The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

Hawkins or Sanders gets 10 billion votes.

edit: boo for my bad maths.

Try again.

10 people on board are convinced.

10 people total.

They each convince 1000.

10 + (10 * 1000) = 10,010 total

They each convince 1000.

10,010 + (10,010 * 1000) = 10,020,010 total

Yeah, I must have stuck an extra 1000 in there somewhere.

Meh. I don't doubt the DNC was against Sanders (or any other independent) winning the nomination, but I can't imagine they did anything to undermine him that couldn't have been overcome if Bernie had a majority of the grassroots primary voters on his side.

Bernie was losing before the pandemic hit.

Nothing was shut down yet when Biden carried all 83 counties in Michigan, a state Sanders won in 2016.

The fact is, Democratic party voters had five years to get to know Bernie Sanders, and the better we got to know him, the less we wanted him to be president.

Neither Donald Trump, nor Joe Biden, are the cancer. @garamet likened Biden to treatments, but choosing either does not constitute a cure, and the treatment either one claims to offer is superficial at best. Joe Biden sure as fuck isn't the chemotherapy. Medicare for all? He'd veto it. Defund police? He wants to increase their budgets. Global climate change? He has a plan set to begin implementation some 15 years after the cutoff date for some of the more disastrous baked in changed. Hell, legalize weed? Not a fucking chance, already said no. Disregarded everything the task force brought to him. Told his donors nothing would fundamentally changed. Told an interviewer that he has no empathy for the coming generation. Told a worker who questioned his positions that he didn't work for him, and in that moment Joe Biden told the unvarnished truth.

Now, Donald Trump will continue to blatantly poke at the cancer saying it's not nearly as bad as it looks, and in fact things are great! Tremendous!
Joe Biden will hide some of the more visible effects of the cancer from the people who want to believe that there really is no cancer, that it's all just a bad dream. Joe Biden, along with much of the media, will certainly help that happen.

Neither one of them will cure the cancer. There is no profit in curing the cancer.

You talk about good outcomes, or the possibility of good outcomes, increasing the chances for better outcomes depending upon the choices made now, but that also depends upon what is good for you, what is good for me, and what is good for the people who get to experience the direct effects of our choices. What's good for the landlord isn't necessarily good for the renter. What's good for the CEO of Raytheon's stock portfolio isn't necessarily good for the brown kid whose parents were hit by a million dollar bomb. We've surpassed the point of better outcomes if the outcome is to keep people safe and healthy. Waiting 4 years to act on treatment was the foolish first step.

It took them a hell of a lot less time to find out they didn't want Elizabeth Warren, or Kamala Harris, too, right? No problems there, I'm sure you'll agree. Bernie's grassroots campaign was stronger than anything Warren could build and Kamala could lie about. Democrats don't want your candidates. Clearly they want a racist pedophile who forgets who his wife and his sister are, wouldn't you agree? That's what the Democrats want? The message of "I'm Joe Biden and I'm running for Senate" resonates strongly with them? Logical.

Glass houses, my friend.

I think your diagnosis is just completely wrong then, and if I can't trust your diagnostic skills, I sure as fuck can't trust your prescription.

I believe I speak with some authority here when I say that throwing around unsubstantiated pedophilia accusations is an extremely shitty thing to do, even when they're directed at a politician you don't like.

And?

Joe Biden is a sexual predator. He kisses, touches, sniffs, and fondles children against their will, to their discomfort, and he does it in public with the parents mere feet away. He does it to women, too, and some women have called him out on it, though not too harshly because he still has power and notoriety by whom he's still connected with politically, but it's there.

Would you leave your (possibly hypothetical) children alone in a room with him?

And you're being willfully blind in order to ignore difference between an indifferent status quo and the increasing chances of outright fascism which could kill millions and extinguish liberty here for good. So your opinion is not worth considering.

Behold my field of fucks at the notion of you finding my opinion not worth considering. Alas, the field is barren, for I have already harvested my fucks for truly important matters.

Then you, like kajillions of other people, don't understand how American politics work. The idea that it's some kind of long, drawn-out process that's a race to the wire in the final primary is a myth spread by the media. The simple fact of the matter is that since 1972 (when the primaries really started to matter) that on the Republican side, whoever wins the New Hampshire primary is most likely to go on to be the nominee. On the Democratic side, it's whoever takes South Carolina. Guess where Mike Bloomberg put most of his resources? South Carolina and states that held their primaries on the same day. This effectively prevented other candidates from buying a lot of ad time (because Bloomberg had already sucked it up). Meanwhile, a whole lot of community leaders in SC were brought before the media to endorse Biden. Guess who won that primary? Biden. Whole lotta Democrats dropped out at that point, even though from a delegate standpoint, it was still between Sanders, Warren, and Biden. Fun fact, as was documented in the primary thread, up until SC, Bloomberg was promising that he didn't care who won the nomination, he was going to be spending billions of dollars to beat Trump. After Biden won SC, Bloomberg pulled out, tossed whatever he could find in between his couch cushions at the DNC and hasn't been heard from since. You know what my reaction was to Bloomberg pulling out?



And, yeah, if you dig through the threads here, you'll find that before SC's primary, I was saying that Bloomberg wasn't serious about running and that he was going to pull out as soon as he was certain Bernie wasn't going to win.

Yeah, Bloomberg pulling out and tossing spare change was an inevitability. Honestly? Considering how much of an asshole he is, I'm surprised he tossed anything to the DNC considering the shit they did, and after all they did to get him on stage.

So, @Amaris, I'm honestly confused what you are arguing in favour of. A fascist dictatorship with millions or tens of millions dead and environmental damages so bad that there is no future for the species? Because the alternative is so bad it isn't worth living either in your view? Is there any hope left at all in that view?

Seriously, what exactly did they do that Bernie couldn't have overcome with an actual majority of primary voters in his corner? Guy had five years to lay the groundwork, the whole "Hillary screwed over Bernie just to lose to Trump" mythology that made him extremely sympathetic, and a bunch of young extremely passionate supporters. If he was really that popular, it should have been a coronation. Especially with the moderate vote split among infinite mainstream candidates.

They did the same thing they did in '16. Went with the Big Money people who pushed for Hillary.

AOC won her nomination with zero support from the DNC. Obama won his nomination while the big money people pushed for Hillary. Trump won his nomination with the establishment firmly against him. Why couldn't Bernie do the same?

I'm arguing in favor of breaking out of an electoral duopoly that serves no purpose but to reinforce the grip on the exploited and most vulnerable. Both parties have a vested interest in telling you just how fruitless it is to look elsewhere for leadership, and people believe them because they think their particular party ultimately has their best interest at heart, even if they do seem out of touch or full of themselves at times, when the truth is that neither party gives a fuck about any of us. They want our labor, and they're willing to let their money pass through our systems long enough to get it, but they do not give a fuck about any of us.

Authoritarianism is already here. Our congress has passed bill after bill increasing the scope of police, of surveillance, of military engagement against its own citizens. That's not just the Republicans, but also the Democrats. They're two sides of a right wing coin. It's why FDR's policies are seen as radical today, why the Democratic party has no stomach for strong positions outside of the watered down policies which push ever so slightly to the left of an ever advancing right wing. Negotiating with Democrats will only continue to further our move to the right. Our climate can't tolerate it. Our social fabric can't tolerate it. They talk about choosing a lesser evil, but they never talk about choosing a good. A move to the right, whether it be an inch or a mile, is still a move to the right and further away from where we need to be. The Republicans in congress are running hell bent for full on fascism. The Democrats are briskly walking behind them, telling them we can still come to a bargain.

Both of them need tossed, and people need to reject both of them before it's too late. People here think I won't pick Biden because he's not good enough, when they don't realize I'm not picking Biden because I think he's evil. Do you feed your child the poison pill or stab them with the poison arrow?

Why are you even considering the choice at all?

How?

That's a fair question. I'd like it if leftists and left leaning liberals would break with the Democratic party and vote Green, the only other remotely organized party. Better yet, the massive group of people who don't vote because they believe the system is rigged against them, or who don't understand that their lives are politics, and that politics do matter, getting them to vote for a third party would be a good start. My own goal is to abolish parties entirely, but that's a long way down the road, and we're not ready for that just yet.

The battle uphill, either way, is enormous. There is a lot of money invested into the two parties. I know it's bad when I hear people say "we have to balance saving lives and the economy," as if they're both equitable. That is how deep in the system we are as a nation. What other developed country looks at humans dying in a pandemic and says "I'd like to give you healthcare coverage but that would mean changing the current system and I can't do that because my son said not to," (source) and then says they want to give our police forces a $300 million increase in their budgets in the midst of protests against widespread police brutality against black people (source).

That is our country right now, that's our supposedly Democratic candidate right now. We are in fucking deep, and we don't really have the time to dig our way out trusting either party. Getting people to wake up, to organize, to realize they are being murdered, wrung dry of their lifeblood, to line the pockets of the wealthy. It is a long, longtime struggle, and it has to be done. It is a massive uphill battle, but it has to be done sooner than we're prepared. Trusting the Democrats or the Republicans is the gravest mistake we could make right now, and while I tell you these things, there is a significant part of me that already knows we're going to choose between them, and that our years of viability as a species will be cut in half, not just by our actions, but by our inaction to make the necessary changes we refuse to make because we've been so conditioned to think in binary terms regarding our electoral system, that we are actively trying to choose between the poison pill and the poison arrow for our children.

You've seen my signature, I think. I have links to the U.S. concentration camps. Do you think I will be able to remove that link should Biden win the election? Do you think, over the four years he'll serve, that the link will be removed because it will be no longer relevant?

Yes, I do think that. But more importantly, I think that Biden means four years for the political work you describe. Trump means it's over. The contradiction I see in what you are saying is that you liken both candidates to administering poison, but then you propose politics that presuppose survival. That luxury is no longer there.

The luxury is in choosing either one of these candidates, and I will say it right now: few, if any, of those concentration camps will disappear from that link, and the link itself will stay. Joe Biden is not the man he's trying to convince you he is. I said he was evil, and I meant it. I do not use the term lightly.

Joe Biden means continuing the status quo from 3.5 years ago. That can be fixed. Improved. I'm coming around to the belief that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic.

If Joe wins, there will still be a Republic in 4.5 years. Imperfect, but we can work on that. If Trump wins, there's a non-zero chance that the Republic will no longer exist.

FiveThirtyEight has new numbers... sort of. A few. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/yes-biden-has-a-big-lead-but-its-probably-not-15-points/

But first, in writing this post, I discovered an error in my spreadsheet, which changes some of the numbers from the past 2 maps. The 6/25 map should have been this:


And the 7/8 map should have been this:


The big differences are that MN and NH are bluer than before, and WI and GH haven't flipped yet.

Now, back to today...
Frankly, most of the polling, even in the swing states, is quite bad lately. Most of the movement below 1% has been due to changes in national polling. Still, I was able to run my numbers based on what they are giving me, and...



GA and WI have flipped now. I'm reporting NE-2 as blue because there was a second poll giving Biden a large lead there, but there's not enough data to call it likely, given the rest of NE. Several states are drifting redder (or less blue) with the rest of the country. The only other new polls don't really change the results (MO, MT, and AL), except that MO is now over the T+10 threshold. Still, as long as PA or FL stay blue, Biden should pull this out.

You're voting for him now? I thought you said you couldn't vote for a Democrat due to your beliefs?

You've been using plenty of terms lightly lately, especially when comes to Biden.

I'm powerless. My vote is utterly, wholly meaningless. Alabama's 9 electoral votes will go for Donald Trump.