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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26867 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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Well I'm calling it for Harris - the people I know in D.C. are very calm and expecting a Blue victory. Could be underestimating him like previously, but in the context of the Selzer poll it seems like people don't want to be blamed if the predictions are off and are seeing a Harris win as very likely.

Come back to laugh at me later if this wrong.

Edit: Leaving this up for posterity. :)

I'd also bet Harris wins if you gave me 50/50 odds, but if there's storefronts being boarded up in DC then I wouldn't say the expectations there are completely calm. Right-wing rioters would be less likely to go after local businesses than left-wing rioters would, and the guys shelling out for plywood know that.

I'm not sure that's saying much, statistically.

The premise seems to be: for some store owners the expected amount of damages exceeds the cost of boarding up windows. Going with the implied assumption that damages occur only if Trump wins, the expected damages are the product of (probability Trump wins) × (probability angry Democrats smash in my windows) × (cost if they smash in my windows). (It's a little bit more complicated because there are also probability for smashing in windows, smashing in windows + looting products, smashing in windows + looting products + setting the store on fire, etc., but that's not really important for the argument.)

My point is that (probability Trump wins) is not super variable. It's almost certainly between 40% and 60%. But that means the expected damages can increase by only 50% from the absolute minimum. The expected damages and the costs of boarding up windows have to be really close for a difference in that probability to affect the decision to board up the windows. For most stores the decision is going to be the same whether the probability is 40% or 60%.

In short, while you could argue that there would be more stores boarding up the higher Trump's chance of victory is, the mere fact that some stores board up windows does not tell you much about Trump's odds. Most of those stores would be boarding up if Trump's chance of winning were 40% or even less, too.

Can they really rely on the rational calculus of anybody dumb enough to go out and riot?

That's a fair point, although quite a few of the people I've talked to today are under the impression that Trump has a magic ability to instantiate an army from the aether. TDS is still real.

Although on a counterfactual note I think we should be pleased that institutions seems to be prepping either way. That's more competence than I've come to expect as of late.

Sorely wishing I could join the riots just to score a truck load of free plywood, but I bet it's all quarter inch, and half of it looks like fucking osb.

If you know of a riot where I could score some free cement ping me.

I heard people sometimes leave pallets of bricks just lying around commercial areas...

I called it for Trump based on the slightly hysterical attitude here on the best coast, but we can't both be right.

I looked up some of the reddit reactions to Selzer's poll from four years ago (1 2) and it amused me how similar they were to the reactions to the 2024 one here, just with allegiances flipped.

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