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Saturday, October 10, 2020

Lies, Damned Lies...and Statistics

 


Friends, articles like this one give us an interesting perspective on the 2020 election.  It's a piece from the New York Times, so it's a given that it's full of crap, but mixed in with the crap is some genuine insight.  You'll see a lot of articles like this one in the next few weeks, moreover.  The upshot is that Democrats have an early lead.  Something like 8 million Americans have already cast ballots in the presidential election, and it's highly likely that most of them have voted for Biden, not Trump.  So...it's curtains for Trump, right?  Not so fast!  For one thing, this is a very odd election: for the first time ever, massive numbers of Democrats are determined to vote by mail (and ASAP), following the advice they've received from their own party and from pandemic-obsessed journalists.  Republicans, by contrast, are wary of mail-in voting, even absentee voting (at which they usually excel), because of President Trump's warnings about the unreliability and outright fraud in our mail-in system.  Democratic conspiracy theories about postmen run amok probably don't help either.  So what that all means is that more Democrats than ever will vote early and by mail this year.  The die-hard Trump haters will, needless to say, be highly motivated to cast their ballots the second they are able.  Fewer Democrats than ever, however, will show up in person, especially on election day.  Note that this article says that areas thick with white liberals, like Madison, Wisconsin, are showing stratospheric levels of early voting.  No surprise there.  Heavily black counties in North Carolina, by contrast, are showing anemic levels of early voting.  Plus, a lot of Republicans are still voting early and by mail, keeping the GOP competitive in these categories, even as the GOP, with a finely-tuned turnout machine already humming, seems poised to win in-person voting and election-day voting by a landslide.  What does it all mean?  Not a hell of a lot, except that we don't know for sure who's going to win the election...and the Dems who say they've read the tea leaves, and Biden is a shoo-in, are full of it.


https://news.yahoo.com/huge-absentee-vote-key-states-160423152.html

 

Meanwhile, there are other sets of tea leaves to read.  Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics has been studying them assiduously, and here's his take.  He's forecasting a close race.

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/09/trumps_path_to_victory_with_a_nod_to_washington_state_144400.html 

9 comments:

  1. I put a lot of the responsibility for our current state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of Nancy Pelosi. As Speaker of The House she could have deflected a lot of the chaos that has gone on since 2016, and she failed to do so.

    Regrettably, she allowed he almost pathological hatred of Trump to rule many of her inactions. One of the first mistakes she made was to allow AOC and other radical left junior members of Congress to gain an unprecedented amount of influence. After that, she technically lost control of the authority she once had.

    At this point, no matter what she does or says counts for much. A good example of how she has allowed her hatred of Trump to rule her, is when she tore up her copy of Trump's State of The Union address. She has forfeited her power, and let craziness reign.

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  2. Another thing Pelosi could have done was use some of her influence to curb some of the violence and looting that went on in some of our cities. She failed to do so. Pelosi could have "stood tall" for America and all Americans, and she failed to do so. She allowed herself to become a part of bickering partisan politics. She had a chance to ameliorate situations, and she blew it!

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  3. Somewhere in the back of my brain is the thought that if Biden does win, this might not be the disaster that right wing propagandists predict. One thing for sure, that if that does happen, Trump will never be in The White House ever again. A Biden victory might also serve as a warning to Republicans that they are going to have to fight harder in 2014 than they have ever fought. On that note, even the Democrats can't prevent elections in 2024 at the risk of a national rebellion. With that said, I would like to see Nikki Haley run against whoever The Left puts up as a candidate, and I suspect it could be Michelle Obama. However, I think Nikki could handle the heat, and by the end of a Biden or even Harris regime, those on the right will be more than ready for a change, an understatement. So all in all, I am "girding my loins" for the possibility of a Biden presidency, as much as I'm sure I will dislike it.

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  4. Ray, I agree that Crazy Nancy is...crazy, and animated by Trump-hatred, above all. In that sense she's a great representative of her party. I will differ with you, however, insofar as I think she's done a decent job of bottling up the "Squad". They're in the news a lot less than they used to be, and their real political influence -- over legislation, say -- is practically nil. In general, in fact, I'd say the hard left has been domesticated by Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden. That's an achievement that won't last beyond the election, though. Win or lose, the Left is going bonkers starting on Nov. 4th. They're straining at the bit already.

    Ray, you could be right about a Biden win. There are always silver linings... My hope would be that the court-packing gambit would fail, and the GOP would make a big comeback in 2022 and 2024. Stranger things have happened. Much better, though, would be a win in 2020, followed by a left-wing meltdown!

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  5. DR. NICK

    Today is Columbus Day. Horrors! More depressing news from Portland, Oregon. To protest Columbus Day, protesters in that city tore down statues of Presidents Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in a Portland Park. Apparently nothing was done to stop them. Very depressing. Happy Columbus Day. Ha! Sure glad I'm old enough where I don't have all that many more years to live in a country that permits this bullshit to take place.

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  6. Dr. Waddy and Ray from Jack: ok, one erasure down and probably more to come so I'll switch to plan b, short bursts! I feel sorry for the good decent people of Portland.

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  7. Dr.Waddy and Ray from Jack: They have to be convinced that their city and state governments have,with dismissive contempt for their unenlightened views, delivered them to the tender mercies of the always "compassionate" lefty crazies who see them as flies which in the summer shambles quicken even with blowing (paraphrased from Othello). And that's just how they would us all,each and every one, if we grant them power through a democratic process they would summarily destroy.

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  8. Dr.Waddy from Jack: I think the Real Clear Politics article creditable and credible. Its well documented and I like its use of terms like "heuristic", which should flummox foo foos who find in their SUNY New Paltz educations no definition of this term. It was no doubt avoided for fear of igniting their egalitarian passions.

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  9. Ray, the destruction of those statues is abhorrent...but it's also politically expedient, insofar as once again the leftist wackos are "letting it all hang out", and at just the right time! Bring on the riots, I say...for they will, in turn, bring on a second term.

    Quite right, Jack: heuristics are the opposite of the preferred learning process of the Left. That's based on simple deduction: "Whatsoever we [the enlightened] say, is true. Whatsoever you [the deplorables] say, is false. Here endeth the lesson. (Postscript: Shut up!)"

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