The more "you people" think and act on beliefs like this, the more normal America will turn their backs on you. There are lots of normal Americans, many highly educated and successful Americans, who truly believe the people pandering this fascist nonsense have truly either lost their minds or been brainwashed by leftist media. How many of you are still wearing covid masks in public?
Well, I'm 72, and Covid doesn't like old people. So, I wear a mask when I'm in the supermarket, or in the audience at a performance. The one time I forgot to wear a mask at a performance, I caught it. Fortunately it was a very mild case. But I have no interest in catching it again, especially as repeated exposures increase one's risk of getting long Covid. I have better things to do with what's left of my life than lying around, trying to breathe.
Well, I am 73 and we had largely ditched masks in Texas (ok maybe not Austin) six months into the pandemic. Our grandchildren did not go to school wearing them - you do know they won't stop a virus don't you? My physician had great advice. If one is worried about catching Covid - don't get tested. Then all one has to worry about is a cold.
What I do know is that N 95s are effective at stopping viruses, due to their electro static charge. Nothing is 100%, but I’ll take whatever measures improve the odds. YMMV.
Masks were never touted as a panacea. Medical grade masks do and did, in fact, reduce the risk of the wearer infecting others. That is why surgeons and ICU nurses wear them. The coronavirus SARS-Co-2 and its mutations are borne on the droplets broadcast as much as 6 feet away in a conical pattern by normal human respiration--coughing, sneezing, exhaling. Droplets are caught in the mask or muted at the source before it dissipates. There was a dramatic reduction in other airborne viral maladies --colds, flu, and possibly pityriasis rosea--while people were wearing masks and isolating during COVID. They have now returned to pre-COVID levels. Ideology is no substitute for public health.
Belief in ideologies is due to a lack of critical thinking.
The masking thing is always going to repel people for any number of reasons that outweigh exposing one's self and others to pathogens. It's interesting because in Asia, masking is taken as a matter of course when needed.
I kind knew that we were in for something bad when many of the Asian members of our crew and on other shows starting wearing masks to work in late 2019.
It is also a matter of airflow dynamics and how particles move in the airflow of a blown N95 mask a bit like the way a catch boom works to pick up trash in a river.
I cannot think of anything less interesting to argue about than whether someone else is wearing a mask. I thought Republicans were the ones who say people should be free to do as they please.
Your physician doesn't happen to make money from treating sick people does he. I knew three people, two elderly parents and their son who all caught that cold and the paramedics had to wear masks with camphor to cover the smell of decomposition when they came to their house. I would like to know where you got the would not stop a virus fact from. Corn Flakes are good for breakfast but you should not read the box.
I’m 72 and sympathize. In 2022 I attended a small applied math conference at Oxford and modeling disease and analyzing data was a now favored topic. The data/model presented on masks is that it would reduce the spread by 50%. I’m interested in further benchmarking. Data/model showed, not talking will reduce the spread by 10x (that is, instead of down to 0.50x it is down to 0.10x). So wearing a mask where everyone is talking is much worse than minimizing time in a chat zone. And yes I although I was vaccinated I got COVID traveling via Heathrow on the way back like your performance.
You’ll catch it again. Your better bet is catching it early via later flow testing and then popping antivirals quick (highly effective in initial infection but quickly wane by symptomatic presentation).
But I am curious to read the long Covid data. What most people don’t realize is that the phenomena isn’t new to Covid. What did everyone think post viral tussis (cough) was?
In 2020/2021 Donald Trump lost a fairly run election, subsequently promoted conspiracy theories while continuing (to this day) to state that he actually won this election, encouraged protestors to storm the capitol, and pressured Pence (and everybody else he could think of) to help overturn the results.
Given this behavior, do you *really* think it's "nonsense" to question whether such a person would intend to relinquish power in the future?
Maybe "don't vote for a person who does this stuff" is really a losing message, and America seemed to turn its back on it this time as you suggest. But the concern is very much not unwarranted.
Really the thing to say here if you really want to help people believe Trump will not extend his presidency beyond this term is "I'm a Republican, and I voted for Trump and I think he's going to be a great president for four years. However, if he seeks the GOP nomination in 2028 I will vote against him and if he is somehow on the general election ballot again as the Republican nominee in 2028 I will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate."
I will say that it's hard for me to game out how he could possibly extend his term beyond these 4 years, but it doesn't seem all that unlikely that he will attempt to do so (just as it didn't seem unlikely that he would run for president in 2024 -- once a person has done a thing, it's typically plausible that they'll do that same thing again). Nobody needs to really agree on whether he will try to remain in power, though. We just need to agree that we will all do our part to stop him if he does try.
Everyone I've seen on the right is very quick to disparage the idea that Trump will try to stay president beyond 2028, but I've yet to see anyone who enthusiastically voted for him already say that there's no possible way they or anyone else would vote for him if he ran again. If he does give it another try, his voters are going to get behind it.
Yea this year I’ve lived in Pennsylvania and California, both city and rural. I haven’t seen almost anyone wearing a mask outside hospitals. I feel like this is just propaganda you’re spreading.
I was at a grocery store in Austin 18 months ago (granted not a Whole Foods, because I don’t like to burn money), and I don’t think I saw anyone wearing a mask. Or at least not a notable percentage.
I also live in blue NJ in a relatively liberal area and only see the occasional person who may be recovering or immune suppressed.
So I very much doubt your story is representative of anything but conservative media exaggerations.
I live Oakland, CA. A reliable 5% still mask everywhere, especially outdoors. Two children in my kid’s first grade class are still masked daily by their parents. And, no neither these kids nor their families have any comorbidities which would recommend around-the-clock infection prophylaxis.
That said, I'm aware of one attempt by a governor to unilaterally cancel an election. It was in 2020 and the courts quickly put an end to that obviously bad idea.
Saying all progressives is admittedly too harsh. But this a recurring refrain elements of the left put forward every gop admin, without any evidence.
The repetition of such baseless fears against all gop politicians also just diminishes the charge. Kinda like how Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, McCain, Romney, and Trump were all compared to nazis at some point.
This is just completely made up. There was absolutely no widespread fears that Reagan, Bush, Bush, McCain, or Romney were threats to democracy or that they would attempt to subvert the results of their elections. And then, in the case of Bush I, McCain, and Romney, none of them did challenge the election results and Romney is among the people who condemn Trump. You cannot be serious here.
Re: Romney & McCain specifically, yes, that's the point. You don't have to look hard to find examples of democratic campaigns calling comparing them to nazis and Hitler.
And, yes, in 2004 and 2008 elements of the left circulated conspiracy theories Bush II was going to cancel the elections. The nation article in my original post was an example from 2008, 2004 leaned more into Bush would use a Madrid bus style terror attack to permanently cancel all elections.
And I honestly cannot tell if you are serious because there are literally books written about why every republican is a threat to democracy. That's the point that this line of argument isn't persuasive against Trump because it's used against every republican.
I can’t tell if you’re serious because nobody in the mainstream left was saying these things about previous Republicans and now Mitt Romney is saying it about Trump. This is such a preposterous false equivalency
This person said on camera "I committed election fraud?" Link? The only person I'm aware of who was convicted of election fraud in recent memory was McCrae Dowless in North Carolina (a Republican).
No evidence? Trump literally refused to accept the 2020 election results and incited a deadly insurrection to try and halt certification. He then peddled his demonstrably false election conspiracy theories for months afterwards, trying every avenue he could to steal the election himself. He's repeatedly talked about wanting to be President beyond his 2 terms, he praised Xi Jinping for becoming "President for Life" and suggested they should do the same in the US.
But we're all supposed to ignore that because he hasn't succeeded "yet". We have to wait until it's too late before we can point out the obvious.
Exactly. The problem for them is there is ever a wolf (for which I’m confident most would claim Trump is) then no one will take them seriously.
If everyone is a nazi or commie or whatever the nom de jour is, then it has absolutely no rhetorical value and is arguably counterproductive. Telling a family paying 25% more for their groceries to look at Trump as a rapist/indicted felon/fascist/etc only makes them tune them out. Had they stolen a page from the blame China handbook, they maybe could have allayed inflation sentiments. Then again, calling it transitory and saying don’t worry about it were woefully naïve in electoral presentation.
If I were a betting person, I'd be willing to place a bet that he won't be. Aside from reasons why any other person wouldn't be on the ballot after 2 terms as president, he's also 78. A lot of men die before they get to 82.
Zero chance he’s on the ballot in 2028. In order to do so, he’d have to pass an amendment, which would have the side effect of allowing Obama to run against him.
He didn't try to amend the constitution in 2020 to stay in power, he just came up with some legal hocus pocus to justify it and tried to force his way back. If he wants to run in 2028, he won't amend anything, he'll just have his lawyers cook up some reason the existing amendment doesn't apply, and then date anyone to stop him.
We seem to be forgetting that Trump already was disqualified under another amendment. The 2-term limit is one of the few guardrails I'm confident will hold, but I'm not 100% confident.
Yeah, I hear you. But Hugo Chavez died and Venezuela isn’t exactly a thriving democracy under Maduro. Dictatorships start with strong personalities but end with systems.
I think Trump's age will be the biggest impediment to seeking a third term. Comparing 2020 Biden to 2024 Biden there was a pretty big deteriorating effect from 4 years, and Trump is already looking pretty old. Even if he's not dead he might just not have the energy for it in 2028.
Trump running for a third time takes one of two things:
- A constitutional amendment
- The assent of the military
No one can get constitutional amendments passed even for much more broadly acceptable things. There is at most a 1-2% chance he could get it done even with major successes in the states and Congress.
And while Trump's fairly popular among the rank and file in the Army, the officer class does not like him. It does not like him at all. Military officers are classic Romney-Clinton voters, and eight more years hasn't changed that. And though many of them are still Republicans, they take their oaths seriously, and "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same" comes before "obey the orders of the President" for a reason, a reason they all know.
Things might get worse. That's a real possibility. Trump running for a third term is much, much less likely than that.
Trump's lack of military officer support scuppered his plans in 2020, but he knows that as well as anyone. It's little wonder though that he's placing much higher value on loyalty with appointments this time and trying to purge the unbelievers. Maybe he doesn't succeed completely but it's comforting to get to a scenario of having to rely on unelected military leaders to force out the civilian president and his cabinet
That is an excellent example of a way things could plausibly get much worse while still falling well short of enabling Trump to run for a third term.
The independent apolitical military will not fall apart in four years. A 'warrior board' would do enormous damage and might make it possible for three terms of *Vance*, but not three of Trump; it couldn't work fast enough.
It’s kinda blowing my mind that Nate, Pfeiffer, and pretty much every other election analyst out there is acting like the party who was openly running on “Facism for everyone! Wheee!” Is going to be super cool with elections as usual.
It's the Democrats who cried wolf effect. Democrats had an absolute cow between 2016 and 2020, the sky didn't fall in, and it seems like the voters preferred 2016-2020 to what the Democrats offered, unfortunately.
A million dead people may dispute your analysis and there are a lot of republican members who are calling hands off on Biden's policies because they know how their districts benefited.
A million dead people as compared to what number? Trump handled
COVID like a moron, but I totally disagree with the implication that number would have been lower under say a President Clinton. What would have been substantially different in people’s reaction to COVID if she were President? Would people who were flouting COVID restrictions in Spring 2020 have been double masking and Tweeting #flattenthecurve under Clinton? I don’t think so.
The sky did fall in-- the judicial branch is dead. It is a delayed effect, but there have already been plenty of nakedly partisan rulings even outside SCOTUS which is completely compromised.
I agree; Trump is definitely a threat to our institutions. But those institutions have been around for a very long time, and it's not going to be so easy for him to subvert them. This isn't like Venezuela or Germany in the thirties; we've had our Constitution for 200 years, and even the justices on the Supreme Court, some of whose decisions I've strongly disagreed with, are committed to the rule of law (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions). The next 4 years are certainly going to be interesting, but I still give us about a 80-90% chance of surviving with our democracy more or less intact. The likelihood of it not surviving is much higher than it's been with any other President, and I don't like it one bit; nevertheless, it's too soon to assume the worst.
That’s a totally valid worldview, I guess I just think it’s odd that Nate, who’s long been an advocate for probabilistic thinking (and that proselytizing has had a pretty big impact on me personally) is kinda writing off a pretty obvious set of worst case scenarios that one would normally price into their risk assessment.
If he didn’t want to be too alarmist, for example, a simple caveat of “assuming elections proceed normally” would probably be a sufficient disclaimer that addresses the legitimate 10-20% risk you’re describing here.
To me this probability estimate seems too optimistic for two reasons:
1. For most of Trump's first term, he didn't know how to work around the limited guardrails; now he does after his 1/6 trial run and armed with the Agenda 47/Project 2025 playbooks. Plus many of the authors are now announced as part of the incoming administration.
2. The Supreme Court has immunized him from prosecution if there's a pretense that his actions were official acts.
It’s one of the ways I’m morbidly grateful for having holocaust survivors in my family tree (grandmother). It really gets you to internalize the capacity for countries to become the worst possible version of themselves very, very quickly.
It's due to comments like this that Trump won and in an electoral landslide increasing his margins across all demographics. If progressives keep this up 2026 may actually result in further losses
I don't know how serious you are, but to the extent you are serious it's part of a broader problem of liberals continuing to treat Trump as an existential danger to democracy when the majority of voters, looking back over his publicly available record of governance, simply don't see it.
Also, not only is Trump constitutionally barred from seeking another term, he wouldn't want to even if he could. His ego has been sated, and he's lazy.
No, I don't think that will be an issue. I think we need to come to terms with the fact that over the past two years, partisan liberals really have been engaging in lawfare against a political opponent. Given that the primary motivation behind Trump's trials was to stop him from becoming president again, there will not be nearly enough political will to prosecute a two-term former president - who will likely still be popular with at least half the country - when he leaves office in January 2029.
He’s already been convicted of 34 felonies so there doesn’t need to be a political will to prosecute. They delayed the sentencing because he was running for president, and will delay again because he is going to be president. It wasn’t lawfare, it’s trying to hold everyone to the same standard. He’s a convicted felon and should be sentenced .
I agree that Trump would probably like to be on the ballot in 4 years, I just don't think he realistically could achieve that. They can get up to a lot with a majority in congress and a friendly SCOTUS, but they probably won't be able to amend the constitution.
I personally think the fear of Trump's corruption and envy of dictators is warranted, but I think the democratic backsliding will be a bit more subtle than Trump literally running for a third term.
Yeah, it's hard to see how he would manage to get into a position where he can actually run for another term. That said, given that SCOTUS has said anything a president does in their role as president is immune from criminal prosecution, he has little in terms of disincentives from trying to suspend the electoral process or otherwise remain in power beyond the end of his term out of some concocted "national security" or "election integrity" concerns. I realize a lot of what he says is just an old man who doesn't understand how our government operates rambling, but he's used phrases such as "suspend the constitution," so it feels like there is some degree of possibility of stuff like that going on (as to what percent chance? Maybe like 5-10% chance he tries and then some lesser percent that he's successful? 🤷🏻♂️)
To me the least likely outcome is that he serves a full four year term and then there is an uneventful 2028 contest and he goes into normal presidential retirement in the way Obama, Bush, and Clinton did (and that presumably Biden will).
You're assuming that Trump will still be President in 2028. I think that you can flip a coin on that. A lot of the GOP would love to see him gone, and will be watching for an opportunity to push him out the airlock. Then you can freak out about JD Vance.
Would they like him gone? Yes. But they didn't even have the guts to vote to impeach him in 2021, at which point they could have barred him from office. Mitt Romney said many GOP didn't vote guilty for fear of their own personal safety.
Would the House impeach him? 9 of 10 Republicans who voted to do so were driven from office by MAGA. Would the Senate this time vote for removal? That would require (in the first two years) that at least 19 GOP members voted for removal.
More of a concern than Trump running again is whether we can have free and fair elections in 2028 under an embolden Trump administration. I used to discount those who had this concern in prior election cycles. But after 2020 and later actions, it's a real concern now.
I think the motivation for him to retire would be (1) a clean pardon for all criminal acts that he's facing prosecution for. Sure, he can try to pardon himself, and that might ultimately be effective. But that wouldn't keep him out of court in the way a pardon from a President Vance would and (2) he's really pretty lazy, so if it gets difficult or if he feels like he's done all the things he wants to do maybe he's good with passing the baton to Vance and still being able to basically dictate the things he cares about under the threat of primarying Vance in 2028. I'm not sure if it's a coin flip, but the odds of him serving his full 4-year term have to be lower than the average president's would be
I suppose that enough Trump chaos might cause these gutless and corrupt Republicans to dump Trump to save themselves. It certainly won't have anything to do with virtue. That's a quality lacking in all political spectra and in a large portion of the population.
Their big fear is being primaried and MAGA has an iron grip on the GOP voters. Elected officials aren't turning against Trump; it's political suicide for them if they do.
There's probably some who privately would like him gone, but their numbers have been waning in the 8 years that he has completely dominated the party and more and more of them came in either riding his coattails or else just living in MAGA world for so long
Down ballot Republicans lost most of the swing state statewide races this year in an election where Trump was on the ballot against an incredibly unpopular incumbent administration amidst record inflation. The hardcore MAGA base doesn't care enough to show up for down ballot races, and the reluctant Trump voters who chose him over Harris because of inflation and the border aren't necessarily conservative, which is why Gallego, Slotkin, Whitmer, Ossoff, and Warnock are in the senate.
I think a big problem is that while the data was good, the analysis was terrible. And that occasionaly includes here. The google searches article was a classic example. Other forecasters (such as Split Ticket) talked about the horrible campaign Trump had run, when, lets be real, he ran a pretty effective one. The MSG rally and other things were just Harris supporters hoping against hope the narrative would change. Their big example of a terrible campaign? Focusing on people who just weren't going to vote... right up until they did.
Others are choices from a marketing perspective. Focusing more on the 50/50 nature of the forecast rather than understanding more the likeliest outcomes probably did good for subscriber numbers (and the liberal audience who wanted to believe it really was closer than it was).
I also think the problem wasn't so much with polls as it was the "gold standard" polls. Polling had a good year because of a lot of those polls which were routinely viewed as garbage or partisan hackery ended up being a lot closer than the gold standard polls. Emerson got lots of shit (including from Nate), but they performed a lot better than the gold standards. It really feels like the pollster ratings need a more dramatic revision than is probably called for, but most of the gold standard guys blew it even worse than 2020.
I actually think Silver Bulletin did better than most, but retros are good and healthy.
"The MSG rally and other things were just Harris supporters hoping against hope the narrative would change. "
The funny thing about the MSG rally thing is that I have since heard that Puerto Ricans are one of the groups that broke big for Trump, particularly in Florida. I guess they can take a joke. Don Rickles made a career on comedy that I guess would be beyond the pale now.
Nobody so far has been able to explain how that joke actually works as it doesn't have any thing humorous or witty about it. Don Rickles would say that there was no joke there. I don't think that the Island of Garbage would pass the three year old test and they will laugh at anything even close to poop. A bit like Vance and the Grilled Dogs in Springfield, saying that people couldn't take a joke. But if you find that funny then laugh away for everyone has a different standard when it come to humor.
You asked for someone to explain how the joke works. Someone explained it. This is all well-known if you follow Puerto Rican politics at all. Alas, the side that loudly proclaims how outward-looking and empathetic they are only ever looks inward and has no theory of mind for people who are different to themselves.
Nobody explained how the joke worked they just mentioned a category. Now that you have informed me that it was directed at a select sub group I am still trying to get someone to explain how it worked. I am familiar with the double entendre which is saying something while meaning another generally with a bawdy overtone but there was no double entendre the delivery was done as straight fact hence my questioning how the joke worked. The three year old who says poop understands that it is going to work with other three year olds but if you want to expand the positive reception you have to do a little more work. I have a great sense of humor but I rarely waste my time laughing at things which are just not funny. You must extrapolate on this theory of mind.
I like the optimism that Trump won’t be on the ballot in 4 years.
The more "you people" think and act on beliefs like this, the more normal America will turn their backs on you. There are lots of normal Americans, many highly educated and successful Americans, who truly believe the people pandering this fascist nonsense have truly either lost their minds or been brainwashed by leftist media. How many of you are still wearing covid masks in public?
Well, I'm 72, and Covid doesn't like old people. So, I wear a mask when I'm in the supermarket, or in the audience at a performance. The one time I forgot to wear a mask at a performance, I caught it. Fortunately it was a very mild case. But I have no interest in catching it again, especially as repeated exposures increase one's risk of getting long Covid. I have better things to do with what's left of my life than lying around, trying to breathe.
Well, I am 73 and we had largely ditched masks in Texas (ok maybe not Austin) six months into the pandemic. Our grandchildren did not go to school wearing them - you do know they won't stop a virus don't you? My physician had great advice. If one is worried about catching Covid - don't get tested. Then all one has to worry about is a cold.
What I do know is that N 95s are effective at stopping viruses, due to their electro static charge. Nothing is 100%, but I’ll take whatever measures improve the odds. YMMV.
Masks were never touted as a panacea. Medical grade masks do and did, in fact, reduce the risk of the wearer infecting others. That is why surgeons and ICU nurses wear them. The coronavirus SARS-Co-2 and its mutations are borne on the droplets broadcast as much as 6 feet away in a conical pattern by normal human respiration--coughing, sneezing, exhaling. Droplets are caught in the mask or muted at the source before it dissipates. There was a dramatic reduction in other airborne viral maladies --colds, flu, and possibly pityriasis rosea--while people were wearing masks and isolating during COVID. They have now returned to pre-COVID levels. Ideology is no substitute for public health.
Belief in ideologies is due to a lack of critical thinking.
The masking thing is always going to repel people for any number of reasons that outweigh exposing one's self and others to pathogens. It's interesting because in Asia, masking is taken as a matter of course when needed.
I kind knew that we were in for something bad when many of the Asian members of our crew and on other shows starting wearing masks to work in late 2019.
It is also a matter of airflow dynamics and how particles move in the airflow of a blown N95 mask a bit like the way a catch boom works to pick up trash in a river.
I cannot think of anything less interesting to argue about than whether someone else is wearing a mask. I thought Republicans were the ones who say people should be free to do as they please.
Your physician doesn't happen to make money from treating sick people does he. I knew three people, two elderly parents and their son who all caught that cold and the paramedics had to wear masks with camphor to cover the smell of decomposition when they came to their house. I would like to know where you got the would not stop a virus fact from. Corn Flakes are good for breakfast but you should not read the box.
Paging the DHOTY Awards!
I’m 72 and sympathize. In 2022 I attended a small applied math conference at Oxford and modeling disease and analyzing data was a now favored topic. The data/model presented on masks is that it would reduce the spread by 50%. I’m interested in further benchmarking. Data/model showed, not talking will reduce the spread by 10x (that is, instead of down to 0.50x it is down to 0.10x). So wearing a mask where everyone is talking is much worse than minimizing time in a chat zone. And yes I although I was vaccinated I got COVID traveling via Heathrow on the way back like your performance.
Why? We literally know it doesn't work. Like, you seriously get no benefits from it.
You’ll catch it again. Your better bet is catching it early via later flow testing and then popping antivirals quick (highly effective in initial infection but quickly wane by symptomatic presentation).
But I am curious to read the long Covid data. What most people don’t realize is that the phenomena isn’t new to Covid. What did everyone think post viral tussis (cough) was?
In 2020/2021 Donald Trump lost a fairly run election, subsequently promoted conspiracy theories while continuing (to this day) to state that he actually won this election, encouraged protestors to storm the capitol, and pressured Pence (and everybody else he could think of) to help overturn the results.
Given this behavior, do you *really* think it's "nonsense" to question whether such a person would intend to relinquish power in the future?
Maybe "don't vote for a person who does this stuff" is really a losing message, and America seemed to turn its back on it this time as you suggest. But the concern is very much not unwarranted.
Really the thing to say here if you really want to help people believe Trump will not extend his presidency beyond this term is "I'm a Republican, and I voted for Trump and I think he's going to be a great president for four years. However, if he seeks the GOP nomination in 2028 I will vote against him and if he is somehow on the general election ballot again as the Republican nominee in 2028 I will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate."
I will say that it's hard for me to game out how he could possibly extend his term beyond these 4 years, but it doesn't seem all that unlikely that he will attempt to do so (just as it didn't seem unlikely that he would run for president in 2024 -- once a person has done a thing, it's typically plausible that they'll do that same thing again). Nobody needs to really agree on whether he will try to remain in power, though. We just need to agree that we will all do our part to stop him if he does try.
Everyone I've seen on the right is very quick to disparage the idea that Trump will try to stay president beyond 2028, but I've yet to see anyone who enthusiastically voted for him already say that there's no possible way they or anyone else would vote for him if he ran again. If he does give it another try, his voters are going to get behind it.
How many have you seen? I see almost no one wearing masks outside of hospitals atp
They’re still everywhere in Westchester. I still see them driving cars with masks on. Alone and with the windows up.
Which is weird because I thought those people loved the smell of their own farts.
Yea this year I’ve lived in Pennsylvania and California, both city and rural. I haven’t seen almost anyone wearing a mask outside hospitals. I feel like this is just propaganda you’re spreading.
You should come enjoy the spectacle at a Whole Foods in Austin.
I was at a grocery store in Austin 18 months ago (granted not a Whole Foods, because I don’t like to burn money), and I don’t think I saw anyone wearing a mask. Or at least not a notable percentage.
I also live in blue NJ in a relatively liberal area and only see the occasional person who may be recovering or immune suppressed.
So I very much doubt your story is representative of anything but conservative media exaggerations.
I was at an urban running store the other day in a gentrified area and about half the people had them.
I have lived in two heavily liberal areas and I find this so hard to believe. 50% is absurd man. I don’t even see 1% masked around me.
I live Oakland, CA. A reliable 5% still mask everywhere, especially outdoors. Two children in my kid’s first grade class are still masked daily by their parents. And, no neither these kids nor their families have any comorbidities which would recommend around-the-clock infection prophylaxis.
wow you even know about their medical histories and the medical histories of their families!
Why do you repubs have to make it so obvious you're lying?
How is it even possible for you to know that? Do you just assume no one has comorbities
This is the same nonsense progressives peddle seemingly every republican administration. It's almost like they wish they were living under Franco.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bush-postpones-2008-election/
That said, I'm aware of one attempt by a governor to unilaterally cancel an election. It was in 2020 and the courts quickly put an end to that obviously bad idea.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/wisconsin-governor-suspends-in-person-voting-in-tuesdays-elections-amid-escalating-coronavirus-fears/2020/04/06/9d658e2a-781c-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html
Saying all progressives is admittedly too harsh. But this a recurring refrain elements of the left put forward every gop admin, without any evidence.
The repetition of such baseless fears against all gop politicians also just diminishes the charge. Kinda like how Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, McCain, Romney, and Trump were all compared to nazis at some point.
This is just completely made up. There was absolutely no widespread fears that Reagan, Bush, Bush, McCain, or Romney were threats to democracy or that they would attempt to subvert the results of their elections. And then, in the case of Bush I, McCain, and Romney, none of them did challenge the election results and Romney is among the people who condemn Trump. You cannot be serious here.
Re: Romney & McCain specifically, yes, that's the point. You don't have to look hard to find examples of democratic campaigns calling comparing them to nazis and Hitler.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/124572-romney-campaign-tells-obama-to-rein-in-his-supporters-on-nazi-comments/amp/
And, yes, in 2004 and 2008 elements of the left circulated conspiracy theories Bush II was going to cancel the elections. The nation article in my original post was an example from 2008, 2004 leaned more into Bush would use a Madrid bus style terror attack to permanently cancel all elections.
And I honestly cannot tell if you are serious because there are literally books written about why every republican is a threat to democracy. That's the point that this line of argument isn't persuasive against Trump because it's used against every republican.
https://press.georgetown.edu/Book/Reaganism-and-the-Death-of-Representative-Democracy
I can’t tell if you’re serious because nobody in the mainstream left was saying these things about previous Republicans and now Mitt Romney is saying it about Trump. This is such a preposterous false equivalency
I mean, we literally had a Democrat in PA *admit* on camera to election fraud in Bucks County.
You can't talk your way out of that one. She should rot in jail.
This person said on camera "I committed election fraud?" Link? The only person I'm aware of who was convicted of election fraud in recent memory was McCrae Dowless in North Carolina (a Republican).
No evidence? Trump literally refused to accept the 2020 election results and incited a deadly insurrection to try and halt certification. He then peddled his demonstrably false election conspiracy theories for months afterwards, trying every avenue he could to steal the election himself. He's repeatedly talked about wanting to be President beyond his 2 terms, he praised Xi Jinping for becoming "President for Life" and suggested they should do the same in the US.
But we're all supposed to ignore that because he hasn't succeeded "yet". We have to wait until it's too late before we can point out the obvious.
An ex-sabermetrician like Nate would probably call this the Designated Hitler Rule.
Exactly. The problem for them is there is ever a wolf (for which I’m confident most would claim Trump is) then no one will take them seriously.
If everyone is a nazi or commie or whatever the nom de jour is, then it has absolutely no rhetorical value and is arguably counterproductive. Telling a family paying 25% more for their groceries to look at Trump as a rapist/indicted felon/fascist/etc only makes them tune them out. Had they stolen a page from the blame China handbook, they maybe could have allayed inflation sentiments. Then again, calling it transitory and saying don’t worry about it were woefully naïve in electoral presentation.
If I were a betting person, I'd be willing to place a bet that he won't be. Aside from reasons why any other person wouldn't be on the ballot after 2 terms as president, he's also 78. A lot of men die before they get to 82.
Zero chance he’s on the ballot in 2028. In order to do so, he’d have to pass an amendment, which would have the side effect of allowing Obama to run against him.
He didn't try to amend the constitution in 2020 to stay in power, he just came up with some legal hocus pocus to justify it and tried to force his way back. If he wants to run in 2028, he won't amend anything, he'll just have his lawyers cook up some reason the existing amendment doesn't apply, and then date anyone to stop him.
It’s not the same.
I wouldn't put pass the current SCOTUS some creative reading where consecutive terms disqualify you but non-consecutive terms don't :)
Read the amendment, it’s very short and very clear. We would need another amendment to allow Trump to stay on.
We seem to be forgetting that Trump already was disqualified under another amendment. The 2-term limit is one of the few guardrails I'm confident will hold, but I'm not 100% confident.
Current scotus has no particular love or fear of Trump
Obama would lose.
Not a chance
Obama couldn't even persuade the brothers to vote for Kamala.
He is a relic of an earlier time.
You’re looking at this backwards. Kamala was so unappealing to Black men that even Obama couldn’t persuade them
Yeah, I hear you. But Hugo Chavez died and Venezuela isn’t exactly a thriving democracy under Maduro. Dictatorships start with strong personalities but end with systems.
Odds are for him making it past 82 since he's already 78 and that's less than half average life expectancy for a 78 year old.
For a 78-year-old man? I've known plenty of women who made it that long but 0 men.
You must know some unhealthy 78 year olds.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
9.5 years expected from here.
I think Trump's age will be the biggest impediment to seeking a third term. Comparing 2020 Biden to 2024 Biden there was a pretty big deteriorating effect from 4 years, and Trump is already looking pretty old. Even if he's not dead he might just not have the energy for it in 2028.
About 23% of 78-year-old men fail to make it to 82, according to the social security administration's actuarial life tables.
Trump running for a third time takes one of two things:
- A constitutional amendment
- The assent of the military
No one can get constitutional amendments passed even for much more broadly acceptable things. There is at most a 1-2% chance he could get it done even with major successes in the states and Congress.
And while Trump's fairly popular among the rank and file in the Army, the officer class does not like him. It does not like him at all. Military officers are classic Romney-Clinton voters, and eight more years hasn't changed that. And though many of them are still Republicans, they take their oaths seriously, and "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same" comes before "obey the orders of the President" for a reason, a reason they all know.
Things might get worse. That's a real possibility. Trump running for a third term is much, much less likely than that.
Trump's lack of military officer support scuppered his plans in 2020, but he knows that as well as anyone. It's little wonder though that he's placing much higher value on loyalty with appointments this time and trying to purge the unbelievers. Maybe he doesn't succeed completely but it's comforting to get to a scenario of having to rely on unelected military leaders to force out the civilian president and his cabinet
The military will follow whoever signs their paychecks, they're not gonna take a principled stand on anything.
People don't join the officer corps and stay there for a paycheck.
Great take on this. On your second point, the recent Hagel Op-Ed in NYT was quite sobering. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/opinion/trump-military-politics.html
That is an excellent example of a way things could plausibly get much worse while still falling well short of enabling Trump to run for a third term.
The independent apolitical military will not fall apart in four years. A 'warrior board' would do enormous damage and might make it possible for three terms of *Vance*, but not three of Trump; it couldn't work fast enough.
It’s kinda blowing my mind that Nate, Pfeiffer, and pretty much every other election analyst out there is acting like the party who was openly running on “Facism for everyone! Wheee!” Is going to be super cool with elections as usual.
It's the Democrats who cried wolf effect. Democrats had an absolute cow between 2016 and 2020, the sky didn't fall in, and it seems like the voters preferred 2016-2020 to what the Democrats offered, unfortunately.
A million dead people may dispute your analysis and there are a lot of republican members who are calling hands off on Biden's policies because they know how their districts benefited.
A million dead people as compared to what number? Trump handled
COVID like a moron, but I totally disagree with the implication that number would have been lower under say a President Clinton. What would have been substantially different in people’s reaction to COVID if she were President? Would people who were flouting COVID restrictions in Spring 2020 have been double masking and Tweeting #flattenthecurve under Clinton? I don’t think so.
Trump knew 3 weeks before the first official (then) death that Covid was airborne and much more deadly than the flu.
He did nothing.
Reacting faster would have at least slowed the initial exponential slope.
Look at the fatality rates in other countries that were more aggressive.
The sky did fall in-- the judicial branch is dead. It is a delayed effect, but there have already been plenty of nakedly partisan rulings even outside SCOTUS which is completely compromised.
>the judicial branch is dead.
Yeah, if fat Elena Kagan can't make all the rules in society, the judicial branch is dead. I totally get it.
Do you people hear yourselves?
I think they feel that a fascist dictator has never taken over the government before so we will be fine.
Of course before 2009 we never had a black president before. Or every other thing that has happened for the first time.
I agree; Trump is definitely a threat to our institutions. But those institutions have been around for a very long time, and it's not going to be so easy for him to subvert them. This isn't like Venezuela or Germany in the thirties; we've had our Constitution for 200 years, and even the justices on the Supreme Court, some of whose decisions I've strongly disagreed with, are committed to the rule of law (with maybe 1 or 2 exceptions). The next 4 years are certainly going to be interesting, but I still give us about a 80-90% chance of surviving with our democracy more or less intact. The likelihood of it not surviving is much higher than it's been with any other President, and I don't like it one bit; nevertheless, it's too soon to assume the worst.
That’s a totally valid worldview, I guess I just think it’s odd that Nate, who’s long been an advocate for probabilistic thinking (and that proselytizing has had a pretty big impact on me personally) is kinda writing off a pretty obvious set of worst case scenarios that one would normally price into their risk assessment.
If he didn’t want to be too alarmist, for example, a simple caveat of “assuming elections proceed normally” would probably be a sufficient disclaimer that addresses the legitimate 10-20% risk you’re describing here.
To me this probability estimate seems too optimistic for two reasons:
1. For most of Trump's first term, he didn't know how to work around the limited guardrails; now he does after his 1/6 trial run and armed with the Agenda 47/Project 2025 playbooks. Plus many of the authors are now announced as part of the incoming administration.
2. The Supreme Court has immunized him from prosecution if there's a pretense that his actions were official acts.
It’s one of the ways I’m morbidly grateful for having holocaust survivors in my family tree (grandmother). It really gets you to internalize the capacity for countries to become the worst possible version of themselves very, very quickly.
And that because Trump left power the previous time, it will just happen again. To the hell with the actual way on which he left office.
I mean, Democrats were running on s3xualizing children. What do you want from people?
Just because Daniel Liberson likes it doesn't mean the world does.
It's due to comments like this that Trump won and in an electoral landslide increasing his margins across all demographics. If progressives keep this up 2026 may actually result in further losses
This was not a landslide, regardless of how many times you (and pretty much nobody else) say it was.
Agreed. It wasn't nearly as big as Obama's 2008 win, and I'd say that's borderline for being a landslide.
I don't know how serious you are, but to the extent you are serious it's part of a broader problem of liberals continuing to treat Trump as an existential danger to democracy when the majority of voters, looking back over his publicly available record of governance, simply don't see it.
Also, not only is Trump constitutionally barred from seeking another term, he wouldn't want to even if he could. His ego has been sated, and he's lazy.
He still wants to avoid jail though, and he’ll be sentenced when he leaves the presidency.
No, I don't think that will be an issue. I think we need to come to terms with the fact that over the past two years, partisan liberals really have been engaging in lawfare against a political opponent. Given that the primary motivation behind Trump's trials was to stop him from becoming president again, there will not be nearly enough political will to prosecute a two-term former president - who will likely still be popular with at least half the country - when he leaves office in January 2029.
He’s already been convicted of 34 felonies so there doesn’t need to be a political will to prosecute. They delayed the sentencing because he was running for president, and will delay again because he is going to be president. It wasn’t lawfare, it’s trying to hold everyone to the same standard. He’s a convicted felon and should be sentenced .
I agree that Trump would probably like to be on the ballot in 4 years, I just don't think he realistically could achieve that. They can get up to a lot with a majority in congress and a friendly SCOTUS, but they probably won't be able to amend the constitution.
I personally think the fear of Trump's corruption and envy of dictators is warranted, but I think the democratic backsliding will be a bit more subtle than Trump literally running for a third term.
Yeah, it's hard to see how he would manage to get into a position where he can actually run for another term. That said, given that SCOTUS has said anything a president does in their role as president is immune from criminal prosecution, he has little in terms of disincentives from trying to suspend the electoral process or otherwise remain in power beyond the end of his term out of some concocted "national security" or "election integrity" concerns. I realize a lot of what he says is just an old man who doesn't understand how our government operates rambling, but he's used phrases such as "suspend the constitution," so it feels like there is some degree of possibility of stuff like that going on (as to what percent chance? Maybe like 5-10% chance he tries and then some lesser percent that he's successful? 🤷🏻♂️)
To me the least likely outcome is that he serves a full four year term and then there is an uneventful 2028 contest and he goes into normal presidential retirement in the way Obama, Bush, and Clinton did (and that presumably Biden will).
You're assuming that Trump will still be President in 2028. I think that you can flip a coin on that. A lot of the GOP would love to see him gone, and will be watching for an opportunity to push him out the airlock. Then you can freak out about JD Vance.
Would they like him gone? Yes. But they didn't even have the guts to vote to impeach him in 2021, at which point they could have barred him from office. Mitt Romney said many GOP didn't vote guilty for fear of their own personal safety.
Would the House impeach him? 9 of 10 Republicans who voted to do so were driven from office by MAGA. Would the Senate this time vote for removal? That would require (in the first two years) that at least 19 GOP members voted for removal.
More of a concern than Trump running again is whether we can have free and fair elections in 2028 under an embolden Trump administration. I used to discount those who had this concern in prior election cycles. But after 2020 and later actions, it's a real concern now.
I think the motivation for him to retire would be (1) a clean pardon for all criminal acts that he's facing prosecution for. Sure, he can try to pardon himself, and that might ultimately be effective. But that wouldn't keep him out of court in the way a pardon from a President Vance would and (2) he's really pretty lazy, so if it gets difficult or if he feels like he's done all the things he wants to do maybe he's good with passing the baton to Vance and still being able to basically dictate the things he cares about under the threat of primarying Vance in 2028. I'm not sure if it's a coin flip, but the odds of him serving his full 4-year term have to be lower than the average president's would be
I suppose that enough Trump chaos might cause these gutless and corrupt Republicans to dump Trump to save themselves. It certainly won't have anything to do with virtue. That's a quality lacking in all political spectra and in a large portion of the population.
Their big fear is being primaried and MAGA has an iron grip on the GOP voters. Elected officials aren't turning against Trump; it's political suicide for them if they do.
There's probably some who privately would like him gone, but their numbers have been waning in the 8 years that he has completely dominated the party and more and more of them came in either riding his coattails or else just living in MAGA world for so long
I have a feeling 2026 will be landslide for Republicans and then it will be fun to see the reactions
Down ballot Republicans lost most of the swing state statewide races this year in an election where Trump was on the ballot against an incredibly unpopular incumbent administration amidst record inflation. The hardcore MAGA base doesn't care enough to show up for down ballot races, and the reluctant Trump voters who chose him over Harris because of inflation and the border aren't necessarily conservative, which is why Gallego, Slotkin, Whitmer, Ossoff, and Warnock are in the senate.
>lost most of the swing state statewide races this year
Only in states with no ID and endless mail-in vote counting.
lol good one
I think a big problem is that while the data was good, the analysis was terrible. And that occasionaly includes here. The google searches article was a classic example. Other forecasters (such as Split Ticket) talked about the horrible campaign Trump had run, when, lets be real, he ran a pretty effective one. The MSG rally and other things were just Harris supporters hoping against hope the narrative would change. Their big example of a terrible campaign? Focusing on people who just weren't going to vote... right up until they did.
Others are choices from a marketing perspective. Focusing more on the 50/50 nature of the forecast rather than understanding more the likeliest outcomes probably did good for subscriber numbers (and the liberal audience who wanted to believe it really was closer than it was).
I also think the problem wasn't so much with polls as it was the "gold standard" polls. Polling had a good year because of a lot of those polls which were routinely viewed as garbage or partisan hackery ended up being a lot closer than the gold standard polls. Emerson got lots of shit (including from Nate), but they performed a lot better than the gold standards. It really feels like the pollster ratings need a more dramatic revision than is probably called for, but most of the gold standard guys blew it even worse than 2020.
I actually think Silver Bulletin did better than most, but retros are good and healthy.
"The MSG rally and other things were just Harris supporters hoping against hope the narrative would change. "
The funny thing about the MSG rally thing is that I have since heard that Puerto Ricans are one of the groups that broke big for Trump, particularly in Florida. I guess they can take a joke. Don Rickles made a career on comedy that I guess would be beyond the pale now.
Nobody so far has been able to explain how that joke actually works as it doesn't have any thing humorous or witty about it. Don Rickles would say that there was no joke there. I don't think that the Island of Garbage would pass the three year old test and they will laugh at anything even close to poop. A bit like Vance and the Grilled Dogs in Springfield, saying that people couldn't take a joke. But if you find that funny then laugh away for everyone has a different standard when it come to humor.
I think the joke was a double entendre about Puerto Rico being unable to handle its garbage.
https://globalpressjournal.com/americas/puerto-rico/trash-crisis-leaves-puerto-rico-brink/
If you have to think it it wasn't a joke it was a critical commentary. You don't have to think jokes that's why they are fun hence funny.
You asked for someone to explain how the joke works. Someone explained it. This is all well-known if you follow Puerto Rican politics at all. Alas, the side that loudly proclaims how outward-looking and empathetic they are only ever looks inward and has no theory of mind for people who are different to themselves.
Nobody explained how the joke worked they just mentioned a category. Now that you have informed me that it was directed at a select sub group I am still trying to get someone to explain how it worked. I am familiar with the double entendre which is saying something while meaning another generally with a bawdy overtone but there was no double entendre the delivery was done as straight fact hence my questioning how the joke worked. The three year old who says poop understands that it is going to work with other three year olds but if you want to expand the positive reception you have to do a little more work. I have a great sense of humor but I rarely waste my time laughing at things which are just not funny. You must extrapolate on this theory of mind.