sulla
19d ago
There are rumors, stemming from the boss himself, that Republicans found some “secret” to help improve turnout. I’m skeptical, but you never know.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/trump-secret-house-republicans-panic.html
sulla
19d ago
I don’t know why after the insanity of the past 8 years, your initial reaction to something absurd like this wouldn’t be blanket denial.
This pollster also shared the results with Kamala surrogates well in advance. People tweeted rumors about it yesterday. Apparently a surrogate let it slip by accident, not realizing the poll wasn’t released yet. So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.
sulla
19d ago
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
The idea that abortion is going to cause a massive polling error in favor of Harris is just a blatant wish fulfillment fantasy. There is no evidence for it. It’s completely made up. Even in 2022 the polls underestimated Republicans slightly, they just didn’t miss as badly as they did with Trump so people misremember them as overestimating Republicans.
Odds are the polls will underestimate Trump like they always do, meaning it will be a Trump blowout. The “right leaning” pollsters haven’t changed anything about what they do, and the gap between them and the polling average is the same as ever. This strongly suggests nobody has changed anything, meaning they will be wrong in exactly the same way.
sulla
28d ago
I noticed the odds fluctuating slightly, but had no idea that this was why. This is a very lame attempt. They’ve already been calling Trump Hitler for 8 years. Why would it finally stick?
Hitler is rapidly becoming irrelevant anyway. You might as well say Attila the Hun did some good things.
sulla
30d ago
The defense is still playing at an elite level, and the offense still has a very good line. But the WR situation is a disaster.
sulla
1mo ago
I can't shake the feeling that the Cowboys under Dak have always been and will always be a clown car. They put up big stats in random regular season games but always fold like a lawn chair under the slightest pressure.
As for the Eagles, I just can't shake the sense that they're not good. They look like the same team from the late-season collapse last year, but with better RNG.
The Redskins look actually good, surprisingly. Tough loss against a good Eagles team. I think they have a legit chance to win the right to lose to the Chiefs in the Super Bowl.
The Giants... lol.
sulla
1mo ago
They don't have to agree. They just need to come away with minimal emotional valance. If Vance said "No, because the election was fake and gay and Biden is a fake Mickey Mouse president" it might affect normie's views. Instead he just said "no" to a question that normie doesn't really understand, then complained about Big Tech, who everyone hates. It's not a "gotcha" and it's not a "blunder."
Honestly, it was a fine answer and nobody cares. If you are smart enough to realize the flaw in the argument the you are smart to realize that he has no choice but to say he wouldn’t have certified the election. Most people just zone out and don’t really remember what he is talking about, and vaguely agree that Big Tech censorship is bad. This is not going to move the needle at all.
sulla
1mo ago
but what did it for me was the way everyone bent over for masks and vaccines during covid.
Not even a big deal compared to lockdowns.
sulla
1mo ago
I would claim that at minimum the Democrats are tilting the playing field through illegal or quasi-illegal mechanisms. For example, letting illegals vote illegally tilts the playing field in their favor, but there are still a finite number of illegals, they might not all vote for Harris, etc. Same with ballot harvesting. Therefore, Trump can still win, he just needs a larger margin.
I also share the same basic sentiment as many of the other posters. If you don’t want people to make unfalsifiable voter fraud claims, don’t make them illegal to falsify them. They can only be falsified by election integrity laws like voter ID, strict chain-of-custody, etc. If you outlaw election integrity, then all elections are by-default suspect.
The question isn’t whether you can prove that the ballots are illegitimate or not. The question is why can’t you? Any answer you can come up with is uncomfortable.
sulla
2mo ago
I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.
The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.
The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.
The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.
sulla
2mo ago
If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.
This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.
sulla
2mo ago
I've known true alcoholics who still manage to hold down a job and live a normal-ish life, but I've never known a true stoner who was able to do this. Even light smokers seem to have more fucked up lives than light stoners. Alcohol will kill you faster, though.
sulla
2mo ago
Agreed. If you are even debating the question, it’s a win by default for Trump.
sulla
2mo ago
I will state for the record that yesterday a few hours before the debate I was reading about the Springfield affair and told my wife that "at this point if I were a US citizen I might actually vote for Trump." So in that sense, I was a 'floating non-voter', and Harris would have won me over.
Oh come on. You’ve been posting on The Motte, how long, since the SSC subreddit days? But you claim to be an innocent undecided after everything that was happened? Even if somehow you are undecided, you are the most atypical undecided imaginable.
If he'd stuck to messaging around the economy, used migration mainly as a competence issue ("Harris was made Border Tsar, well let me ask you this, do you the American people think she has done a good job of that?"), moved to the center at least rhetorically on foreign policy issues (why exactly couldn't he say it was in America's interests for Ukraine to win?), and made a more concerted effort to tar Harris with the failures of the Biden administration, I think he could have won.
This is why he did win. Everyone came away understanding that he had the winning hand on almost every issue. Whether he “won the debate” is irrelevant. Nobody says to themselves “I agree with Trump on everything, but since he was ineloquent I guess have no choice but to vote for Kamala. Sorry, I’m coconut-tree gang now.”
Trump persuaded people on the issues. On the other hand, I honestly can’t even remember one thing Kamala said.
sulla
2mo ago
The polls underestimated Trump by 3-4 points in both of the last two elections. There is no reason to think this has changed.
“Surely they wouldn’t make the same mistake three times!” Please allow me to introduce you to managerialism.
sulla
2mo ago
This is just mind games. The Harris Campaign is using meaningless nitpicks to bait Trump into doing something stupid. I think this is an underrated strategy in general. It would be very bullish for Harris if the people in charge are this smart.
The catastrophically bad setup and staging of her recent interview suggest that this is not the case.
sulla
2mo ago
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
It's easy enough to just eat the L and start having uterus-only restrooms, which is open to anyone who has ever had a uterus. Intersex women who have never had a uterus due to developmental issues can use the non-uterus restroom. Same with uterus-only sports leagues, and uterus-only settings on dating apps.
sulla
4mo ago
The competency crisis rages on. Boeing's planes fall out of the sky. The Secret Service forgets to check the nearby roof. Anti-virus software bricks your computer. These sorts of incidents have always happened, but it's hard to deny that they have gotten more frequent.
sulla
4mo ago
If you are in a heavily left leaning area or social circle it will feel this way. But in more mixed groups, it’s the left leaning people who have been suddenly a lot more quiet. and those who aren’t have self-immolated themselves out of the group. This is just my observation. There has been a massive vibe shift.
sulla
4mo ago
Yes, it would not be unprecedented for the polls to change. However, it would be unprecedented if on Election Day the polls were what they are now, yet Biden won.
sulla
4mo ago
That’s true, Trump’s vibes are positive. The Dem vibes are schizo fire-and-brimstone. There is confusion about who the candidate will be. Everyone has a different insane conspiracy theory about the shooting. Their rhetoric is focused on 7-8 year old debunked misquotations of Trump. Their messaging and priorities appear utterly confused.
The Dems are supposed to be the party of experts, the ultra competent managerial elite. Schizo is not a good look.
sulla
4mo ago
The polls would all have to be off by 5+ points. With the electoral college Trump will win even if Biden wins the popular vote by 2% or less. It would be an unprecedented polling error, at least for American presidential elections with dozens of independent polling sources.
I think it’s more the government intrusion angle than animal rights.
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