berlinerbaer

Ben Wikler announced his candidacy for DNC chair today, and he is really impressive. He's led the Wisconsin Democrats since 2019 and helped bring the party back from the brink in that state. Most notably, WI Democrats flipped the state supreme court and unfucked the GOP gerrymander that was in place. Yes, Trump just won there but WI was the bluest of the 7 swing states, Tammy Baldwin won reelection, and the GOP supermajority in the state leg just got broken. He also knows media., working as a producer for Move On, Al Franken's gig, and a writer for The Onion. Yes, The Onion. Jamie Harrison's only claim to fame was raising a boatload of cash to ultimately lose to Lady G by 10 points. Ken Martin, who has led the Minnesota party, is also a strong candidate.

I'm looking for tiny wins and y'all can pry this one from my cold dead hands. Fuck Gaetz and fuck Trump 2.0

I'm done with doom scrolling, that's for sure, but I'm not disengaging entirely. I want to get more involved in-person rather than in front of a screen, although I'm not sure exactly what that means yet.

Commanders

For those who are superstitious, the Commanders won today.

Top line for PA: Even For reference, the actual VBM partisan split in PA as of this Monday is 58-31-10 D-R-I. Giving the GOP all the indies, and assuming no other partisan switching makes it 58-41. This poll clearly seems to have oversampled Republicans. MOE of 9% though, so small sample size of like 100.

SIAP. Apparently a CNN poll from today has Harris +1 in AZ with 55% of poll respondents saying they already voted, with Harris leading among the early voters 53 - 44, even though most of them were Republican. If accurate, then this thing's all over but the shenanigans. They polled Nevada also and had Trump +1 overall and up 52 - 46 in the already voted category, which was only 42% of respondents. That corroborates the current GOP lead we see there but suggests a lot more of the vote is outstanding. I couldn't find the early voter respondent data but the numbers are in the CNN article. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25257085/cnn-polls-harris-and-trump-locked-in-close-races-in-arizona-and-nevada-as-pool-of-persuadable-voters-shrinks.pdf https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/politics/cnn-polls-arizona-nevada-trump-harris/index.html

Yeah there was this whole thing with the Cheneys a couple of weeks back that we don't need to revisit.

I think the breakdown of newer voters in GA can tell us where the newer voters are coming from or how old they are, but not both. My somewhat pessimistic best guess is that they are recent arrivals from other states, retirees probably like elsewhere in the Sunbelt, and likely leaning Trump. The silver lining is that some of them are leaving the northern swing states and making them bluer.

The margin of error reported by polls is just the pure random statistical error, which is inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size. I agree that it's conveniently small compared to how far off many polls are. Where most polls screw up is with the systematic error: unrepresentative sampling, wonky weighting, incorrect expectations of voting behavior, etc. To play devil's advocate, thought, there is no way to measure this error mathematically, so pollsters report the only error they can measure quantitatively.

It seems Dems are crushing the mail-in vote in PA and elsewhere. Then I keep hearing that the Rs are keeping pace or even leading with early in-person voting. So is the partisan discrepancy more between mail vs. in-person than it is early vs. Election Day? Where that discrepancy lies will be the difference between a close race and Harris blowing Trump out a la Fetterman - Oz.

Was that tweet from earlier today about the "found" Democratic votes in Nevada legit? I haven't heard it reported elsewhere.

Bruh

Just got back from doing my part. Fuck Trump!