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Goodguy  10d ago (text post)   Edited 10d ago   11333 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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The Gateway Pundit is reporting that there is a legibly fraudulent pattern of statistical anomalies in this election’s results. They posted the math for anyone to see. The original reporting comes from TruthIsFreedom on X.

Like any good epistemologist, they basically call it predictive: pick a county, apply their formula, and see that the result matches.

Although I’m a minarchist libertarian Republican, I’m probably one of the few remaining advocates for Trump on The Motte, from what I see in these threads. I’m not here to argue that point, FYI. I’m here to ask people not to simply disregard it out of hand because Trump reposted it or because it has LLM speech hallmarks. The allegation is so monstrous that, for the sake of the perceived legitimacy of our democratic republic, the mechanism needs to be explained by literally anything besides malfeasance.

Excerpts posted here from GWP so you don’t have to give them ad revenue if you don’t want:

One formula fits all of it: Republican 2026 = 0.85 × Trump 2024 Democrat 2026 = Harris 2024 + 0.15 × Trump 2024

For every 1,000 Trump points, 850 stayed Republican. 150 landed on the Democratic side. The numbers: Senate: Republicans kept 85% of Trump’s share Governor: 86% Variation explained: 88%

What makes it strange: It didn’t matter how red the state was. Wyoming, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts: same 15% (p = 0.69). The Democratic gain was sized by Trump’s vote, not Harris’s. The Harris part is zero.

The 0.85 beat both standard election-swing models in every set of races. Drop any single state and the multiplier stays between 0.846 and 0.853.

Why seats flipped: At 0.85, any state where Trump got under about 58.5% falls below 50%. Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina: all under that line. All flipped.

What this means: Midterms are messy. This one isn’t. Two sets of races, different candidates, different campaigns, and the same 15% decrease almost everywhere.

A pattern this even demands answers at the ballot level: paper ballot hand counts, poll-book check-ins against votes counted, and voter files showing who actually turned out.

So, what’s the benign mechanism that explains this?

So, what’s the benign mechanism that explains this?

a basic national trend of Trump voters who felt betrayed enough to defect to a Democrat voter while some sat out and not vote and a politicized situation where national politics, e.g., an ongoing extremely unpopular war, swamped state politics

Democrats get near their 2024 voter numbers (mirroring their primary and 2025 turnouts), GOP doesn't get those numbers (again, mirroring the primary turnouts and 2025 races), and the independents who voted (while significantly down) and who leaned heavily Trump in 2024 voted for Democrats instead

this isn't what fraud looks like in the US; you don't get a national trend across a bunch of different systems, different machines, different software, different people, and different places

we do not have a centralized vote counting system

this is NOTHING like the 2020 fraud

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