The U.S. Is Fast Heading Into a Dangerous Place Politically.

Wikileaks is a Kremlin funded front for the Russian intelligence services.

A timely article in the NY Times:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/0...e-states-are-the-real-tea-party.html?referer=

The thrust of the article is that people in red states are over represented, while people in blue states pay a disproportionate share of net taxes.

There's more of interest, but I thought that paragraph nicely summed up one of the big problems with polarization. Then to finish up, comes this dire warning:

I agree with O'Brien's take on what I said. And I probably know more about what I said than you do. Right now, there often is no easy mechanism for such regional coalitions, that could change. I specifically told you I was not proposing an additional layer of government. Why didn't you pay attention to that?

Because you are proposing another layer of government.

Can states enter and leave the regional government? No they can't. Because you can't have states entering and leaving regions at will. What you said, "What we need is a middle layer of super regions, agglomeration of multiple states with similar population demographics."

So yes it's a new layer of government. No matter how you now try to spin it that's what it is.

the bias exercised would not have saved Sanders. She waxed his ass to a degree of magnitude well beyond how much she lost to Obama. He did get fucked around, but he still wouldn't have won - and primary shenanigans have a long sordid history and have fuck all to do with the general.

When you take the partisan labels out of the equation, Americans are not that divided. Democratic (centrist) policies do have a mandate, but it's institutional inertia (gerrymandering, electoral college) that keeps them from being actualized.

No, you are ignorant, common core came out of the governor's associatipn where individual states wanted to coordinate their teaching cariculum. The feds weren't even involved only state governments.

I could actually see it happening. How it winds up playing out I couldn't even begin to guess on where of the sliding scale of idealism-cynicism it'd fall, however. And yeah, I'd imagine California would dominate the politics and will of such a regional government.

Groups of states have coordinating for a while, probably since the beginning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

city voters already tend to dominate the rural voters in all three states, in the context of this thread not much changes.

Eh, in polls that offered people the choice between Trump and Sanders, Sanders beat Trump by double digits. There's no way to know what the outcome would be had Sanders gotten the nomination. He might have lost, or he might have been able to draw lots of votes away from Trump simply because he wasn't Clinton. We'll never know.

pertinent to some exchange in this thread which can't be arsed to look for tonight

http://www.ncsl.org/research/redistricting/redistricting-criteria.aspx

The polls also predicted a decisive victory for Clinton over Trump, up until the morning of November 8. Polls don't mean much these days.

Wow, what a surprisingly considerate post!

It's not only an American problem. We can see that pretty much anywhere in the western world. There is a VERY strong undercurrent of undefined dissatisfaction with 'them' 'up there'. And I'm not using the term undefined loosely here. We're not talking about existential threats, famine or raging black plague. We are talking about overdrawn expectations. Seems like these days it's enough to be mad at 'the elites' (whatever that is) to vote for anybody who says he's not part of that. Doesn't matter if it's a god damned billionaire who claims to understand what's irking an out of job rust belter or a nazi who's been a career politician all his life (he lost btw but narrowly) - bullshit is enough. The social media information bubble, willingness to believe even the most idiotic conspiracy theories and decades of neglecting general education do the rest.

It's like people expect their governments to tend to all their needs including a 1000-euro-iPhone every year. Can't afford that? Vote crazy! Because the screaming guy promises that and a free lunch too!

It's a major trap that has been in the making for many many years. Now we've got the perfect storm of wide-spread stupidity and political malevolence. I wonder if this will tide over peacefully or if we have to burn the world yet again to wake up.

We were more polarized in the 1960's.

I wish Goldwater and Johnson were our choices today. Or even Nixon and Humphrey (Wallace not so much).

Perhaps.

But we actually had real issues that would naturally demand polarization back then.

Nothing "naturally demands polarisation" and what the hell are "real" issues, that is to say the characteristic that makes today's issues "unreal"?

The issues are "unreal" because more issues don't affect white guys.

we had Nixon and Wallace. Almost half chose Wallace.

Not really. They gave Hillary a narrow margin of victory. That can only be considered "decisive" in the sense that she would have won both the popular vote and the EC. Suppose, for example (because I'm too lazy to look up the actual figures), they had her winning by 5%, and she lost by 5%. The polls had Sanders beating Trump by 10+%, so if the polls were wrong by 5%, Sanders still would have won.

Of course, we don't know how a Trump campaign would have handled Sanders, what kinds of attacks they would have made against him, if they would have been effective, or any of a number of other things. Hell, if Sanders had locked up the nomination early on in the primaries, Trump may not have been the GOP nominee. I don't know how he might have polled against Rubio. It's all just speculation.

Discussing a Sanders-Trump match-up is a waste of time. There are way too many variables, and none of it can mitigate the unfortunate electoral college result. Trump won, that's what we have to deal with, not whether or not he might have lost under different election scenarios.

the polls were actually very right on a national level. They only really failed in a band of upper midwest states - MN, WI, MI, OH, and PA were well off what they were polling, everywhere else that was heavily polled (you can't really count states like OK or RI that are never polled) was reasonably accurate and her popular vote total nationwide is going to settle in very close to what 538 had projected.

Missing on a few key states - and they need to be looking at their models to see why specifically there they failed - isn't the same thing as being flawed overall.

Interpreted conservatively, the polls told us that the race was much to close to predict, as was the case for every race for several decades now. The problem is that we thought we had robust demoscopic models that allowed us to go far beyond the simple fact that we tried to predict an election by asking people who'd they vote for, and got answers that didn't settle our curiosity.

IIRC there was a strong bias among pollsters and pundits that when it came to election day, virtually all of the undecideds would break in Hillary Clinton's favor as it was felt they simply "could not" tolerate or endorse Trump.

From what I read, going into election day a staggering 12% of voters were still believed to be undecided (about three times more than typical) and a majority of them broke for Trump.

You do not recall correctly at all.

Elaborate please.

Pollsters can go ahead and close shop now. How do they stay in business? They have failed at every important vote in the last 2 years and not by small margins. It's no better than guesswork at this point.

Yes, but much like with AGW , there's an entire industry of dependents that's not going to go anywhere.

It's funny how, besides being a few election cycles late, things are going eerily similar to this game's plot expositions... well, besides DC getting nuked...