerns over last minute COVID-related election law changes. It's just complaining about rules you don't like, which is fine, but every election is going to have rules some group of people doesn't like. It's basically the Stacy Abrams model.

Likewise, well aware, hence why I said that I expect more boomers going around complaining about dead people voting and stolen ballots and a bunch of other stuff that the evidence for is non-existent or super thin. I think arguing about rules is a worthwhile thing to do and I think ballot harvesting is a great example of the sort of thing that should be reigned in, but focusing on things like that requires letting the more aggressive claims of "mass fraud" go.

Well maybe don’t be too embarrassed. 2000 mules combined harvesting with fake ballots. That seems silly to me.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats