rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

i still believe that this is all going to end with the trump gang packed into a helicopter, flying toward putin's loving arms. i'm hoping putin will just send them to siberia, in a coldblooded cruel twist, but we'll see

the 538 article was at least the first one that actually utilized plausible scenarios and had an actual understanding about how the government works.

tbh, the Dems should just do what they did when the rumors of firing Mueller started flying, just start publicly saying "Trump's gonna try and stay in office, we need a bill to prevent that" (which we don't), to where he can't possibly do something that the lamestream media wants him to do, so he defies them by leaving office when he loses.

the umair haque one, which was far more popular, was one of the worst pieces of writing I'd ever seen.

the umair haque one, which was far more popular, was one of the worst pieces of writing I'd ever seen.

Umair Haque is a singularly awful writer.

Not sure where to put this, but the people responsible for editing this wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election - have decided in their wisdom to use these two pictures of trump and biden and... we are in the bad place.

https://i.imgur.com/EX7EQi5.png

BREAKING: In 4-3 decision, Wisconsin Supreme Court keeps the Green Party ticket off of Wisconsin's ballot.

Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joins the court's three liberals to form a majority.

This means clerks do not have to reprint ballots and can now mail them.

— Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) September 14, 2020

This decision may well cost Trump Wisconsin.

thank god, fingers crossed

Trump is in pretty big trouble here anyway, but yeah every little bit helps. it's so much better for everyone if this election is not particularly close

we are in the bad place

The Trump one is an "official portrait" and therefore a choice which cannot be criticized as unfair to him. The Biden photo is from 2013, mirrors the Trump portrait in terms of composition and is relatively flattering, so it too cannot be criticized as unfair. This is a common type of editorial neutrality. Not sure of your point, really.

both pictures are flattering, yes, but they look almost identical to each-other, it's like the picture of the Korean models but with American presidents

they're just the political equivalent of high school yearbook senior portraits from the early 1960s, which is strangely apt, considering.

They also both look like John Carpenter needed to shoot a presidential portrait for They Live

Umair Haque is a singularly awful writer.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, September 14, 2020 4:31 PM bookmarkflaglink

totally, I keep telling my peeps to stop sharing their shit asap

This decision may well cost Trump Wisconsin.

I mean maybe but I would not have expected the Greens to clear 1% in Wisconsin this year at any rate, and they probably draw off more non-voters than people who would otherwise vote for a Democrat.

Delaying mail in ballots was a bigger issue there I think.

Definitely, and that was presumably the plan behind waiting until the last possible moment to file suit instead of filing right away when the election commission ruled.

We'll see what happens down the stretch, but Biden's Hispanic problem looks very real. Looking at pre-election polling from 2016 and now, it seems Biden's ~10 pts off the Clinton pace among Hispanics in FL and nationally. https://t.co/GWmMOsnhrY

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) September 15, 2020

i know i was asking about this recently, re: poor performance with hispanic people in FL. FL seems like an especially complicated situation.

anyone have thoughts on what is driving this, elsewhere? it's baffling to me, but i am obviously underinformed

Startd listening, Karl, at the 30-min. mark. The dude interviewed by Silver is an acquaintance, a Cuban American and former MIamian:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/why-some-latino-voters-are-backing-trump/

I totally get why one would be wary of noted Castro copycat Joe Biden.

from the Enten story. Fascinating:

Perhaps not surprisingly, Biden's best path to the White House largely relies on winning states Trump won four years ago and where Hispanics voters make up less than 5% of the electorate. Specifically, Biden has been up by at least five points over the last two months in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Indeed, Biden can struggle with Hispanic voters and still win the election. It's, in fact, something he's doing right now. Biden is up by seven points nationally and has at least a trivial advantage in the six closest states Trump won four years ago: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Biden is able to do so because he has countered his relative weakness with Hispanic voters by doing extremely well with White voters. Biden has cut Clinton's deficit among White voters in the pre-election polls from about 13 points in 2016 to a scant four points now.
The result is a Biden lead nationally and in the swing states because White voters make up about seven times the percentage of the electorate Hispanics do nationally and at least three times (though in some cases many more times) in the closest swing states Trump won in 2016.

thanks alfred!

That interview I linked to is even better than I thought; this is what I'd share with white friends struggling to understand the complexity of the "Hispanic vote."

Can I guess? Respectability politics, evangelical beliefs, fear of the fake bogeyman of Communism?

I don't know how you define "respectability politics" here. I'd add: fear of immigrants, fear of a wobbly economy.

Fair enough. In this case, respectability politics means the sort of talk about 'well we worked hard and came here the right way and these new people are just lazy' etc etc.

Oh, yeah! That's certainly a trope with those Cubans who came here before 2000.

came here the right way

under the most lenient and generous immigration status granted by the US government to any population in the world

I've heard that from non-Cubans, too, though.

Perhaps Biden needs to be photographed eating a taco bowl

https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3479ac3/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048x1365+0+0/resize/1680x1120!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F27%2Fcc%2F54445f484154aeb8d9c652b69d20%2Flat-bidengarcetti-la0094685552-20190508

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/media-mistakes/616222/

I need a mask to protect me from that gastronomical horror.

There's yet another article from The Atlantic magazine linked upthread, this one about the news media and its failures in covering Trump. The article is otm from start to finish. It's thesis is here:

if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure.

Narrator: ... (eh, you can fill in the rest of the joke that is increasingly less funny and more sad every day.)

I need a mask to protect me from that gastronomical horror.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, September 15, 2020 1:36 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

just looks like they are eating tacos

lol I read that as "locusts"

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/joe-biden-youth-vote-turnout/616168/

Some of the messages Baumann tried on the group didn’t perform very well. For instance, participants didn’t like being told that Trump is so bad, they simply must vote for Biden, even if they don’t particularly want to. “They needed positive reasons to do it,” Baumann told me. The “You must stop Trump” strategy didn’t work.

They’re catching on!

He came up with what NextGen now calls “the Democratic Avengers,” after the Marvel movie featuring an ensemble of superheroes.

... oh

The critical 12 year old demographic is going wild for Biden

Scientific American just endorsed him, apparently.

He came up with what NextGen now calls “the Democratic Avengers,” after the Marvel movie featuring an ensemble of superheroes.

as I quoted on the Biden thread:

In May, NextGen announced it planned to spend $45 million to help Biden beat Trump. […]

The Democratic Avengers has since become one of the group’s most popular messages about Biden, according to its surveys[…]

The Avengers-style ad by NextGen had 145 views on YouTube when I last played it.

My 15-year-old, who has watched all the Marvel movies, really liked the Democratic Avengers thing -- I don't think it was the official NextGen thing, it was some homemade mod of the big battle sequence from Avengers 4 with Democrats' heads pasted over the Avengers? Anyway, he can't vote.

I think the 154 YouTube views thing is a bit silly, political ads aren't supposed to be watched that way.

How do you think political ads that exist only on social media are supposed to be viewed?

Generally speaking, those ads are uploaded separately to Twitter; they're not YouTube embeds. So thousands of people will see the tweet, but only a few hundred will see the ad on YouTube (unless they pay for it to run as an ad in front of someone else's video).

Yes, exactly.

Very few ads have people searching them out to view them by choice, they still can be successful ads without going viral.

I did an advanced search on twitter for August 1 to September 4th and it just gave me people aggrieved by the Atlantic article yesterday, no postings of the video from August

Rachel Bitecofer has spoken. There's a lot to read, but things are looking not-good for the world's shittiest human (and they're not looking much better for the world's second-shittiest human, Mitch McConnell).

tossup in alaska huh

After being introduced by Luis Fonsi, Joe Biden pulled out his phone and started playing Despacito ahead of his remarks kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month in Kissimmee, FL. pic.twitter.com/7R6hUZgLW1

— Sarah Mucha (@sarahmucha) September 16, 2020

Putting this here instead of the Biden thread for reasons