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What Do The Polls Say Today?

October 19, 2020

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Okay folks. Here it is. The last 14 days.  And like it or not, there’s still a chance that Trump could wind up with a big W on November 4th, or whenever they finish counting the votes. But the chance of this happening as of today (but not necessarily tomorrow) are slim to none, and even his own campaign staff are beginning to look for other jobs.

That being said, I always start looking over my shoulder during the last several weeks of any political campaign because no matter how accurate the pollsters all claim to be, the moment that someone starts using regression analysis to predict results, you’re in something of a la-la land, whether you like it or not.

Regression analysis is fine when you want to explain or illustrate how two or more trends moved against each other over time. But it’s not all that accurate or reliable when you use regression methodologies to predict the outcome of any event before the event takes place. And the reason for this lack of reliability is very simple – there’s always a chance that the particular event will turn out to be what Nassim Taleb first called a ‘black swan.’

And no matter how unique and rare the appearance of the black swan happens to be, it happens and there’s no way to predict when it might happen again.

In compiling this week’s report on pre-election polls, I thought I would double down on the possibility that what I have been describing to date might turn out to be totally and completely wrong. So this week I’m going to give you the national and swing-state numbers from two aggregators, Nate Silver’s 538 and the independent political blog, RCP.

It turns out that both aggregate national polls ended up at just about the same number in 2016, with Hillary coming out slightly under 3% more than Trump, which is exactly where things ended up. Both polls also had basically the same odds of a Clinton win on the eve of the election itself, with 538 saying that she was 71% in the bag and RCP outing her number at 69%.

One more point before I give you the numbers. All the pollsters today have Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin as a Democratic ‘lean.’ All the pollsters had the same three states leaning blue in 2016. All three states ended up going to Trump by a total margin of less than 2/10ths of 1 percent.

Here are the battleground numbers from 538, Joe blue and Trump red:

Here are the numbers from RCP:

With the exception of New Hampshire, the numbers from 538 look better for Joe than the numbers from RCP.  The difference isn’t all that great, except that Joe has hit the magic 50%-mark in 6 battleground states according to 538, he’s only at 50% in 3 battleground states according to RCP.

Taken together, Joe’s battleground average in the 538 polls is 49.52%, but in the RCP overall average his number is 48.52% – Trump is 4 points behind (44.8) according to 538, the polls from RCP have him only 3 points behind at 45.08. I know it’s only a nit here and a nit there, but let’s not forget the size of Trump’s winning margin back in 2016.

For me, here’s the most worrisome point in these two aggregate results. The dog shit number from 538 is 5.61, it was 5.89 last week. That’s a good thing to see. But the RCP dog shit number is 6.4, which means that at least half of the dog-shit still haven’t made up their minds. If all those dummies go for Trump, he could win again. At least that’s what we see in the RCP polls, the 538 numbers are somewhat more positive for Joe.

The point is this. Nothing’s done until it’s done. Which means we all have serious work to do for the next two weeks. Money, phone calls, ZOOM, whatever it is. Do it. Just do it.

The Accidental President.

October 18, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 2 Comments

              As of yesterday, the RCP national aggregate poll has Joe at 51.3% and Trump at 42.4%, a gap of 8.9 points. The 538 aggregate poll scores it 52.4% for Joe, 41.9% for Trump, a gap of 10.6 points. Take your pick. Either way, Biden is doing a lot better this time around than Clinton was doing in 2016.

              On October 17, 2016 the RCP national aggregate poll had Clinton at 46.2% and Trump at  Clinton got 48.8% of the popular vote, Trump ended up with 46.09%, the increase in Trump’s number coming largely from Libertarian voters who decided at the last moment not to waste their vote.

              Why have we put up with Trump for the last four years? Because he won the electoral votes in 3 states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – which have delivered their electoral votes to the Democratic in every national election since 1992. Move those 46 electoral votes from Trump to Hillary in 2016 and guess who would be running for re-election on the blue line?

              That’s kind of depressing isn’t it? Wait a minute – it gets worse. Add up the votes cast for Hillary in those 3 states, then add up the votes for Trump and here’s what you get: 6,577,816 versus 6,655,560, a difference of 77,744 votes. What did these 77,744 Republican voters accomplish in 2016? They gave Trump 46 electoral votes without which he would have ended up 14 electoral votes short of what he needed to win.

              Want to get a little more depressed? The difference between what Trump got in those 3 states and what we got was – ready? – less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the total votes cast in those states. We have had to put up with the most vulgar, racist, divisive, insulting, stupid and reckless rhetoric ever to come out of the mouth of any President because we, that’s right – we, couldn’t figure out how to convince 77,000 voters in three states that a vote for Trump was the wrong thing to do.

This morning, our friends at The (failing) New York Times seem to have finally figured this out. They posted a story which details how and why voters who didn’t vote for Hillary in 2016 are going to vote for Joe. And in every case, what they are saying is that they simply didn’t like Hillary because she was too arrogant, too distant, too this and too that. Fine. That was a reason to vote for Trump?

It’s not as if Trump made any attempt back in 2016 to hide who he was. He couldn’t wait to jump off the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his campaign by making sure that everyone knew he was going to pander to the lowest emotional and intellectual human denominators . And four years later, he’s still trying to wrap a campaign around the idea of ‘locking them up.’

So here’s the bottom line. Trump was and is an accidental President. For all the post-election talk about a new, populist wave, a disinformation Russian campaign, a this and a that, Trump won because we let him win, and it better not happen again.

Because if it does, in 2024 God willing, this yellow-dog Democrat since 1968 will vote for the GOP.

Should We Abolish The Electoral College?

September 20, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              Ever since the world was startled and shocked by how Trump won the 2016 Presidential election but lost the popular vote, I have been hearing kvetch after kvetch from the anti-Trump, liberal combine (it’s one and the same thing) about how and why the Electoral College has to go. Incidentally, I didn’t hear a single complaint about the Electoral College in 1992 when, thanks to Ross Perot, Bill Clinton received the winner’s share of Electoral College votes even though his 43% of the popular vote was below the 46% received by Trump in 2016.

              Anyway, we now have an ‘official’ argument for abolishing the Electoral College in a book written by a member of The (failing) New York Times editorial board, Jesse Wegman, whose book, Let The People Pick The President, is reviewed right here. And basically the book argues for direct voting for President through something that Wegman calls the ‘National Popular Vote Compact.’ which would require all the states to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

              If Joe and Kammie win the election, I suspect the interest in reforming or changing the Electoral College will die down. If somehow, Trump is able to pull off a second term by convincing the rednecks in a couple of swing states that he’s still their man, you can be sure that every person on the Biden-Harris email list will start receiving fundraising requests to support some kind of scheme to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote.

              If that were actually to happen, the way things stand right now, it would probably bring about the demise of the Democratic Party and/or make it virtually impossible for the blue team to ever capture the White House again. And here’s the reason why.

              Going into the 2020 election, there are 24 states which are reliably red. How do I define a ‘red’ state as being reliable? Any state which delivered a majority of votes to the GOP ticket in every Presidential election since 2000. I picked 2000 because the Reagan elections in 1992 and 1996 were such landslides that the results were simply too unusual to be considered typical of what happens when Americans go to the polls every four years. Frankly, when he recovered from getting shot, Reagan could have been elected President for life.

              Since 2000, there are also 19 states that are reliably blue although two of those states – Colorado and Virginia, did have several results that would put them in the red bucket, but as of today these states are as blue as any to states can be.

              Criticisms that the Electoral College favors the smaller, rural states may sound convincing, but it happens not to be true.  Together, the 24 red states contain 111,372,848 residents, the blue states count 136,329,440 (2019 Census estimates.) Which means that going into a national election, the blue team starts off with a reliable 222 electoral votes, the red team has 191. This leaves 125 electoral votes controlled by 9 ‘unreliable’ states – Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and PA.

              For the Democrats to win the White House, they need to win any combination of ‘unreliable’ states that will yield them 48 electoral votes. So, if they win, let’s say, Iowa, Florida, and Michigan they win. If they take Ohio, Wisconsin, and PA they win. In other words, because the blue team goes into every national election needing only 48 electoral votes, the road to victory is much easier than for the red team because the red team needs to corral 79 of those ‘unreliable’ electoral votes.

              What needs to be understood is not whether we should ‘reform’ or ‘revise’ or even get rid of the Electoral College. What needs to be understood is how the 2016 Clinton campaign could spend twice as much money as the Trump campaign spent in 2016 and somehow let states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania vote red by less than 1/100th  of the total votes cast in those three states.  If we do in 2020 whatever we did to let that happen in 2016, Trump deserves another four years, like it or not.

Where’s The Trump Campaign?

August 3, 2020

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 Last Friday, the President of the United States, a.k.a. Donald Trump, flew down to Florida to meet with a group of cops and get their endorsement for his re-election campaign. The cops are probably the only people in the whole country who are willing to even meet with Trump these days, never mind support his attempt to take another four-year White House lease.

              The picture above is Air Force 1 landing at the Tampa airport and as you can see, there was a large crowd waiting for the nation’s Chief Executive to come bounding down the stairs.

There’s only one little problem.  The above picture is what Trump would have posted on his Twitter except that a photographer got a shot of the entire crowd:

              And here’s a photograph of the thousands of Trump fans who couldn’t squeeze into the airport but were happy and willing to greet their beloved President as he came outside:

              This is how Trump described his trip to Florida in a tweet: ”My visits last week to Texas and Frorida had massive numbers of cheering people gathered along the roads and highways, thousands and thousands, even bigger (by far) than the crowds of 2016. Saw no Biden supporters, and yet some in the Fake News said it was an equal number. Sad!” And don’t think for one second that the way he spelled Florida was a mistake. It’s just another example of how racism (in this case against Asians) permeates his campaign. He really is a POS.

              If the ‘Chinese flu’ had never arrived, right now Trump would be holding one of his Nuremburg-style rallies every day. Instead, he spent the weekend playing golf, something he has done more than 270 times since he was inaugurated in 2017. That’s only an average of one golf outing every five days. Just like Ike. Hey – that’s a new slogan for Trump. Just like Ike.

              Back to the polls. Here’s how the swing-state numbers look today: 

              There really has been no change from last week. Note that Joe has his largest leads in the states where he is at or just about at 50 percent (FL, WI, MI, PA, and NH.)  If he wins those 5 states along with all the Commie-Socialist states, he’s well past 300 electoral votes. So that’s the good news today. And here’s some more good news.

              Back at the end of March when the Democratic primaries were basically finished and done, according to the Federal Election Commission, Biden had $26.3 million on hand, Trump’s campaign was sitting on almost $100 million bucks.  As of June 30, Trump had $113 million in the bank, Joe had $108 million waiting to be spent. Biden raised $63 million in June, Trump raised $55 million, but Trump’s campaign spent $50 million that same month, Joe’s gang spent $36 million and change. When you’re raising less and spending more and your numbers don’t improve, sending out a completely phony tweet about the ‘massive’ crowds in Florida won’t help you one bit.

              Today the Trump bunch resumed their TV advertising campaign by placing an ad in four swing states: AZ, FL, GA, and NC.  They had paused their ads for two weeks so that the new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, could re-evaluate their messaging and come up with a new and more powerful ad. So what’s the message this time around? That Biden is a ‘tool’ of the ‘radical Left’ who will triple your taxes, defund the police, and lead the country down to radical Socialism or worse.

              This advertising blitz doesn’t mention the corona virus, not once. But Trump  mentioned it on Twitter this morning when he criticized his own virus expert, Deborah Birx. I think Trump is smart by pretending that the Covid-19 emergency won’t hurt his campaign. After all, three out of ten Americans still believe that what he says about the virus is true. So if 30% are willing to give this liar and racist MF any kind of credibility at all, add to that group the Sedaris 10% dog-shit vote and maybe you’re still in the game.

              Don’t relax, don’t think it’s done. It’s not done and this is a very serious time.

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