Hermit wrote:

laklak wrote:

Hermit wrote:
I don't know about you, but if there are to be popular elections it would be ever so nice if the outcome were proportional to the number of votes candidates attract.

Nope, I don't want to be ruled by ignorant coastal city proles so lets keep the College. And the Senate, and all the other undemocratic institutions we have. They're there for a reason, and they're working just fine as they are.

The Electoral College gave you Trump, you lucky devil, you. And with almost three million fewer voters than Shillary. What a catastrophe she would have been, compared to be governed by the stable genius, eh?

Nobody knows what the vote totals would have been in a 2016 election where the popular vote determined the Presidency, because such an election was not held, and the incentive to vote would not be the same in such an election in safe states like California or Oklahoma.

The Electoral College distorts vote totals by incentivising voting in swing states, compared to safe states, and it's not reasonable to assume that that distortion would persist in a popular vote election where a voter's state of residence is immaterial to the effect of the vote on the election outcome.

OlivierK wrote:Nobody knows what the vote totals would have been in a 2016 election where the popular vote determined the Presidency, because such an election was not held...

This is true. It is also true that Trump won the presidency despite trailing Clinton by 2,868,686 votes. Trump might still have won if the EC had not existed, but by removing it there would have been one less source for blatant distortion. And it is blatant.

OlivierK wrote:...it's not reasonable to assume that that distortion would persist in a popular vote election where a voter's state of residence is immaterial to the effect of the vote on the election outcome.

How would you know? As you said, "Nobody knows what the vote totals would have been in a 2016 election where the popular vote determined the Presidency, because such an election was not held"

The distortion I referred to was towards higher turnout in swing states. Given that higher turnout is observed in states where votes have a higher impact on the election outcome, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that removing the discrepancies in vote influence would reduce the discrepancies in turnout. We won't know until it's tried, though, obviously.

Everybody says there's a catastrophe. They must be right, too many of them to be wrong . I haven't seen it, maybe I'm not looking in the right places? Is there a guided tour, maybe?

laklak wrote:Everybody says there's a catastrophe. They must be right, too many of them to be wrong . I haven't seen it, maybe I'm not looking in the right places? Is there a guided tour, maybe?

there are several catastrophes in progress,
if you can’t see even one, maybe take the tomatos from your eyes.

The woke left, once useful foot soldiers for the Dems, are chasing voters into the arms of Trump, as emboldened monsters prove

27 Aug, 2020

By Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.

Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden has the right strategy in campaigning from his basement, staying mostly out of public view to avoid exposing his cognitive deterioration and his bad ideas.
If only far-left activists could have done the same, staying in their mothers' basements until after election day...

...
Luckily for President Donald Trump, the woke mobs have been more active and visible than ever. Americans are getting a chance to see more and more what the woke brigades are about, and in this case, to know them is not to love them.
...

...
It's gone so far that this week's rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, escalated to the point that CNN host Don Lemon sounded the alarm Tuesday night, warning that Biden will lose votes in November if he doesn't stand up to rioters. "This is a blind spot for Democrats," Lemon said. "I think Democrats are ignoring this problem or hoping that it will go away. And it's not going to go away."

Lemon's comments marked a watershed moment in the presidential campaign. Here's one of CNN's leading apologists for Black Lives Matter and Antifa misconduct recognizing – out loud – that the Democrats may be in serious trouble. A leading player of the anti-Trump media's CONfidence game is ahead of Biden in realizing that voters are being turned off by the mayhem.

Unfortunately for the party, it may be too late. Biden may have crossed the Rubicon with his policy of see no evil, hear no evil. For him to step up now and scold agitators and opportunists who have become drunk on power wouldn't be taken seriously, and he would risk revolt by the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, which doesn't like him to begin with. As Lemon points out, Biden may be afraid to give a speech taking on the rioting.

Even if he does, the far left has already authored too many of those seminal moments that can cause voters to rethink where they stand – and whom they stand with. These are the kinds of moments that stick in a person's mind and help shape their world view much more powerfully than a brilliant speech or a clever campaign ad.

Kenosha has already given us a few of those moments, such as when an elderly man was beaten up for trying to protect his business from looters and arsonists, or when a man pleaded with rioters to not "destroy people's businesses," only to be told, "We'll burn your shop down, too."

Full text at:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/499152-left-helps-trump-voters/

--yuck. I have an almost visceral reaction to this kind of propaganda. I suppose that's normal given its lack of intellectual rigour.

It's good though, as far as propaganda goes, it may even be excellent. It's feigning concern that riots will push people towards Trump, in order to push people towards Trump. --nasty

Does it really work like that? People get "pushed" to Trump or Biden? Or do they just double down on whatever they thought before? I haven't done any sort of actual study on this, but anecdotally speaking, all my Dem friends are still Dems, all the GOP ones are still GOP. They're still arguing over the same things they were arguing about 4 years ago. Actually some of them aren't speaking to each other, because they're fools, but otherwise it's business as usual.

All these polls come out, and say pretty much what they've been saying for years, a small percentage apparently prefers Democrats. But then Republicans win. So, either it's all rigged (OK now double down in 3...2...) or people aren't telling the truth to pollsters, or ... aliens?

I'm going with aliens and the Illuminati.

sean_w wrote:--yuck. I have an almost visceral reaction to this kind of propaganda. I suppose that's normal given its lack of intellectual rigour.

It's good though, as far as propaganda goes, it may even be excellent. It's feigning concern that riots will push people towards Trump, in order to push people towards Trump. --nasty

It's CNN's Don Lemon saying it!

...given its lack of intellectual rigour.

Don't make fun of Don Lemon's intellectual rigor mortis!

laklak wrote:Does it really work like that? People get "pushed" to Trump or Biden? Or do they just double down on whatever they thought before? I haven't done any sort of actual study on this, but anecdotally speaking, all my Dem friends are still Dems, all the GOP ones are still GOP. They're still arguing over the same things they were arguing about 4 years ago. Actually some of them aren't speaking to each other, because they're fools, but otherwise it's business as usual.

All these polls come out, and say pretty much what they've been saying for years, a small percentage apparently prefers Democrats. But then Republicans win. So, either it's all rigged (OK now double down in 3...2...) or people aren't telling the truth to pollsters, or ... aliens?

I'm going with aliens and the Illuminati.

Sure it does. Anecdotally speaking, I was given pause by Comey's statements about Clinton prior to the last election. We aren't talking about converting Democrats, just keeping certain voters at home or changing their vote at the last minute.

It's as if posting fabrications from a known disinformation website to a very small and mostly skeptical readership in an almost empty chamber on the "Forums --> This way" section of the internet has a disproportionate effect, somehow. Vomit inducement may be its aim.

Well, we're small, but evidently Mighty. Like chihuahuas.

laklak wrote:All these polls come out, and say pretty much what they've been saying for years, a small percentage apparently prefers Democrats. But then Republicans win. So, either it's all rigged (OK now double down in 3...2...) or people aren't telling the truth to pollsters, or ... aliens?

or gerrymandering

and people still not having caught up to not participating in polls via telephone, or just generally avoiding any activity that puts their address with party preference on a map
to make gerrymandering harder

Mike_L wrote:

sean_w wrote:--yuck. I have an almost visceral reaction to this kind of propaganda. I suppose that's normal given its lack of intellectual rigour.

It's good though, as far as propaganda goes, it may even be excellent. It's feigning concern that riots will push people towards Trump, in order to push people towards Trump. --nasty

It's CNN's Don Lemon saying it!

This is a silly thing to say. The article says:

If only far-left activists could have done the same, staying in their mothers' basements until after election day...

one of CNN's leading apologists for Black Lives Matter and Antifa misconduct

A leading player of the anti-Trump media's CONfidence game

Biden may have crossed the Rubicon with his policy of see no evil, hear no evil

the far left has already authored too many of those seminal moments

Don Lemon doesn't go on about far-left activists, saying people are basement dwellers, call being against Trump a con etc. etc.

If you want people to know what CNN's Don Lemon says, how about a post linking to Don Lemon on CNN, instead of pretending this rubbish is just the same?

In every respect it's more incisive than Lemon's almost reluctant acknowledgement of the problem. But although the slant is different, the basic message is the same: that Biden's lacklustre opposition to the rioting is likely to swing some voters' sympathies toward the Trump camp.

Thommo wrote:If you want people to know what CNN's Don Lemon says, how about a post linking to Don Lemon on CNN, instead of pretending this rubbish is just the same?

A YouTube excerpt of Don Lemon's opinions is embedded in the article. So Tony Cox's piece gives you that... and more.

Meanwhile, strong data from the core areas of Dem support: large cities. I'm linking to my posts about Detroit and St. Louis. I urge people who are strongly curious about actual American voters, to step away from the Russia-propaganda vapor long enough to ask whether or not massive movement has been regularly occurring in the Dem's core voting blocs since the financial crash.

The central take-away from Detroit, imo, is that in addition to gains Trump made by recruiting new voters (primarily from rural areas of Michigan, but also in suburbs... I give Oakland county as an example, which Hillary won, but Michigan has several pivot counties to scrutinize) Hillary lost a fuckton of working class black voters - even in counties she won, such as Wayne (which I focus on, for good reason). But she didn't lose them overnight. The Dem party was bleeding them for 3 cycles and have never asked themselves why. At the time, they didn't even notice. That's how patronizing and dismissive they've been to those voters since the 90's. Their policies when in power, only affirm this.

The current election messaging, other than a few non-specific signals about fixing injustice (publicly at least, which is the point) and telling black people they "ain't black" if they don't show up to the polls... flatline. Oh, and painful prostration before the same white suburban affluent voting bloc that took over the party by design in the first Clinton era. That takeover, in turn, was a delayed reaction to the southern strategy of the Repubs all the way back in the 70's. That's how slow the Dem party is to react to things. But then again, this is their jam. This suits them better. Fundraising is much stronger when the Repubs are not only doing well, but slanting further and further right. The Dems lick up their leftovers & grab the dollars from would-be Repub donors who aren't quite reptilian enough to stomach that many more migrants in cages - and half of whom are genuinely alarmed at far-right encroachments to women's reproductive rights.

Aside from direct tampering with machines, Russian meddling is not a serious issue by comparison. (Even the built-in inscrutability of voting machines themselves are a much more serious threat to democracy than any Russian pinging or propaganda. Always has been. No one's paying attention to it.) Except, "Russia" is a vote-getter for Dems - OTOH it's also a massive liability... if only the partisans in the FBI hadn't fucked that one up! Oops! Meanwhile, if we're talking politics here (which we are), everyone will remember Pelosi's extreme reluctance to launch an impeachment investigation. Many people will remember Richard Neal's extreme reluctance to access Trump's NY State tax records, which were furnished by the state legislature in the very summer after he complained to the press that Trump was refusing to cooperate.

Gawd almighty... I could outline the impeachment timetable alone in a way that would nauseate any earnest Dem voter... but what's the point.

And yes, of course people lie to pollsters. People lie to their friends and family. People lie to their children. Etc. People lie to themselves. It's an American specialty.

I would also urge people to stare at the pattern of "pivot counties" in Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine, and Ohio. That's the upper-upper-right quadrant of the country. (Pennsylvania didn't shift much... Dems just lost there because of urban malaise. Pennsylvania is always a sea of red, with a few crucial blue urban areas.) Compare the vote trajectories across three cycles. It shouldn't take long to realize that this is a long-term pattern.

It's not all that different from other cycles... after a 2-term president, enthusiasm wanes, and then it picks back up by the time the other party has had 2 terms. Trump had 3 unusual things going for him: he's an entertainer in a field of husks; his racism is overt enough to galvanize lazy voters that another Repub would struggle to recruit; and he's willing to relentlessly attack politicians in power, even in his own party. These are 3 great ways to motivate people. You'll alienate a ton of people also, but it's a numbers game, and he's got well-paid people to track the numbers. Or had. I'm not projecting anything for this cycle - I'm speaking of 2016 in the present tense, is all. Four years is the blink of an eye as these things go.

Mike_L wrote:In every respect it's more incisive than Lemon's almost reluctant acknowledgement of the problem. But although the slant is different, the basic message is the same: that Biden's lacklustre opposition to the rioting is likely to swing some voters' sympathies toward the Trump camp.

Thommo wrote:If you want people to know what CNN's Don Lemon says, how about a post linking to Don Lemon on CNN, instead of pretending this rubbish is just the same?

A YouTube excerpt of Don Lemon's opinions is embedded in the article. So Tony Cox's piece gives you that... and more.

Right, so in fact you agree it's not "CNN's Don Lemon saying it!" after all. Why you insult everyone's intelligence with this nonsense I really don't know.

Mike_L wrote:In every respect it's more incisive than Lemon's almost reluctant acknowledgement of the problem. But although the slant is different, the basic message is the same: that Biden's lacklustre opposition to the rioting is likely to swing some voters' sympathies toward the Trump camp.

Thommo wrote:If you want people to know what CNN's Don Lemon says, how about a post linking to Don Lemon on CNN, instead of pretending this rubbish is just the same?

A YouTube excerpt of Don Lemon's opinions is embedded in the article. So Tony Cox's piece gives you that... and more.

Psst... It is entirely possible to deplore rioting (if that's what you want to call what has been happening) whilst being entirely sympathetic to the grievances of those on the street.

Shades of grey.

OlivierK wrote:The distortion I referred to was towards higher turnout in swing states. Given that higher turnout is observed in states where votes have a higher impact on the election outcome, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that removing the discrepancies in vote influence would reduce the discrepancies in turnout. We won't know until it's tried, though, obviously.

I made it clear what I think about the Electoral College. What is your opinion about it? Would you like to see it gone, retained or don't you care either way? Laklak likes it. Stops him being ruled by ignorant coastal city proles. Apparently, it is better to be ruled by corrupt, nepotistic, psychos that voters who are not ignorant coastal city proles elect into office.