The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

Y’all aren’t the only ones getting the texts.

 

You mean Don Jr, Eric Trump, and Mike Pence are lying to me???

 

They're gonna hit us with sooooo many catto and doggo vids.

The lady who owns Charlie the Golden is gonna feel like 12,000 strangers took her up the ass.

As opposed to just wanting to.

What? She's pretty cute.

 

Ironically, it sounds like if we get an earlier-than-expected result on Election Night, it could be thanks to ... Florida.

There's been a lot of attention paid to things like how Pennsylvania may not have a result for several days if it's close. But Florida is allowed to start counting absentee ballots up to 22 days before the election (with clerks banned from revealing any numbers under pain of a felony conviction), and they're used to dealing with lots of absentee ballots because of all the seniors.

If Biden ends up winning Florida by a few percentage points, which is where the polling averages are now, that could be known by about 10 or 11 p.m. Eastern. And while it wouldn't put him over the top, it would make a Trump win extremely difficult to pull off.

 

I really don't understand why more states don't do this. So far, 2.5 million Floridians have voted by mail. Thank goodness Election supervisors don't have to wait until after the election to start counting them.

 

Your state can take credit for the fuckup that resulted in the changes... despite your whining about that fuckup 20 years later.

 

Really?

Because Republican legislatures in PA, MI, and WI are perfectly happy to set up a chaos scenario in their feilty to Dear Leader even if it means the whole goddamn country flies apart at the seems. They will pay literally ANY price for power.

Ditto the Republican judges shooting down any reasonable state action to make things go more smoothly (has happened in re Texas, Georgia, Alabama, and elsewhere) if the net effect is to repress the potentially Democratic vote.

 

If you're not up to speed on how we got here (and the Brits as well) - you should watch this.
Then read "Shadow Network"

https://smile.amazon.com/People-You...fix=people you,prime-instant-video,506&sr=1-2

 

Right? I posted this on FB -- both as a troll (face it, it has propaganda value) and because it's so well done that it stands on its own as a good piece of music.

 

As for the Oregon front here: I've cast my ballot, and my sister has been tracking everything for our family.
All three of my sisters, our parents, my two brothers-in-laws, and myself have cast ballots and they've been counted, representing four different counties (Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington, and Linn Counties) and three cities and one incorporated area (Portland, Jennings Lodge, Hillsboro, and Albany).
I'm trusting that my in-law's families have voted, and I don't care for whom they vote, but as long as they have. I can be disappointed with their votes later; it's more important that they've voted at this moment.

And on a related front, I am absolutely elated that voter turnout is substantially higher than in 2016 and has the potential to be one of the highest turnouts percentage wise in American history. I can be disappointed and disgusted with voters later, but right now, I just want them to vote.

 

If Biden somehow manages to win Texas will Republicans start jumping off buildings?

If Texas goes blue it’s pretty much over for them as a national party, at least in their current alignment. We’d probably see them try to forcefully cast off the white supremacists and conspiracy nuts and move towards being a more diverse party. Going even further right would not help them. I think in the Reagan and Bush eras the GOP was a little more welcoming to minorities.

That ended during the 08 campaign when Obama broke people’s brains and the crazier elements of the party started to come out of the woodwork. Look at WF around that time, for example.

Obama was referred to as the Kenyan, the spear chucker... Michelle became an ape... folks questioned Obama’s birthplace as well as his religion and conservatives started going crazy worrying about Sharia law. Trump amped it up with calling Mexicans rapists and murders and allying himself with white supremacists. Foreign nations were shitholes, Neo Nazis were fine people and Covid became the China Flu.

Let’s be clear, Biden is an awful candidate. No one is excited about voting for him. If Republicans get wiped out it is solely due to Donald Trump and his brain-dead, inbred base hijacking the party.

 

Not sure about this at all. I don't expect him to be a great president, but I don't think he'll be a bad one, either. He'll certainly know more about the job as soon as he gets into the WH than any of our last four presidents did.

And I expect him to recruit intelligent people and listen to them, something that people like Carter, Trump and Bush (W) didn't do. Someone has said: "Sometimes the greatest talent is to surround yourself with talent."

We are used to presidents who stand out in front and basically say, "Everyone look at me!" Someone who just sits back and coordinates a team of talented people might be a good thing. Will he do it? I can't say, but there certainly is no proof at this point that he won't.

 

Putin is distancing himself from Trump, and saying nice things about Biden. He refused to back any speculation by the Trump administration on Hunter Biden, across the board, even after Trump said Putin was aware of the details of payments from Moscow to Hunter.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-pours-cold-water-trumps-112917287.html

 

Well that's it then. Putin practically calling the election for Biden makes it a cinch.

 

Putin is a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. He knows which way the wind is blowing, and he needs to co-exist with the USA under a Biden administration.

This is basically an admission, on his part, that they won't be as successful this time as they were in 2016 in influencing the election.

 

Putin's not the only one. Netanyahu is also making polite noises about working with whoever the U.S. President is. It makes me think that my theory that the inside polls are showing a republican wipeout in the works may be right. I'm not about to put any money on that, though.

 

I don't think anyone is really sure Biden is going to win. We haven't forgotten 2016, even though this is so different from 2016 in so many ways.

Which is a good thing. Biden supporters -- and anti-Trump voters -- are very motivated to get out and vote, instead of just relying on the polls.

I'm still hoping for a really, really, really big Biden win. 100+ in the EC, maybe +15 in the popular vote.

 

Vladimir Putin is one of the canniest operators in international politics. He thinks long-term, he's excellent at sussing out vulnerabilities, and he knows how to play to media almost as well as a top-tier Hollywood personality.

 

The pollsters were just as shaken up by their mistakes in 2016 as anyone else. This article is an interesting look at what they're doing to try to prevent a repeat.

The president’s campaign and Republican leaders in both states contend the race is closer than the surveys show — especially the recent polls that have Biden opening up a double-digit lead following the first debate and Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. For his part, Trump repeatedly has drummed up enthusiasm among his supporters by emphasizing how wrong the polls were four years ago.

“This year, I think the polls are going to be more reflective of the actual vote,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “It’s not because the polls and the technology that are used have been improved tremendously. It’s mostly because it’s a better environment for polling.”

After the polling mishaps four years ago, Burden was charged with heading up a new battleground states survey for the University of Wisconsin that has polled the three swing states that Trump won by less than 1 percentage point — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Burden described a “paucity of high quality polling” in those states, particularly in Michigan, where he said plenty of “fly-by-night operations” and automated robopolls helped contribute to the bad polling averages

 

I think the polls in 2018 were relatively unbiased and provided us a glimpse of what to expect in 2020. But Republicans continue to be vocal about the “shy” Trump voter effect, with some even having the audacity (or stupidity) to say Trump will surpass his EC vote count from 2016.

 

I think polls are worth exactly jack and shit. The only one that matters is the one on Election Day. A political poll is like the guy who says he's going on a diet and then eats two dozen Krispy Kremes.

 

Hari Seldon disagrees.

 

I find polls to be interesting, but nothing to hang my hat on. One thing I'll be watching is to see how high election day turnout will be for both. Will there really be high overall turnout for the election or all these early voters just a case of vote shifting?

 

Even Hari Seldon needed a secret cabal of people with mental powers to make sure his "polls" were accurate.