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2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.


bolverk

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People need to stop the hand-wringing over MAGA youth.  Yes, they exist.  They're also a significant minority.  Look at the 18-29 group in the last 2 POTUS elections:

2016:  58-28 (Clinton/Trump)

2020:  59-35 (Biden/Trump)

 

It will vary from election to election, a little bit, most likely due to any 3rd candidate support.

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22 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

  Williamson has a super entrenched R county machine, but tends to vote bluer in national and statewide races. I was really disheartened at the candidate quality of most of the commissioners court and county judge races last cycle. We flipped the Sheriff's office, but that had more to do with Choty being a wholly unlikeable and corrupt prick than the greatness of Gleason as a candidate. 

Williamson is Exhibit A of how with just a tiny bit of effort the TDP could flip a historically red county blue for the foreseeable future. I don't know how this all works on a local level, but I do know how things have been trending at the top of the ticket since we moved here in '07. I've included a couple of previous elections just to show how red this county was up until recently:

image.png.0a6a8f1e08fb69e81221282e384ab244.png

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1 hour ago, South Austin said:

I worked at a Burger King one summer, and I have never, ever put that on a resume or job application.  I speak of it every once in a while (usually with some amount of gratitude for having that experience in my job history), but it has not been mentioned in any of my biographies.  What unbelievable fucksticks.

This is unforgivable.  MAYONNAISE on a burger??  GTFOH.

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I am probably in the minority, but I think that Trump‘s statements on the military and deceased military - and McCain specifically- and his failure to attend the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I because of rain - and the recent Arlington lawbreaking will have a small effect on his followers.  I’m not saying there is mass defections. But I am saying more independents will go Democrat and more old school VFW GOP supporters will stay home.

What I am saying is, I think it will be a small difference in turnout that will prove to be a huge difference in close electoral college results.  . 

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Man, scroll down to "Results by County" and you realize that the vast majority of rural Texas is... man, I'm trying to find the right word... I'll let you pick one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas

Sort by % for Trump over Biden.

Round about 100 Counties in Texas voted 80%+ for Trump.  Roberts did its best to get to 100%.  Can you imagine being the poor souls in that county who voted anything but R?

One County in Texas, Travis County, Texas voted $70%+ for Biden.  

Yes, I know land doesn't vote but still... its jarring what rural communities are like. 

image.thumb.png.90aa16ac7719d5d62d934de337240ebd.png

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2 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

If they haven’t left him by now, they will never ever leave him. 

They got the largest salary increase under Biden in 22 years. Crickets 

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1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

Not necessarily--I've had elections in which I was undecided until the last minute (including 2008).

For me, this election isn't anything like 2008.  Nobody has an unformed opinion of Donald Trump.  But perhaps the substitution of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden has increased the number of last-minute deciders, with Harris being much less known and defined than Biden.

I would observe that since 2016, those last-minute deciders have consistently broken in favor of the Democratic candidate across all manner of elections (presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, dog-catcherial).

 

1 hour ago, Js1 said:

Those Fox News polls have abortion amendments passing in AZ and NV by 73-23 and 75-21, respectively.  

Yes, there will be some Trump-abortion referendum crossovers, but it does feel more....obvious (?) that Harris has a higher ceiling in both those states, based on a) having voted Dem in 2020 and b) having such high support for abortion. 

Yes, take percentages off for now and just talk real numbers.  Trump’s actual number of voters is not growing.  He is not doing anything to add to his total unless it’s motivating racist/misogynists that can’t vote for a melanated woman. 

Trump is shedding voters who are less motivated and in some cases seeing some of the weirdness open their eyes with a horrible VP choice and continual fuck ups with veterans.  He lost some on 1/6/2021, lost more that have died over the last 4 years.  Trump’s max this cycle was when Biden was still in the race and he looked like the most capable old guy.

The changes in percentages are happening because Harris is changing eligible and registered voters to likely and unmotivated to engaged.  In this way Harris-Walz own the outcome of the election and all Trump can do it bitch and whine which is what he is best at.  Harris-Walz actions will determine the race based on their ability to maintain momentum and avoid pitfalls.

The wildcard factor in this race now will be the economy over then next 2 months.  I saw data where 3 of 5 people think we are in a recession now.  If we have pundits that start saying recession too much it could be like Beetlegeuse and manifest in the minds of voters even though we have not had one negative quarter yet, much less two required to be in a recession.

Edited by TexasEd
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My god she looked so fucking NORMAL interacting with the employees (and working aged kids) at that BBQ restaurant yesterday compared to Vance at a donut shop 

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My hope is people will see how crass and purely political Trump's stunt was. He doesn't care about those veterans or the deceased. He only cares that he can use their deaths to his advantage. Christ, his team made it a fucking Tik Tok that was released. He gave a thumbs up and a smile in front of the graves of soldiers. We all get aghast at people taking selfies at the Ground Zero memorial or Auschwitz. Some places just shouldn't be props for your pictures or videos. Of course, some just see this as fine because "it was Biden/Comrade Kamala's fault anyhow and WHY WASN'T SHE THERE INSTEAD!!!!". Those people are lost regardless. But maybe the middle will find this fairly disgusting. 

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1 hour ago, Wiler77 said:

In May I attended my niece's HS graduation in Houston.  It's a private school, and one of the speakers was a girl from the senior class.  I don't think it was the Valedictorian speech--it was something stupid like speaking on memories from her time at the school because she was one of the few that had been attending since 1st grade.

She got to 5th grade, and her favorite memory was watching Trump's Presidential Inauguration, "or what they call in my family 'the best day EVER!'"  Half the room applauded.  My sister rolled her eyes at me and I said "you're the one who paid to send your daughter here."

Let's face it, most of us are influenced by our parents beliefs at an early age.  So I'm sure she was excited for the inauguration at age 11 because her dipshit parents were excited.  What I don't understand is the inability of people to think independently as they age to understand who has your best interests at stake.

My money's on Second Baptist 

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4 minutes ago, mdmost said:

My hope is people will see how crass and purely political Trump's stunt was. He doesn't care about those veterans or the deceased. He only cares that he can use their deaths to his advantage. Christ, his team made it a fucking Tik Tok that was released. He gave a thumbs up and a smile in front of the graves of soldiers. We all get aghast at people taking selfies at the Ground Zero memorial or Auschwitz. Some places just shouldn't be props for your pictures or videos. Of course, some just see this as fine because "it was Biden/Comrade Kamala's fault anyhow and WHY WASN'T SHE THERE INSTEAD!!!!". Those people are lost regardless. But maybe the middle will find this fairly disgusting. 

There were other graves visible in the pics/videos. Imagine being a normal person who fucking hates Dotard, and seeing your relative's tombstone on one of those things. "But but but we had permission from the family!!". You did? From all of the families in Arlington National Cemetery? Fucking ghouls. 

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26 minutes ago, Js1 said:

My god she looked so fucking NORMAL interacting with the employees (and working aged kids) at that BBQ restaurant yesterday compared to Vance at a donut shop 

 

Why do I get the feeling Walz will be at college football games and tailgates and then they will see that and unleash JV at a tailgate and he will look like this the whole time:

 

ricky bobby idk GIF

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538's new model - Harris up to 59%, 291-247 EC victory (her highest EC total so far in the model) 

Our model now gives more weight to polls

At a high level, the version of the model we published before Biden dropped out of the race allowed for a dynamic rather than static, explicit weighting on the polls. When we launched the forecast in June, this was not an apparent issue; the model was generating estimates that were only slightly closer to our "fundamentals" indicators about the election — such as economic growth and whether an incumbent president is on the ballot — than to the polls, which had a lot of uncertainty in early June.

In July, however, the two sets of indicators started to diverge significantly. As the polls moved away from the fundamentals, the model did not react as expected to the new data and therefore generated estimates that deviated from the polls. (This divergence was possible because the old model did not explicitly dictate how much weight to put on polls versus fundamentals. More details on that below.)

Our model's overemphasis on the fundamentals stemmed from the way we explored future uncertainty in the election. In a nutshell, our old model worked by using the current day's polling average in every state as its starting point, then generating a forecast of what polls could say on Election Day by simulating random error in the race based on the amount of time remaining until the election. This allowed us to account for many different possible ways in which the election could unfold.

And when our model simulated random error for each state, it picked numbers that, on average, were supposed to pull the forecast slightly toward our fundamentals-based prediction of what the polling average would say on Election Day — with the precise strength of that pull determined by how much uncertainty we had about each indicator. (The more polls, or less time remaining until Election Day, we had, the more certain we were about the polls and the less we had to hedge toward the fundamentals.) The fundamentals were supposed to help steer us, in other words, amid a stormy sea of polls.

The model was technically working as designed (and produced expected results in back-testing) but ended up hewing more toward the fundamentals because of the complexity of these random errors. Basically, when we told the model to figure out how much polls were likely to change by November, instead of looking more like a bell curve centered around 0, it latched onto the fundamentals since that was the only other data source available to it. While this is how the complex statistics powering our model were supposed to work in theory, in practice, the model produced unusual results that did not lend themselves to easy explanations.

That's the "Reader's Digest" version of what was going on with our old model. However, I know a lot of you will be interested in the additional details, so a fuller explanation can be found in the appendix at the end of this article. For now, I will explain how we addressed these issues in our new model.

Our new approach: Averaging different models together

Our revised method is to run the fundamentals- and polls-based forecasts completely separately, then to compute our overall forecast by taking a weighted average of the two. The weights correspond to the (un)certainty we have about each forecast in isolation.

We accomplish this averaging by using something called Bayesian model stacking. In a nutshell what we're doing is running two separate versions of the 538 forecast, each producing 10,000 simulations of each party's vote share in each state. Then, we use the math explained in equation 13 here to estimate how much weight we should put on the polls-based forecast given how much time is left until the election — and thus how much uncertainty is left in the polling average relative to the fundamentals. The chart below shows an estimate of how much weight the model will put on the polls-only forecast given the day we're running the forecast and uncertainty in the fundamentals forecast.

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1 minute ago, Js1 said:

538's new model - Harris up to 59%, 291-247 EC victory (her highest EC total so far in the model) 

Our model now gives more weight to polls

At a high level, the version of the model we published before Biden dropped out of the race allowed for a dynamic rather than static, explicit weighting on the polls. When we launched the forecast in June, this was not an apparent issue; the model was generating estimates that were only slightly closer to our "fundamentals" indicators about the election — such as economic growth and whether an incumbent president is on the ballot — than to the polls, which had a lot of uncertainty in early June.

In July, however, the two sets of indicators started to diverge significantly. As the polls moved away from the fundamentals, the model did not react as expected to the new data and therefore generated estimates that deviated from the polls. (This divergence was possible because the old model did not explicitly dictate how much weight to put on polls versus fundamentals. More details on that below.)

Our model's overemphasis on the fundamentals stemmed from the way we explored future uncertainty in the election. In a nutshell, our old model worked by using the current day's polling average in every state as its starting point, then generating a forecast of what polls could say on Election Day by simulating random error in the race based on the amount of time remaining until the election. This allowed us to account for many different possible ways in which the election could unfold.

And when our model simulated random error for each state, it picked numbers that, on average, were supposed to pull the forecast slightly toward our fundamentals-based prediction of what the polling average would say on Election Day — with the precise strength of that pull determined by how much uncertainty we had about each indicator. (The more polls, or less time remaining until Election Day, we had, the more certain we were about the polls and the less we had to hedge toward the fundamentals.) The fundamentals were supposed to help steer us, in other words, amid a stormy sea of polls.

The model was technically working as designed (and produced expected results in back-testing) but ended up hewing more toward the fundamentals because of the complexity of these random errors. Basically, when we told the model to figure out how much polls were likely to change by November, instead of looking more like a bell curve centered around 0, it latched onto the fundamentals since that was the only other data source available to it. While this is how the complex statistics powering our model were supposed to work in theory, in practice, the model produced unusual results that did not lend themselves to easy explanations.

That's the "Reader's Digest" version of what was going on with our old model. However, I know a lot of you will be interested in the additional details, so a fuller explanation can be found in the appendix at the end of this article. For now, I will explain how we addressed these issues in our new model.

Our new approach: Averaging different models together

Our revised method is to run the fundamentals- and polls-based forecasts completely separately, then to compute our overall forecast by taking a weighted average of the two. The weights correspond to the (un)certainty we have about each forecast in isolation.

We accomplish this averaging by using something called Bayesian model stacking. In a nutshell what we're doing is running two separate versions of the 538 forecast, each producing 10,000 simulations of each party's vote share in each state. Then, we use the math explained in equation 13 here to estimate how much weight we should put on the polls-based forecast given how much time is left until the election — and thus how much uncertainty is left in the polling average relative to the fundamentals. The chart below shows an estimate of how much weight the model will put on the polls-only forecast given the day we're running the forecast and uncertainty in the fundamentals forecast.

tl;dr statistics word salad; voila! model moar gud 

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22 minutes ago, Foosters said:

My money's on Second Baptist 

Second Baptist school is, no shit, a fundamentalist school trying to push out tradwives. I'm mostly kidding, but only partly, when I say I don't think they'd let a female speak at all. 

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1 hour ago, The Dog said:

Williamson is Exhibit A of how with just a tiny bit of effort the TDP could flip a historically red county blue for the foreseeable future. I don't know how this all works on a local level, but I do know how things have been trending at the top of the ticket since we moved here in '07. I've included a couple of previous elections just to show how red this county was up until recently:

image.png.0a6a8f1e08fb69e81221282e384ab244.png

There's even some positive direction in Montgomery County. Not necessarily a lot of progress but not going in the wrong direction like in the 80s to 2000.

 

MontCounty.JPG

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The model is giving her the entire Blue wall (WI 62%, MI 63%, PA 57%), NV (57%), AZ (54%), NE-02 (75%) - which is 287

GA (49%) and NC (47%) are the others that go to Trump.  In this scenario, she wins 287-251.   The model gives her a 1 in 3 chance in both TX and FL 

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54 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

If they haven’t left him by now, they will never ever leave him. 

They won’t switch to Harris, but they won’t be enthusiastic about voting.  If they think she’s gonna win, or if they are in a deep red state, or both, they probably won’t show up.  

And Trump is out there telling people the election is rigged.  If you think the election is rigged, why bother showing up?

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54 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

If they haven’t left him by now, they will never ever leave him. 

You are confusing his core MAGA supporters with old-school Republicans who hold their nose and vote straight ticket.  Former will never leave him, but I think we have already seen polling data that Trump‘s support among some GOP voters could be reduced due to the enthusiasm gap brought about their anti-military and anti-female talking points  

I’m not betting my house on it, but several people on this thread have given their personal anecdotes about friends or family members who are not going to vote for Trump this time.  Even a one percent shift would be YUGGGGE!!. 

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3 minutes ago, Gatorubet said:

You are confusing his core MAGA supporters with old-school Republicans who hold their nose and vote straight ticket.  Former will never leave him, but I think we have already seen polling data that Trump‘s support among some GOP voters could be reduced due to the enthusiasm gap brought about their anti-military and anti-female talking points  

I’m not betting my house on it, but several people on this thread have given their personal anecdotes about friends or family members who are not going to vote for Trump this time.  Even a one percent shift would be YUGGGGE!!. 

The play is to tell these unenthused Republican voters "it's not the end of the world if Harris wins, just as it wasn't the end of the world when Biden won, or when Obama won twice, or when Clinton won twice" 

Granted, I don't engage with a lot of Republicans, and I've hung up the phone on both my parents if they even start, because they are both so fucking stupidly brainwashed due to a lack of higher education. 

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1 minute ago, Gatorubet said:

You are confusing his core MAGA supporters with old-school Republicans who hold their nose and vote straight ticket.  Former will never leave him, but I think we have already seen polling data that Trump‘s support among some GOP voters could be reduced due to the enthusiasm gap brought about their anti-military and anti-female talking points  

I’m not betting my house on it, but several people on this thread have given their personal anecdotes about friends or family members who are not going to vote for Trump this time.  Even a one percent shift would be YUGGGGE!!. 

I'm seeing more than a few of the latter in the wild. They're saying that they'll leave the top line blank then vote straight red. 

As to the former - this group is overwhelmingly "low information" voters - remember that Trump's favorables are POSITIVE with "disengaged" voters. MAGA is primarily from this group.

Fox/Newsmax/OAN are working overtime to keep them in the dark about how shitty Trump is and how badly he's flailing. 

22 minutes ago, Js1 said:

538's new model - Harris up to 59%, 291-247 EC victory (her highest EC total so far in the model) 

Our model now gives more weight to polls

 

The problem with polling right now is that it's missing new registrations. IMHO that's why polling has been so off lately - in 2016 Trump brought in a bunch of disengaged voters. Recently it's been in the opposite direction thanks to Dobbs. 

We're seeing spikes in new registrations right now and those people won't be polled this cycle simply because they won't be on any voter lists - much less be included in any "likely" voter model. That could skew things either way depending on how these people intend to vote.

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21 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Second Baptist school is, no shit, a fundamentalist school trying to push out tradwives. I'm mostly kidding, but only partly, when I say I don't think they'd let a female speak at all. 

But they will let Beth Moore speak... oh, wait...

Edited by texasdago
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1 minute ago, The Dog said:

The problem with polling right now is that it's missing new registrations. IMHO that's why polling has been so off lately - in 2016 Trump brought in a bunch of disengaged voters. Recently it's been in the opposite direction thanks to Dobbs. 

We're seeing spikes in new registrations right now and those people won't be polled this cycle simply because they won't be on any voter lists - much less be included in any "likely" voter model. That could skew things either way depending on how these people intend to vote.

Oh trust me, I've been the first in line for the "the polls are underestimating Harris because they aren't capturing the youth vote at all" 

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20 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Second Baptist school is, no shit, a fundamentalist school trying to push out tradwives. I'm mostly kidding, but only partly, when I say I don't think they'd let a female speak at all. 

I was back in town for a HS reunion a few years ago and ended up talking to an old classmate who kinda fits the bill for traditional conservative wife. River Oaks Homemaker, church every Sunday with the family, probably half of their friends will pull the trigger for Trump. Somehow, SB came up in the conversation and - having been away from that scene for 20 years, I had no thoughts on the place - the look in her eyes when I brought up SB was a mix of terror and disgust. Flat out told me that its a cult and she and her husband stay as far away from anyone who attends church there or sends their kids. Pretty eye opening for me. I didn't remember that being the case in the 90's/early 00's, but maybe its always been that way.

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17 minutes ago, Js1 said:

The model gives her a 1 in 3 chance in both TX and FL

If that’s true and the outcomes are statistically independent (which they probably aren’t), that would mean there’s a slightly greater than 50% chance that Kamala wins one of the two. 

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I've watched videos of former govt intelligence employees saying that Trump was 100% wrong in keeping and then retaining classified material when asked to return them, but they're still voting for him.

I imagine there are ex-military who are uncomfortable if not in disagreement with Trump using Arlington as a political prop, but they will still vote for him.

And don't get me started on the evangelical hypocrisy. 

They just don't care.

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3 hours ago, lemonlime said:

I doubt there are many 18-22 year old trump voters also.  He has no room to grow his vote, he can only drum up enthusiasm among his existing cult who haven’t died in the last 4 years.

SEC road trips are going to be eye opening for you, brother.

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1 hour ago, The Dog said:

Williamson is Exhibit A of how with just a tiny bit of effort the TDP could flip a historically red county blue for the foreseeable future. I don't know how this all works on a local level, but I do know how things have been trending at the top of the ticket since we moved here in '07. I've included a couple of previous elections just to show how red this county was up until recently:

image.png.0a6a8f1e08fb69e81221282e384ab244.png

I'd like to see an overlay of counties in blue and red and shades of purple and the voting districts. Denton County is split three ways. Instead of being in Burgess' district where it was perhaps getting tougher they put it me in with Ronny Jackson. In Amarillo. That chunk of blue in Denton proper was mixed with a lot of very very red counties of low population and Amarillo. Fucking Amarillo. 

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4 minutes ago, royiv said:

SEC road trips are going to be eye opening for you, brother.

I recall the recent video of the Ole Miss student from Dallas who was dancing and making noise like a gorilla in front of the black student. This was in the middle of a school day. I can't imagine how they would act on a Saturday night after a day of drinking.

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1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

I am probably in the minority, but I think that Trump‘s statements on the military and deceased military - and McCain specifically- and his failure to attend the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I because of rain - and the recent Arlington lawbreaking will have a small effect on his followers.  I’m not saying there is mass defections. But I am saying more independents will go Democrat and more old school VFW GOP supporters will stay home.

What I am saying is, I think it will be a small difference in turnout that will prove to be a huge difference in close electoral college results.  . 

 

dems need many more ads about the R’s plan to cut VA disability checks 

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