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Who cares if the model is accurate? Its not supposed to be. It exists so that when Biden gets the most votes in history again, you can point to the model and call everyone asking questions an election denier.
This is pure seething contempt for your tribal enemy without any evidence or even argumentation. You know better.
That was the argument. I can add 6 paragraphs largely repeating myself if it helps. I've had to resort to ChatGPT to please you guys before, I can do it again. Although I think I still have my copy of Dilbert's Desktop Games which had a bloviator. That aught to be good enough.
Yes, and it didn't work, and we told you what we'd do if you did. The problem is not that we don't understand the argument you are making. The problem is that casting loogies at your enemies is not the kind of argumentation this place is for, and you've been around way too long and been modded way too often to pretend to be befuzzled and outraged when the "don't post low-effort boo-lines" rule gets applied.
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A lot of people. For one, everyone who is outside the organization and thinks it is accurate, and depends on it as a guide to truth. For another, those in the organization who visualize themselves as trying to predict, which, there are undoubtedly some.
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There are a lot of people who dislike Trump. Biden’s victory is unlikely, but not implausible.
A path to victory? Possible. A path to the most votes ever in history again?
Well, like I said. I'd have questions.
Population keeps increasing. It would not be at all surprising if the election winner got the most votes in history.
With a TFR of 1.786, our population of citizens is not increasing. On the other hand...
Like I said... questions.
I encourage you to state your thesis more clearly.
The number of US citizens has been steadily increasing. I doubt I need to find a citation for that. US fertility is below replacement, but net positive (legal) immigration combined with long lifespans and a demographic bulge have led to the total citizen population increasing.
If turnout remains constant, then, we would expect every election to set a new record for votes cast for a presidential candidate.
(I'm aware that turnout does not remain constant, but 2020 was a high-turnout election and I expect 2024 to be as well.)
You linked a graph indicating that illegal immigration has spiked, which may well be true, but illegal immigrants by definition can't vote and don't factor into the figure we're discussing. You might argue large-scale illegal voting, but if so that seems like it would require its own evidence, not merely the existence of a significant illegal population.
In general what I'd like to ask you to do is to not bother darkly hinting at shadowy conspiracies, but rather state your questions clearly and unambiguously. The Motte isn't going to kick you out for having weird or unpopular takes. Nor do you have to be certain of something to say, "Here's what I suspect to be the case".
But repeating 'questions'? What's the point of that?
Say what they are. Be clear. Be right or be wrong, I don't care, but be clear.
Illegals can’t legally vote. That doesn’t mean they don’t vote. If you design a system that doesn’t validate legal status, then you will get illegals voting— especially if one party is adamantly for them and the other adamantly against them.
No, but it waggles its eyebrows suggestively and says “check for fake votes!”
There was a great deal of hunting for such fraud in contested and uncontested states. How many illegal votes did they find?
I think if you create a system that is hard to find fraud, you won’t find fraud when you look.
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How many votes were the various fraud hunters allowed to look at by election officials and officers of the state, versus being tol they’re not allowed? How many of the trials went to discovery, versus being thrown out of court for not having standing? How many ballots were kept for the required number of years, versus being deleted from tally scanners with a “whoopsie! aren’t we clumsy”?
Sometimes, all a cover-up requires is to simply refuse investigation.
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Non-citizen voting is a crime that would be easy to catch if it was happening on a large scale, that Republican governors and secretaries of state have the tools and an incentive to catch, and which nevertheless you don't see large numbers of people getting caught for.
There have been a few serious attempts to investigate non-citizen voting, and they generally catch a low-double figure number of illegal votes per state.
Not at all. I have never had my ballot vetted in accordance with IL law ever since I moved to Chicago. I can go to the polling place and intentionally sign my name in a way that is completely opposite of how I signed on my registration. And they still give you the ballot without asking for additional verification of who you are.
Chain of custody? Forget about it. There are boxes stacked and intermingled and ballots spilling around.
The same is true in another city where I attended college. Reality is elections are completely insecure in cities and on campuses. The sole difference is the age of the people perpetuating the fraud/incompetence.
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I've mentioned this before (because I never tire of referencing my history nerd reading), but Robert Caro's description of the Texas senatorial election in 1948 was illuminating.
Short version is that both parties trucked large numbers of illegals across the border to vote. This was known. Even relatively honest politicians knew that that's how things worked in Texas and if they didn't get involved directly and kept it arms-length enough to have plausible deniability, they still knew.
Presumably Texas was not the only state in which this happened (it's just the state Caro was interested in because he was researching Lyndon Johnson).
Could such a thing happen today? It would be more difficult, what with more surveillance, more information systems, more people with phones, more data analysis, etc. I doubt you could have party officials literally trucking hundreds of illegals across the border and herding them through polls without someone noticing. But would it be impossible for some operatives to plan and execute an operation large enough to influence a tight election? With enough plausible deniability that if caught, they could be disavowed by whoever they were benefiting? No, I don't think it's impossible. There are still a lot of remote counties without a lot of monitoring.
I am not saying this is actually happening (and I doubt it is, at least on a large scale), but I wouldn't dismiss concerns about illegal voting, even if they are frequently exaggerated for political purposes. The fact that it could be done means we should take serious precautions against it.
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How is it easy to catch? Someone did a post recently on California and how easy it would be for illegals to vote.
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You underestimate how hard it can be. Especially when the evidence is routinely destroyed and/or the people who control the data refuse to hand it over.
In my state, someone did go county by county inspecting voter rolls and identifying non-citizens voting. They made it through a couple counties before the Democratic governor caught on and instructed all offices to stop cooperating with them. Then to add insult to injury, when the incomplete report was released, the Democratic spin machine acted like it was a nothing burger because it "only" found several thousand noncitizens registered to vote, and a smaller proportion of several thousand actually voting, "in the whole state".
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I suppose you'd have to look up the TFR from 18 years ago.
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Legal immigration and naturalization are also things that happen.
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I think by this point there is not a plausible path to the presidency for Biden, or at least, not one Biden can follow without a dramatic and improbable improvement in his condition. This is not really something that models do a good job of capturing. Most polling models anticipate some kind of regression to the mean in response to short term bounces and dips in polling. But that assumes a candidate that is capable of running a normal campaign. That's Nate Silver's argument - that Biden's chances depend on the assumption that he can run a normal campaign.
I disagree, and Nate does too in the post. Even given that Biden can't run a normal campaign, polls are just wrong sometimes, and even if the polls widen a bit more it's still within polling error precedent that Biden wins.
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.
Unprecedented? It's July, not October. Polls in August 2016 had Clinton up by double digit margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and we all know how that turned out.
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.
Frankly, it would be unprecedented for the polls to not change to some degree. Things happen, especially with modern short attention spans/news cycles.
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Would you accept an even odds bet that the polls are going to “widen with Biden”?
Can you elaborate?
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Are you talking about the fundamentals-based models or the polls-based models? They give very different results.
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