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Notes -
Obligatory Election post!
The US election is finalized tomorrow. Who do you think will win, Trump or Harris? Polymarket currently has Trump at about 58% and Harris at 42%, but these things can change on a dime!
Relatedly, do you think there will be issues certifying the election results? Which side do you think will struggle more if they lose?
And of course - do you think we'll see outright political violence? I certainly hope not, but it's good to be prepared.
Overall, how was your experience of this election? Did it seem noticeably different from any recent elections in any particular way?
Harris. Pace @SSCReader’s comment I think that the power of the media to set the facts that everyone but the very-obsessive cares about is very high, and similarly their ability to set the emotional tone. I don’t believe they can get people to believe just anything, but I do think they can get a bad candidate elected against an unpopular candidate in the face of the fundamentals.
Likewise the blue apparatus around making sure their supports vote is much more powerful than the red one, and I would expect that to get them another few points.
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There are certainly people I know who are fired up, but the majority I know are fed up. I know some people who moved from column B to column A because they believe Trump's survival in Pennsylvania was supernatural in origin.
I've talked to several people I know or suspect are moderate-to-conservative in politics who are apathetic because they don't think Trump is a good leader. Liberals and progressives seem more fired up, because of their dislike of Trump, and because of the abortion issue. In contradiction to what I see here and in right-wing spaces, I believe we're well past the point where Trump alienates his opponents more than he energizes his supporters.
Like someone at work said today, "No matter who you're voting for, I think we can all agree it'll be good to get tomorrow over with."
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My gut says the real money prediction markets have a 5-10 point bias in favor of Trump due to the nature of the demographics that participate in it. Given right now Poly, Kalshi, and PI average a 9-point spread on Trump winning, the race really does seem like an actual toss up. The fake-money markets feel much more neutral from a partisan perspective, and Manifold and Metaculus in fact average out to 50-50 right now, which reinforces my first sentence.
By toss up, I don't mean we'll end up with battleground state vote margins so thin that we're into recount and SCOTUS ruling territory. Rather, the unknowns are so great that you just can't do better than a coin toss. You can have four digit significant figures from complicated modeling and it won't matter none if you're forced to include an operation with one significant figure.
As such, I think it's mostly pointless to stake a strong claim on whether Trump or Harris wins. It's like claiming prescience when you call a literal coin toss. Sure, you can argue the shy Trump effect (or even shy Harris effect among women) screwing with polling, and whether there is under or over correction. But there is just no real way to know ahead of time if the median pollster is sampling correctly, because it's circular reasoning, right? You can only adjust your model after the real thing takes place, and you contrast the results with your forecast. Having a track record almost doesn't really matter because of how much the electorate realigns and changes or how people's propensity to respond changes. Everyone is running blind given how close the election is.
This is probably a useless sentence, but if Trump wins, people will attribute his victory to inflation, Biden's late decision to drop out / Harris's anointment without a competitive process, and racism/sexism/bigotry; if Harris wins, people will attribute abortion, Jan 6, and racism/sexism/bigotry.
...but if you held a gun to my head and made me bet on my life who I think will win, I say Harris. Abortion is just really an electoral loser. The sooner the GOP realizes it, the sooner it can be competitive again in elections.
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My gut impression, with very little in terms of analysis to back this up:
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Awfully hard to say, because the best evidence is the polls and the polls are maximally uncertain. It’s like guessing the polling error, which is normally a fool’s errand. Still, one can reason through various sources of error:
a) Sample error won’t be much of a factor. We have lots of polls and we can average out their sample errors. We can’t entirely get rid of it, of course, but the real problem is that the polls we’re seeing don’t have enough variance. This suggests …
b) Herding. The polls are not really independent of each other. This means that averaging them won’t diversity away the errors they have in common, and a big one is …
c) Model error. The fundamental problem is that it is believed that the traditional sampling is just missing voters. It has certain missed Trump voters the past two cycles. So a lot of pollsters try to estimate what they can’t sample. They can be sophisticated about it but it’s ultimately a guess, and it seems that a lot of pollsters are reluctant to guess too far away from the NYT/Siena and other leading pollsters. However, this guess can be wrong about the electorate that will really show up and this will produce a bias against the true result. Currently, pollsters seem to be herding around and 50-50 outcome, which minimizes their chances of being seriously wrong unless there’s a blow out.
d) Latency. It is often stated that polls are not a prediction of the future but a snapshot of the present electorate. Not quite. It’s a snapshot of a recently past electorate. Polls take a number of days to complete. Sometimes they are held. For most polls we’re looking a delay of a couple of days. Poll aggregators, like RCP, reaching back weeks have big latency problems, given in composite picture of the race one or two weeks ago. Latency error means that polls may be too slow to respond to late breaking changes or late deciders.
How does this affect the current election? The biggest sources of polling error seem to be model error and latency error, and we’re not completely in the dark about them. We have some data points showing the effects of different models. In particular, the IA Selzer poll arand the IA Emerson poll released on the same day has D+3 and R+10, where the former does not even try to find missing Trump voters and other latter does. That’s a 13-point spread. Some of it could be sampling error, but these polls shows that model error could be a significant chunk of the polling error. There’s also a leaked internal IA poll from the Trump campaign which is R+5, suggesting that Trump may be underperforming the modeling by 3-5 point. That’s huge. If you give 3 points to Harris, she sweeps the swing states and cleans up with about 319 to 219 EVs. There are of course lots of complications with the IA Selzer polls, but it opens the possibility for significant model error in most posts (and they’re herdering around this, so not completely independent) and a major polling miss.
As for latency, the last week of the Trump campaign has been disastrous for non-online Latinos. The “floating island of garbage comment,” which Trump refused to condemn personally, appears to have liquidated the undecided Latino vote in Pennsylvania. Given how close in the polls PA is, it probably hands the commonwealth to Harris and her blue wall holds. If there’s a 3-5 point model error, as there are some signs for, she could end up sweeping the swing states or even start winning Red states.
Of course, model error could favor Trump. Polls are trying to account for low-propensity Trump voters (generally young and non-college educated men) but the problem is with low-propensity voters is that they don’t turn out. Maybe they did more when Trump was fresh and cool. The last week of campaigning with emptier and emptier rallies suggest he’s past his expiration date.
Final call: lean Harris with upside.
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If Harris loses, I think there is a strong chance that the powers that be will remove Biden from office using the 25th amendment, so that Kamala could be the first woman president. (Maybe I just like the idea because I’m tickled by seeing how far Kamala can go without winning an election.)
If she loses, Biden will get a lot of blame for sabotaging her campaign, and this would be the perfect revenge.
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I'd say it's pretty close to even, certainly the closest (polls-wise) that we've seen in decades. Nate Silver has an almost perfect 50-50, while betting markets have 55-45 in favor of Trump. I trust Silver a bit more than the betting markets, which have a record of being slightly R leaning. There was a Romney whale in 2012, and a 35% chance for a Trump win in 2020 was a bit too high IMO given the polls. Silver might have a slight D bias, but it doesn't matter much in any case since they both pretty much agree with each other (the betting markets have mostly converged with Silver over the past few days after being too pro-Trump for a bit).
Anyone who has a high degree of certainty on this election outcome is either a fool, a charlatan, or a grifter. You should knock them down a peg or two in your mental map of who to trust.
Republicans will absolutely, 100% throw a fit if they lose. That's practically guaranteed. Trump has been laying the groundwork for it for a while now, as have pro-Trump accounts like Catturd (who's a good barometer of the online right). Trump said the vote was rigged when he lost the Iowa primary in 2016 (with little evidence), he said it was rigged in 2020 (with little evidence), and so of course he'll say it was rigged now if he loses. Republicans will squint, say something like "the media is biased, so yeah, I guess the election was stolen" while ignoring all of Trump's actual claims.
I'm not sure if the Dems would go the same way. I'm sure there will be some who want to escalate given what Republicans have done, while others will be more along the lines of "we cannot become that which we hope to destroy". The jury's out on which side will win.
As to whether either side could actually steal the election, I'm doubtful. Trump is more committed, but also highly incompetent and he doesn't have the levers of government at his disposal like he did in 2020. The Dems are more competent and control the presidency, but are less committed and so I don't there will be enough of a consensus to take drastic action.
I think either group is going to be a problem. However, some states have been calling up NG (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/02/us/washington-oregon-nevada-national-guard-election/index.html) especially it appears in Blue states. This seems rather telling, because it seems like the elites are expecting unrest in Blue areas not red ones. This makes me suspect that they’re anticipating a Red win, as that’s what would cause trouble in Blue areas. The Proud boys aren’t going to Portland. But Antifa goes there all the time.
Antifa doesn’t like Harris much either, though.
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It just means the left took stuff like J6 seriously, while the right tries to memoryhole it as nothing more than a few folks strolling through a building.
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I suspect they're expecting riots no matter who wins. They're organized and funded in advance, and you can't tell the people you've bussed in to shut up and go home without blowing off some steam. Like Hines always talks about, blues just consider it a charming youthful game for their tribe, like Spartan kids playing Pillage The Helots.
If Harris wins the riot can be about Dunkin Donuts' complicity with Israel or something.
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Maybe you don’t mean me since I am not a Republican … but this is too light on the media.
The thought is ‘ the vast majority of journalism in this country revolves around getting one political party elected ‘ and even that thought is almost too tame for me.
Trump has hours and hours of air time to fill and a bunch of information at his disposal to try and say the election was stolen with a straight face. The rest of us don’t have that problem. We can simply just state what is, imo.
I’m unsure what the solution is - but ‘ journalism ‘ needs to be disbanded and reformed into proper working other in much the same vein as the government itself.
The media exists to make money, with the partisan slant being a secondary consideration, caused by the leanings of the reporters themselves. If the media was as coordinated and hated Trump as much as some would claim, it wouldn't have given him so much free air time for his entire political career.
I agree journalism could use improvement, but I haven't heard of any reasonable propositions to do so. Most people who want to change it can only think of replacing it with something like Catturd, i.e. the same problems as before, amplified significantly, but it agrees with their sectarian ideology so they claim it's "better".
"Disbanding" the media would be a terrible idea.
Not sure why. Mainstream media is already pretty much dead or dying, being replaced via the capitalist mechanism you use to justify it, making money.
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Dem win, as I've been predicting since the biden-trump debate.
Literally nothing matters in this country except the institutions, and they are now as dominated by the ruling party as anything in China. And like in China, any apparent loosening of total control is just a slipup caused by intra-party feuding, like the Connecticut voting fraud case where someone got caught dropping off a garbage bag full of ballots for the wrong democrat in the primaries.
The real difference in this election is how little discussion there's been. I haven't felt the need to debate whatsoever, because it's as pointless as arguing with chatgpt. "Issues" don't matter, reality doesn't matter, only framing and who holds the megaphone matters.
Why get caught up playing the game of "that's misinformation! Well, maybe it's true but it's still malinformation! and anyway you're banned for Hate Speech, read the room." You can see all the moves coming 20 steps ahead, being right in retrospect doesn't matter because you still publicly lost the social power game against the guy who demonstrated his power to rig it, and the only winning move is not to play.
A nonexhausitive list of examples: violent crime & shoplifting rates, the state of the economy, inflation, #s of illegal migrants and the very existence of government programs importing them, Biden's senility, assassins' motivations, "woke and CRT doesn't exist it's all in Republicans' imaginations," Biden's nuclear crossdresser stealing women's underwear, there's no censorship on social media you're just banned for being a bad person, we must criminalize residential school mass grave genocide Denial, leftists don't support Hamas at all you're crazy for thinking so, "yeah well you're weird for noticing!". I could go on and on.
The people lying about all of these didn't lose anything by lying. They actually beat you by demonstrating that they can maintain the lie longer than the truth can stay solvent and then bury it in a ditch afterwards.
Like Scott said about arguing with Vox: they can lie endlessly and force you to burn ever more weirdness points correcting them.
I've been feeling this too, but contemplating that it may just be a side effect of getting old and having done all this before.
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I think Trump will win. Weak confidence.
If Harris wins, I think we'll see a serious attempt at immigration amnesty within her first term. Moderate confidence.
If Harris wins, I think Trump will probably receive a prison sentence. Moderate confidence.
If Harris wins, I think Trump will make some attempt to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Moderate confidence.
Over the next year, polling will measure significant decreases in trust in the Federal government, the media, and Elite institutions generally. Extremely high confidence.
Posts I didn't get to prior to the election, in no particular order:
Retrospective on whether Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe, and on whether Joe Biden was cooperating with the sale, how this was investigated by the authorities and the press, and how we talked about it here over time.
Retrospective on Jan 6th, comparing the arguments we had on the day to the information that's come out since.
Path-Dependence as an expression of institutional decay: Public Trust in elections and institutions, Democratic Party presidential candidate selection, hopefully other examples.
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Trump, not because of the polls (too much herding means they are likely wrong in some way) or because of the match up, but because of the fundamentals which I think outweigh most other things. Inflation has hit pretty hard (even if that was likely to have been similar had Trump won in 2020, that doesn't matter to voters), the Democrats do not have the benefit of an incumbent, and the Senate races up for grabs heavily favor Republicans. Therefore like 2016 regardless of who the candidates are, the Republican should be favored to win.
The only headwinds are abortion, which seem to have driven turnout for Democrats in mid-terms and special elections and the like, and that Trump while popular with his base is also unpopular with others, even sometimes those not out and out Democrats. However I don't think those are enough to prevail over "It's the economy stupid", but they will probably make it closer than it would otherwise be.
Elseworlds prediction: A generic Republican would out-perform Trump. The fundamentals favor the Republican candidate enough and Trump is polarizing enough that any random Republican carries almost everyone Trump would have in this circumstance plus picks up some of the wishy-washy Democrats and Independents who are unhappy with the economy but also really dislike Trump. Sure his base would be less enthusiastic about Jeb 3.0 or non-Mormon Romney or whoever but they are still being hit by inflation and economic circumstance, so it is extremely unlikely they are a loss overall, and picking up even a few thousand votes in purple states is likely more valuable.
Is there a single generic Republican running for any other office who is ahead of Trump? If there is even one, I would be surprised. If that's the case or even if this isn't a long list, it should be very difficult to make this argument. Would you vote for a generic Republican over empty-suit generic Democrat?
Is this some pure counterfactual which requires the generic Republican to run only for President?
People do not like the GOP brand. Substantial portions of Trump's voter base do not like the GOP brand. He gets them to go to the polls and then they mostly vote for downticket GOP. Absent Trump being on the ballot, they don't show up and the GOP loses. It is seemingly only in these spaces among people who are mostly disaffected blue tribers, if even that, who claim these sorts of things.
Trump's base wouldn't bother to show up to the polls and vote at all because they're not GOP voters which is why the GOP managed an anemic majority despite a R+6 general ballot in the 2022 midterms
They don't have to be GOP voters with the current economic woes. But even without Trump the GOP has a realignment which will last beyond Trump (see DeSantis et al). The GOP post Trump is not the same as the GOP pre-Trump.
So you don't know of a single generic Republican who is currently ahead of Trump?
Oh yes, we got the primaries to see what the GOP would default to without Trump and that "generic Republican" would be far behind Trump. It would look a lot like the Senate, where despite Trump still in politics and having heavy effect (and threat), the Senate votes to fund wars, pass awful immigration bills, pass awful funding bills, etc.
DeSantis, perhaps with the best chance among them, would be trailing far behind Trump's numbers because he's uncharismatic and is unappealing in the battleground states. His stated chances on abortion in his train wreck in Iowa would be hard for him to outrun. If we can guess what a Trump-less DeSantis campaign would look like, we have that train wreck for guidance.
The GOP has a near zero GOTV operation despite spending a billion dollars on a system to do it. Without Trump, voters do not show up to the polls and a generic Republican would rely on groundgame to do that, but there is none.
Would you vote for this generic Republican like Nikki Haley over generic Democrat? How many generic Republicans have you voted for?
I'm a lifelong democrat voter who would vote Haley, but I do think it's up in the air how much better she'd do. Trump does energize Democrats too.
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I've never voted for a generic anybody, because they don't exist. They're a theoretical comparator. I have voted for both left and right wing actual candidates though, both at local and national levels.
Being behind Trump in a primary against Trump does not mean that you would run behind a Democrat in the general.
Most people vote for parties not candidates, the impact of charisma is not zero, but it is massively overrated in my opinion. Fundamentals and political coalitions are the building blocks of political success. Charisma is at best a tie breaker when fundamentals are balanced. Trump won in 2016 largely because he was a Republican following two Democratic terms with a not great economy. A generic Republican probably would have won, though with a different voter spread.
GOTV is also overrated in my opinion (and I say that as someone who has organized such things in the past). Even our best internal measures showed it had very little impact. But politicians and political consultants like myself (albeit retired now) are reluctant to stop them, because what if this is the one time it does make a difference. No-one wants to be the one who broke from tradition and got hammered because of it. Plus of course consultants and strategists can rake in big bucks for organizing them.
As an example Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.
"It's the economy stupid" is the dominating factor. Candidates, GOTV, scandals, and the like are very secondary. In a bad economy (defined by how people feel, not actual measures) the incumbent party will be punished regardless of almost anything else. And inflation and living costs have been feeling very bad for large chunks of America right now.
Not-Democrat is going to be enough to get a lot of votes this electoral season, regardless of the candidates in question I think.
I don’t think this is true at all. Rishi Sunak lost because he was a useless man in a suit who talked tough while doing very little and firing everyone who tried to follow through on the rhetoric. He alienated centrists who split to Labour and right-wingers who split to Reform.
We’re talking about a man who thought that resurrecting David Cameron from corrupt ignominy and extending compulsory maths were political triumphs.
Kier Starmer was and remains an incredibly weak candidate: a proven liar who literally couldn’t open his mouth on policy without either scandalising his party or the nation.
Even dragged down by a decade of mismanagement, almost anyone could have followed the Johnson strategy of pushing for change, getting foiled, and using that to push for a bigger mandate. To put it frankly, Sunak didn’t have the guts and he spent two years fiddling, losing not only his chance to accomplish anything but his ability to credibly promise to do something next time round.
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I'm sorry I wasn't more clear, but what I meant to say is these generic Republicans, the many nameless candidates no one knows, are all running behind Trump and have been for months with that difference finally closing in the remaining weeks of the election. We can go down a list of every generic GOP running for Senate, House, etc., and we can see they're behind Trump in the same exact polls by significant margins.
I honestly don't understand how this is a defensible position. Were all the GOP registered voters voting for the party when they picked a 1990s Democrat reality TV star from NYC? Was the Obama wave in 2008 in primary voting for party? Was him winning a landslide in 2008 due to people just voting Democrat? Was him beating Romney despite 4 years of incredibly unpopular policies just people voting for party?
Kamala is a good counterexample, but I think she's the exception which proves the rule. As long as you have every institution, nearly every major media conglomerate, the government bureaucracy itself trying to win you an election, as well as those major media institutions essentially running your campaign while you hide, I agree that charisma is likely overrated.
Trump won in 2016 by ~50,000 votes across 5 states. The other primary candidates who would have likely been the alternatives would have lost badly because they would have picked the wrong topics to focus on and they weren't going to flip rustbelt states which were required to win the presidency for the first time in the generation with another Romney 2.0. A guy like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush wouldn't have even won in Ohio demonstrated by Romney loss there in 2012.
I honestly don't follow UK elections or know much about them at all. I barely know the parties, but didn't Reform UK, a party started in 2024, cannibalize much of the Tory vote? Do you think an uncharismatic rando would have been able to accomplish something like that? I doubt it.
Institutions and media are able to gaslight people into thinking pretty much anything within a wide band for long enough for the economy to not be the controlling factor.
Without GOTV, you just lose. Without registration machines, you just lose. In my experience, they're the necessary foundations to win at all. There are ways to substitute for them, like having a guy so charismatic he drives voters to the polls.
But would Romney have lost in 2016, after a two term Democratic president? That is the question. The pattern is that after two terms the leadership usually swings. So yes my contention is that Romney probably would have won Ohio in 2016. 2012 was a different election with different fundamentals.
My experience with being in politics is that people vastly overrate the ability of the media and politicians to gaslight the people. At best we hope to find something that resonates then run hard on it, but we have much less power to actually persuade people than is commonly believed. I know, it used to be my job. It isn't Trump's charisma that drove his win, because he inspires hate in about as many people as he does adoration. Look at Brexit, despite the media going hard, it still happened. The people have their own opinions formed by their social groupings much more than driven by the media or politicians in my direct experience.
Put it this way if we had two boring uncharismatic, candidates in this election, with the economy as it is, with Biden being dumped for Boring Dem 2.0, who would you put your money on? I submit the smart money would be on Republican 2.0 all else being equal. High inflation, low economic confidence, some push back on woke stuff like trans, a one term President who can't run for a second term because he can barely cope with a debate. Setting aside who is running, the fundamentals I think lean Republican.
Yes, Romney would have lost after a two term Democratic president. Fundamentals were worse for Democrats in 2012 than the were in 2016. The national registrations imbalances were worse. The economy was quite a bit worse with very unpopular policies still in recent memory. I agree people vote for parties when they don't know the candidates, but far more people know the top of the ticket than the down ballot. We're talking about the top of the ticket here.
we had a 3 year long 24/7 news cycle into a hoax about Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia to win 2016; the media is regularly engaging in a cycle of throwing stuff out to see if it lands with a portion of the population who want it to be true and then they run with it
if the media crunchdown doesn't work then they rely on goldfish memory to drop it and move on to the next accusation cycle
if you're trying to hit every ball, your batting average may plummet, but eventually you find something which has a sufficient amount of nugget of truth or interest group to hang onto and then use it to gaslight large portions of the population
you shred your credibility when you do this and we've seen that in hyperdrive for 8 or 9 years, and yet the media has incredible power in framing any discussion, controlling any perception of reality and we see that in the way the regime tries so hard to control information and places of discussion, and set the outside limits of acceptable beliefs
you see it in the collusion hoax to the covid hysteria to the BLM religious revival
At this point, I think this Great Alternative Generic Republican theory is functionally unfalsifiable; fundamentals were worse, the GOP in 2016 had an even worse policy on immigration until Trump showed up, their trade/industrial policy was to ship it to china and suck more money into wall street, the possible alternative candidates polled worse in must win states in the midwest, and more, and yet this belief survives.
I'm not saying this particular to you, but it's always funny to watch the cycle in these sorts of forums: Trump is an idiot and buffoon, he will fail miserably, and never succeed at anything, but also once he does win or do anything (win presidency, get SCOTUS picks, overturn Roe, etc., etc.,) actually it wasn't that difficult and also any nonTrump generic GOP would have done it anyway (and probably would have been more successful!).
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It's a good thing I'm not an American, because I'd be driven to despair by the choice of candidates in every election since Obama and Romney. Though my mild disappointment in a Trump win would be even more mildly assuaged by Vance becoming more likely to be elected himself in the future. I like smart people being in power, even if they have to ride Trump's coat tails on the way there.
I do recall when too much time on Reddit had given me minor TDS, I remember my gut dropping when I heard the news he'd been elected back in the day (I was very concerned about him kicking off a nuclear war with the Chinese). I very quickly learned that was an overreaction, mostly by becoming a regular on the old Motte and being exposed to more reasonable (or at least varied) viewpoints than the Reddit mean.
Anyway, I'm mostly ambivalent between the two, or at least I can't pick one I think is strictly superior. If I had to bet, I'd pick Trump going largely off the prediction markets, it's too close to call from what I can tell otherwise.
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Low confidence predictions on the swing states- NC, Georgia, Arizona: Trump
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada: tossup
Michigan, New Hampshire: Harris
Downballot, I think r’s take the senate but democrats get a mildly less restive caucus.
I expect trump to allege fraud in swing states he loses. His lawsuits will probably go better for him this time but still not succeed. If trump wins the election there will be a few protests in deep blue cities which turn violent because of retards, but no wide scale rioting. I expect protestors in blue cities in red states to get the jackboots on them if they violate some pissant technicality.
If Trump loses the overall election the majority of the R caucus will vote against certifying again, but there won’t be another January 6.
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I do not know.
If Trump wins, I place an 75% probability that Rep. Jamie Raskin carries through on his implied threat to not certify the election results, as he tried to do in 2016. I doubt that he can get a critical mass of democrats to join up with the effort, however.
I would not be surprised if there were extensive protests which degenerated into limited looting sprees in major cities in the event of a Trump victory. I would be surprised if more than 5 people nationwide were killed.
The media bias was cranked up to 11, and the candidate quality (with the pleasing exception of JD Vance) was through the floor.
Yeah, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act's standards are high: 20 Senators and 87 Representatives is not pocket change. I'd expect some sort of symbolic act anyway, but I'd be unpleasantly surprised if they were able to pick up even half that.
((Of course, in 2020 I thought Red Tribes never rioted; there's a lot of space for unpleasant surprise.))
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I bet on Trump after the assassination attempt. I don’t think anything since then has really changed his fundamentals. Harris is a significantly better candidate than Mecha-Biden, but I’m not sure how much that affects swing states. High confidence she wins the popular vote, though. Trump enthusiasts are wildly uncalibrated on this.
Democrats are unlikely to fight certification. I guess there’s a possibility of a Bush v. Gore cock-up leading to a serious legal challenge? Not the “throw shit at the wall” approach of the Kraken suits. Trump found those by making it a show of personal loyalty. Harris can’t and won’t command that kind of initiative. She’ll give a polite concession speech, and if she has to retract it like Gore, she will.
Trump supporters will pitch a fit if he loses. I was at the local gun store this weekend; it’s become fashionable to say things like “winning the vote is one thing, making it through the count is another.” A Democrat victory is presumed illegitimate. Trump will continue to pander to this sentiment, refusing to admit defeat. Again. That won’t actually lead to violence, mind you; Texas’ continued lean red will satisfy their honor.
In summary, there’s next to no chance of organized violence by anyone. It is possible that a Trump victory leads to riots in Democratic cities, but there would be zero chance (or expectation) of that changing outcomes. It’d be violence for frustration’s sake. Conversely, there’s near zero chance of random pro-Trump violence. Coordination on the level of 1/6 is more likely but still implausible. Nothing more complex will occur.
My overall experience? Pretty unpleasant. The discourse has been terrible and the vibes rancid. I am incredibly disappointed at how many intelligent, articulate users on this forum alone gave up all pretense of rigor.
I didn’t vote in 2012. Every Presidential election since then has been a referendum on Donald Fucking Trump. I’m ready for him to be out of the news. He doesn’t deserve to be rewarded.
I voted for Harris, and so should you.
Democrat militias carrying out organized violence doesn't count as organized violence? They get a complete pass on rioting and burning as much as they want? Why? Why the passive "leads to" instead of "the left will"?
Militias? Sure, that’d count. Those are awfully few and far between.
I don’t believe I’ve given anyone a pass on looting and/or burning.
And I use the passive because I don’t believe “the left” is an agent.
It is possible that, after a Trump victory, some morons at a Mostly Peaceful™ protest go burn down the local 7-11. I don’t consider that organized violence any more than I consider the Charlottesville debacle organized.
If we define "militia" as "organized to the point that the people committing the violence have defined, articulatable responsibilities in managing how the violence is implemented", that doesn't seem rare to me over the last decade. "you three hit people, these two "intervene" once you've gotten a few licks in, these two are on medic duty, you guys run interference with anyone trying to record the action..." I've been observing something like that pattern since 2015/2016 at the latest.
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They’ll show up to some Texas nationalist movement events and then stop, most likely.
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Harris, because we'll get as much turnout from the living-impaired voter demographic as necessary to ensure she wins.
No, because Republicans lack the wherewithal to block certification no matter how obviously fraudulent the results. We could have North Korean election results, and people will just throw up their hands, grumble, and plan to vote harder in 2028.
Only if Trump somehow manages to miraculously overcome the margin of fraud — in which case, we will see strong attempts to block certification. We'll also Trump given a lengthy jail sentence in New York, which left-leaning state law enforcement — and possibly the FBI — will attempt to arrest him so he can be extradited to serve said sentence before he can be sworn in. Expect large, organized uprisings to stop the Fascist takeover.
Granting the possibility that it would be easy to cast ballots in the name of dead people, wouldn’t this type of fraud be trivial to prove after the fact? Who voted in any given election is public information. Select a random cohort of voters, then check if they are still alive. Did anyone do this for 2020?
No, because AIUI, it's literally illegal to try to obtain the evidence necessary to prove it. (Edit: I think /u/The_Nybbler has posted comments here to this effect.)
To again quote "L" at Jim's:
…
[Emphasis added]
I think it varies state-by-state. Here is what voter data Pennsylvania says you can get for $20.00:
Why can some election integrity guy on Twitter not post TODAY the cryptographic hash of a pseudorandom algorithm that he will use to pull a sample of registered Pennsylvania voters who cast a ballot in the 2024 election to manually check for dead people? This wouldn’t be like, super easy, but surely someone out of the 25% of the country who thinks Trump won in 2020 has both the skills and the will to do it.
Supposedly anyone with a few bucks can file a FOIA request too. In reality you need a team of lawyers to force the government to comply with it's own laws. Which is why only large news organizations get any information out of FOIA anymore.
And that's more or less how it's played out over the last 4 years with all the litigation that is still ongoing from the 2020 election.
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No idea. I'm just posting this as a reminder, mainly for myself, that no matter what narrative of inevitability will be drawn from this election, it sure didn't look inevitable the day before.
Good on you! Yeah just judging by the comments, it definitely seems pretty split so far.
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I think Trump will win. I think he's being underestimated again, and low propensity voters and undecideds are splitting for him. The Democrats found the one politician less charismatic than Hillary Clinton. But then again, I also believed that he'd win against Biden, so I'm curbing my expectations this time around. But that's what I'm reading the vibes right now.
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Oh man, I wish. Back in the good old days, I think (?) we used to get same day election results, but not anymore.
Even barring the real possibility that this gets tied up in the courts for weeks, or even months, I don't expect a same day result. Last election was held on Tuesday November 3, but results were not confidently projected until November 7, and not called until November 19. Per Wikipedia:
More detailed timeline from 2020:
votes
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Electoral college - 80% Trump
Popular vote - Cointoss
Polls show a close race, but pollsters underestimated Trump support in both 2016 and 2020, when he was supposed to lose soundly. (In October 2020, poll aggregators were showing him down by 10 points nationally.) I see a lot of people arguing "surely they've adjusted now", but if anything, my impression is the media has been trying to hyperstition a Kamala victory, and I wouldn't put it past polling organizations to be part of that attempt. Reports of a close race encourage turnout from an otherwise divided and demoralized Democratic base. The timing of the sudden Kamala swing in polls feels artificial.
Riots/violent coup attempts - 10%
For either party. The level of passion from Democrats is lower, and the sort of Republicans who would consider staging a January 6th again will, I think, have been spooked by the DOJ's level of political repression in the last four years.
Neither side will contest the election. Republicans will bark about illegal votes if they lose, but not bite. Meanwhile, Democrats will kvetch about the electoral college if they lose despite a popular vote victory, but otherwise stand down.
MAGA Republicans will be devastated if they lose this one, woke Democrats merely irritated.
Maybe true but a) this functions both ways, so pollsters could, under this theory, equally be great polling results for Harris in order to avoid complacency, and more importantly b) the differences here are tiny (well within any MoE) between a close EV race and a popular vote tossup delivering a Trump victory, only one or two points. Polls can't pick up those tiny margins anyway, and the far more parsimonious explanations for polling predicting tight races in key states is herding - but once again this has no particular valence so could be hiding good results for either Harris or Trump.
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I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.
For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.
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My personal prediction is a 270-268 Harris win, with the Democrats taking PA and all three great lakes states by ~1% in each case.
This is not a policy election. It's a GOTV and political ratfucking election, and the DNC has massive operational edge in both.
This is a low confidence prediction.
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I finally got Robinhood event contracts working and put down a trivial amount of money on Harris. I find it hard to believe that after January 6, Trump is more popular than ever. I have a feeling that the movement reflects how pollsters are adjusting for their big misses in 2016 and 2020, not a change in sentiment on the ground.
Normies don’t give two shits about J6.
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I mean, it helps that Jan 6 has been extensively relitigated, and found to not be what it was at first sold as. No police officers were killed, down from initial claims of 3-6. There is extensive footage of capital police just waving grandmas into the capital, contra the sizzle reel that the media put together. Trump is consistently reiterated that he told people to march "Peacefully and patriotically". The FBI has never disclosed how many agent (agent provocateur?) they had in the crowd, but the former head of the Capital Police claims his agency was excluded from briefings and intentionally kept in the dark about it. In fact, the former head of the Capital Police contradicts many "official" claims with his narrative of the events of that day. And effectively the only person willing to get his side of the story was Tucker Carlson, who was coincidentally fired before the episode aired. So he interviewed the guy again when he went independent.
So yeah, a lot of people are now willing to overlook January 6.
Hell, a lot of people are motivated by it because a from the outside it appears that many ordinary people were put through the wringer and many are still in prison or will be heading to prison over it.
That was probably the biggest misstep. Making a big deal of out J6 was one thing, but slamming people with no criminal records with prison time reads as pure political payback.
This is the one time it would have been helpful to exercise some restraint and leniency, but it'd be hard to square that with the narrative that the republic was inches from being overthrown.
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I have think it will be a Trump victory. Lately the attacks by the Harris campaign have seemed weak, desperate and inconsistent signaling a campaign that knows it doesn't look good. I remember back in September there was a big push for the 'Republicans are weird' angle and there was much agreement even on this site that it was devastatingly effective. Despite the alleged effectiveness it seems to have been dropped pretty quickly and by late-October we were back to the usual 'Trump is a fascist dictator existential threat', which to me indicated that the 'weird' angle was actually pretty ineffective and largely astroturfed. Latching onto Trump's Liz Cheney comments seems incredibly weak too, not only is it a blatantly dishonest misinterpretation of his words (this is typical) but it is supposed to win people over through their sympathy for...Liz Cheney of all people? Fundamentally Kamala Harris has always been unpopular as she got an absolutely negligible amount of votes in the 2020 primary. All the enthusiasm I saw on reddit in the wake of her being chosen felt forced and inauthentic. She isn't popular and Trump is more normalized than ever. Seems like an easy one to call.
As for rioting and looting, I don't think there will be much at all. I don't remember any substantial riots in 2016 and as I said, Trump is more normalized now than he was then by far.
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I am starting to theorize that Prediction markets will have a bit of a bias inherent to them on certain issues, given that the participants are generally pro-capitalist and like/trust markets. This probably broadly correlates with certain beliefs and preferences which gently nudge how they trade to put the result a point or two off from 'reality.'
Polymarket might reinforce this issue, being crypto-based.
Yes. Do I think it will be on a scale large enough to warrant alarm? Not sure. Probably not. Trump wins we're seeing some cities get huge protests, some of which will turn into rioting and looting. Kamala wins and I'm not sure where the violence pops up, but there'll be some.
It has been miserable for me in that the candidates we got would probably have lost handily to almost any of the respective opposing Party's other frontrunners.
I think there is too, although I haven't spent as much time looking at this bias as others. Smells like an opportunity.
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As I see people proclaiming a Harris landslide, I'm pretty sure it means the end of our country if that happens. And yeah, there is the whole "They'll flood swing states with illegals and then grant them all amnesty" angle. But for me it's just the fact that they, be it big media, three letter agencies, George Soros, etc, were able to brainwash the country into voting for a rando with a 19% approval rating with zero democratic input or vetting during a primary. If that succeeds, it's over, we're no longer a democracy. If people will rubber stamp whoever the CIA tells them to elect, we're fucked.
This post is beyond goofy. It's like a perfect personification of the Dale Gribble voters Hanania rails against.
Do you have any evidence the CIA or George Soros is "brainwashing" people to vote for Harris?
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Well no, the big issue is that the Harris-Walz campaign position is that the first amendment doesn’t protect anything they disagree with.
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So back in 1908, when there weren't any primaries, the US wasn't a democracy? Only in the 70s, when binding national primaries were first implemented, did it become one?
Elites always win. This isn't new.
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Well, I disagree. The primary driver for Democratic turnout in this election is Trump and abortion and none of them rely on Harris being anything other than not-Trump, you don’t need a deep-state conspiracy for her to be a viable candidate. Also I disagree that CIA brainwashed people to vote for her, like, I don’t even know where to begin with that.
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Eh, I'm not nearly as doom and gloom as you. FWIW I don't think America has been a real democracy since at least FDR, if not earlier, lol.
I agree that the deep state agencies' grasp on the political landscape is troubling. I get the sense that now that big tech has gotten more of an understanding of the situation though, there will be a realignment of power. Political or otherwise.
"Former" CIA staffs most of the moderation teams. How much of a collaboration this is I don't know. Which is to say, I don't know if they were invited in, or sent in, or both. But IMHO you should treat big tech as an extension of the CIA.
Do you have even something like even an InfoWars citation on for this? I've never heard this before (and, plainly, don't believe it). I know some of the moderation folks at YouTube etc. They're the last people who would work at the CIA - most are art history major from Vassar types ... which, yes, brings up its own concerns about the censorship. But, this idea that we're already at KGB levels of information-gov't integration seems truly weirdo.
Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts
The irony if you never hearing about this, because the FBI/CIA has such control in the first place should be a punch in the gut.
Thanks for the source. Learning has occurred.
Wow, like, damn, dude, you're so based and right. I'll go take my midwit self to the euthanasia trough ASAP.
I have terrible news for you about the board members of Euthanasia Trough Ltd
What? After that partnership with Nihlism, Inc. I thought the synergies were leading to way more onboarded users - OHHHH, I see it now.
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Personally, I was invited. Zorba had to wait for my badge and gun to come in the mail before he could give me any permissions, though.
This website hardly qualifies as "big tech" sufficient to be dunking on Coil
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You think that’s bad, imagine the headache it must have been to get @self_made_human onboarded and his gun transported into rural Scotland.
Five Eyes collaboration made it quite easy tbh, especially when they figured out I could write a legal script for all the crack cocaine I was asked to smuggle in!
Damn, the CIA’s gonna do the same thing to the British blacks that they did to the American blacks… 😢
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If I had to bet, I guess I'd bet on Trump, but as a foreigner looking at the situation only through the Internet, I don't feel particularly confident.
Stranger things have happened I suppose, but it would be weird for Dems to do it after 4 years of handwringing over voter-fraud conspiracies. Don't think Trump will try anything either given how the last time turned out, unless they'll find a smoking gun.
My impression is people are tired. Maybe some half-heated protests. Maybe a lone-wolf attack. But nothing mass-scale, not even a repeat of J6.
It was bizarrely vibes based. No actual clash of ideas or policies, either from the candidates, or from their supporters.
Democrats have absolutely no problem with threading that needle. They’ll just claim their claims to be real and republican’s to be false.
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If the Democrats refuse to certify Trump I think its more likely to be due to claiming Trump is unqualified to hold office (for some reason) than voter fraud allegations. But don't be surprised if Trump wins and they try and do a similar challenge to what Trump did but somehow its preserving democracy instead of destroying democracy.
I’ll take that latter bet.
I don’t think they’ll resist certifying unless there’s a Bush v. Gore level of doubt.
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Scoop: Some top Dems won't commit to certifying a Trump win
Words don't actually have meaning to politicians. They are just mouth sounds they make to keep their job.
I don't have an issue with only promising to certify 'fair' elections in hindsight, because that is Trump's current attitude too.
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Yeah agreed on this. The almost complete lack of genuine policy proposals, especially from the Harris camp, was shocking to me.
Like... I get that vibes are more important but usually there's at least the veneer of caring about the object level policies. This time it seemed that veneer was totally absent.
'Who, whom?' is the only policy statement they need.
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