rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

the spitballing metaphor has to do with an idle pastime

Appreciate that. I took it as sarcastic framing of something you thought was so obvious only someone exceedingly stupid would need it explained. I can be thin-skinned and misread things.

Spitballing is when you accidentally kill a baseball player IIRC

they did. and it was folgers

Fill it to the rim.

WITH BRIM.

I do think that Biden should say "we'll pay people to stay home" when asked btw. And if asked "how will you pAy fOr iT," to pledge that his administration will crack down on massive corporate fraud and tax cheats, and return stolen money to the people. Trump voters are demonstrably attracted to vote for someone who says that they'll punish Mysterious Powerful Figures who are Ripping The Voters Off; this would have the twin benefits of also attracting votes from sensible people, and being able to come true.

i hope everyone here is ready for 10:30 tonight

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/schedule-of-speakers-for-the-2020-republican-national-convention

hmm

boy he sure looks like a winner. i wish biden and harris were perfect

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/29/michael-moore-donald-trump-repeat-2016-warning

Thanks, Mike.

🤯🤯🤯

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/08/trump-could-have-election-night-lead-blue-states.html?

xpost i like how he considers himself an expert since he guessed right once in 2016 using very non-scientific methods. and ignored that we had a mid-term since then which is somewhat indicative of how the climate has changed.

Actually that "lead in blue states" article is kinda scary

Not really. It's a what-if scenario at best

Before the author finally concedes that Democratic voters aren't going to 100% vote by mail, they seem to think nobody voting D will show up in person.

And even then, the endgame isn't a loss, it's Trump challenging the results. Which tbh he might do anything, challenging and succeeding considering the elections are all run by states, means he and his lawyers would have an assload of lawsuits to file

i find it very troublesome.

According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 30 percent of registered voters said they planned to vote by mail, and 43 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. But among Trump supporters, only 11 percent said they planned to vote by mail, and 66 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. Among Joe Biden backers, 47 percent said they planned to vote by mail, while only 26 percent said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. (The share who said they would vote early in person was consistently 20-21 percent among all three groups: Trump supporters, Biden supporters and voters overall.)

If this holds, it would mean votes cast on Election Day would skew heavily toward Trump, and votes cast by mail would skew heavily toward Biden.

that does seem likely to lead to election night results that would be skewed faaaaaaar toward Trump, right? it doesn't seem far-fetched to assume that a good number of people in this country will not be aware of the reason for the predictable discrepancies. on the left, seeing it as evidence of another invalid, stolen election by trump, and on the right, permanent evidence of their leader's beating of the polls and expectations and media lies.

regardless, it does seem destined to be the most litigated election of all time. i assume every single state is going to be its own battle

Trump has a big enough war chest to hire all the lawyers he needs to challenge results in every jurisdiction where he loses. And he's litigious enough he might just try it, but I don't think the courts yet have been so totally flipped into pure partisanship that this would overturn an election, unless it is very close, as in 2000. Maybe I am just insufficiently paranoid, but robbing people of votes they legally cast tends to make them exceedingly angry and most judges and politicians know enough not to attempt it. Suppression works better.

How many states don't provide drop boxes for mail-in ballots? And is there a means by which those mail-in voters are able to see if their votes have been counted? I've always voted in person so this is all-new territory for me.

no measured optimism please this is the doomer thread

https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&choice=Oppose

Apologies it this has already been referenced here. According t this, opposition to BLM is the highest its been in over 2 years, and has closed the gap on support by 14 points in just under 3 months. This does not look like a positive indicator.

Trump must win the Midwest. But out here his breezy reelection gambit falls flat

Trump simply must win Iowa and Wisconsin. So he cast a convention against this backdrop of anxiety and fear – godless looters are coming for yours – and roped in our governor, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa to play in the tragedy. Few were inclined to listen. When the corn calls, you are too busy removing fallen trees from your machine shed. Trump dropped into the Cedar Rapids airport for an hour shortly before the convention to promise assistance after the derecho pulverized our Second City. After he left, he approved homeowner and business relief for just one of the 27 counties the governor had requested.

For that, Governor Reynolds told the TV convention that Trump “had our back.” Senator Ernst, trailing Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield in fundraising and polling, landed a prime-time cameo to praise her fearless leader. The one who knocked down soybean prices. The one who helped the corn-fueled ethanol industry implode. The one who ordered children in cages to be separated from their mothers.

Farmers are anxious. Latinos are afraid. Unemployed machinists are frustrated. That prized demographic, suburban women in Urbandale next to Des Moines, are encouraging the school board to sue the governor over her in-person school orders.

A few Latino organizers gathered in the park on the sweltering evening when Trump would commandeer the Rose Garden for his reality show.

“Our people came here to be free of the corruption and violence,” said Storm Lake City Councilman José Ibarra. “Now it has come back to find us. Where can we go? What can we do but vote?”

They said their older folks who never saw a reason before have finally found one.

Even some of those farmers are wondering about Trump as they dig into a harvest so meager that wraps up as they vote. An ill wind blows for incumbents.

About the author:

Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on agriculture.

god November is gonna be such a nightmare

pretty obvious prediction but yes Trump will probably be ahead election night but will wind up losing as the mail in ballots are counted and all hell will break loose

Never fear, America was inoculated against tyranny by the Founding Fathers™.

Wait, wrong thread.

As with 2016, I feel like it's just 50/50 at this point.

Would feel better if Biden wasn’t a complete void.

Many want nothing more than to embrace the void.

Those are Trump voters tho

and here I thought they want to embrace Chaos and Old Night.

Anvil, that study you posted is interesting, but I'm not so sure that it says anything except that this country is a racist shithole.

Its a fairly significant shift since 6th June (though most can be explained by the large decline in 'neither support nor oppose'). The direction has changed course since early June and thats a bad sign

Biden's primary victory came at the hands of older suburban whites and they've been the backbone of the polls showing him cruising to victory - if they're responding to continued protests and unrest with a shift back to their authoritarian daddies in the GOP...

The margin of support for Black Lives Matter is roughly the same (+10) as it was at the beginning of the year. Both support *and* opposition have increased, and the number of people who are don't have an opinion has decreased. The aberration is the period in May and June, when support went up before opposition did. This seems like a case of positive media coverage of the George Floyd protests quickly followed by right-wing backlash, leading to broader awareness overall.

I'd be concerned if the gap narrowed significantly, but I don't think it's worrisome yet.

The direction has changed course since early June and thats a bad sign

The conservative media and Republican Party know how deep and abiding the fear of Black Anger is among middle class whites, however mildly it is expressed aloud by the more polite elements of that demographic, so they've been pumping it out so violently they may break the pump handle. They did the same with Gay Panic in 2004. They have no shame.

My local 'daily' paper, The Oregonian, just trotted out that editorial shibboleth, that Black leaders in Portland must denounce the violent protestors, which implies that they've remained silent regarding it. They haven't. The Oregonian has reported their statements all along. This echoes the endless calls for Islamic leaders to denounce 9/11, even though they did so as soon as it was established al-Q was responsible and continued to do so repeatedly. It never made a dent in the public mind.

It's almost as if the media in this country are in on all this white supremacy stuff!

Right, I agree with the last 4 posts. That chart, to me, says that Conservatives have regained control over the wider view of BLM, so much to the point, that even as something as big as the events of this summer are not only fairly quickly negated, but then with the trajectory also pointing in the wrong direction

And its a similar scenario with Covid, as Biden's lead is gradually chipped away. Can come up with all sorts of reasons why this might be, but numbers like this seem to say we're at a point where its almost as though civil unrest and covid haven't really happened, but with the lines pointing the wrong way around

Might have something to do with Biden offering nothing on COVID and Democrats weakening in their public support for BLM - more tut-tutting about riots (as always) cuts them both ways, eroding support for BLM but they're still the party tied to it in the imagination of the people who are turning to oppose it.

That chart, to me, says that Conservatives have regained control over the wider view of BLM

"regained control" -- not so fast. Jeremy Peters of the NYT, whom I consider a bellwether of journalistic centrism, just filed a story in which he admits his paper is "unclear" about the consequence of Kenosha.

btw the right seems pretty united in trying to turn the Kenosha shooter into a hero, I'm not convinced this stuff only cuts one way

shit like this is all over the news. I don't think the state of civil unrest is gonna help Trump as much as people here think it is

Driving through crowds and macing out of vehicles at SW 4th and Washington. pic.twitter.com/dCNJxYlkYn

— Cory Elia (@TheRealCoryElia) August 30, 2020

I'm not saying I think its necessarily going to help him, I just don't like the trajectory in recent weeks in that chart. With this and covid he should be doing a lot worse than he is (and he was doing a lot worse....8-10 weeks ago?)

Well 1000+ deaths per day from covid is sorta baked into our way of life now

well think of all the people that don't die every day from covid, and give 2scoops some credit

sunday morning checklist accomplished: i just ran across the "it's 6%" trending topic on twitter, which is all about how the evil CDC revealed that only 6 of Covid19 deaths are attributed to "just" Covid19 (the rest are attributed to comorbidities) and then called some anti-twitter karen with many thousands of followers a "MOTHERFUCKER" before even realizing what i was doing, then deleted it

good mourning, FUCK

imagine the gall of having tens of thousands of followers, and then making yr main twitter schtick the promotion of anti-science (and you just know it's going to involve anti-vaccination). you're supposed to just shake your head and just be like "well twitter is hell, it's terrible, haha!", but no, FUCK these people

i'm not even like a big "pro-science" guy - there's all sorts of reasons to be skeptical about studies and statistics and probability and charts and all sorts of shit. but goddamn, the anti-science "position" is just always, always sooooooo fucking dumb, and inevitably ends in some sort of unbending faith in the supposed writings of moses as the end point

The comorbidity thing drives me nuts. People often die of secondary infections when they have a disease affecting their immune system, nobody questions that.

Then there's the question of the excess deaths this year, which nobody ever has an answer for.

and twitter itself, i mean, i'm sympathetic to the difficulty of trying to moderate many millions of people at the same time. it's hard enough here on ilx, from what i understand. but can't there just be some person who wrote a book about ethics, or something, who occasionally skims the list of Trending topics that twitter itself is promoting, and then sees the words "it's 6%" and addresses the disinformation campaign?