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naraburns  nihil supernum  12d ago (text post)   26773 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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With Harris shaping up to receive 10-15 million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020? This graph is floating around Twitter: https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1854144250562429081

Is Harris truly so unpopular that 15 million Democrats just stayed home? Or was the overwhelming shift to mail-in ballots in 2020 the key to Biden's victory, giving barely motivated Dems an opportunity to fill in a ballot and mail it out rather than drag themselves to the polls? Republicans in several swing states managed to pass legislation tightening voting laws -- maybe that helped? Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?

I think I mostly wish that graph started at zero.

I really really despise people who try to exaggerate data by starting an axis at anything other than zero.

Or is America simply not ready for a woman president (much less a "black" woman president)?

I really disagree with this but I don't have a way of proving or disproving it. I hate the claim and I think a large part of the reason is how impossible it is to prove. Maybe polling could work? I can say confidently (as a person who has voted for two different black men and at least one female) it played no role in my decision.

There is no way of proving or disproving it, since the claim is based around the SocJus notion of "privilege," which is fundamentally unfalsifiable. The claim that America is simply not ready for a black woman president isn't some categorical one about how no black woman could possibly win in 2024 due to there being too many sexist racists who would just refuse to vote for her. It's that a politician who is identical to Harris in every way except for being a white male would have won more points due to having to face less implicit bias from the media and the electorate, which would have translated to more votes going to this fictional man than the real Harris, with the gap accounting for the real Harris's loss to Trump.

Obviously, this is unfalsifiable.

Likewise, your history of voting for black men and/or white women would mean nothing to someone making this kind of claim, because, again, the claim isn't that you're one of the many vile American racists who would categorically vote against any black or female person. It's that, if these politicians were white and/or male, then you would have required less from them in order to convince you to vote for them. The fact that you voted for them even though they're black and/or female just proves how good of politicians they actually were, to overcome the biases you must have had against them and convince you to vote for them over someone more white and/or male. And that's before getting into the whole stuff about intersectionality where black women face bigotry in ways that are beyond merely combining the bigotry faced by black people and by women.

Again, obviously, this is unfalsifiable.

Clinton came pretty close to winning in 2016, and if things had shaken out in a different way (e.g. Obama decides he didn't want to run in 2008), she would almost certainly have become President.

Tons of countries have elected female heads of government and state. Of course, plenty of European and Anglo countries. But even outside of those, you have Rousseff, Gandhi, Aquino, Arroyo, Bhutto, Sukarnoputri, Sirleaf. Are all of their countries more gender progressive than the USA?

As far as the black aspect, if the US had a prominent black person who had run for office and won the Presidency, twice, that would be a piece of evidence that blackness doesn't preclude anything.

No.

I thought fraud was quite unlikely in 2020 on account of all the audits which found nothing. I still think it was really unlikely. We’re not talking about a few hundred fraudulent ballots flipping PA; this is a gap of millions. That doesn’t happen without leaving a trail.

Trump 2020 was running as an incumbent in a bad economy. Biden 2024 was running as an incumbent in a bad economy. Harris 2024 replaced that with a sort-of-incumbent in a bad economy. In hindsight, it doesn’t seem so surprising that she underperformed.

It wasn't actually a bad economy though.

Not all votes are accounted for yet, so some (but not all) of that 15M drop will shrink.

Yes. I'd expect a minimum of 5m additional ballots for Harris from California alone to trickle in over the next week or so. This problem was one (of many) big flaws in the 2012 GOP post-mortem: early numbers for the popular vote are always wrong.

I'd expect a minimum of 5m additional ballots for Harris from California alone

CNN says that they are 58% counted, amounting to just about 10M votes -- which only leaves like 5M total there, no?

I agree that it will be a near-ish thing, but Trump leads by ~5M right now, and most non-CA (or AZ, WTF) states are pretty much done counting -- he might lose the plurality, but I think he still beats Kamala by a bit.

At least if I'm reading things correctly, that's 10M currently counted, for a total of around 17.25m ballots cast, and 7.25m remaining uncounted. 58% of that would be ~4.1m, but between county breakdowns and mail-ins breaking more toward Dem in general I'd guess 5m is a lot more reasonable minimum, giving a 12.5-6.5m split in the final vote count for the state. That'd be pretty comparable in final result to the 2020 11m-6m.

Yeah, my head math is a little off there -- even still, if she gets 5/7.5 remaining, Trump gets 2.5 and is still a couple million ahead. AFAICT there's no other big states with enough left to count (or that kind of margin) to catch her up.

Washington State has another 1.3m, Oregon and Colorado 0.6m, Arizona 1.2m, Maryland and Illinois and Utah 0.5m. I think Trump still (somehow!) wins the popular vote if the late ballots follow state-wide trends, and even if they're pretty blue, it's still either a win or so close as to be a tie. It's just not likely that total turnout is that much lower than the 2020 election as today's highlights suggest.

Maybe? but probably not. 2020 was just a weird year in a massive number of ways. I guess am a bit more sympathetic now to the argument that mail-in expansion and other COVID electoral changes were "spiritual" fraud.

I wouldn't have had a huge problem if Trump had been wink-wink nudge-nudge about it after 2020 instead of the tantrum he decided to throw, but apparently I don't have a clue what the median voter likes.

has anyone here updated with regards to the chance of fraud in 2020?

Yes.

The chance of fraud in 2020 went down, since if the Ds did it before, they would've done it again.

This reasoning seem bizarre to me. I'm not saying there was fraud what is common background noise and especially not that it was enough to swing several states, but your reasoning seems to be the equivalent of saying "Well, if the Japanese snuck attack Pearl Harbor, surely they'd pull another Pearl Harbor" it neglects that after that sneak attack, the US was on a much different footing.

The problem being that Trump and republicans were talking about vote fraud in September 2020. If there was fraud, it was not a sneak attack, but rather something subtle enough to get by them while they were watching. So why not again?

Talking about it and actually doing something about it, especially with regards to Trump are very, very different things. Trump talked about fraud a lot but in terms of actual action, he did next to nothing to meaningfully try and thwart any. Four years of smarting over the loss and the GOP workshopping how to actually crack down on where they feel the fraud occurred is an entirely different thing. They were much better prepared this time and had a lot of lawyers working to make sure the rules were as in their favor as possible.

If this is true, you should be able to point to specific stats showing that change in preparation.

So. How many more lawyers did Trump have?

I think January 6 may have genuinely spooked them into deciding that they couldn’t pull that type of thing again in the near future without provoking a civil war.

Unless the Republicans were on the ball in 2024 in a way they weren't in 2020 - filing court cases and working around the clock to make sure polls stayed open in Red areas and poll watchers witnessed everything in blue areas. Even if they don't catch explicit fraud, their actions make it less likely to happen in the first place.

I consider this pretty strong evidence that the sloppiness of just spamming mail-in ballots to just about everyone successfully increased turnout in 2020. Whether you consider that rigging, illegal, totally fair, a desirable state of affairs that should be permanently implemented... whatever, it just seems like that's actually the explanation. If that's not it, we need to explain the big fluctuations in the Trump vote as well.

The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.

Following a discussion with friends about the electoral college last night, I came up with an idea that would select for higher agency / lower time preference voters without venturing into dangerous waters. Basically, if we're not going to have direct election of the president then we should do away with any pretense that we have direct election. My ballot shouldn't say Harris or Trump if I'm really just voting for a predetermined slate of electors to cast the real ballots on my behalf, especially since these real voters are political muckety-mucks whose names aren't even widely publicized. We should get to vote for these people directly, and they should all be selected at-large. If California has 54 electoral votes, then California voters select up to 54 names.

To take things a step further, political parties won't be listed for any of the candidates. You just get names. Running for elector is just like running for any other position; have a certain signature requirement and fee and adjust things enough so the ballot has a reasonable number of names. So when people go to vote they're presented with a ballot on which they have to select numerous candidates from a slate of names without any party identifier. There's already precedence for this; if you vote in off-year elections in Pennsylvania you'll occasionally have to vote in some nonpartisan election for the board of a special district where you have to pick something like 5 names from a list of 20, and unless you really care about the makeup of this board there's a good chance you haven't heard of any of them unless you happen to know them personally. To my knowledge no one has ever complained about this.

Furthermore, the Founding Fathers hated the idea of political parties and would be appalled to discover that they've become a semi-official part of our system of governance. I'm not advocating the abolition of parties, but I don't know why our electoral apparatus needs to provide what is essentially free advertising to people who haven't otherwise paid attention to the election. In my system, electors can advertise who they plan on voting for, and newspapers, the League of Women Voters, and other groups can publish voter guides, and everyone gets full media access. But you have to do a modicum of preparation beyond selecting one of two names that have been pushed on you ad nauseum for the past six months. Some people just won't vote, and others will arbitrarily select names, like many do in the elections I described above. But a sufficient number of actually motivated people will do their research and fill out their ballots, and these are the people who will likely decide the election.

Why all at large and not two at large and one from each district?

The idea is to optimize voting to favor the preferences of the voters who do research on the candidates and make informed decisions, as opposed to voters who turn out for Harris or Trump and then either vote their preferred party the rest of the way down the ticket, arbitrarily pick candidates, or leave the rest of the ballot blank. If you're only voting for one elector per district plus two at-large, it's easy for the parties to narrow in on their preferred candidates and run TV ads reminding you that a vote for Gene is a vote for Trump or whatever, and the uninformed electorate will have an idea of who to vote for. This would still be the case in the smallest states, but as you increase the total number of electors the less oxygen any individual candidate can get. By the time you get to 10 EV states it would be pretty much impossible for anyone to remember all the names based on osmosis alone, and the opportunity for osmosis is limited by the dearth of advertising. Ideally, the number of votes allowed would be based not on available seats but on percentage of the total slate, so that even small states would still have to potentially contend with large numbers of votes. The point is to maximize the amount of noise so the remaining signal comes from people who actually did their homework and are familiar with all of the candidates.

Seeing as the electors do, with few exceptions, respect the preferences of their electorate, I’m not seeing much value.

Why not just ban listing parties on ballots, period? It’s not going to change anything about the top races, but it’ll hit most everything at the state level or below.

For a more drastic (and probably illegal under the VRA) filter, require all ballots to be write-ins. To really get with the zeitgeist, text recognition and counting the vote will be handled by a dedicated AI. We can call it GW.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. I have previously argued at some length in favor of abolishing absentee balloting outside of military service.

My claim isn't that 2020 was good, but that it just turns out that the simple model of 2020 has plenty of explanatory power.

I agree with this, but can't put my finger on the principle. It's just a vague sense that universal suffrage is a problem not a solution.

Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.

What alternative do you propose to universal suffrage?

Extra votes for my in-group.

Married men, with children born of the marriage get extra votes for their children, provided they're not drawing state benefits.

I think people on this site have made a surprisingly (to me) good case for bringing back property ownership requirements to have the vote. That may not be the best solution (buying a house is not exactly easy depending on where you live), but I do think it's a good idea to require voters to have a vested interest in the long-term success of the country and proof that they are able to contribute positively. I used to think that universal suffrage was an obvious good thing, but I'm not so sure after seeing some discussions on it in the past.

That sounds very interesting. Would you happen to have links to such past discussions?

Unfortunately no, I wish I did.

The election has caused me to update against the election theft theories more or less completely. It requires an extremely specific and absurdly narrow theory of the case for TPTB to have the ability and will to steal 2020 but not 2024 (or 2016), particularly when 2024 is clearly more important. No one really did anything to change the voting environment, no one was jailed or prosecuted for voter fraud, so they just decided not to do it this year? Unserious theory at this point.

While such a theory exists, I've never seen anyone propose it, so even if they started to I'd call it Texas Sharpshooter energy and move on.

Trump winning is proof that democracy works.

There were irregularities, but Republicans were more alert and suspicious in 2024 in a more productive way than 2020. Republican lawyers were working around the clock to make sure polls stayed open in Red areas and poll watchers witnessed everything in blue areas. Even if they don't catch explicit fraud, their actions prevent it from happening.

What is TPTB?

The powers that be, or the producers of The Bachelor. Depending on context.

The Powers That Be, an old term for entrenched systems of power and the agents imbedded in them.

the case for TPTB to have the ability and will to steal 2020 but not 2024 (or 2016)

My theory on 2016 has long been that Hillary's hubris led her to tell Bill and the party bigwigs that she'd win by 50 points even without cheating, and they said "LOL, okay then, you go, girl!"

Yeah, Harris is more naturally unpopular today than Biden was in 2016. Plus 2020 happened during a high point for widespread public political involvement, activism and debate in modern America, probably the high point since the 1970s, plus everybody was at home and on the internet. Easy to see why turnout peaked.

Most people are mostly unaffected in a visceral, immediate way by politics. In 2020, the lives of most Americans were directly affected by government in a way more major than at any time since…the Second World War, maybe? Hard to know exactly, but certainly in a long, long time.

I hate to be that guy but source? I simply cannot take such a just-so explanation at face value without something to substantiate it. Especially by the margins we are talking about here. 20 million votes out of 150 million cast? 13% of the electorate just checked back out? Especially when the conventional wisdom is that once you get a person to start voting, they generally keep voting. This study even says the effect is magnified in "high salient elections" which 2020 most certainly was?

Voting for the first time for a high-salience election should have a higher effect on turnout in subsequent high-salience elections

Edit: Let me put it like this. Show me the people who didn't vote this time that voted in 2020. Show me a poll, show me on the street interviews, tell me about people you know. Anything at all that points to this massive hypothetical dark matter voter that hadn't shown up at all in any of the polling this year. Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year. It wasn't even on the radar. Don't just default to it being the only possible explanation because the alternative is unthinkable.

Lots of them were in Philly. I pointed out before the count was finalized that turnout did not seem that high to me, just from eyeballing it compared to 2020. And I was correct. We already knew mail in ballots were down as well. My wife voted but numbers of her friends did not and she had very little queue time, compared to 2020 when she queued for 2 hours.

I had a post a couple of months back that I was observing an enthusiasm gap for Harris in the black community, and again that appears to have been borne out. I think I even got an AAQC for it.

Trump held his numbers in Philly compared to 2020, Harris dropped somewhere near 80,000 votes compared to Biden, just in Philly.

Overall in PA black voters went from being 11% to 9% of the total from 2020 to 2024. In 2016 they were 10% for comparison.

Given Floyd (May 2020) and BLM energized those communities in 2020, i don't know how much is just reversion to the mean, and how much is Harris though.

In fact according to Reuters the black share of the vote dropped from 13% to 11% nationwide. Thats, what a few million votes right there?

Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year.

I did.

https://substack.com/@sethinthebox/note/c-73271569

40% confidence isn’t very confident

Yeah, I was under-confident, as persistent problem. Still, I made the prediction...who else did?

Nate Silver predicted "a total turnout of 155.3 million, with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million", which is something like 73% odds for lower turnout than 2020 (158.4m).

Nice. It's gratifying to know my gut is aligned with the most sophisticated prediction matrices and gurus on the planet. I probably would have taken the under though.

It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?

3 different candidates vs 1 candidate? Two females vs one male? rederendum on Trump vs referendum on Democrats? Pandemic vs no pandemic? Trump telling people not to mail in votes vs not doing that? Height of BLM popularity vs. not? Sometimes people get more votes and sometimes less?

Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.

Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out

In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.

We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.

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