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naraburns  nihil supernum  18hr ago (text post)   10022 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Separate from the presidency itself, it looks like a takeaway from the night is that the Republicans are taking back control of the Senate.

Assuming Trump wins, this would give the Republican party to make various federal appointments, including Supreme Court judges. Four of the current judges- Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Roberts- will all be 70 or older next year, and all of theme are Obama, Bush, or H.W. Bush appointees. Meaning long-term implications for the balance of the court if any, especially Sotomayor, does, though alternatively entrenching a Republican justice in place if the oldest (Thomas) leaves.

Not clear at this point but maybe possible is a government trifect if Trump wins the presidency and the Republicans win the house. While potentially very powerful, the narrow Republican majorities will likely limit any organized effectiveness of this, bar some signature legislation push.

If Sotomayor doesn't make it to the next D President, she'll look as dumb as RBG not resigning under Obama.

I've noted before that this campaign has been awfully short on signature legislation. Is that strategic ambiguity? Is it a crippling fear of 🤓 emoji? Is it a tacit admission that our most salient problems are unusually vague? No idea. But I'm betting Supreme Court decisions will be the closest we get to a lasting legacy of the next President.

Kavanaugh has exceeded my expectations. Barrett has not. I don't even think I have an opinion on Gorsuch. Not thrilled about the prospect of one or two more Trump picks.

Here's a new one: https://x.com/MichaelLangeNYC/status/1854003103302828246

Kamala Harris, with >95% of precincts reporting, is polling at 67.8% of the vote in New York City.

If that holds, that would be the WORST performance for a Democratic Presidential candidate in the five boroughs since 1988 (!!!!)

Didn't have that one on my bingo card. I'm guessing the migrant issue has something to do with this.

Her numbers in Illinois and Virginia are also really bad.

NYT putting a Trump victory at 89%.

Assuming he wins, all of the people who've spent the last few weeks posting blackpills in the main threads about how the election is rigged and the Democrats are just going to pull "another" 2020 - I expect to see some mea culpas out of you. You know who you are.

Already drafting those in my head.

Though a lot can still happen between tonight and January.

It’s why the Vance pick was so important.

I'm still expecting to wake up to headlines about "election night miracle as millions of WW1 veterans surge to polls in key swing states: they fought to protect trans kids from Hitler, now they're here to save america from fascism"

I had my thesis. Was I right? Yet to see. Those 3 am vote dumps are still possible.

96% to win, 92% to win popular vote. How is that strong a conclusion possible after all the last minute surprises last year? There are huge amounts of uncounted votes in swing states.

Context: I strongly do not think there was a material amount of fraud last time around, and I don't expect there will be this time either

Comment downthread suggesting that Trump moving from "don't mail in your ballots" to "vote in whatever way you can" could possibly explain the entire phenomenon.

But CNN is full of cope. Fifteen minutes ago they posted "Outstanding Georgia votes include in-person from metro Atlanta and absentee from Savannah area." They did finally call North Carolina, but Decision Desk is eating everyone's lunch.

Does anyone know what’s taking Nevada so long to begin releasing results? Are they waiting until the numbers are finalized?

They hold their cards close to their chest.

The networks are saying that they don't release any totals until ALL people still in line are done voting. So results won't release until every line clears in the whole state.

Thanks!

Supposedly they do not release results until all voters finish voting and all votes are tabulated. I expect 2-3am EST for NV to report.

They're depressed because they're a swing state but don't actually matter in any of the plausible scenarios.

Looks like Kamala Harris will not win the south end of Dearborn, an area 90+% Muslim that Biden won with 88% of the vote 4 years ago.

This may not end up mattering in the end, but still hilarious.

Muslims didn't vote for a woman

Absolutely shocking, I say. Maybe the democrats will finally learn their lesson about pandering to this particular demographic

I haven't seen it discussed much, probably because Harris didn't lean into it, but the elephant in the room is that maybe America just doesn't want a woman president?

I can see the headlines now:

Trump beats women

I'm following Ken White and some other usual suspects on bluesky. If she does lose they're already prepping that narrative hard. Lots of "the votes of racist misogynists aren't valid expressions of democracy"

I’ve been watching NBC, and they just talked about that too. (Paraphrased) “If Harris loses, it might just be proof that Americans won’t vote for a black female president.”

There have been two notable female candidates for the American Presidency in the last half century. One was a clearly ambitious, unprincipled, anti-charismatic party member with debatable interest in legality who ran because it was her turn and the party machine cleared the way. The other was Hillary Clinton.

There are jokes about which was the better role model for young women, but the key point is that neither ran or rose the position on the power of their popularity. This is something of an obstacle in democratic elections, which are basically weighted popularity contests.

I think Hillary would be the better role model. Harris is just as venal but a lot stupider.

I'd like to be able to contradict you, but I don't actually know anything about her, and it looks like I'm going to keep it that way.

I think the Democrat coalition contains a lot of small but important demographics (Muslims, evangelical blacks etc.) who are very firmly opposed to a female President, for many of the same reasons that they're opposed to LGBTQ stuff. This fact makes DNC staffers uncomfortable, so they ignore it, but if they want to win elections, they won't be able to ignore it forever.

I actually don't think the idea of the Republicans putting forward a successful female candidate in the next decade is completely implausible.

I recall seeing a couple articles about this leading up to the election (eg, from the BBC). I expect to see a whole lot more if Trump wins.

This is an angry special interest group casting protest votes in a safe state. The message is that Democrats are eventually going to have to choose between appeasing Jews, and appeasing Muslims--and for the forseeable future, a lot more Muslims will be born into or emigrating to the U.S., than Jews.

But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote, which would be quite something to see.

It will be interesting on how this plays out in internal democratic party politics over the next few years.

This election has definitely shown the limits and the breakdown of the Obama wing of the party. I forget who first made the comparison of Obama's having a Chicago political machine approach to national politics, but this election had so many of the tropes of a machine-led political campaign. Starting from the efforts to build a controlled-opposition via Cheney's wing in the 2021, to the organized lawfare campaigns, to the heavy media influence efforts, to the Democratic candidate switch and even harder narrative efforts. Even these last few weeks of polling and polling coverage have been weird- not just the outliers, and what I now suspect were attempts to paper over / prevent a despair spiral, but coverage of topics not actually matching to voter sentiment. It was a political machine trying to do what a political machine does.

It's also clearly broken down without Obama's star power to drive it, and Obama's technocratic wing of the party always hinged on the argument of 'we're the best at winning.' It's kind of clearly not, a lot of the Democratic old guard is on the way our if not already done so, and so a lot of the party is going to be up for competition going forward.

One thing that is going to matter, though- and one of the things that keeps a political machine working as a machine and is why the Democratic Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world- is the role of loyalty to the machine. The muslim wing voting as a block made a point about power, but it also made a point about reliability. That, specifically, will not be resolved so easily as some accommodation, especially when the anti-Israeli opinion is still a minority position for most of the American electorate.

population is less relevant here. Jews have more influence and spillover compared to Muslims. Policy that pisses off Jews means losing support of some Christians, negative media coverage, other ripple effects

But this potentially feeds into the larger possibility of Trump winning the popular vote

If this happens it'll chiefly be because Trump narrowed his margins in places like NY and CA by 10+ points

This is an angry special interest group casting protest votes in a safe state.

Safe state?

Oh, good catch, sorry. No, not a safe state at all.

If true, this is incredibly fucked up. It means they are voting as a block.

Also, you have to LOL at the incompetence. The Harris campaign let those people exercise veto power over their VP pick, and then lost their vote anyway.

The Harris campaign let those people exercise veto power over their VP pick

Uh, when has Walz ever openly opposed Kamala on support for Israel? Wasn’t he boldly (some would say falsely) proclaiming his military background/support for the global American empire?

The rumor is that Shapiro was nixed for being Jewish

One of the frontrunners for Kamala's VP pick was Jewish.

Ah yeah, I forgot about that guy. Good point; I stand corrected

Block voting is the optimal thing to do when you're a relatively small minority. Even if you're 10% of the population if you consistently block vote and no other groups do you can be the kingmaker effectively every single election. Main party A and Main party B may get to win half the time each but through promising your votes off to the highest bidder (the party that pledges to give you the most stuff) and effectively guaranteeing your chosen side victory you get to win basically every single election. Pretty sweet, isn't it?

This is just the correct way to play the democracy game under the ruleset of the 21st century. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If you don't like it, do away with "democracy".

This is the wages of identity politics, unfortunately.

There was a huge campaign throughout the election cycle by the Palestine crowd to punish Biden and/or Kamala electorally for their concessions to Israel, which is kind of funny given that Israel much prefers Trump.

I placed a bet a few weeks ago that Trump would win the presidency, and a second bet that Kamala would win the popular vote. Earlier this week I was thinking "well I'll lose the former, but I'll still win the latter".

But now it's looking like there's a good chance I might win the former and lose the latter! Never saw this coming.

Kamala really was that bad

Saw this tweet:

"Florida counted all its votes in about an hour. Fraud is a choice."

It's hard to disagree.

Given how this election is going, I'm guessing that states with red governors and state houses will make securing elections a top priority. Even a fraud rate of just 1 or 2% can be incredibly impactful.

Yeah, I've seen similar sentiments. Isn't there some scheme in Florida where every county counts their votes and shows their hand near simultaneous? And as soon as these measures were put in place, wouldn't you know it, Florida went inexplicably solid red.

It just seems obvious to me — if A goes before B, then it gives B a chance to cheat

I don't get it. If B went first, it couldn't cheat?

It wouldn’t know by how much it needed to cheat.

Trump has a 21% chance in Minnesota according to Polymarket. (Thin market though).

Whatever happens, Walz had a really bad campaign. Despite being the beneficiary of an nearly unprecedented positive media blitz, he was quickly exposed as a faker and, quite frankly, not very bright.

If Kamala loses Walz's home state of Minnesota, his selection would go down as one of the great campaign blunders of all-time.

Eh, I think Sarah Palin will be the front runner for some time yet.

I mean, it has to be Tom Eagleton, right?

Do you think McCain had a path to victory? The media hate of Palin might not have mattered.

Certainly the media love of Walz didn't.

Amendment 3 to legalize marijuana in Florida failed with 56% (needing 60%), while prior polls showed 63% support.

Somewhere out there is an Obama-Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voter and I genuinely want to know what guided that person's voting pattern.

They've achieved daoist enlightenment and have aligned their desires with the will of heaven, and in doing so can accomplish their goals without effort.

Honestly, just aging and changing priorities.

Just the aging process could explain it

How does aging explain the Trump-Biden-Trump part?

Biden ran as a centrist and seemed moderate at the time, I could see an older person feeling like Trump was too extreme at the time

COVID and George Floyd messed people's brains. "the world is getting crazy with Trump. I wanted change with Trump, but not like this. I'm going to pick hold my nose and vote for the most milquetoast democrat just so nothing happens for 4 years and things can go back to normal"

A realization that the “return to normalcy” promised by Biden was either absolute bullshit or that normalcy was terrible, actually.

Always votes for the oldest candidate in the election.

That's counter to the two Obama votes, though.

Democrat leaning but hates women (what I like to call "the pizzashill") gets you this pattern.

the pizzashill

No one is going to get that reference.

My buddy's weird pastor was telling me the other day over beers that based on his reading of biblical text Trump is the prophesied antichrist ushering in the end times.

On the one hand the end times are god's will, so both pointless and bad to oppose. But on the other, the antichrist is bad and should be opposed, right?

So assuming Trump is the antichrist, should a prophetically inclined Christian prefer to have voted for or against him?

And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.” Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.

I would not want to risk it.

Prophetically inclined Christians would be aware that Jesus was very clear about his coming will be like a thief in the night, and that no one knows about that day or hour, not even himself, but only the Father knows.

sadly, I know waaaaay too many Christians devouring media insisting that the Rapture is happening any day now.

"sure, sure, but if you use the middle letter of this book with this complex and arbitrary system of numerology, bam, you crack the whole thing wide open!"

I like Trump but I don’t rule it out.

I chose to abstain from voting on this basis, although I still think he's less likely to cause a Revelation-grade catastrophe in the near future than Harris would have. (I associate Mystery Babylon, and the Whore of Babylon, with America, and Harris would fit the bill, although the Whore doesn't need to be a specific individual to represent the country.)

To answer your question: Christians prefer not to vote for the antichrist.

My understanding is the Antichrist is supposed to be a military man of some sort, which Trump is decidedly not

I generally believe that the most important aspect of biblical end times prophecy is the specific statement in Matthew 24:36 that no one knows when it will happen. So I'm generally of the opinion that we won't be able to interpret these prophecies except in retrospect.

Obviously there's meta concerns but I'll just ignore those.

Also, the Antichrist is supposed to be universally popular, which pew research indicates Trump's appeal falters hugely on the international level.

When do you think Harris will concede?

way premature to concede. there is no upside to early concession

She still has an 8% chance according to Polymarket so I think this is a bit premature.

The big networks haven't called a single swing state yet.

Wow Trump at 93 now with a 78 chance to win the popular vote on Polymarket.

In retrospect those popular vote shares were cheap considering Trump was actually ahead in some national polls.

For those of you in it for the schadenfreude, I just saw my first news pundit who looked like she was about to cry (the black woman on CNN reporting live from Harris HQ).

I get my injection of schadenfreude from reading /r/fivethirtyeight and /r/neoliberal. Although I voted for Harris, this is a pretty good silver lining.

It hits different when you can see and hear them. There is something primally activating about faces and voices.

/r/neoliberal transformation into just another /r/politics is application of Conquest's Second Law

I blame the locomotives.

The NYT needle is predicting that Trump is the likely winner: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president-forecast-needle.html

I wasn't able to stay up to watch the entire 2017 Australian Open men's final; I fully expected that Nadal would come up with his usual plot armor bullshit and pull it out. Waking up to see that after five years in the wilderness, Federer had finally won again on the very biggest stage - defeating his greatest rival to boot - is genuinely one of my favorite memories.

I have to go to bed now; I wonder if tomorrow will be another morning like that.

Oh, man, speaking of Nate Silver - apparently his attempt at making a live election night tracker has sputtered out and crashed because its design was low-effort enough that it kept outputting probabilities near 50% long after everyone else had called that Trump probably had it in the bag. That's especially embarrassing for him because the main criticism of Nate through this cycle has been that his model distorts the race to make it look closer to even than it actually is in order to generate drama.

In retrospect, it seems like the obvious failure mode of his election night product. Plenty of information would exist about the state of the race in swing states long before any were actually called, but his election night model would ignore that information. If you wait on saying anything until news orgs have called PA, you'll be hours behind everyone else.

Election Fortification post II:

  • Precinct in Milwaukee, WI had seals discovered broken on 15 out of 16 tabulator machines. They cancelled out the votes from the machines and retabulated all of the 30,000 ballots.

  • Location in Centre County, PA was evacuated due to a bomb threat.

  • Problem from earlier post in Harris County, TX has received a comment from a County Clerk that the difference in numbers was due to an "Alignment' issue.

  • I haven't seen a convincing explanation of what happened, but Burlington County in NJ have had 3+ hour waits, causing some to give up.

Hopefully no further updates.

had seals discovered broken

It's significantly worse than that: Half were discovered defeated but not broken. With a tiny bit more effort, an attacker could have hidden the evidence that they accessed the machines.

How hard is it to select a tamper-evident seal that actually makes it evident when it is tampered with?

Regarding the Selzer poll, I had the following exchange:

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.

We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?

It looks like once again my judgment was infallible and the left was completely and utterly deluded. The entire online left was collectively deluded by the Selzer poll. "She's the gold standard!" It was beyond obvious the poll was rigged.

I ask myself constantly if it is I with the willful blinders. But no, when reality gets a vote in the past 8 years it's always the left who was deluded. The great Selzer debate is just a microcosm. They worship "muh experts" who are bought and paid for, or who are simply lying to support their ideology, and then refused to be moved by facts or logic. I guarantee this will trigger no self-reflection. They will insist they were right to trust the "gold standard" Selzer against all logic.

It's possible Selzer just botched it accidentally, and it wouldn't be the first time to have a weird outlier. But... it wouldn't be the first time to have a weird outlier, so it's at least not a strong look for the people certain it had to be correct.

Selzer looks to be living the Jesse Smollett media arc.

  1. Be a minor notable

  2. Trade integrity for brief media celebration

  3. Collapse

They could just have had a somewhat flawed process that happened to align with the final consensus last time. These things are such tiny sample sizes.

But no, when reality gets a vote in the past 8 years it's always the left who was deluded.

2022 midterms beg to disagree.

There is the theory that Ronna McDaniel and other GOP bureaucrats were purposefully sandbagging Trumpy candidates, starving them of campaign funds and promotion. Now that the Trump takeover of the GOP is complete with Lara Trump as chair, there is no longer internal sabotage.

This is by far a less convincing argument than some of those candidates just being loony.

All politicians are loony when put under any scrutiny what so ever. Even my favorites are kind of loony, but in a way that's endearing to me. All that matters is the information war that shapes public perception of them.

The surprise factor works to trump's advantage...the stuff not captured by polls by possibly picked up by savvy prediction market traders or investors of DJT stock. However, the cockiness by the left was nowhere near where it was in 2016.

At this point, it seems Selzer will be off by 15 points. Wow.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking through where I went wrong.

In what way was it 'beyond obvious'?

I don't claim that the poll was particularly good/accurate, but I find it funny how easily people are willing to label a called shot on a probability 'obviously wrong' as soon the result doesn't agree with the slightly higher probability assigned.

If anyone's right, it's those who look at the record of the pollsters they follow and decide who to believe based on how many cumulative shots they've called correctly.

In what way was it 'beyond obvious'?

Because it blatantly contradicted every other piece of evidence about the state of the race in a way that was wildly implausible.

I find it funny how easily people are willing to label a called shot on a probability 'obviously wrong' as soon the result doesn't agree with the slightly higher probability assigned.

I spent the past few days on X relentlessly making fun of anyone who believed the Selzer poll. And then bet some money on PredictIt for good measure.

If anyone's right, it's those who look at the record of the pollsters they follow and decide who to believe based on how many cumulative shots they've called correctly.

As predicted, zero self-reflection. I could explain to you where this logic goes wrong, but it's better if you figure it out yourself.

I didn't think it was real either. Iowa D+3 would have meant a Democratic sweep of historic proportions uncaptured by any other pollsters. But experience has taught me to avoid a mental states which invite punishment for hubris: the night isn't over quite yet.

Polymarket is spiking to Trump at 90% Did something get called that I am unaware of? It looks the major swing states are still in play.

It can be modeled as a doubly absorbing matrix in which winning/losing a certain number of swing states of a 50% probabiblity confers an absorbing state. This can occur long before most of the votes are tallied. having a sizable lead on 6/10 swing states effectively means winning the election, so winning 5/6 of the necessary states leaves very little room for Kamala to win. or 1/2^5 odds

True, I wasn't thinking in probability.

NYT is projecting an 80 percent chance of a Trump win

But I don’t know I’m getting 2020 vibes, feels like deja vu. Someone know how this is different this time around? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona all look like a toss up and could go for Harris

here is what happed in 2020 based on a screenshot of FTX betting market:

https://wp.decrypt.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FTX-Prediction-Market-U-T-D.png

The ballot dumps come in at 9:30 UTC , so in 5 hours from now

From memory Trump got to like 60-70% chance to win in betting markets.

I certainly am in the 'it ain't over til it's over' crowd. If looking at statistics and probability, since Trump just needs to win one state he's more likely to come out ahead than Harris. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised of midnight shenanigans.

I think the difference is that we don't have COVID forcing first-time-ever changes in election mechanics. Less of a chance for midnight ballots to show up and/or the probability of that is priced in.

That's the theory anyway.

The Dem and Media have called trump an asshole for 4 years about the “big lie”.

If nothing else, he has mobilized his supporters to be vigilant for election rigging. It will be harder to pull the same trick twice. I worry they have new tricks. But in 2020, people were confused when there were reports of vote tabulators being sent home for burst water pipes.

Someone said MI, WI and PA need to be won to allow Harris a path to victory at the moment. WI and PA are about 1% ahead for Trump right now with about 50% of those two states counted.

Edit: WI, MI and PA currently ahead for Trump in the count. Shitposters are memeing 'Trump built the Red Wall'.

If trump wins AZ and Georgia then Yes harris would need to sweep all 3 of those to win.

wtf, 90 percent.

Annoying: ABC is showing the number of votes from different counties with circles. But it seems like they're using the number of votes as the radius, instead of the area. So even when things are entirely tied up, you see a sea of blue.

Malice or incompetence?

Willful blindness. Don't look at what you don't want to see.

New York Times needle now predicting Trump to win the popular vote by 0.3%. That would be absolutely startling.

There goes my 'sure thing' Polymarket bet. But at least I'll make enough in crypto to be up overall.

Do you mean you made a crypto bet, or you just expect crypto markets to respond positively to a Trump win?

https://coin360.com/

It's a sea of green out here. Trump promised to help out with crypto (even launched his own shitty memecoin). Elon's influence should also be helpful here.

And stocks are green too, especially NVIDIA. Something underappreciated IMO is that someone got the Aschenbrenner Thesis into his hands and converted him, he was talking about how the US needs all this power for AI - he seemed enthusiastic about it. Elon and Thiel should definitely be in the inner circle, the e/acc Silicon Valley echelon is advancing at great speed.

They already are responding positively to a Trump win. Bitcoin just hit a new all-time high.

The expectation is Trump will enact pro-crypto policy. I think the probability of this happening is very low though.

Is there a reason, or just enthusiasm? Were the Dems considered more likely to increase taxes and regulation on crypto?

Absolutely. Republicans can be anti-crypto in power and Democrats can be pro-crypto in power, but it's still certainly a polarized issue.

I'm personally waiting for the postmortem gender breakdown between men 18-30 and women 18-30. While I wouldn't have voted for Trump for aesthetic reasons if I had a vote I also wouldn't have voted for Kamala for running a campaign that basically saw men only through the lens of what effects (positive or negative) they have on women.

You being unbanned on Election Day is really incredible timing. Welcome back.

Thank you, it's good to return to the old stomping grounds. You have to be a lot more obtuse on /r/SSC ...

It was trading at 25% ish before the election. Kamala's lead in Nate Silver's polling average was 1%, well within a single standard deviation.

Surely they just haven't yet baked California sufficiently into the pie... surely?

They absolutely have. It's a predictive model rather than just tallying up confirmed votes. In fact, rather to my chagrin, Nate Silver told his subscribers-only chat to just "watch the Needle" because it's got much better granularity than his own Silver Bulletin model for interpreting county results.

All I'm hearing in my head is 2020's talking heads lectures on the "red mirage." If it's not that, then it's just... 2016 all over again.

I'm still feeling very Nybbler-y about it all, myself.

NYT is predicting Trump winning iowa +9. So what was with that selzer poll?

She admitted to weighting women much higher than usual for *mumble mumble* reasons.

Honestly one of the reasons why I am watching the site and the election results right now. A few theories:

  1. Someone published an outlying dataset without permission

  2. Someone paid someone else big $$

  3. Bad sample

  4. Recording error

Note that none of these truly excludes any other reason, but it was a confounding polling error.

I'm more interested in what was with the people trying to convince everyone who doubted it that they were crazy. There was a real hard consensus building push there, almost as forced as "weird" was.

I tend to be easily blackpilled due to my anxious temperament. That’s my excuse why I let that poll sway me so much.

Well, I was pushing it as an important data point, with my motivation being that she has done well in the past, including publishing pro-Trump results against public sentiment. What did I get wrong? I'm not sure. My most generous interpretation is that her methodology has essentially been a RNG that got a pretty lucky streak.

Or could it have just gotten an unlucky miss with that poll? I don’t understand why people took a single data point like that so seriously

It's a bit more than an unlucky miss, though: she's going to be off by double digits, far outside the statistical MoE.

At the least, I should have taken the "throw it into the pile" approach, instead of privileging it as a gold standard poll.

Sign error?

It ain't over 'til its over, and I still pretty much expect to wake up tomorrow to Pennsylvania or Georgia explaining how they found half a million Harris votes in a mailbox somewhere and how that's totally normal.

But just this moment I'm getting some real Hillary vibes out of this one. Remember when people were arguing that she was going to flip Utah blue? I've grown pretty accustomed to news coverage about Kamala winning, say, North Carolina--or all seven swing states. But as of right now, dreams of a mandate were clearly just that; if any of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin do turn red, she's done.

If it does become clear that she's lost, will Harris concede? Or will she recycle Hillary's advice to Biden and instead set lawfare into motion? Would Democrats try to steal the election again, like they did in 2016, with faithless elector schemes or attempts to prevent the certification of the vote? Would the up the ante?

I am still skeptical that we'll get a chance to find out, but people have been speculating about Trump and Republican "sore loser" scenarios for months. What does a Harris loss look like?

What does a Harris loss look like?

Depends a lot on degree.

If it's tight -- one state under 5%, two or three states under 1% -- some amount of delaying is unavoidable. Literally, in some cases, like Pennsylvania where I don't think Harris could stop people from getting a recount if she wanted to. Some of the objections I might even agree with: there's a mess with Nevada signature verification that seems at least plausible. If it's not -- lose the popular vote by most of a percentage point, multiple states with multiple percent differences -- probably not.

I don't think we'll get a complete copy of J6, knock on wood. The Electoral Count Reform Act makes any challenge at Congress specifically to be exceptionally hard, requiring twenty Senators and over eighty Representatives. There's revelations about Trump I could imagine getting that level of cohesion, but I can't imagine any that wouldn't have been released long ago and needing (or wanting) a particularly boisterous riot at all.

There's still some place for ugliness toward the middle, though. I've mentioned the possibility of a blue governor in a state that voted red by a narrow margin and has the NPV Compact on the books doing something Interesting when it came to certifying electors for their state. I don't think it's likely, since neither Shapiro nor Whitmer seem to be Grishams, as bad as I think Whitmer's COVID response was, and that's why I'll describe it at all. There's a hilariously stupid loophole in the Electoral Count Reform Act related to judicial review, and it's one that's very hard to exploit, but there are some specific lines I could see the Baude/Paulsens of the world try to push, to serious destruction, enough that I'm not going to go into more detail.

Neither of these work at 300+ electoral vote splits. There's stuff that might, but it's... very far tail end, and very ugly. I'd be disappointed if the Harris campaign keeps trying to get blue jurisdictions to find ballots that can't close a 50-point EV gap, but that's just be embarrassing rather than destructive. There's gonna be people trying to come up with novel interpretations of everything -- Lawrence Tribe is still alive -- but they don't need conservatives wargaming for them.

((Wouldn't be surprised by some last-minute regulatory or executive branch bird-flipping, though dunno if anyone cares at this point. Probably will set the stage for a lot of legal fights afterward, though, both in terms of APA challenges to Trump and in making it hard for him to undo hits against himself or Musk; a CFPB-like established in the lame duck session is definitely on the table.))

Harris specifically almost certainly turns into one crux of any election post-mortem if she loses, especially by a large amount. A very tight race might be handwaved as racism or sexism, and I still expect to see a lot of ''racist v anti-racist'' tweets about the African-American male vote even as California brings it back closer to historical norms, but a large EV loss against Trump is gonna leave too much blame to go around. I don't think that's entirely fair, with the combination of general economic mess and everything Biden and last-minute swap (and, frankly, weakness from Walz), but the public relations people aren't going to put their own necks on the line. There's already gonna be a ton of outreach folk sharpening their wits for the tell-all books, and Harris being the nominee this year was always a bit about fear of that possibility from 'better' candidates like Whitmer or Newsom (ugh).

I'd like for there to be some more serious considerations among the broader progressive field about how it came to this, especially about emphasizing every tactical option but persuasion, but I... don't think it could happen.

((And, conversely, I'd hope that Trump et all does some actual giving on matters like abortion, like an 8-week safe harbor in exchange for requiring in-person consultations for oral abortificents, if only for tactical considerations like not getting absolutely crushed next election, but I'm not very optimistic. Even if it ends up a split House/Senate, there's gonna be too much temptation to take everything they can get.))

That said, I spent a lot of November 2020 sure that the Red Tribe Didn't Riot, so discount all this analysis as appropriate.

Concession within a day unless there's a Gore-level "too close to call". And I would like to think such would have been apparent by now.

What does a Harris loss look like?

She doesn't have the constitution, the character, or (going by reports) the personal charisma necessary to sustain a defiant stand. Blues do not have enough gas left in the tank to sustain a pivot to election denial at this late date. If Trump takes this, I think the reckoning might arrive in Blue-Land.

But is she retarded enough? Look at Stacy Abrams and all her hagiography denying not one, but two election losses! To this day she's a hero, has raised (embezzled?) millions of dollars for "election fortification", and even had all sorts of cringey cameos in Orange Man Bad shows like Star Trek.

Show me a time when she's dug in, bared her teeth, and defied the odds to fight for something, even once, anywhere. It's possible she has and I'm simply unaware, but from what I've seen of her, I rather doubt it.

Trouble is that 'sways like the willow' sways to every wind. I think it'd need to be close to a big progressive push to carry her along, but there's a variety of avenues that would let her be easily pushed, even to her own detriment.

In public, no, in private, she took the inside track didn't she? Sucked up to the winner, then launched a coup against him.

Hillary publicly admitted defeat, and in private effectively nullified Trump's entire presidency with the fake Steel Dossier and the fake Russia investigation. Who knows what Harris has up her sleeve.

I don't think it's accurate to say Harris launched the candidate coup against Biden. She clearly knew about it to some degree, given how prepared she was to start advertisements mid-weekend, but the names in most political scuttlebut have very much been party elders.

yeah many people still remember that 2020 surge

It ain't over 'til its over, and I still pretty much expect to wake up tomorrow to Pennsylvania or Georgia explaining how they found half a million Harris votes in a mailbox somewhere and how that's totally normal.

I do wonder what their cover for action will be this time around. Last time it was the fact that Trump told people not to vote by mail. This year their organization was all about turnout no matter how you vote. Early in person, mail in, day of, they don't care, just vote. What possibly plausible explanation can there be for those 3 am 90% Harris vote dumps?

Whenever I see the guys on TV doing the county-by-county comparisons in Pennsylvania, it looks pretty grim for Trump. Why are the PA markets at 80%? What am I missing?

What am I missing?

Whatever you're missing, I'm missing it, too.

But if Kamala's team also missed it...

We had fewer mail in ballots and the split between Republicans and Democrats was smaller than in 2020 for those ballots. Because they take longer to count (and PA can't start preparing them before the election), those are the ballots that come in late to the count. In 2020 that meant it was always going to get better for Biden as the night went on. Harris does not have that same split to rely on. If she is not up on "on the day" voters there are not enough mail in ballots to save her (unless a lot of registered Republicans got mail in ballots then switched to her from Trump, which seems..unlikely). Down over 600,000 compared to 2020 and the split was less than 2-1 in favor of registered Democrats, compared to more than 3-1 in 2020.

It may be that Trump shifting gears in his PA rallies and telling his supporters to vote however they can including mail in ballots might have been enough. Of course if he had said that in 2020, the split might not have been as big as it was in the first place. Potentially exonerating those PA Republicans who opened up mail-in voting in 2019 just prior to Covid. Without Trump encouraging his supporters not to use the mail-in ballots, it might be their plan to boost rural elderly turn out is finally successful, just 4 years down the line.

Also while Harris is running ahead in some counties, she is running below Biden in 2020. Unless Philly has huge turnout (and it didn't seem THAT busy to me), you'd rather be in Trump's shoes than hers right now.

I, too am not understanding county turn out.

Trump's ahead in WI (and PA for a few seconds at around 43% counted) right now. Less opportunities to rig things now covid's over. Polymarket spiking past 85%. This is looking like a solid win.

Trump at 70% chance of winning according to NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/05/us/elections/results-president.html#

I wish I had NYT needle values over time for 2016 and 2020.

Edit: 73% at 9PM central time.

80% at 9:20PM. Redditors dutifully explaining the "red mirage". Which might be real. But what a swing that would be.

88% at 9:41PM. I have a sin to confess. I excessively enjoy reading doomers on reddit. Blood is in the water right now. Any election megathread. Just saw a transwoman say she'll be killed soon. She won't of course. But that gives you a reading on their temperature level.

90% as of 11:10 central time.

election odds are weird. they can flip suddenly depending on a few states. It's the pitfall of having an extremely high variance and small sample size

Who would win:

Thousands of politically active data nerds, or

One rich crazy French dude?

I wish I had NYT needle values over time for 2016 and 2020.

I still remember watching the sudden and extreme flip in the NYT needle graph in 2016. It was really something to witness that happening live. The public meltdowns were nothing short of epic.

Trump is now up to 79.7% on Polymarket with small leads in MI, WI, and PA. IIRC, Harris needs to win all three of those states.

Here in Antifa-land there is already a helicopter hovering within earshot. Oh, the memories.

Here in Antifa-land there is already a helicopter hovering within earshot. Oh, the memories.

I had to laugh at Scott, here:

The market defines “major [election riot]” as five hundred participants causing either $1 million in damage or 10 hospitalizations/deaths. This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the Democrats riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).

His calculation was to set the chance of (presumably rightwing) riots if Trump loses to 100% and assign the remainder to Trump's victory. That's not an assumption I share, to put it lightly.

I want to see more of PA/WI/MI, but at the least it seems the Selzer poll was... wrong.

Getting ready for the riots! Been needing a new TV.

I want to see more of PA/WI/MI, but at the least it seems the Selzer poll was... wrong.

I suspect that not just the Selzer poll was trying to lead opinion rather than reflect it.

She pulled this same stunt in 2020 for the Senate race; which, to be fair, did manage to get the RNC to panic and blow money there until she put out a "new" poll showing them up by 10.

She's a hack; even if she weren't, her methodology is to triple-down on landline phone polling, but only counting guaranteed voters. How anyone expected this to be legit is beyond me.

Oh, certainly. Her poll was obviously motivated. If the Democratic party's army of pollsters looking for good news weren't able to see such trends, it wasn't for a lack of looking.

I'm thinking more of the other herding polls. I suspect some of them may have been pushed slightly higher not just on grounds of uncertainty, but to avoid a self-fulfilling doom spiral from dispiriting the Democrats in the final phase. That level of uniformity between polls is extremely unlikely, particularly when there are plenty of incentives to lean out.

Herding is a defense if you believe organizational embarrassment is a priority, but I don't think that applies to many of the organizations that were herding.

Oh, certainly. Her poll was obviously motivated.

The obviousness escaped several posters here.

Did Nate Silver just get obliterated by some twitter random (Keith Rabois) for 100K? Back a month ago there was this exchange where Nate asked this dude for a binding promise to transfer 100K if Trump didn't win by 8 points in Florida. Nate seemed pretty confident and I assumed he knew what he was doing. The other guy seemed like an angry lower-caps twitter dude.

https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1842211340720504895

Florida is 91% in and it's looking pretty bad for Nate: https://www.axios.com/visuals/presidential-election-results-2024-updates-harris-trump?selectedRaces=all

Trump 5,864,014 56.1% Harris 4,491,712 43.0

Am I fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on here? It seems very bad for Mr Forecaster if he bets so confidently and gets nuked.

Edit: According to Rabois Nate Silver later withdrew his offer of a bet: https://x.com/rabois/status/1853971462744359299

It's not like he has millions to throw around. Nate is smart enough to know that accepting the bet would be Kelly suboptimal

Nate should've kept his mouth shut then, he was the one that offered to bet in the first place. I probably should've copied out the full exchange in OP.

Nate links to a post 'should Kamala gamble on a Blue Florida' where he argues that Florida could plausibly fall to Harris

you are a buffoon. Minimum Trump win in FL is 8 points and more likely 10-14.

Dude you've gotta stop huffing the Twitter vibes. How much money are you willing to bet on a Trump +8 point spread in Florida?

$100k

Have your lawyer draw up a quick contract and it's a deal. NATE DOT SILVER DOT MEDIA AT GMAIL DOT COM. No contract, no bet, because you've been nutty lately and are a payment risk.

bet u missed Ron’s margin in election too??

Keith, we don't need to trash talk since now we've discovered a more honorable way to settle our little disagreement. Just send the contract over.

I thought Nate was the bigger man, offering a substantive bet and speaking in full capitalized sentences. But clearly he was all talk, no substance.

I thought Nate was the bigger man, offering a substantive bet and speaking in full capitalized sentences. But clearly he was all talk, no substance.

So, basically this meme, but Red is in the right?

The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.

As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.

I'm not a Nate fanboy, I read Scott's most recent post (TLDR: Polymarket bad, Metaculus good, Nate good) with disapproval back when it was written. I am a Polymarket true believer. But I wasn't brave enough to post my thoughts beforehand since I thought Nate might have some idea about what he was doing...

Proposing a bet and then refusing to sign it (and then being proved wrong later) is very poor sportsmanship though. It shows his true beliefs are not aligned with what he says.

Seems like the polls were way off in Florida. Nate Silver had Republicans up by 5 - 6%, and it looks like they're going to win it by 13 points.

As a Floridian, I could have warned him.

Its not just that the Dems are outnumbered now, they're UTTERLY DEMORALIZED so even if they show up in polls, they might not bother voting.

Keith Rabois is not a "Twitter random" but a well-known VC.

Keith never followed up on the bet IIRC, but yeah, it's looking like he'd have won. Losing a particular bet, though, doesn't mean it was a bad bet to make on Nate's part. You play the odds as you see them, and given enough bets, eventually you hope to come out ahead.

Has Nate made any other bets?

He's big on poker and sports betting and apparently moderately successful there, but I don't believe he's made any public political bets.

Is that not showing +13%? seems like +13 > +8?

By my math she would need to win ~72.5% of the remaining votes to lose by 8. I don't know how plausible that is.

Yeah, especially since a decent fraction of votes remaining are in the central time pan handle, not remote votes like in other states. I interpreted the comment as implying Nate Silver took the margin greater than 8 points side. But then the comment also implied he was wrong?

I think 56-43 gives a +13 spread. Was OP interpreting it as +13/2 or +6.5?

Nate silver wins the bet if trump doesn't win by 8 points, is what I read.

Nate Silver was betting Trump's margin wouldn't exceed 8 points, so it's (arguably) looking like Nate will be down $100,000 if the contract was indeed signed.

Sorry to not answer your question, but what's up with Florida?

Florida was THE swing state until quite recently. Obama won in 2012. And now Trump is going to win by 12 points !?

Is it just that conservatives are fleeing the corruption and taxes of Illinois and New York for the sunnier shores of Florida? Or is it DeSantis coattails?

More sinister explanation: Retirees are living in Florida for tax residency, but then voting (D) in their original home states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now that Florida is no longer in play.

A) A lot of people moving here/retirees from Blue states that increase the Republican voteshare.

B) Desantis is a terrifyingly competent governor, from day 1. Even Dems notice that he keeps the state in tiptop shape.

C) As part of B), Desantis cleaned up the problem counties when it came to voting, which probably eliminated whatever fraud there was.

I explain here.

A couple guesses / theories.

For one, Florida was the Covid refugee state for a lot of the New York / North East lockdown dissidents, when covid-driven migrations largely trailed the election. New York saw a lot of out-migration during the lockdowns as part of a broader emegration trend, and despite the stereotypes / theories that people go back to voting for what they just left, there's a separate dynamic in that the discontents are the first to go and the most to go. A flip side to this, in turn, was emigration of Florida democrats to other places. LGBT-aligned Democratics reportedly (though I've never found strong numbers) left the state in significant numbers during various culture war fights for friendlier ideological neighbors. Culture war national media fights like the 'Don't Say Gay' fights had their own impacts to local voter pools.

Second, the Cuba lobby has stopped being competitive and strongly dislikes the Biden Administration's policies and became straight up [R]. The linked article from Responsible Statecraft casts that as a failure of the lobby rather than of the democratic party, but the issue is that the 'Cuba Lobby' isn't really just Cubans anymore- it also has substantial crossover with the Venezuela block, where most Venezuelans who've fled over the last two decades have ended up (other than Texas) in Flordia. Now, obviously the illegal migrants themselves aren't the voting block, but rather the legal resident / citizen families, and communities. There is a substantial and under-appreciated (or unheard) hispanic anti-socialist block, where anything that comes across as pro-latin-american-left is looked at with suspicion.

You can see here from Florida voting data that third-generation migrants in particular are considerably more likely to vote for Republican than Democrat, even though Democrats have slight leads on first and second generation migrants. That reads to me in Florida as Cuban and Cuban-adjacent migrants in particular, incorporated into the cuban political machine.

A third point is that since 2012 DeSantis broke the back of the local Florida Democratic Party while building a much stronger voter registration base. One of the things the Florida Republicans have done is functionally limit the role of out-of-state registration/mobilization groups, which limits the ability of the Democratic national party aparatus and various activist groups to substitute for Florida Democratic Party shortfalls.

In short, a FDP doom-loop where a loss of Democratic organizers led to fewer voters led to less ability to organize leading to worse results leading to dispirited partisans leading to more emigration leading to less mobilization ability, even as the Republicans had a win-loop of increasing Cuban-support, sympathetic immigration, and organizational advantages that built upon each other.

Less sinister explanation: retirees move to Florida, vote red there and not in their home states, making Florida redder and NY/NJ bluer.

But that's not different than it was in 2000. It's not a cumulative effect since the retirees die.

The split by age wasn't as large, and Florida has gotten older over time.

I looked it up (thanks Perplexity!).

It looks like Florida was 3.4 years older than the US average in 2000 and 4.5 years older in 2020.

So you are right. But no way this swings the electorate by 12 points !

I called him Nate Bronze back in 2016: I'm calling him Nate Bronze now.

I wonder how much of Nate's success was simply applying some relatively decent methods to what was formerly a pretty midwit domain. Perhaps a similar comp would be the rise of sports analytics. It's not exactly rocket science, yet prior to the last couple decades, there was far too much credence given to human intuition over hard data.

Silver made some big improvements in the meta, but now the world has caught up. So he's not quite the oracle he once was.

Early-mover advantage of using big data and other quantitative methods to forecasting, tons of positive media coverage, darling of the left by predicting Obama wins and Democratic sweeps of House elections from 2008-2012. He was smart enough to pivot when the left became to extreme.

Nate's model is basically the simplest obvious way to project election results from polls. A motivated high schooler could have built it. At the time he started, however, people and pundits were basically idiots, and even now most people just want a commentator that says why their preferred candidate is going to win.

His only edge now is that he's pretty principled with his modeling choices and doesn't bow to angry Twitter people. Which is rather rare: if you want to build an audience, the easiest way is to just tell your audience what they want to hear.

Since Elon's takeover, building an audience seems to be as simple as being anti-left

Very saturated now though. Becoming a fresh right wing Twitter personality puts you up against some very stiff competition. Sadly even the constant struggle to stay on top has burned out a lot of good men: 0HPLovecraft is about to hit -10

Nate silver literally made this exact point 11 years ago

People often have a glowup after high school, Nate Silver had to wait until midlife crisis! He looks so much better with a beard and losing the dorky nerd style!

Nice find on the video timestamp. How in the world did you dig that up so quickly?

Yeah, it makes sense that Nate would understand that. And I have nothing but respect for him.

So I remembered nate silver's "water level" comment from a powerpoint presentation.

From there I typed "nate silver" got terrible results then typed "nate silver talk" got bad results then typed "nate silver presentation"

I found a few links worth exporing (time> 20 minutes and clearly a powerpoint presentation)

I then watched the video at 2x speed mashing forward key until one of the videos had this waterline graph that I remembered then I pressed back until the start of that slide

note that the actual quote was at 29:30 where He said "I look for fields where that water level is low"

True nerd power right there. We approve.

Nate Age Pervert.

Silver Age Mindset?


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