Is it weird to you that your whole brand is data-driven journalism but you’re increasingly writing articles that aren’t much more than your own punditry?
I didn’t view this so much critiquing the websites as providing his reflections both as a knowledgeable political,observer and hopefully providing some insights to his readers. As someone who considers himself pretty politically astute, I benefitted from his observations since my other activities take precedence over visiting the candidates websites.
I think a big part of it is this is a subscriber based Substack (paying $10-20 per month for something comes with the expectation of new content almost every day) with only 2 people available to write articles, one of whom is probably only part-time based on his being in grad school currently. Most of his current subscribers are probably just here until the election and he knows that, so it’s going to be entirely election content right now. But beside the model he updates and discusses daily (which has been mostly stable), there’s not ton of other election data to talk about without cross tab diving, which we all know Nate is against.
Didn't he say part of the reason he went independent on Substack was that he didn't like having a corporate overlord having editorial control over his articles? His reputation is as a statistician, but I think he also likes punditry too. Articles like this seem like they're more for himself than for the business.
Disagree; I thought 538 did some really interesting data-driven work sometimes, giving a different and more methodologically sound approach to the headlines of the day. They interviewed me once for one of my academic pieces, I found them to be more genuinely inquisitive (and conversant in the data/literature) than most of the other calls I got.
He had a way bigger staff at 538 though. Much easier to have a new article every day accompanied by in-depth data analysis if you can have 7-8 people each doing one piece per week, rather than just 2 trying to make sure there’s another blog post every couple of days.
Yeah, I subscribed for model talk and interesting takes on polls. For example, AtlasIntel was off by 18% in the Mexican Election, yet Nate uses them as his #1 weight because of recency. I'd love to hear a thoughtful article about why that's a "throw it on the pile" poll. Yet, instead, I now just get daily updates about how much Nate Silver dislikes Kamala Harris and how she's failing the moment. It's pretty disappointing.
They had a catastrophic failure in their methodology. If the methodology is flawed and produces random results, that'd be much more interesting to hear about than some bad punditry takes.
ALL polls have a catastrophic failure in their methodology. If we haven't learned that at least, I'd recommend the book on the history of American polling, "Lost in a Gallup," by Joseph Campbell. Polls are broken, they've fallen and they can't get up, I've given up on polls ----------- and the fundamentals do favor Trump.
Is their methodology the same for Mexico and the US? That would be surprising to me. Polling Mexico is going to have a different set of challenges that polling the US. They could have a problem with the methodology they use in Mexico, but their US methodology be fine.
I think Nate Silver doesn’t actually have any experience on the side of conducting and structuring a poll though! He has lots and lots of experience over the past 16 years reading and comparing polls of the United States, so he has some idea empirically of what works and what doesn’t, but isn’t the person to ask about how you would want to go about actually creating and running and structuring a poll in a different context.
You're right. He does seem to dislike her & he really can't stand the campaign team that she largely inherited from Biden. And her picking Walz over Shapiro was the last straw (for him). He's missing the larger picture.
It is actually conventional wisdom. Nate’s article is merely an excellent summary of what countless pundits from both the left and the right have been saying for weeks.
Actually, Atlas Intel has quite an interesting record, it would be absurd to completely disregard them. They were among the best pollsters in 2020 and successfully predicted the 2022 Bahia gubernatorial election when every single other polling firm (not an exaggeration) was wrong about the result. So you're simply wrong about this
I'm asking for analysis around that. Why does a firm that has some good results also have catastrophic failures? Why is that the top weighted poll by 2x in Nate's model? Is their opt-in polling appropriate methodology? Something like that would be considerably more interesting to read about than some bad punditry like we're getting with this article.
You call it bad punditry but I don't see why it is. It explains carefully a very legitimate opinion that running such an indecisive campaign as Kamala has, trying to appeal to everyone by not supporting anything too "out of line," is a failing strategy. We can have both; good articles about polling and good punditry.
I don’t find her campaign indecisive at all. And the only part of Harris’ strategy Nate is looking at is her website design, which is a ludicrous take.
I disagree. He makes a valid point by using the website as an example, because presumably the central part of her strategy (messaging) is captured in the website. If it is not, then thats a problem in and of itself, suggesting there is no cohesion in the messaging and brand. Either way, its not a good look. By the way I{m voting for Harris, but I like that Nate tries to be objective, and some of the reactions here are likely a defense mechanism.
If you want media that says, Kamala good and Trump evil daily, you can watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC for that. If you want the reverse, there is Fox News. All of these sources of info become unwatchable garbage in the final weeks before the election. They really step it up in the last two weeks of the presidential election. Most of us here prefer honest punditry rather than agenda driven punditry. On Mark Halperin’s Morning Meeting on 2way today, another place for honest punditry, they played a clip of Norah O’Donnell as an example of the mainstream media in full-scale save-Kamala mode. Both the regular Democrat and Republican co-hosts laughed along with Mark at how absurdly biased she was.
I'm actually fine with Nate writing this take. He's just sharing his informed opinion, which I find interesting to read. That said, I have issues too with taking Atlas Intel as a high quality pollster. I knew them from the Peruvian presidential election, where they considerably diverged from most local pollsters (which have been historically accurate) and showed both a trend and a final snapshot that proved to be extremely off.
So I went to see their detailed results and there are some things that don't make sense. Trump getting 32% of the black vote nationally? Ok...maybe I'm dealing with large margins of error because I'm going too deep into the cross-tabs.
Trump getting 48% of the black vote in Michigan? Sounds strange...but maybe I'm nitpicking: errors outside of the 95% confidence interval happen 5% of the time after all.
But Trump consistently winning the female vote by +4 points both nationally and in most of the swing states (including an 8 point difference in Michigan) doesn't make any sense at all. And we're talking about all women, so this is a very large sub-sample.
So maybe they got lucky in the last election, or maybe they're just inconsistent...but I'm not too confident about their polling.
On the one hand, I’d love to see 2-3 articles every day answering every little question I have about his methods. On the other hand, I realize that there’s probably a line he has to walk with that. Give too many fine details about how the sausage is made and eventually you’ll have someone who managed to reverse engineer the sausage down to every gram of seasoning and offering it for half-price.
You can't really have a newsletter whose only daily content is: "Oct 21. Harris win probability 47.0%"
He could talk about his model in every post, but even as a (former) data scientist, that gets boring. It's only one model, there's only so much you can say about it.
So instead we get pieces like this, which IMHO is fine.
I mean, this is the standard critique of Nate Silver, and in fact the one he gives of many others. Punditry always involves a lot of unsubstantiated BS, which is often interesting and useful to think about, but shouldn’t be mistaken for clear actionable intelligence.
What would be actionable in this context? We all should be voting. Maybe we could bet on one of the sites?
I take it as filling the time until we get some actual answers on November 5. No one really knows anything, and the polls only get interesting the last weekend when the (limited) undecideds start breaking. We have no idea even then who is going to vote, turnout numbers and with some Venn overlap, how many shy Trumpsters are out there still. All this noise about polls is entertaining but not really informative. They could be 3 points off as they were in 2020. Or 3.5 points off as they were in 2012. Or 4 points off as they were in 2016. Can't even really pick a direction either, though I would expect Trump to overperform, I can't even be very sure of that. The pollsters might have overcompensated after 2020.
My hope is that when Nate writes an article critical of the Harris/Walz campaign’s approach, they’ll read it, too, and view it as constructive criticism to then re-evaluate. With two weeks to course correct, and they better or Trump 2.0 might rise from its ashes and be our commander in chief and leader of the Free World again; a scary thought considering his narcissistic and vindictive personality and the fact that he’ll surround himself with yes-men/women this next time. Add in his increasing overt symptoms of Alzheimer’s which has a strong genetic component to it, which his father died from? America might find itself in a crisis unlike anything we can imagine.
I have expertise in this area and so I say sorry; yours is not the deeper view with well-established, medical science information included. Neurolinguists and neurolinguists know what hallmark symptoms to look for and Trump is not only displaying some of those signs of dementia, more specifically it’s frontotemporal dementia. There are many indicators that Trump is showing due to his clear deterioration of oral expressive language when compared to samples from decades ago when he gave frequent interviews as a real estate mogul and celebrity in NYC. I’d be happy to point you in that direction. No matter who evaluates them side by side meaning from 29 -30 years ago to now, there is no question that something is up.
Also, Trump is showing increasing signs of what's called tangential speech where the meaning of what he says is difficult to track for the listener since it omits key grammatical elements. He rambles on: stringing half sentences together but omitting what is needed for full comprehension and he ties together mid-stream one subject to a completely unrelated one — sometimes bringing in a third or the original with no clear point; showing an extremely disorganized and chaotic pattern of thought that makes little sense. I’d be happy to post some examples in quotes. This is something he never did before and it shows deterioration in the temporal lobe of the brain. Then there’s this symptom of particular concern: both semantic and paraphasia in his speech where he verbalizes nonsense words or slurs two words into one with examples such as "missush" for missiles, “Venezeurzo” for Venezuela which he perseverates on. Perhaps most famous is "bigly" for big league and also *with an inability to self-correct* so while some laugh at the dozens of examples people can watch of this at the many, many available videos at YT called "Trump's Best Words," the paraphasias I name are specifically caused by a breakdown within the neuro-pathways in the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain where language is formulated, with the frontal lobe (think Central Command) then receiving corrupted input which eventually leads to a complete breakdown of oral language in those with full blown dementia.
Then there are Trump’s increasingly alarming mix-ups with people and events; a classic symptom. Some examples: confusion with people, places, history, etc., such as repeatedly saying Nikki Haley was in charge of security on J6, claiming under Biden we’ll be WWII soon, saying he beat Obama — other times GWB or Jeb who he says he invaded Iraq, calling Melania “Mercedes,” identifying in court a photograph of E. Jean Carroll his sexual accuser as his wife when his actual wife is standing next to him, and the list goes on.
Add in the fact that Trump's father died of Alzheimer's which has a strong genetic component, it appears to be a ticking time bomb. We just don't know "the when” especially since our latest information on dementia includes new knowledge of a somewhat initial quiet phase while the damage within the brain is accelerating at a fever pitch and then it rapidly tanks the person’s ability to function. Let’s consider that worrisome aspect of its takeover within a four year term: Does anyone think Trump’s family would dare speak up to him about their increasing concerns and risk their inheritance? Or any of the sycophants who will surround him should he win — rather than any guardrails like in his first term — when there’s still time to invoke the 25th Amendment before something catastrophic happens?
Happy to keep going here but there certainly are many available reads that get further into the weeds with what I point out. Of course, the Goldwater rule is preventing many medical professionals from too forcefully speaking out but there is a growing list who when considering what’s at stake, they think they need to and so they have.
I think there’s a difference between actively looking — with the intended purpose to get new strategy advice — versus multiple eyes everywhere; all taking the temperature & tone from any number of solid sources which then generate reevaluations and adjustments.
The truth is we don’t know either candidates’ full schedule, although Trump was cancelling some events last week and caught dozing off elsewhere so who’s to say how focused he even is at these alleged “open-ended meetings”?
BTW... I liked your thoughts LudGirl. I'm a Trump voter who disagrees with some of what your wrote (though agree he is a narcissist and vindictive - though see no differences in what Dems are doing to him from the other side) but do agree this is how we get better campaigns, people critiquing and campaigns actually listening.
The polling is all pretty consistent, so consistent that the model isn't really imparting any useful information behind the polls.
What's more looking at the timeline it occurs to me that the model is really measuring fluctuation in the polling rather than fluctuation in underlying public opinion, or rather that it's not certain that it's accurately tracking public opinion.
So do some further data work to see if you can uncover something your model isn't telling you. Dig into the differences in methodological approaches from the various elections. Dig into some quantitative data. Do literally anything a data scientist would do.
Instead, Nate wants to give us his thoughts on website design. Thanks.
What is wrong with him noting the differences in what the campaigns are doing. He is using the websites as an example, but truth be told the Harris campaign HAS focused on the touchy feely stuff and far less on policy. The case is true that Trump has leaned into what many would call his worst attributes to give them a positive spin AND is sharing policy content, even if many don't like the delivery. I actually welcomed his insights today.
First, there are a million things he could do with the polling other than chuck it in the model and shrug. First, you could do as I say above; what's actually different about the polling this year as compared to previous elections? Second, let's dig into the crosstabs a bit; what do those tell us? Third, let's model undecideds a bit; what data tells us how they might break? How might we factor that into our model? Etc. And I'm just spitballing off the top of my head; I'm not a famous quant political journalist who is getting paid for this.
Beyond that, there's a ton of quantitative data we could look into. Just because you can't chuck it into a model doesn't mean it's useless, and doesn't mean it isn't data. To be honest the approach of many of the polling prediction outfits this year has been kinda lazy; I was hoping for more here.
"...what's actually different about the polling this year as compared to previous elections?"
Take on specific question: shy Trump voters. Did the polling outfits make any adjustments this year to try to correct for bad misses in 2020? If so what specific measures did they take? Good luck finding that out, because that's proprietary information and the various pollsters will jealously guard their intellectual property.
Silver deliberately ignores the crosstabs. He wrote about this a few articles ago. From his perspective you just toss the overall results into the model and ignore the crosstabs, which is a reasonable approach given that the crosstabs are probably much more susceptible to error.
How do you model undecideds? What tools do you have there other than polling?
I am pretty sure that Silver is running the model on his laptop as compared to a cluster. Plus it's just him and some other guy. I think for those reasons a model that is primarily focusing on polling and excluding the other stuff is eminently reasonable.
It would swell if you people were a bit more explicit about your motivations for these types of comments: I don't like the message so I'm going to shit on the messenger.
I mean it's a dumb as fuck stance, but at least has the virtue of being self-aware.
I think I'm being pretty explicit in my motivations; if I wanted anecdotal speculation there are plenty of places to go for that. I was hoping I could get some actual data-driven analysis (beyond 'I built this model, let's see what happens when I hit the analyze button') here, but Nate seems to increasingly treat it as a platform for his own gripes.
I don't see any issue with Nate not only sharing hard data but also his interpretation of what we are seeing in the campaigns based on his years of experience. When he is sharing his opinion he backs it up with facts which is far more than many other commentators are doing.
What an incredibly arrogant, from the stands comment. “aren’t much more than your own punditry” did you read/do you anything Nate writes beyond those things that support your partisan world view? Your contribution to any dialogue in any context I can assume is substantial if it any way differs from your world view 🙄
Nate started with data, Harris' popularity vs her election polling and tried his best to explain it with punditry. I liked it. Some who didn't might have preferred it to be more positive for Harris and her campaign.
Both Silver and the site are obviously left leaning and hoping for positive Harris takes.
Sometimes it feels like Silver is reaching for ways to put positive spin on negative Harris attributes or data points. Then you see people in the comments claiming he is in the pocket of big business and trying to hurt Harris.
I think in this case he is pointing out in the most soft manner possible what everyone sees pretty clearly. Harris is banking 100% on people voting AGAINST Trump.
The strategy is to not screw that up. Which means, no policy discussion (especially considering how unpopular Biden policies have been). Make it about Trump and what a jerk he is.
It clearly is not working at this point. It will be interesting to see if Harris tries to lay out a populist policy or two in the last couple of weeks here.
Nate Silver uses an awful lot of column inches on something that's very easy to sum up. In fact, he hit the nail on the head early in this essay. We are not voting for the homecoming king. We are voting for the president of the United States.
When you push into the reasons that people actually pulling the lever for Donald J Trump give, a common thread connects all of these voters. All of them are pissed off. The system does not exist to serve them. It doesn't matter how many platitudes you throw out there. It doesn't matter how much the S&P 500 went up this year. These people don't have multi-million dollar 401ks, and they don't have 15% of their assets tied up in the stock market.
They want somebody who is going to fight for them and hopefully win for them. They don't even think for sure that Trump will win. But at least he isn't getting elected and immediately forgetting them.
When you contrast that with Kamala Harris, people are left with a stark choice. Vote for abortion, or vote for someone willing to possibly fight to keep them from dying from starvation, in a gutter, from a fentanyl overdose, or whatever.
And this response is exactly why Harris is losing. Rather than fix the problem, the left is going to roll out some stats proving how 'asaakkkksssshuuuallly' they are playing 5D chess.
Maybe you win the argument. But you haven't convinced anyone to vote for you, and all you've done is turn people off to ever talking to you again.
I agree that thrusting Fed data and scientific studies into peoples' faces hasn't won over many voters. However, I don't think the best way forward for the country is to validate the American id at all costs, even when it does not match objective reality. The Harris campaign is trying to strike a difficult balance of countering Trump's narrative of a country in decline without invalidating our pwecious fee-fees.
But surely you can't get mad at someone for "well ackshually"ing with data in a Nate Silver comment section for crying out loud lol.
I mean, that's a fair observation. It's a data driven blog where people present data. However, this specific article wasn't about data at all. I'm simply making the point that politicians connect with people on a human level. They do not connect with them on a data level.
Overdose deaths over the last few years have reached insane levels. This last year is the first one since Biden/Harris took office with less than 100,000 deaths iirc.
In addition there is some suspicion that deaths are down because so many addicts have already kicked the bucket that inevitably deaths would need to decline due a shortage of warm bodies.
Ok. So sharing substantiated data (on overdose deaths, crime or stocks) is turning people off "asaakkkksssshuuuallly". What is Kamala supposed to do to win ? Start speaking about eating cats or the attributes of dead golfers ? It is a sad state of things if true.
It's not hostility, to be clear -- it's frustration. Being correct doesn't move people to listen to you. It's why the left doesn't understand Trump's appeal. They believe they can call out his hyperbole and distant relationship to fact and people will stop listening to him.
And that's why they failed to stop him. It's why he's going to win this election. Trump's voters /know he isn't telling the entire truth./ Telling them that is basically no different than saying: "Hey, did you know you have two arms and legs?" They're like: "Uh. Yes. Yes I knew that." Then they look at you funny.
Trump's voters are looking for someone to fight for them. The left thinks they can 'stop Trump' and it will show everyone who voted for him how wrong they were. What you need to grasp is that a LOT of these people already KNOW Trump will most likely not succeed in helping them. You do not understand despair. Trump does. If Trump is perceived as fighting for them and listening them after he gets in office, that's good enough.
On Trump's hyperbole. It reminds me of country talk when I grew up in Tennessee. People aren't intended to take it literally --- it makes a point and is humorous besides. So Trump says something over the top and a little outrageous and always fun -------- and all the Dems can counter with is to say, "He's wrong."
Trump is actually dangerous. I don't find him fun. Four people died on January 6th. He is estimated to have caused at least 200,000 excess covid deaths with his poor covid policies. He is an incompetent liar. The leaders of other countries have laughed at him. He is an embarrassment
That's the crux of what I'm saying, yeah. It's like they do not understand that people /enjoy/ hearing a tall tale. They aren't there to grade you on your command of statistical data. They are there to connect with you. You, in this case, being the candidate.
Going negative works because you are drawing a clear line between yourself and the other guy. But there's an important caveat, here -- you need to have defined yourself in such a way that by drawing that contrast, YOU are obviously the only choice. Democrats were extremely effective at using abortion in that way in 2022.
The problem there is that someone said 'that issue worked like gangbusters!' and then they went all in, trying to appeal to women. I swear, every generation, politicians need to re-learn the most fundamental aspect of politics -- no /one/ group puts you in office in anything like a competitive race. Harris doesn't appeal to ~60% of men. At all. You can never govern from the center if your opening act of gaining office is to start a gender war before you even swear your oath.
Phebe, and An Internet Poster- the country talk / tall tales point you make explains a lot. If only it didn't encourage hatred and/or disdain of 50% of the country we all share in this case. I know there's hatred and/or disdain w/ Dem voters, too, but i can only see one side that even allows the possibility of working together.
Thanks for clarifying, I see where you're coming from now.
I agree with your frustration with progressive political messaging, but I don't think Paul's comment above was meant to be a campaign ad. It's just a blog comment. And it's not trying to persuade people to vote for Kamala -- only to contribute some true and useful information.
Having a better-informed population would be a good thing, I think!
No, not at all. I think screaming at each other has been the bane of our political system since the 1990's. There are lots of reasons for that, but they don't matter.
"When you're just wrong." Actually, I'm not wrong. Firstly, when people say 'fentanyl,' it's code for 'all opioid drug abuse.' People don't care about nuance when their brother or son ODs. Secondly, when you see a skyrocketing increase of 25k opioid-related deaths in 2002 to 107k in 2022, then try to say 'BUT AKKKSHUALLY THEY ARE DECREASING!!!,' you are part of the problem -- the dip was from 107k to 105k. Yeah, great job solving that scourge. High five! (source: https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/opioid-deaths-fell-in-mid-2023-but-progress-is-uneven-and-future-trends-are-uncertain/)
So congratulations. You won that argument on the facts! Now get out there and tell those 105,000 families that all lost someone to opioid OD last year what an incredible job you are doing. I'm sure they'll believe you.
Lead in with 'WELL ACKSHUALLY!!!' -- I'm sure that will help.
The left as you call it don’t want Kamala to win. They don’t like her policies. They want Trump to win, wreck everything, donations hit sky high and then win in 2028 with hopefully a Congress behind them.
Back in the '90's the crack cocaine epidemic burned itself out because all of the addicts overdosed and died. Potential addicts saw that crack was insanely addictive and lethal and steered clear of it.
Google "tranq Philadelphia". I doubt anybody who's just getting into drugs would look at some of the addicts in Kensington and decide that's something they want to get into.
What are you talking about?! Trump will instantly forget about them! He hates the working class and middle class and will do nothing for them. Kamala Harris actually will and she actually has the tools to do it.
The problem with this is, Donald Trump does not actually give a genuine solid shit for his constituents. He cares about one thing and one thing only: himself, his own aggrandizement.
Think about it, think about his behavior, not the sales pitch. What is most important to him? What really gets him animated? His rallies, social media, celebrity endorsements (or non-endorsements). He has a bizarre fixation on the prospect of camaraderie with powerful despotic figures like Kim Jung Un, Xi, Putin, and Orban. He constantly exaggerates everything positive about himself, and is enraged by even minor criticism. He never admits fault. When the source or validity of his praise is threatened he becomes erratic, seemingly unable to control his decision making, even when it leads to serious damage to his own interests (see the debate with Harris).
This explanation cleanly fits much of his other behavior too. January 6th for example. Trump is widely reported to have known he lost the election, and even slipped up and said it himself on a podcast. Wouldn't someone who loves America and its people more than themself put the laws and norms and peaceful transfer of power before their own self-interest, as every President of this country has in the past? Or take his decision to run for President in the first place, born not out of a desire to take care of the regular people of America, the masses whose calloused, unwashed hands he is disgusted by and terrified of, but a reaction to the public mockery he received at the White House Correspondents dinner.
Why? It seems to me like the result of a very deep-seated insecurity, probably the result of a poor relationship with a parent, the person whose love he wanted so badly, (as we all do), but never got enough of; it left a gaping maw inside him that he has never figured out how to satiate. He's even willing to risk his life after an assassination attempt to feed that monkey inside him, (and boy what a meal it must have been for him seeing the images, the press the next day).
But herein lies the real danger of electing Trump, the actual reason most people who don't support him worry about a second term: he will do anything in service of the one and only thing he cares about. This includes blundering into war, sidling up to dictators, violating the Constitution, demeaning those who have suffered and died in war, praising empowering and elevating scoundrels con-artists and grifters. This also includes abandoning his supporters and their interests. And in fact, he mostly couldn't be fucked to do the work to get anything done for his people in the first term, probably because he knew they'd support him anyway, at least for a while, and they have. But the second they stop giving him the adulation he craves, he'll cut them loose too and leave them with nothing, just like all the people who he's stiffed over the years.
In Nate's analogy, Trump is that billboard lawyer. An asshole but "your asshole", one who will fight for you. But Nate, no one actually wants to use those guys, because they aren't actually going to do a good job. They only take cases that are easy wins for them, and even then they take a bigger cut than they deserve. They are grifters, just like Trump, and they prey on people who think they have no better option, even when they do. People strapped for cash and time and already in a bind because of some accident. I'm not sure why more people don't see this or say it--the Harris campaign especially.
You misunderstand me. I'm not making anyone's argument. I am not saying Trump's argument is better than Harris'. I am instead telling you how the arguments are being perceived by people.
When you refuse to take policy positions, and you have a history of extremely left-leaning policy prescriptions that you were putting out there 5 years ago, it is incumbent upon you to draw a distinction between your views now and your views then. Instead, the Harris campaign has essentially tried to go around screaming 'but Trump!'
And frankly, whether you think Trump is a criminal or not, none of the lawfare that has been lodged against him was effective in doing anything other than making him look like a folk hero.
Let me ask you - what is an "extremely left-leaning policy" to you?
And, what is an "extremely right-leaning policy" to you?
And, follow up, can you envision any policy to the left of the left-leaning policy you've described, and can you envision any policy to the right of the right leaning policy you've described?
Banning all fracking is extreme. Free tuition at four year colleges for all Americans is extreme. Gun confiscation is extreme. Universal, government-run healthcare for all is extreme. Promising to open the border and to 'reexamine' ICE's existence is extreme.
Those, and others, are all positions Kamala Harris advocated for in 2019.
> Universal, government-run healthcare for all is extreme
This is half a lie and half an exaggeration. "Government run healthcare" is not a thing anyone has advocated for ever. Government funded, sure. And if government funded healthcare is extreme, then every single other developed nation on the planet is "extreme".
Why is banning all fracking considered extreme? Is it extreme to ban all waste dumping in public waters? At what point is a concern justified? It's not any more "left" than, say, national parks.
Free tuition isn't really extreme, either - there are public schools and public universities all over the world that don't charge tuition. Some pretty amazing schools, at that. Europe has a whole network of them. Doesn't letting kids pursue education on merit, rather than some non-academic criteria (like finances) sound more like the meritocracy the right keeps saying they're aiming for?
No one ever advocated for universal government run healthcare, ever. Single payer insurance through the government, though, is far from extreme and indeed all over Europe.
Reexamining a government organization is extreme now? Don't you want to "reexamine the IRS"? "reexamine the EPA"? Trump is trying to reexamine all sorts of government programs - why is reexamining ICE "extreme left wing"?
No one ever promised to open the border, nor wants to open the border, that's just a straight up lie.
None of these positions are extreme except in the minds of extreme right-wingers.
Yeah. Whether you put any weight on the betting markets or not (personally don't), the vibes among the pundit class definitely feel Trumpy. Guessing it's really that most people deep down don't believe the Trump polling phenomenon has been solved (so it's not actually a 50/50 proposition in their gut). The most compelling cases that I've heard as to why polling error could favor the dems this time are pretty simply "polling error is more random than you think" and "they've been so focused on the Trump issue they may have overcorrected this time"... and neither of those are particularly compelling because it just gives deja vu from 2020 (even if they might be valid this time)
I think the Dem hopes are that the demographic turnout models the pollsters have built are incorrect and women are going to turnout more heavily for Dobbs.
I mean, what's the value in platitudes, cliche and generalities as opposed to formulating a hypothesis? "Error is more random than you think" is just a generality as compared to "There is a group of people out there with high levels of social distrust who for that reason are less likely to pick up the phone and talk to pollsters. Those levels of social distrust correlate with Trump voters."
Because at least the second leads you to "In 2020 those distrustful voters tended to be white. Now polling appears to show Trump gaining with minority voters, but that specific population of minority voters is also distrustful". Interesting implications all around--for society, history and demographics, possible impacts on the polling this time out, and so on.
The hopium from the left being spread around right now is that there is some large contingent of Harris voters out there that aren't being captured in the polling, and this is a repeat of 2012.
It's a flawed argument -- there is no social penalty to be paid for being an open Harris supporter. You won't lose your job. You won't be cancelled. Nothing bad will happen to you if you proclaim yourself to be a Harris supporter, the left's assertions to the contrary.
But there /is/ a social cost associated with donning the red hat. Some small percentage of voters don't even want to reveal that to a perfect stranger during a phone screen. And all of this is before you get into the problems with surveying exurban and rural voters.
Edit: the Left brought this on themselves, by the way. They are incapable of getting good data because of their own efforts to censor and cancel people right of center for wrongthink. You reap what you sow. In this case, it's biased sample.
It's like Liz Cheney says, you don't have to tell ANYONE who you actually voted for! It's private information & it's perfectly ok to lie about it if necessary.
"...the Left brought this on themselves, by the way. They are incapable of getting good data because of their own efforts to censor and cancel people right of center for wrongthink. You reap what you sow. In this case, it's biased sample."
Wow! You are hot today, Internet Poster. This is certainly how I feel. I'm not afraid to say who I'm voting for, but I'll never take any survey given by those ferschugginah leftwing elitist anti-me poll takers. Not now, not ever. Let 'em eat cake.
Or it's not about any "social penalty" at all, and I just don't answer my phone or texts no matter how many times the pollsters call. And I'm very far from alone. No one answers answers spam calls or texts, except maybe die-hard Trumpers.
Nate has written so much it’s always more likely he’s covered something and I’ve just forgotten. But one topic to cover after 2024 elections is the poll bias (again). Why is it not better to leave the polling procedure the same, with bias observed in 2024, and “correct” for it in 2028, vs change the polling procedure, hoping to eliminate bias, but really make it hard to estimate the new bias…
Not *very* strongly. 60-40 is pretty close to a coin flip, and the market can end up there even if most gut feelings are the opposite direction, as long as a few bigger traders are betting on this side.
It isn't directly comparable in the sense that a 60 cent share price for Trump doesn't translate into a 60% chance of winning as in Silver's model. The total price for all candidates on Predictit right now exceeds 100 cents.
They can launch all the lawsuits they like for all of me; I just hope they don't launch riots. I'm surprised the media hasn't started up a flurry of articles about the riots the Right will start if we lose ---- maybe because even they realize rioting is a leftwing thing to do. We don't riot; we're conservatives.
You call THAT little party an insurrection??? The French do better than that every third Wednesday. If you think that's what an insurrection looks like, I can see you are not much of a history reader.
Your "mostly peaceful" riots with all the buildings on fire and men throwing flaming gasoline on police and shooting each other and making no-go zones --- that might begin to come a little closer to insurrection, but even that is probably just a riot.
Actually, it's an interesting question. How many dead people define an insurrection, or a rebellion, or civil war? All require a lot of dead people: the only irregular political move that doesn't that I can think of is the palace coup, like when Kamala overthrew Biden, bloodlessly.
"The betting markets strongly imply that a majority have a gut feeling that Trump is going to win."
The Wall Street Journal this afternoon has up a piece on how investors are now positioning themselves to try to make a profit on stocks in the event of a Trump win.
I always loved the underdog. Harris never shyed away from being the underdog, and I kinda am ok with it. I have a feeling things will go our way this time in the poll errors.
If I was a pollster, I wouldn't wanna underestimate Trumps support for a 3rd time and lose all credibility, I rather risk it and overestimate it to account for failing the last 2 times.
His head (and model) says it’s 50/50, and yet his gut keeps compelling him to write about the warning signs of a Trump win.
To be honest though, there seems to be some thought around the David Plouffes of the world that Harris has this higher ceiling than Trump that can be realized in these final days. Nate’s last two posts seem (to me) to be skeptical of that source of liberal optimism. #MakingTheCase as to why polling bias will favor Harris this time seems more difficult than the alternative
It's not uncommon for pollsters and gamblers to get cold feet when things vary from the expected, and because they will all argue that they are *very rational people*, they assume that they are not in fact reacting but foreseeing.
Which is usually when the professional analysts tell them to stop pacing and shut up so those of us who actually analyze what is going on can get the data we need for after the election is over and we have the full picture.
Right now, the numbers still line up for a 50 / 50. Maybe two percentage points in Trumps favor currently, but that could slip away for any number of reasons with the final vote tally.
Trump is *likely* performing better in early voting (No idea how independents are voting) , but given how there was a huge republican push to get people voting earlier we don't know how much of the vote yet is *actually low propensity voters*.
Getting someone to the polls earlier is good, as you know their vote is in, but it doesn't actually mean much come the final day.
The reports actually may hurt Trump in the long run, as if it doesn't actually add enough low propensity voters, the panic reflex that people like Nate are tapping into could drive more low propensity Democrats to vote early, which is always a risk with believing the early reports: until they are all in, there's always a chance for a backlash either next week or election day itself.
As for why it could be favoring Harris? That's easy enough, but that requires Geo Spatial Analysis and 'cross tabbing' which Nate considers bad words and admittedly are techniques best reserved for after the election.
Which is of course why Nate and others do them anyway before the election and call it something else.
The concerns from the analytics right now is that a chunk of the polls that show Trump winning, the ones that allow us enough data to properly review them, are working very hard to poll women and minority voters, but they don't appear to be locating those voters as carefully as they are at getting party affiliation properly balanced (the root cause of the 2016 failures, and a commonly believed cause of the 2020 inaccuracies).
What that means is minority and women voters from minority areas are effectively being given more weight than their urban counterparts, but the urban vote projections don't take that into account.
Which, this isn't a 'bad polling' issue, it's the fact that any poll is going to have issues as we cannot get large scale accurate polling anymore, not since we killed off local news and the associated network of analysts supporting their marketing.
You ask me what that means?
It's a question mark.
Maybe urban women and minorities are just fed up and don't care.
Maybe they were too difficult to reach ala rural residents in 2016.
The poll in question seemed to indicate that urban voters would be about 1.4% of voters in this election, which seemed problematic.
As of yesterday, 144 thousand Philadelphians have handed in their early ballots.
That is, for all practical purposes, 1.4% of urban voters, with signs that about 60% of them are leaning towards democrats so far and around 35% republican, with some interesting implications for me on a completely unrelated non-political study that is happening in parallel.
Still doesn't change anything of my above statements on Results,
we don't know how this affects the final tallies as it is a Map Gap,
but it immediately indicates that most polls managed to mess up urban polling,
bad enough that I can prove it 11 days before the election.
The points made here about "we can't go back" are very cogent. I've always found it weird that the Kamala campaign chose that as a slogan given how easily it could backfire. I think, actually, a clear majority of Americans would like nothing better than to go back - maybe not to the 1950s when women and minorities knew their place, as in the Democrats' caricature of the Republican vision for America, but at least to the '90s or so, when people generally looked to the future with optimism, felt that they could safely tune out the news if they so chose, and didn't need to worry about what seemingly benign thing they were saying today that would retroactively be deemed offensive tomorrow.
If the polling is believed a lot of people think the Trump economy was better, so going back to 2018 probably isn't such a terrible thing in their eyes.
I didn't want to go too deep into the weeds in my original comment for fear that it would end up tl;dr. But I cited the 1990s for a reason. I think a lot of the problems in the current political zeitgeist can be directly traced back to the atomizing effect that social media, and actually the Internet in general, have had on American society. I think that's a major causative factor behind the nostalgia that seems to pervade our culture today: a fond remembrance of times that may not always have been better but were at least more coherent, and when technological and social changes were something we adopted rather than something forced on us. The 1990s were the last decade in which the Internet wasn't the primary driver of everything, and I personally would love to go back to a less online world, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Great comments! Only thing I would add is that the problem with social media isn't only an atomizing effect: the worse effect may be that it shoves caricatures of the "other side" at you because it wants to make you mad as that drives engagement, hence "doom scrolling". This both misinforms people about what others think and keeps them on social media too long, both isolating effects.
Lately I've been joking that we need to create an offshoot of the Amish that cuts technology off at the 1990s.
And yeah, I know that's not how the Amish work, with them more emphasizing the effects that particular technologies have on the human person (fun fact, some Amish actually use computers running a very specific Linux distro designed to only allow them to be used for work purposes).
Exactly. Perhaps "techno-moderate" is a good term. Personally, I'm not opposed to technological progress as a matter of principle, but I think we need to begin challenging certain preexisting assumptions, such as that further progress is both inevitable and unambiguously desirable. I think we need to leave space for questions like "do we really need further advancement, or has enough become enough?". Because it's becoming increasingly clear that it's a quite sensible question.
And, to bring my comment back on topic vis-a-vis the original article: when a huge chunk of the voting public sees us as hurtling toward dystopia - of whatever variety; technological, political, social, etc. - "we're not going back" is an odd message to foreground.
You're completely missing the point. Women will not go back to a time where they had fewer rights than they have today. And our country will not go back to the days of Trump & his disgusting antics.
I imagine the idea is the old advertising trick of "You may reject the claim, but by doing so you accept the form of the argument". The obvious reaction to "We can't go back" is "well of course we can..." But the actual message they're trying to send is that you accept the framing: Trump represents "going back" and Harris represents staying here (or more charitably, staying on this track).
The idea being to dissuade persuadable voters from believing that Trump offers some sort of alternative future rather than more of the same; and that only Harris offers that
Harris/Walz just sort of feels like one of those failed campaigns where you see it 20 years later on a dive bar bathroom wall amongst thousands of stickers and think “oh yeah”
What will the trump campaign be? A psychopath who barely won in 2016 with foreign help, lost in 2020 and refused to admit defeat? Oh yea that's the orange stain on America we had to clean up
All due respect, Nate, but maybe think a little bit about the message you are sending your readers by posting two consecutive bearish articles about Harris when your model still has the race as a pure tossup. I was certain "24 reasons Harris could win" was coming today. Now I'm wondering if you inhaled some of whatever the fumes are over at Twitter and Polymarket. If Harris sweeps all 7 battleground states (which you currently have as the second most likely scenario!) you'll have a hard time doing the dance where you pretend you were projecting uncertainty this entire time if your blog history is full of posts like this and yesterday's.
Why is she not winning this in a walk? Three elephants on the table...
#1 -- candidate is black -- subtract 2%.
#2 -- candidate is female -- subtract 2%
#3 -- candidate is not full-blooded American -- subtract 1% for each generation distant from that
Bottom line -- Harris starts out with a 5% bigotry deficit. You ask why she is not way ahead -- this is the answer.
Evidence? Plenty of studies.
Plus, why do you think Trump's first substantive comment about Harris as a candidate was -- "suddenly she was black!" A blatant loud dog-whistle to anyone thinking she doesn't look Black!
And, the occasional comment about the White House smelling of curry. Complication for the Repubs on this -- Usha Vance!
As for reminding everyone that Harris is female -- obviously not necessary -- especially when she campaigns on abortion -- and "women controlling their own bodies". But note -- plenty of bros out there (in the shower with Arnie?) think women controlling their own bodies is the worst idea since female suffrage THEY figure that THEY are the ones to be controlling women's bodies -- and not just after pregnancy.
And that last point is exactly why Hariss is not blasting the airwaves with pro-abortion messages. She's already got as much of the female vote as she will ever get, and every such blast just loses more male votes.
Yep -- it's the most explicitly bigoted election in American history since... gee.. I don't even know.
I had to sit through some cringey DEI training when the whole George Floyd thing. You know in 2020 when TRUMP was president. Lately the woke tide seems to be receding, but it will come back with a vengeance if Trump wins.
You didn't have to sit through DEI training. You chose to. Nobody ever, ever HAS to do anything. Not if people threaten death, nothing. Big life lesson: you are always free to choose.
Me, I'll never sit thru any DEI training, be sure. Or use weird pronouns, or call a man a woman because he just wants to force people to believe he really is one, penis or not.
Don't pretend someone is forcing you, people: you can't be forced.
Just stop with the Mean Tweets crap. It's so much more than that. It's spouting non-stop lies, character assassination, conspiracy theories designed to divide, constant inflammatory language to keep the populace fighting amongst itself. It's so much more than Mean Tweets. Do not trivialize his words. Words matter. He was the president of the United States, he's a potential president again, he speaks in an irresponsible manner.
He is NOT entitled to be irresponsible with his words.
Mean Tweets is your way of rationalizing something that has torn this country apart and created the hyperpolarization that exists today.
Huh? You think ignoring the problem makes it go away.
Don't worry -- the media are not saying it -- they got the memo. What is it about elephant on the table?
I guess you don't like problems with no viable solution, eh?
Well, try this one. WHY is the US still a huge racist, misogynist society. We have plenty of tools to have tamped down both many decades ago -- public relations technology up the wazoo for mass persuasion. Why has it gone the other way? Think - who benefits when so many of the 99% are at each others throats? If they weren't, then just whose throats would they be at?!
*I* am tired of "weaponizing" race and gender. But saying Trump is weaponizing race and gender is not itself weaponizing them... it's denouncing the blatant use of racial and gender bigotry for political ends.
Sorry, but please review the Intro to Logic and Reasoning course I hope you took in school. Just sprinkling ugly words at random in a sentence does not constitute reason.
ah and there we go with the first personal attack.
"If you don't vote for me you ain't Black"
"They gonna put yall back in chains"
'Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,”'
I can't believe Trump said those things..oh wait, Biden, Biden, Obama.
Like you just don't get it. Your hatred of Trump is so blinding that you can't understand that people like me may not like him, but the other side isn't appealing either.
OK, you don't like, say, carrot cake, so you vote to eat rat poison instead! I'd love to give you heaps of tasty pesto on perfectly al dente fusilli -- or whatever you crave for dinner. But that's not on the menu today.
I'm sorry, but for "interesting" reasons, those are the only two alternatives right now.
We can discuss the "interesting" reasons later, but you won't like that truth ether.
Then think of your country, and the government, and your right to vote,. All are in jeopardy. Trump is no alternative whatsoever. Trump is a destroyer and a wrecking ball. There is only one choice in this election, and that is Harris.
The problem with this comment is the same problem the Harris campaign has. You're blaming the other side not saying why they should vote for Harris. Its the "basket of deplorables". They won't vote for Harris because there's something wrong with them, not her.
Two things can be true at once. Harris can have a bad campaign and there also be a lot of people who are not voting because she's black or a woman (or both).
I could care less about her race or her gender.....she is just an awful candidate that did not earn her "spot" and who will be an even more awful president....it is that simple
Without a doubt. But a good campaign should be able to overcome some of that at least three 1 or 2% that seems to make the difference. Look at Obama. Despite all the Birther stuff and claims he was a Muslim and everything else he still won.
You're saying the only reason Obama won was because of the recession in 2008? It was a clean slate, no incumbent. The OP was that Harris is losing because she's a woman of color. She doesn't have to win 365 electoral votes like Obama, just 270. She's running a poor campaign.
Yes about Obama. Or that and Palin to be precise, but McCain picked Palin because he needed a miracle and thought there were Hillary voters he could pick up. Given the state of the economy, the fact that Obama only won the popular vote by 7.2% is a good indication. The Ds won the House popular vote by 10.6%.
As to Harris and her "poor campaign", I just don't see it. The tilt in the electoral college is hard for Ds, and the fake news undercurrent is hard to fight.
Also of course, VP's rarely win a straight up election from the VP office. Other than the first 2 ("Founding Fathers" who were technically 2nd place candidates for President), there have been just two.
All the other VPs who became President did so after a break or after the death or resignation of the President.
I love it. That's it! You've got it ---- there's nothing wrong with your candidates, just with the voters! Please, please run the next 14 presidential campaigns on that basis, please?
If these bigotries are baked in to the American electoral system, maybe… don’t run a candidate who is in those categories when Democracy itself is on the line? Run an all-American white male to safeguard our future, and run more diverse candidates in the future when it’s safer.
An all-American white male -- like with initials JB? Yep, that worked... but barely.
And dontcha think JB lost a ton of sleep over his commitment to pick a black, female veep. It seems that he intended, way back then, to run again if we hadn't buried the threat in 3 years. He just forgot about Father Time... or hoped Father Time would forget about him. How'd that work out?
Yes. Lists of future Dem candidates are either black or ----- not really male.
Vance, on the other hand, he's so white he even has blue eyes. Are blue eyes still legal in this country? I asked that on another forum and someone answered, "Yes, but I'm pretty sure it's racist."
It was basically Biden's own decision -- and such a bad decision that it may undo all the good that he did with the Senate that Trump handed him on a silver platter In GA).
Of course, he did a lot of non-legislative good too. I just hope that there is such a thing as honest history being written in the near future, so we can hear details. He was truly one of the most remarkable presidents since... FDR! No not "one of". But like the other remarkable one, he had a fatal flaw that might undo it all... hubris!
Interesting point!! I think you may have just explained for me why Kamala didn't choose Shapiro to be her running mate, assuming he would have agreed. Baked-in antisemitism, in this country, better to wait, they may have thought.
Actually there are a lot of us who don't like or trust Harris. Has nothing to do with race or gender. I'd love to vote for a woman I felt was actually qualified and who had a real vision for the future beyond "joy". The fact that you put it down to the fact that its because of racism or misogyny is exactly why the left keeps losing these kinds of political races. When you throw anyone who disagrees with you over policy, etc., and say yeah, its really because of this, people not only tune you out, but get seriously tired of it. I don't like Trump the man. In previous elections I once voted 3rd party and once pulled the lever for him but quietly for fear of being labeled by someone like you who actually doesn't seem to be interested in the real reason many voters will vote for him. I'm over the labeling thing now. I'm tired of the left calling everyone who disagrees with them somehow a racist, transphobe, climate denier. None of all are true, but happy to give the middle finger to those who seem to think it is so.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but anyone who ever pulled the Trump lever is not thinking clearly, even about their own self-interest, much less the country or world.
It has nothing to do with political disagreement -- it's a fact. He will pull us and the world into a major depression (with his tariffs, which he can enact without Congress). He will turn Ukraine over to Putin in a month... and if that doesn't bother you, then do you doubt that Poland, etc are next. Is that in YOUR interest? Oh, the Atlantic is a wide, wide ocean, but...
Not to mention the truly unthinkable -- that madman's finger on the nuclear trigger, just craving to show the world the size of his...
And jailing his political opponents. Oh, that's just a joke... campaign oratory, eh? Ask Comey. McCabe. Vindman.
Well, no problemo -- JD Vance will be president in less than a year... sooner if Musk, Thiel etc can get the 25th amendment deployed.
Let me remind you -- first they came for the trade unionists, and I did not protest because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Communists... and I didn't protest because I was not one of them either. Then the homosexuals, ditto. And then the Jews, double-ditto.
And then they came for me... and there was no one left to protest for me!
And who made you G-d to determine that all those who voted for Trump are "not thinking clearly"....this is what is wrong with those who are voting Harris....absolutely no respect for anyone who thinks differently....I voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and will in 2024 and if you ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you I am the most informed and clear thinking person they know :)) Please stop demonizing those of us who think differently than you....we can vote differently but still respect one another....I am a Democrat who loved Bill Clinton....the last Democrat I ever voted for....even he when campaigning for Harris he said what a Trump voter wanted to hear when he was talking about illegals murdering US citizens .... he said something to the effect that they needed to be vetted better....DUH!!!!! See Bill knows best :))
Sheila -- can you demonstrate clear thinking about tariffs. To start, what is a tariff and who pays it.
Just for context, I hear Trump saying that someone in China pays the tariffs that the US imposes on, say, steel made in China. Does he say that? Is it true?
Trump seems to be counting on a lot of revenue from tariffs -- his "most beautiful word in the language" -- to pay for the tax goodies he is promising. Is that true? I think he said that in front of the Black correspondents' event.
David is a hell of a lot smarter than some people here. He is absolutely right on his view of the world and this election. Painful, but true. 82 yo, here, seen a lot. At this point, I consider Trump the most dangerous man on the planet. We elect him at our peril. I won't live to see all the destruction but many of you will.
You’re ridiculous. It’s very hard to raise the kind of money you need for even the lowest levels of elected officials. I know highly qualified people from UC Law SF (same law school as Harris) who ran campaigns and failed miserably.
Pretty sure they were just saying some voters are being influenced by their own biases, not that all trump voters are bigots.
I think their claim that it's the most explicitly bigoted election is tough just because of the lack of counterfactual, but there's a pretty strong case for, as you say, lots of people not wanting to vote for someone who, compared to someone selling themselves as fighting for you, is, as you say, running on a platform of "joy".
Her campaign feels like it's starting to emulate a sign I saw earlier "Trump Safety, Kamal Crime", which is basically the Harris campaign: "we're the good guys, trust us because we're the good guys and don't vote for them, the bad guys" with absolutely nothing substantive to back it up.
Plus -- the implications of #1 and #2 for polling error. Pollees may have gotten over their Trump-shyness -- reluctance to admit voting for Trump to pollsters.
But I bet they are not over their racism shyness, and misogyny shyness -- admitting to pollsters (or themselves) that they just can't vote for a woman or a black. Or, they need to hear more!
So unless the pollsters have put a very heavy thumb on the scale to "correct" for recent misses, they are badly underestimating Trumps' vote share, particular shy racists and shy misogynists.
Remember thee 2008 election joke. Pollster at the doorway of a rural redneck house, housewife standing in the doorway. Pollster, clipboard in hand -- "who are you voting for? Housewife turns and yells out into the house -- Hey, Pa, who we votin' for? Unseen Pa yells back -- we're voting for the n----r!
And why are they votin' for the n----r? Because the economy was utterly melting down in the middle of the campaign.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is how and why we got our first black president -- and probably last for a long, long time. It may have been an incredible candidate and a brilliant campaign, but that's never been enough.
The thing is a lot of people vote based on their identity. People identify as a core identity based on race, religion, sex, country of origin (arabs, europe, israel) and vote. This has always been there. In 2020, my liberal neighbor said all women, immigrants, person of color, gays and all under represented identities should vote for Biden. This year she says they should all vote for Harris. Is she advocating all men specifically white men should vote for Trump? Democrats created this identity politics and they cannot have it both ways.
Wasn't it the Teamsters that were to endorse Biden with nearly 70% of their membership voting for him, but when Kamala was introduced with no change in support for the union, they decided not to endorse as only 35% of the membership supported her?
How is that explained? The only variable that changed is from white man to black woman.
Whoa there. If Harris is saddled with a "5% bigotry deficit" (with "plenty of studies" to back this up, as you assert), then 𝑤ℎ𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑠 𝑠𝑜 𝑓𝑜𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑎𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑠𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑠 𝐵𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛'𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡?!
Do you suppose that they were they unaware of these studies?
Or do you suppose that they really don't care about the prospects of a second Trump term? After all, in these intensely polarized times with razor-thin margins in elections, a loss of 5 percentage points in the popular vote spells doom.
It was situational... stirred into the batter from the moment Biden committed to a black female veep, and then baked when -- somehow -- Trump survived and rose again. We can discuss why that happened another day.
Gee, David, welcome to 2008. Barack Obama covered 2/3 of those characteristics and won the presidency… twice. And neither Harris nor Obama are ‘black’ in the traditional sense, so get over yourself. The long and the short of it is that one of these two absolutely horrible candidates will end up being president, and the more that Harris/Walz try to define themselves, the more the public reels from their clumsy efforts. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
"Racist statements" are not the issue. Racist motives for voting are. And politicians explicitly leveraging racist motives to win power are racist tactics, whether the politicians are racist themselves.
And bottom line, using racist tactics to win power are -- at least -- playing with fire. At worst, they are tearing the nation apart for personal gain -- financial, emotional, ideological gain.
If it's not obvious to you that Trump is in the latter category, at least on financial and emotional grounds, then we really have no basis for discussion -- that is a basic fact, and there is no alternative fact.
I sincerely wish you a good and happy life, but please, not at the expense of so much more suffering in a world already suffering enough.
I'm still here, Felicia. (Nice name -- I assume you know what it means.)
Anyway, do you deny that Trump is explicitly, intentionally and persistently leveraging widespread racist motives in the electorate to win power? That he is activating, stoking and then leveraging such motives rather than trying to calm them?
And do you deny that Harris is trying to reduce racist motives among people, to bring them together rather than tear them apart?
Totally agree. I've said from day one her being black and female are going to be her biggest hurdles. My belief is her biggest hurdle is being a female, or at least the type of female that she is. She doesn't appear strong, she appears unserious. I think color is secondary. Many women and a lot of men will not vote for a woman. That Harris doesn't appear to be a serious woman gives women more excuse to vote for the strong male, or at least what they perceive to be a strong male.
Nate says of the Trump Agenda47 site: "Immigration bad! Inflation bad! Drill, baby, drill! At least there’s some sense of direction here. You can click along to the list of 20 promises." He contrasts the Harris issues page: "But of the four sentences, three are just talking about Harris’s credentials and values — not any substantive sort of agenda." When I scroll down a bit on https://kamalaharris.com/issues/ I see a list of ~20 issues with details at roughly the same specificity as Trump's offering. How are these pages (rhetorically) different in a way that supports Nate's argument?
If you look at the issues, it's the same 3 proposals Harris has been discussing for months ($3k child tax credit, $25k downpayment credit for first-time home buyers, $50k small business tax exemption), and the rest are just votes she cast as VP or bills that were passed during the Biden administration
This article just acknowledged no breaking news at all: what the media and Dems already quietly said and Reps loudly said about her during her entire vice presidency, which is that she’s an empty suit with no vision, ideas, or character
Because you present a negative fact about her without any evidence to back it up - in fact her whole career path indicates the exact opposite of what you are portraying.
You’re the one who tied my negative opinion to her gender, so your projection of that is inherently sexist. My criticism neither referenced her gender or based it on any female specific characteristic: you did that.
Oh, I think she has character. Trump has zero character. Which is why he is so dangerous. It's the ideas and vision part that are a problem for Harris. She appears to have difficulty staying on point on focus. Drifts off into the ephemeral and esoteric far too often, does not answer questions with specific points. I'm voting for her because the alternative is unthinkable. But she is a frustrating candidate, of that there is no doubt.
Sorry, but the persuasion part of the campaign has been over for a while. There are few 'undecided' voters left anyway to be persuaded. Rather, there are far more voters who made up their minds, who may not vote because in every election, there are quite a few of those - for many different reasons. Usually, those voters are part of the group that doesn't usually vote.
Now, it's up to the campaigns to move those voter's butt off the couch and into the voting booth. Whichever campaign does that, wins. It's about execution at this point in time. The pundits had their say. Now, the campaigns infrastructure that sits behind the scenes has to show what it is made of.
Turnout operations matter in a big way. But at the end of the day, people are voting for candidate. Kamala Harris comes off as a sorority sister who failed up her entire life. Donald Trump comes off as a shady, ethically challenged lawyer.
I know who I'd rather have working for me if I'm pissed off and I want results.
What a sexist comment. Failed up? That’s ridiculous. She’s highly intelligent. She went to a great law school (same as mine, but a year before me, so I’m biased), was a leader there, won multiple difficult elections, for SF DA, CA DG, senate. Do you know how difficult it is to raise money for and win elections? You don’t get to where she is by failing up. She did an excellent job at each level of her career and was chosen to continue at the next election.
The flaw in that logic, is he is NOT working for YOU. Trump has no conception of what it means to be responsible for anyone other than himself.
Hopefully most here have lived long enough to be able to see through that.
If people in this country are that naive that they actually believe Trump will be working for them, I have a wonderful bridge they may want to buy. This is just shocking rationalization from what should be intelligent people.
This comment is nuts to me. Leaving anything we know about the candidates aside, if you asked me if I'd rather have a sorority sister or a shady lawyer in charge, I'd choose the sorority girl every time. Sorority girls get shit done. Lawyers are creeps who tell you lies and steal your money.
Well, that's why this is a great country. You and I can disagree on who's the best person to take us forward. I may not agree with who you think is a better choice to lead the nation, but, I still respect you and,I respect your choice.
I'm not even talking about the best candidate. I'm just saying your metaphor really doesn't work for me, because it's clearly intended to show the choice as a no-brainer. But I feel a deep mistrust of all lawyers and I love boss bitches who get shit done.
This is the exact type of article Nate should stay away from. Give me data, do not give me your own personal opinion on Kamala’s website. Not only is it horrible analysis based on nothing but it’s not why anyone is here. This is almost as bad as Nate’s article where he said Trump won the debate if you watched with your tv muted because he’s taller.
Good analysis. One typo: "Of course, sometimes you do need to call in poker. A lot, in fact: there are occasions when it’s strictly a better play than calling or folding. " I think you meant "better play than raising or folding."
"Trump’s running a Billboard Lawyer campaign" funny juxtaposition, and very true.
Harris is a progressive populist and doesn't know how to take a principled stand on anything. It's too late for her to pivot away from that and she's incapable even if she had more time.
Is it weird to you that your whole brand is data-driven journalism but you’re increasingly writing articles that aren’t much more than your own punditry?
This is extra...There are still 2 model talk articles coming. Why complain about articles that are a bonus? This one is really interesting!
Is critiquing campaign web pages really that interesting? I'd argue...no, no it is not.
It's interesting to me...funny how that works huh? Do you have anything else to contribute?
No, Jeff. I don't have anything more to contribute. Is that OK to you or do I need to ask permission to comment again.
Haha! No need to get so salty. I hope you have a great day! :)
I didn’t view this so much critiquing the websites as providing his reflections both as a knowledgeable political,observer and hopefully providing some insights to his readers. As someone who considers himself pretty politically astute, I benefitted from his observations since my other activities take precedence over visiting the candidates websites.
It’s interesting to me
Nate clearly wants to just be more able to toss out this opinions on campaign strategy in addition to publishing the model.
But to be fair, 538 was always generally kind of like that.
When used to listen to the podcast they would reference polls but it was mostly just a jumping off point for punditry and commentary.
"Data-Driven Journalism" is definitely more a branding term than a practice.
I think a big part of it is this is a subscriber based Substack (paying $10-20 per month for something comes with the expectation of new content almost every day) with only 2 people available to write articles, one of whom is probably only part-time based on his being in grad school currently. Most of his current subscribers are probably just here until the election and he knows that, so it’s going to be entirely election content right now. But beside the model he updates and discusses daily (which has been mostly stable), there’s not ton of other election data to talk about without cross tab diving, which we all know Nate is against.
Didn't he say part of the reason he went independent on Substack was that he didn't like having a corporate overlord having editorial control over his articles? His reputation is as a statistician, but I think he also likes punditry too. Articles like this seem like they're more for himself than for the business.
I think he just has a large platform and likes to give his opinions, that doesn't seem surprising or nefarious.
I just don't think that 538 was ever that "data-driven" and Nate was often just opining on the podcast.
Disagree; I thought 538 did some really interesting data-driven work sometimes, giving a different and more methodologically sound approach to the headlines of the day. They interviewed me once for one of my academic pieces, I found them to be more genuinely inquisitive (and conversant in the data/literature) than most of the other calls I got.
He had a way bigger staff at 538 though. Much easier to have a new article every day accompanied by in-depth data analysis if you can have 7-8 people each doing one piece per week, rather than just 2 trying to make sure there’s another blog post every couple of days.
Yeah, I subscribed for model talk and interesting takes on polls. For example, AtlasIntel was off by 18% in the Mexican Election, yet Nate uses them as his #1 weight because of recency. I'd love to hear a thoughtful article about why that's a "throw it on the pile" poll. Yet, instead, I now just get daily updates about how much Nate Silver dislikes Kamala Harris and how she's failing the moment. It's pretty disappointing.
That would be relevant if Harris and Trump were running for President in Mexico.
They had a catastrophic failure in their methodology. If the methodology is flawed and produces random results, that'd be much more interesting to hear about than some bad punditry takes.
ALL polls have a catastrophic failure in their methodology. If we haven't learned that at least, I'd recommend the book on the history of American polling, "Lost in a Gallup," by Joseph Campbell. Polls are broken, they've fallen and they can't get up, I've given up on polls ----------- and the fundamentals do favor Trump.
Thanks for the book tip. Ordered.
I hope you like it. I found it delightful, and shocking in the history of polling failures. Also, the author really likes our Nate.
Is their methodology the same for Mexico and the US? That would be surprising to me. Polling Mexico is going to have a different set of challenges that polling the US. They could have a problem with the methodology they use in Mexico, but their US methodology be fine.
It'd be great if there was a Substack that focused on polling and modeling that could go through something like that!!..........
I think Nate Silver doesn’t actually have any experience on the side of conducting and structuring a poll though! He has lots and lots of experience over the past 16 years reading and comparing polls of the United States, so he has some idea empirically of what works and what doesn’t, but isn’t the person to ask about how you would want to go about actually creating and running and structuring a poll in a different context.
and plenty of polls had that in 2020 and 2022 so are we just going to focus on one? You'll say "oh they changed" well Maybe Atlas shored it up too
You're right. He does seem to dislike her & he really can't stand the campaign team that she largely inherited from Biden. And her picking Walz over Shapiro was the last straw (for him). He's missing the larger picture.
Bingo.
What larger picture??
Her momentum, especially with women. Trump fatigue. The overall mood of the country.
The mainstream consensus in the media over the last couple of weeks is that Trump's the one with momentum.
Uh no
Of course it is! But stating the obvious here, I don't purport to be a professional political statistician.
O’Malley Dillion is a disaster.
It doesn't preclude anything. But neither does it predict anything. It's his personal bias, IMO.
It is actually conventional wisdom. Nate’s article is merely an excellent summary of what countless pundits from both the left and the right have been saying for weeks.
Actually, Atlas Intel has quite an interesting record, it would be absurd to completely disregard them. They were among the best pollsters in 2020 and successfully predicted the 2022 Bahia gubernatorial election when every single other polling firm (not an exaggeration) was wrong about the result. So you're simply wrong about this
I'm asking for analysis around that. Why does a firm that has some good results also have catastrophic failures? Why is that the top weighted poll by 2x in Nate's model? Is their opt-in polling appropriate methodology? Something like that would be considerably more interesting to read about than some bad punditry like we're getting with this article.
You call it bad punditry but I don't see why it is. It explains carefully a very legitimate opinion that running such an indecisive campaign as Kamala has, trying to appeal to everyone by not supporting anything too "out of line," is a failing strategy. We can have both; good articles about polling and good punditry.
I don’t find her campaign indecisive at all. And the only part of Harris’ strategy Nate is looking at is her website design, which is a ludicrous take.
Agree! How many people actually look at political websites? I'd never seen hers till he showed it here.
I disagree. He makes a valid point by using the website as an example, because presumably the central part of her strategy (messaging) is captured in the website. If it is not, then thats a problem in and of itself, suggesting there is no cohesion in the messaging and brand. Either way, its not a good look. By the way I{m voting for Harris, but I like that Nate tries to be objective, and some of the reactions here are likely a defense mechanism.
Read a book. Trust me. Polling is something that can't be fixed, like an addled egg. Done bun can't be undone.
Completely new model needed.
That kind of stuff goes into the "Model Talk" posts for paid subscribers. The punditry you get for free.
If you want media that says, Kamala good and Trump evil daily, you can watch CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC for that. If you want the reverse, there is Fox News. All of these sources of info become unwatchable garbage in the final weeks before the election. They really step it up in the last two weeks of the presidential election. Most of us here prefer honest punditry rather than agenda driven punditry. On Mark Halperin’s Morning Meeting on 2way today, another place for honest punditry, they played a clip of Norah O’Donnell as an example of the mainstream media in full-scale save-Kamala mode. Both the regular Democrat and Republican co-hosts laughed along with Mark at how absurdly biased she was.
I'm actually fine with Nate writing this take. He's just sharing his informed opinion, which I find interesting to read. That said, I have issues too with taking Atlas Intel as a high quality pollster. I knew them from the Peruvian presidential election, where they considerably diverged from most local pollsters (which have been historically accurate) and showed both a trend and a final snapshot that proved to be extremely off.
So I went to see their detailed results and there are some things that don't make sense. Trump getting 32% of the black vote nationally? Ok...maybe I'm dealing with large margins of error because I'm going too deep into the cross-tabs.
Trump getting 48% of the black vote in Michigan? Sounds strange...but maybe I'm nitpicking: errors outside of the 95% confidence interval happen 5% of the time after all.
But Trump consistently winning the female vote by +4 points both nationally and in most of the swing states (including an 8 point difference in Michigan) doesn't make any sense at all. And we're talking about all women, so this is a very large sub-sample.
So maybe they got lucky in the last election, or maybe they're just inconsistent...but I'm not too confident about their polling.
On the one hand, I’d love to see 2-3 articles every day answering every little question I have about his methods. On the other hand, I realize that there’s probably a line he has to walk with that. Give too many fine details about how the sausage is made and eventually you’ll have someone who managed to reverse engineer the sausage down to every gram of seasoning and offering it for half-price.
You can't really have a newsletter whose only daily content is: "Oct 21. Harris win probability 47.0%"
He could talk about his model in every post, but even as a (former) data scientist, that gets boring. It's only one model, there's only so much you can say about it.
So instead we get pieces like this, which IMHO is fine.
Is it weird that you’re lecturing Nate Silver on his own brand?
I mean, this is the standard critique of Nate Silver, and in fact the one he gives of many others. Punditry always involves a lot of unsubstantiated BS, which is often interesting and useful to think about, but shouldn’t be mistaken for clear actionable intelligence.
What would be actionable in this context? We all should be voting. Maybe we could bet on one of the sites?
I take it as filling the time until we get some actual answers on November 5. No one really knows anything, and the polls only get interesting the last weekend when the (limited) undecideds start breaking. We have no idea even then who is going to vote, turnout numbers and with some Venn overlap, how many shy Trumpsters are out there still. All this noise about polls is entertaining but not really informative. They could be 3 points off as they were in 2020. Or 3.5 points off as they were in 2012. Or 4 points off as they were in 2016. Can't even really pick a direction either, though I would expect Trump to overperform, I can't even be very sure of that. The pollsters might have overcompensated after 2020.
My hope is that when Nate writes an article critical of the Harris/Walz campaign’s approach, they’ll read it, too, and view it as constructive criticism to then re-evaluate. With two weeks to course correct, and they better or Trump 2.0 might rise from its ashes and be our commander in chief and leader of the Free World again; a scary thought considering his narcissistic and vindictive personality and the fact that he’ll surround himself with yes-men/women this next time. Add in his increasing overt symptoms of Alzheimer’s which has a strong genetic component to it, which his father died from? America might find itself in a crisis unlike anything we can imagine.
Trump’s fluency of language and ability to perform off the cuff would be pretty remarkable for someone with significant progressing dementia.
I have expertise in this area and so I say sorry; yours is not the deeper view with well-established, medical science information included. Neurolinguists and neurolinguists know what hallmark symptoms to look for and Trump is not only displaying some of those signs of dementia, more specifically it’s frontotemporal dementia. There are many indicators that Trump is showing due to his clear deterioration of oral expressive language when compared to samples from decades ago when he gave frequent interviews as a real estate mogul and celebrity in NYC. I’d be happy to point you in that direction. No matter who evaluates them side by side meaning from 29 -30 years ago to now, there is no question that something is up.
Also, Trump is showing increasing signs of what's called tangential speech where the meaning of what he says is difficult to track for the listener since it omits key grammatical elements. He rambles on: stringing half sentences together but omitting what is needed for full comprehension and he ties together mid-stream one subject to a completely unrelated one — sometimes bringing in a third or the original with no clear point; showing an extremely disorganized and chaotic pattern of thought that makes little sense. I’d be happy to post some examples in quotes. This is something he never did before and it shows deterioration in the temporal lobe of the brain. Then there’s this symptom of particular concern: both semantic and paraphasia in his speech where he verbalizes nonsense words or slurs two words into one with examples such as "missush" for missiles, “Venezeurzo” for Venezuela which he perseverates on. Perhaps most famous is "bigly" for big league and also *with an inability to self-correct* so while some laugh at the dozens of examples people can watch of this at the many, many available videos at YT called "Trump's Best Words," the paraphasias I name are specifically caused by a breakdown within the neuro-pathways in the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain where language is formulated, with the frontal lobe (think Central Command) then receiving corrupted input which eventually leads to a complete breakdown of oral language in those with full blown dementia.
Then there are Trump’s increasingly alarming mix-ups with people and events; a classic symptom. Some examples: confusion with people, places, history, etc., such as repeatedly saying Nikki Haley was in charge of security on J6, claiming under Biden we’ll be WWII soon, saying he beat Obama — other times GWB or Jeb who he says he invaded Iraq, calling Melania “Mercedes,” identifying in court a photograph of E. Jean Carroll his sexual accuser as his wife when his actual wife is standing next to him, and the list goes on.
Add in the fact that Trump's father died of Alzheimer's which has a strong genetic component, it appears to be a ticking time bomb. We just don't know "the when” especially since our latest information on dementia includes new knowledge of a somewhat initial quiet phase while the damage within the brain is accelerating at a fever pitch and then it rapidly tanks the person’s ability to function. Let’s consider that worrisome aspect of its takeover within a four year term: Does anyone think Trump’s family would dare speak up to him about their increasing concerns and risk their inheritance? Or any of the sycophants who will surround him should he win — rather than any guardrails like in his first term — when there’s still time to invoke the 25th Amendment before something catastrophic happens?
Happy to keep going here but there certainly are many available reads that get further into the weeds with what I point out. Of course, the Goldwater rule is preventing many medical professionals from too forcefully speaking out but there is a growing list who when considering what’s at stake, they think they need to and so they have.
If the Harris/Walz campaign is looking to Nate Silver for strategy advice they are in deep trouble.
I think there’s a difference between actively looking — with the intended purpose to get new strategy advice — versus multiple eyes everywhere; all taking the temperature & tone from any number of solid sources which then generate reevaluations and adjustments.
Trump is having open-ended meetings and Harris is pretending to have town hall meetings (and 60 minutes is still sitting on their transcript)
https://nypost.com/2024/10/21/us-news/kamala-harris-town-hall-host-maria-shriver-shuts-down-michigan-voter-hoping-to-ask-the-vp-a-question-we-have-some-pre-determined-questions/
Democrats bringing up Trump’s age need to put the Iowa primary back in its early place and not rig the primaries. Four years to fix it.
You mean like Trump's hand selected women supporters in the "town hall".
Open ended indeed.
The truth is we don’t know either candidates’ full schedule, although Trump was cancelling some events last week and caught dozing off elsewhere so who’s to say how focused he even is at these alleged “open-ended meetings”?
BTW... I liked your thoughts LudGirl. I'm a Trump voter who disagrees with some of what your wrote (though agree he is a narcissist and vindictive - though see no differences in what Dems are doing to him from the other side) but do agree this is how we get better campaigns, people critiquing and campaigns actually listening.
This is some weird whining. I found the piece interesting. Nate does plenty of data stuff. Are you a Kamala Stan or something?
The polling is all pretty consistent, so consistent that the model isn't really imparting any useful information behind the polls.
What's more looking at the timeline it occurs to me that the model is really measuring fluctuation in the polling rather than fluctuation in underlying public opinion, or rather that it's not certain that it's accurately tracking public opinion.
So do some further data work to see if you can uncover something your model isn't telling you. Dig into the differences in methodological approaches from the various elections. Dig into some quantitative data. Do literally anything a data scientist would do.
Instead, Nate wants to give us his thoughts on website design. Thanks.
What is wrong with him noting the differences in what the campaigns are doing. He is using the websites as an example, but truth be told the Harris campaign HAS focused on the touchy feely stuff and far less on policy. The case is true that Trump has leaned into what many would call his worst attributes to give them a positive spin AND is sharing policy content, even if many don't like the delivery. I actually welcomed his insights today.
What tools does he have other than the polling? And it's doubtful that he can afford to commission any on his own.
He crapped on internal polling a while ago but having access to that right now would undoubtedly strengthen the model.
First, there are a million things he could do with the polling other than chuck it in the model and shrug. First, you could do as I say above; what's actually different about the polling this year as compared to previous elections? Second, let's dig into the crosstabs a bit; what do those tell us? Third, let's model undecideds a bit; what data tells us how they might break? How might we factor that into our model? Etc. And I'm just spitballing off the top of my head; I'm not a famous quant political journalist who is getting paid for this.
Beyond that, there's a ton of quantitative data we could look into. Just because you can't chuck it into a model doesn't mean it's useless, and doesn't mean it isn't data. To be honest the approach of many of the polling prediction outfits this year has been kinda lazy; I was hoping for more here.
"...what's actually different about the polling this year as compared to previous elections?"
Take on specific question: shy Trump voters. Did the polling outfits make any adjustments this year to try to correct for bad misses in 2020? If so what specific measures did they take? Good luck finding that out, because that's proprietary information and the various pollsters will jealously guard their intellectual property.
Silver deliberately ignores the crosstabs. He wrote about this a few articles ago. From his perspective you just toss the overall results into the model and ignore the crosstabs, which is a reasonable approach given that the crosstabs are probably much more susceptible to error.
How do you model undecideds? What tools do you have there other than polling?
I am pretty sure that Silver is running the model on his laptop as compared to a cluster. Plus it's just him and some other guy. I think for those reasons a model that is primarily focusing on polling and excluding the other stuff is eminently reasonable.
It would swell if you people were a bit more explicit about your motivations for these types of comments: I don't like the message so I'm going to shit on the messenger.
I mean it's a dumb as fuck stance, but at least has the virtue of being self-aware.
I think I'm being pretty explicit in my motivations; if I wanted anecdotal speculation there are plenty of places to go for that. I was hoping I could get some actual data-driven analysis (beyond 'I built this model, let's see what happens when I hit the analyze button') here, but Nate seems to increasingly treat it as a platform for his own gripes.
I'd give 3:1 you haven't written a comment with a similar sentiment on a post which criticized DJT.
I don't comment often, but to be honest I haven't seen many of those lately around these parts.
I don't see any issue with Nate not only sharing hard data but also his interpretation of what we are seeing in the campaigns based on his years of experience. When he is sharing his opinion he backs it up with facts which is far more than many other commentators are doing.
What an incredibly arrogant, from the stands comment. “aren’t much more than your own punditry” did you read/do you anything Nate writes beyond those things that support your partisan world view? Your contribution to any dialogue in any context I can assume is substantial if it any way differs from your world view 🙄
I mean, we're still reading it.
Nate started with data, Harris' popularity vs her election polling and tried his best to explain it with punditry. I liked it. Some who didn't might have preferred it to be more positive for Harris and her campaign.
Both Silver and the site are obviously left leaning and hoping for positive Harris takes.
Sometimes it feels like Silver is reaching for ways to put positive spin on negative Harris attributes or data points. Then you see people in the comments claiming he is in the pocket of big business and trying to hurt Harris.
I think in this case he is pointing out in the most soft manner possible what everyone sees pretty clearly. Harris is banking 100% on people voting AGAINST Trump.
The strategy is to not screw that up. Which means, no policy discussion (especially considering how unpopular Biden policies have been). Make it about Trump and what a jerk he is.
It clearly is not working at this point. It will be interesting to see if Harris tries to lay out a populist policy or two in the last couple of weeks here.
Interpreting data and potential drivers/trends is fun. And maybe people don’t want to pay for raw data and a black box. Are you not entertained?
He just has PTSD from the massive backlash of 2016
because his punditry is actually level headed and adds value to the conversation.
Nate Silver uses an awful lot of column inches on something that's very easy to sum up. In fact, he hit the nail on the head early in this essay. We are not voting for the homecoming king. We are voting for the president of the United States.
When you push into the reasons that people actually pulling the lever for Donald J Trump give, a common thread connects all of these voters. All of them are pissed off. The system does not exist to serve them. It doesn't matter how many platitudes you throw out there. It doesn't matter how much the S&P 500 went up this year. These people don't have multi-million dollar 401ks, and they don't have 15% of their assets tied up in the stock market.
They want somebody who is going to fight for them and hopefully win for them. They don't even think for sure that Trump will win. But at least he isn't getting elected and immediately forgetting them.
When you contrast that with Kamala Harris, people are left with a stark choice. Vote for abortion, or vote for someone willing to possibly fight to keep them from dying from starvation, in a gutter, from a fentanyl overdose, or whatever.
Donald J Trump is Saul Goodman.
Funny enough, drug overdoses are on a sharp decline this year. Researchers aren't sure why, but it's probably not because of Trump.
And this response is exactly why Harris is losing. Rather than fix the problem, the left is going to roll out some stats proving how 'asaakkkksssshuuuallly' they are playing 5D chess.
Maybe you win the argument. But you haven't convinced anyone to vote for you, and all you've done is turn people off to ever talking to you again.
I agree that thrusting Fed data and scientific studies into peoples' faces hasn't won over many voters. However, I don't think the best way forward for the country is to validate the American id at all costs, even when it does not match objective reality. The Harris campaign is trying to strike a difficult balance of countering Trump's narrative of a country in decline without invalidating our pwecious fee-fees.
But surely you can't get mad at someone for "well ackshually"ing with data in a Nate Silver comment section for crying out loud lol.
I mean, that's a fair observation. It's a data driven blog where people present data. However, this specific article wasn't about data at all. I'm simply making the point that politicians connect with people on a human level. They do not connect with them on a data level.
Overdose deaths over the last few years have reached insane levels. This last year is the first one since Biden/Harris took office with less than 100,000 deaths iirc.
In addition there is some suspicion that deaths are down because so many addicts have already kicked the bucket that inevitably deaths would need to decline due a shortage of warm bodies.
Context.
Ok. So sharing substantiated data (on overdose deaths, crime or stocks) is turning people off "asaakkkksssshuuuallly". What is Kamala supposed to do to win ? Start speaking about eating cats or the attributes of dead golfers ? It is a sad state of things if true.
But note that you are telling us about both those things Trump said, and it makes fun prose!!
This is a weirdly hostile reaction to useful, true information.
It's not hostility, to be clear -- it's frustration. Being correct doesn't move people to listen to you. It's why the left doesn't understand Trump's appeal. They believe they can call out his hyperbole and distant relationship to fact and people will stop listening to him.
And that's why they failed to stop him. It's why he's going to win this election. Trump's voters /know he isn't telling the entire truth./ Telling them that is basically no different than saying: "Hey, did you know you have two arms and legs?" They're like: "Uh. Yes. Yes I knew that." Then they look at you funny.
Trump's voters are looking for someone to fight for them. The left thinks they can 'stop Trump' and it will show everyone who voted for him how wrong they were. What you need to grasp is that a LOT of these people already KNOW Trump will most likely not succeed in helping them. You do not understand despair. Trump does. If Trump is perceived as fighting for them and listening them after he gets in office, that's good enough.
On Trump's hyperbole. It reminds me of country talk when I grew up in Tennessee. People aren't intended to take it literally --- it makes a point and is humorous besides. So Trump says something over the top and a little outrageous and always fun -------- and all the Dems can counter with is to say, "He's wrong."
BORING!
Trump is actually dangerous. I don't find him fun. Four people died on January 6th. He is estimated to have caused at least 200,000 excess covid deaths with his poor covid policies. He is an incompetent liar. The leaders of other countries have laughed at him. He is an embarrassment
That's the crux of what I'm saying, yeah. It's like they do not understand that people /enjoy/ hearing a tall tale. They aren't there to grade you on your command of statistical data. They are there to connect with you. You, in this case, being the candidate.
Going negative works because you are drawing a clear line between yourself and the other guy. But there's an important caveat, here -- you need to have defined yourself in such a way that by drawing that contrast, YOU are obviously the only choice. Democrats were extremely effective at using abortion in that way in 2022.
The problem there is that someone said 'that issue worked like gangbusters!' and then they went all in, trying to appeal to women. I swear, every generation, politicians need to re-learn the most fundamental aspect of politics -- no /one/ group puts you in office in anything like a competitive race. Harris doesn't appeal to ~60% of men. At all. You can never govern from the center if your opening act of gaining office is to start a gender war before you even swear your oath.
…and then he follows through on the hyperbole or insists that he really, really means it.
Leaving you looking like a pathetic apologist. Again.
And again, and again, and again…
Phebe, and An Internet Poster- the country talk / tall tales point you make explains a lot. If only it didn't encourage hatred and/or disdain of 50% of the country we all share in this case. I know there's hatred and/or disdain w/ Dem voters, too, but i can only see one side that even allows the possibility of working together.
Thanks for clarifying, I see where you're coming from now.
I agree with your frustration with progressive political messaging, but I don't think Paul's comment above was meant to be a campaign ad. It's just a blog comment. And it's not trying to persuade people to vote for Kamala -- only to contribute some true and useful information.
Having a better-informed population would be a good thing, I think!
Would you prefer just sprouting nonsense? Screaming? When you're just wrong what do you want people to say
No, not at all. I think screaming at each other has been the bane of our political system since the 1990's. There are lots of reasons for that, but they don't matter.
"When you're just wrong." Actually, I'm not wrong. Firstly, when people say 'fentanyl,' it's code for 'all opioid drug abuse.' People don't care about nuance when their brother or son ODs. Secondly, when you see a skyrocketing increase of 25k opioid-related deaths in 2002 to 107k in 2022, then try to say 'BUT AKKKSHUALLY THEY ARE DECREASING!!!,' you are part of the problem -- the dip was from 107k to 105k. Yeah, great job solving that scourge. High five! (source: https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/opioid-deaths-fell-in-mid-2023-but-progress-is-uneven-and-future-trends-are-uncertain/)
So congratulations. You won that argument on the facts! Now get out there and tell those 105,000 families that all lost someone to opioid OD last year what an incredible job you are doing. I'm sure they'll believe you.
Lead in with 'WELL ACKSHUALLY!!!' -- I'm sure that will help.
The left as you call it don’t want Kamala to win. They don’t like her policies. They want Trump to win, wreck everything, donations hit sky high and then win in 2028 with hopefully a Congress behind them.
Forgetting “drug denial” we still have “border denial” and “economic denial”.
Back in the '90's the crack cocaine epidemic burned itself out because all of the addicts overdosed and died. Potential addicts saw that crack was insanely addictive and lethal and steered clear of it.
Google "tranq Philadelphia". I doubt anybody who's just getting into drugs would look at some of the addicts in Kensington and decide that's something they want to get into.
I will never forget January 6. I am a never Trumper republican. We will see how this ends up.
Where Trump offered 10,000 National Guard troops, and Pelosi and Bowser turned him down?
Sure. Keep up the lies.
Which part is a lie? Pelosi is on video admitting J6 was her fault. Bowser literally sent a formal letter stating she did not want NG help. These are all facts. https://www.scribd.com/document/582684364/Bowser-Letter#from_embed
What are you talking about?! Trump will instantly forget about them! He hates the working class and middle class and will do nothing for them. Kamala Harris actually will and she actually has the tools to do it.
The problem with this is, Donald Trump does not actually give a genuine solid shit for his constituents. He cares about one thing and one thing only: himself, his own aggrandizement.
Think about it, think about his behavior, not the sales pitch. What is most important to him? What really gets him animated? His rallies, social media, celebrity endorsements (or non-endorsements). He has a bizarre fixation on the prospect of camaraderie with powerful despotic figures like Kim Jung Un, Xi, Putin, and Orban. He constantly exaggerates everything positive about himself, and is enraged by even minor criticism. He never admits fault. When the source or validity of his praise is threatened he becomes erratic, seemingly unable to control his decision making, even when it leads to serious damage to his own interests (see the debate with Harris).
This explanation cleanly fits much of his other behavior too. January 6th for example. Trump is widely reported to have known he lost the election, and even slipped up and said it himself on a podcast. Wouldn't someone who loves America and its people more than themself put the laws and norms and peaceful transfer of power before their own self-interest, as every President of this country has in the past? Or take his decision to run for President in the first place, born not out of a desire to take care of the regular people of America, the masses whose calloused, unwashed hands he is disgusted by and terrified of, but a reaction to the public mockery he received at the White House Correspondents dinner.
Why? It seems to me like the result of a very deep-seated insecurity, probably the result of a poor relationship with a parent, the person whose love he wanted so badly, (as we all do), but never got enough of; it left a gaping maw inside him that he has never figured out how to satiate. He's even willing to risk his life after an assassination attempt to feed that monkey inside him, (and boy what a meal it must have been for him seeing the images, the press the next day).
But herein lies the real danger of electing Trump, the actual reason most people who don't support him worry about a second term: he will do anything in service of the one and only thing he cares about. This includes blundering into war, sidling up to dictators, violating the Constitution, demeaning those who have suffered and died in war, praising empowering and elevating scoundrels con-artists and grifters. This also includes abandoning his supporters and their interests. And in fact, he mostly couldn't be fucked to do the work to get anything done for his people in the first term, probably because he knew they'd support him anyway, at least for a while, and they have. But the second they stop giving him the adulation he craves, he'll cut them loose too and leave them with nothing, just like all the people who he's stiffed over the years.
In Nate's analogy, Trump is that billboard lawyer. An asshole but "your asshole", one who will fight for you. But Nate, no one actually wants to use those guys, because they aren't actually going to do a good job. They only take cases that are easy wins for them, and even then they take a bigger cut than they deserve. They are grifters, just like Trump, and they prey on people who think they have no better option, even when they do. People strapped for cash and time and already in a bind because of some accident. I'm not sure why more people don't see this or say it--the Harris campaign especially.
Oh please. There are more middle class Trump voters than there are poor Trump voters.
You misunderstand me. I'm not making anyone's argument. I am not saying Trump's argument is better than Harris'. I am instead telling you how the arguments are being perceived by people.
When you refuse to take policy positions, and you have a history of extremely left-leaning policy prescriptions that you were putting out there 5 years ago, it is incumbent upon you to draw a distinction between your views now and your views then. Instead, the Harris campaign has essentially tried to go around screaming 'but Trump!'
And frankly, whether you think Trump is a criminal or not, none of the lawfare that has been lodged against him was effective in doing anything other than making him look like a folk hero.
Uh Harris has plenty of policy positions.
Then she should articulate them when she's doing interviews.
She does
Well, we will have to agree to disagree on that point.
Let me ask you - what is an "extremely left-leaning policy" to you?
And, what is an "extremely right-leaning policy" to you?
And, follow up, can you envision any policy to the left of the left-leaning policy you've described, and can you envision any policy to the right of the right leaning policy you've described?
Banning all fracking is extreme. Free tuition at four year colleges for all Americans is extreme. Gun confiscation is extreme. Universal, government-run healthcare for all is extreme. Promising to open the border and to 'reexamine' ICE's existence is extreme.
Those, and others, are all positions Kamala Harris advocated for in 2019.
(source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-kamala-harris-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-9-issues)
> Universal, government-run healthcare for all is extreme
This is half a lie and half an exaggeration. "Government run healthcare" is not a thing anyone has advocated for ever. Government funded, sure. And if government funded healthcare is extreme, then every single other developed nation on the planet is "extreme".
You have clearly never been to the VA. I have.
Why is banning all fracking considered extreme? Is it extreme to ban all waste dumping in public waters? At what point is a concern justified? It's not any more "left" than, say, national parks.
Free tuition isn't really extreme, either - there are public schools and public universities all over the world that don't charge tuition. Some pretty amazing schools, at that. Europe has a whole network of them. Doesn't letting kids pursue education on merit, rather than some non-academic criteria (like finances) sound more like the meritocracy the right keeps saying they're aiming for?
No one ever advocated for universal government run healthcare, ever. Single payer insurance through the government, though, is far from extreme and indeed all over Europe.
Reexamining a government organization is extreme now? Don't you want to "reexamine the IRS"? "reexamine the EPA"? Trump is trying to reexamine all sorts of government programs - why is reexamining ICE "extreme left wing"?
No one ever promised to open the border, nor wants to open the border, that's just a straight up lie.
None of these positions are extreme except in the minds of extreme right-wingers.
Be sure they're not voting for the Party, they're voting for Trump. 2022 showed that.
Getting the sense Nate thinks Trump is going to win lol
The polls say it's close. The betting markets strongly imply that a majority have a gut feeling that Trump is going to win.
Yeah. Whether you put any weight on the betting markets or not (personally don't), the vibes among the pundit class definitely feel Trumpy. Guessing it's really that most people deep down don't believe the Trump polling phenomenon has been solved (so it's not actually a 50/50 proposition in their gut). The most compelling cases that I've heard as to why polling error could favor the dems this time are pretty simply "polling error is more random than you think" and "they've been so focused on the Trump issue they may have overcorrected this time"... and neither of those are particularly compelling because it just gives deja vu from 2020 (even if they might be valid this time)
I think the Dem hopes are that the demographic turnout models the pollsters have built are incorrect and women are going to turnout more heavily for Dobbs.
I mean, what's the value in platitudes, cliche and generalities as opposed to formulating a hypothesis? "Error is more random than you think" is just a generality as compared to "There is a group of people out there with high levels of social distrust who for that reason are less likely to pick up the phone and talk to pollsters. Those levels of social distrust correlate with Trump voters."
Because at least the second leads you to "In 2020 those distrustful voters tended to be white. Now polling appears to show Trump gaining with minority voters, but that specific population of minority voters is also distrustful". Interesting implications all around--for society, history and demographics, possible impacts on the polling this time out, and so on.
The hopium from the left being spread around right now is that there is some large contingent of Harris voters out there that aren't being captured in the polling, and this is a repeat of 2012.
It's a flawed argument -- there is no social penalty to be paid for being an open Harris supporter. You won't lose your job. You won't be cancelled. Nothing bad will happen to you if you proclaim yourself to be a Harris supporter, the left's assertions to the contrary.
But there /is/ a social cost associated with donning the red hat. Some small percentage of voters don't even want to reveal that to a perfect stranger during a phone screen. And all of this is before you get into the problems with surveying exurban and rural voters.
Edit: the Left brought this on themselves, by the way. They are incapable of getting good data because of their own efforts to censor and cancel people right of center for wrongthink. You reap what you sow. In this case, it's biased sample.
If you live in a red area of a swing state or are a woman married to a Trump voter there is a lot of social shaming if you come out for Harris.
It's like Liz Cheney says, you don't have to tell ANYONE who you actually voted for! It's private information & it's perfectly ok to lie about it if necessary.
"...the Left brought this on themselves, by the way. They are incapable of getting good data because of their own efforts to censor and cancel people right of center for wrongthink. You reap what you sow. In this case, it's biased sample."
Wow! You are hot today, Internet Poster. This is certainly how I feel. I'm not afraid to say who I'm voting for, but I'll never take any survey given by those ferschugginah leftwing elitist anti-me poll takers. Not now, not ever. Let 'em eat cake.
Or it's not about any "social penalty" at all, and I just don't answer my phone or texts no matter how many times the pollsters call. And I'm very far from alone. No one answers answers spam calls or texts, except maybe die-hard Trumpers.
In two weeks, two words: Gender Gap
Nate has written so much it’s always more likely he’s covered something and I’ve just forgotten. But one topic to cover after 2024 elections is the poll bias (again). Why is it not better to leave the polling procedure the same, with bias observed in 2024, and “correct” for it in 2028, vs change the polling procedure, hoping to eliminate bias, but really make it hard to estimate the new bias…
Because each individual pollster wants to be *right*, not just a contributor to an average which can be adjusted by a known amount to be right.
I’ve had the same thought. Would be worth trying as an experiment, at the very least.
Not *very* strongly. 60-40 is pretty close to a coin flip, and the market can end up there even if most gut feelings are the opposite direction, as long as a few bigger traders are betting on this side.
The price on a market like predictit isn't comparable to odds.
Yes it is: if you believe the true probability deviates from the market price, then trading in the market is +EV.
It isn't directly comparable in the sense that a 60 cent share price for Trump doesn't translate into a 60% chance of winning as in Silver's model. The total price for all candidates on Predictit right now exceeds 100 cents.
Yep. It's too close for comfort. And after the polls close we have to continue to fight.
She's going to win.
My gut says so too. We're still going to have to fight.
I think you're in the minority in termsnof believing who's going to win.
I think you're right
If it's close I don't doubt that the losing side will launch a swarm of lawsuits.
Will it be close? I'm not convinced that the vote totals will actually track with the current polling.
They can launch all the lawsuits they like for all of me; I just hope they don't launch riots. I'm surprised the media hasn't started up a flurry of articles about the riots the Right will start if we lose ---- maybe because even they realize rioting is a leftwing thing to do. We don't riot; we're conservatives.
Conservatives launched an insurrection, that counts as a riot and worse
You call THAT little party an insurrection??? The French do better than that every third Wednesday. If you think that's what an insurrection looks like, I can see you are not much of a history reader.
Your "mostly peaceful" riots with all the buildings on fire and men throwing flaming gasoline on police and shooting each other and making no-go zones --- that might begin to come a little closer to insurrection, but even that is probably just a riot.
Actually, it's an interesting question. How many dead people define an insurrection, or a rebellion, or civil war? All require a lot of dead people: the only irregular political move that doesn't that I can think of is the palace coup, like when Kamala overthrew Biden, bloodlessly.
We also what magats did on January 6th.
Is this in English?
"The betting markets strongly imply that a majority have a gut feeling that Trump is going to win."
The Wall Street Journal this afternoon has up a piece on how investors are now positioning themselves to try to make a profit on stocks in the event of a Trump win.
I always loved the underdog. Harris never shyed away from being the underdog, and I kinda am ok with it. I have a feeling things will go our way this time in the poll errors.
If I was a pollster, I wouldn't wanna underestimate Trumps support for a 3rd time and lose all credibility, I rather risk it and overestimate it to account for failing the last 2 times.
just setting up the "I told you sos" just in case
Nate couldn't have made it more clear that he thinks it's basically 50/50 at this point.
His head (and model) says it’s 50/50, and yet his gut keeps compelling him to write about the warning signs of a Trump win.
To be honest though, there seems to be some thought around the David Plouffes of the world that Harris has this higher ceiling than Trump that can be realized in these final days. Nate’s last two posts seem (to me) to be skeptical of that source of liberal optimism. #MakingTheCase as to why polling bias will favor Harris this time seems more difficult than the alternative
It's not uncommon for pollsters and gamblers to get cold feet when things vary from the expected, and because they will all argue that they are *very rational people*, they assume that they are not in fact reacting but foreseeing.
Which is usually when the professional analysts tell them to stop pacing and shut up so those of us who actually analyze what is going on can get the data we need for after the election is over and we have the full picture.
Right now, the numbers still line up for a 50 / 50. Maybe two percentage points in Trumps favor currently, but that could slip away for any number of reasons with the final vote tally.
Trump is *likely* performing better in early voting (No idea how independents are voting) , but given how there was a huge republican push to get people voting earlier we don't know how much of the vote yet is *actually low propensity voters*.
Getting someone to the polls earlier is good, as you know their vote is in, but it doesn't actually mean much come the final day.
The reports actually may hurt Trump in the long run, as if it doesn't actually add enough low propensity voters, the panic reflex that people like Nate are tapping into could drive more low propensity Democrats to vote early, which is always a risk with believing the early reports: until they are all in, there's always a chance for a backlash either next week or election day itself.
As for why it could be favoring Harris? That's easy enough, but that requires Geo Spatial Analysis and 'cross tabbing' which Nate considers bad words and admittedly are techniques best reserved for after the election.
Which is of course why Nate and others do them anyway before the election and call it something else.
The concerns from the analytics right now is that a chunk of the polls that show Trump winning, the ones that allow us enough data to properly review them, are working very hard to poll women and minority voters, but they don't appear to be locating those voters as carefully as they are at getting party affiliation properly balanced (the root cause of the 2016 failures, and a commonly believed cause of the 2020 inaccuracies).
What that means is minority and women voters from minority areas are effectively being given more weight than their urban counterparts, but the urban vote projections don't take that into account.
Which, this isn't a 'bad polling' issue, it's the fact that any poll is going to have issues as we cannot get large scale accurate polling anymore, not since we killed off local news and the associated network of analysts supporting their marketing.
You ask me what that means?
It's a question mark.
Maybe urban women and minorities are just fed up and don't care.
Maybe they were too difficult to reach ala rural residents in 2016.
The poll in question seemed to indicate that urban voters would be about 1.4% of voters in this election, which seemed problematic.
As of yesterday, 144 thousand Philadelphians have handed in their early ballots.
That is, for all practical purposes, 1.4% of urban voters, with signs that about 60% of them are leaning towards democrats so far and around 35% republican, with some interesting implications for me on a completely unrelated non-political study that is happening in parallel.
Still doesn't change anything of my above statements on Results,
we don't know how this affects the final tallies as it is a Map Gap,
but it immediately indicates that most polls managed to mess up urban polling,
bad enough that I can prove it 11 days before the election.
The points made here about "we can't go back" are very cogent. I've always found it weird that the Kamala campaign chose that as a slogan given how easily it could backfire. I think, actually, a clear majority of Americans would like nothing better than to go back - maybe not to the 1950s when women and minorities knew their place, as in the Democrats' caricature of the Republican vision for America, but at least to the '90s or so, when people generally looked to the future with optimism, felt that they could safely tune out the news if they so chose, and didn't need to worry about what seemingly benign thing they were saying today that would retroactively be deemed offensive tomorrow.
If the polling is believed a lot of people think the Trump economy was better, so going back to 2018 probably isn't such a terrible thing in their eyes.
I didn't want to go too deep into the weeds in my original comment for fear that it would end up tl;dr. But I cited the 1990s for a reason. I think a lot of the problems in the current political zeitgeist can be directly traced back to the atomizing effect that social media, and actually the Internet in general, have had on American society. I think that's a major causative factor behind the nostalgia that seems to pervade our culture today: a fond remembrance of times that may not always have been better but were at least more coherent, and when technological and social changes were something we adopted rather than something forced on us. The 1990s were the last decade in which the Internet wasn't the primary driver of everything, and I personally would love to go back to a less online world, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Great comments! Only thing I would add is that the problem with social media isn't only an atomizing effect: the worse effect may be that it shoves caricatures of the "other side" at you because it wants to make you mad as that drives engagement, hence "doom scrolling". This both misinforms people about what others think and keeps them on social media too long, both isolating effects.
Lately I've been joking that we need to create an offshoot of the Amish that cuts technology off at the 1990s.
And yeah, I know that's not how the Amish work, with them more emphasizing the effects that particular technologies have on the human person (fun fact, some Amish actually use computers running a very specific Linux distro designed to only allow them to be used for work purposes).
Exactly. Perhaps "techno-moderate" is a good term. Personally, I'm not opposed to technological progress as a matter of principle, but I think we need to begin challenging certain preexisting assumptions, such as that further progress is both inevitable and unambiguously desirable. I think we need to leave space for questions like "do we really need further advancement, or has enough become enough?". Because it's becoming increasingly clear that it's a quite sensible question.
And, to bring my comment back on topic vis-a-vis the original article: when a huge chunk of the voting public sees us as hurtling toward dystopia - of whatever variety; technological, political, social, etc. - "we're not going back" is an odd message to foreground.
Joe Mama, I like the way you think. And write. Technology forced not adopted, do we need unambiguous progress.
I am 82 years old, trying to keep up.
Never thought I'd see the days of a Trump in politics. May be around another 15+ years or so, the future at times doesn't bear thinking about.
The music was better, too. At least, that's how I remember it.
That's the long term trend. But in terms of this election "Trump nostalgia" is far more immediate and salient.
Also, tl;dr isn't something from the '90's. Back then people had an attention span.
You're completely missing the point. Women will not go back to a time where they had fewer rights than they have today. And our country will not go back to the days of Trump & his disgusting antics.
Bill Clinton said the quiet part out loud about the border...
I imagine the idea is the old advertising trick of "You may reject the claim, but by doing so you accept the form of the argument". The obvious reaction to "We can't go back" is "well of course we can..." But the actual message they're trying to send is that you accept the framing: Trump represents "going back" and Harris represents staying here (or more charitably, staying on this track).
The idea being to dissuade persuadable voters from believing that Trump offers some sort of alternative future rather than more of the same; and that only Harris offers that
The 70s after the end of Vietnam. It was a time of peace, love and prosperity where people looked forward to the future.
Stagflation and malaise.
Harris/Walz just sort of feels like one of those failed campaigns where you see it 20 years later on a dive bar bathroom wall amongst thousands of stickers and think “oh yeah”
Like seeing an old Saturn Vue on the road with a Romney sticker in the back window.
There's a Dole/Kemp '96 sticker on a light pole down the road from me. I sometimes think it needs to be put in a museum.
I took this picture four years ago, and the sticker is still there
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lazio_for_New_York,_20_Years_Later_-_Buffalo,_New_York_-_20200617.jpg
Wow, ‘cause when I watched the Republican National Convention I thought I had mistakingly turned to the Laurence Welk show.
What will the trump campaign be? A psychopath who barely won in 2016 with foreign help, lost in 2020 and refused to admit defeat? Oh yea that's the orange stain on America we had to clean up
All due respect, Nate, but maybe think a little bit about the message you are sending your readers by posting two consecutive bearish articles about Harris when your model still has the race as a pure tossup. I was certain "24 reasons Harris could win" was coming today. Now I'm wondering if you inhaled some of whatever the fumes are over at Twitter and Polymarket. If Harris sweeps all 7 battleground states (which you currently have as the second most likely scenario!) you'll have a hard time doing the dance where you pretend you were projecting uncertainty this entire time if your blog history is full of posts like this and yesterday's.
Narrator: Nate knows it’s not a toss up and that Trump is heavily favored at this point.
It could be what he thinks, but it's not what his model says! At least be honest about that.
Why is she not winning this in a walk? Three elephants on the table...
#1 -- candidate is black -- subtract 2%.
#2 -- candidate is female -- subtract 2%
#3 -- candidate is not full-blooded American -- subtract 1% for each generation distant from that
Bottom line -- Harris starts out with a 5% bigotry deficit. You ask why she is not way ahead -- this is the answer.
Evidence? Plenty of studies.
Plus, why do you think Trump's first substantive comment about Harris as a candidate was -- "suddenly she was black!" A blatant loud dog-whistle to anyone thinking she doesn't look Black!
And, the occasional comment about the White House smelling of curry. Complication for the Repubs on this -- Usha Vance!
As for reminding everyone that Harris is female -- obviously not necessary -- especially when she campaigns on abortion -- and "women controlling their own bodies". But note -- plenty of bros out there (in the shower with Arnie?) think women controlling their own bodies is the worst idea since female suffrage THEY figure that THEY are the ones to be controlling women's bodies -- and not just after pregnancy.
And that last point is exactly why Hariss is not blasting the airwaves with pro-abortion messages. She's already got as much of the female vote as she will ever get, and every such blast just loses more male votes.
Yep -- it's the most explicitly bigoted election in American history since... gee.. I don't even know.
Why is she not winning? Because of comments like this where you think the other side is bigoted.
People are voting for Trump because of mean tweets from liberals? I thought we weren't supposed to care about mean tweets.
No. The entire administration made identity their number 1 goal. Not good policy.
Number 1 goal? C'mon man.
I had to sit through some cringey DEI training when the whole George Floyd thing. You know in 2020 when TRUMP was president. Lately the woke tide seems to be receding, but it will come back with a vengeance if Trump wins.
You didn't have to sit through DEI training. You chose to. Nobody ever, ever HAS to do anything. Not if people threaten death, nothing. Big life lesson: you are always free to choose.
Me, I'll never sit thru any DEI training, be sure. Or use weird pronouns, or call a man a woman because he just wants to force people to believe he really is one, penis or not.
Don't pretend someone is forcing you, people: you can't be forced.
Are you arguing that Trump supports DEI training?
Just stop with the Mean Tweets crap. It's so much more than that. It's spouting non-stop lies, character assassination, conspiracy theories designed to divide, constant inflammatory language to keep the populace fighting amongst itself. It's so much more than Mean Tweets. Do not trivialize his words. Words matter. He was the president of the United States, he's a potential president again, he speaks in an irresponsible manner.
He is NOT entitled to be irresponsible with his words.
Mean Tweets is your way of rationalizing something that has torn this country apart and created the hyperpolarization that exists today.
Huh? You think ignoring the problem makes it go away.
Don't worry -- the media are not saying it -- they got the memo. What is it about elephant on the table?
I guess you don't like problems with no viable solution, eh?
Well, try this one. WHY is the US still a huge racist, misogynist society. We have plenty of tools to have tamped down both many decades ago -- public relations technology up the wazoo for mass persuasion. Why has it gone the other way? Think - who benefits when so many of the 99% are at each others throats? If they weren't, then just whose throats would they be at?!
You are just proving my point. People of all races are tired of this demonization and weaponization of race, religion, age, gender, whatever.
It is exhausting to argue with you people
*I* am tired of "weaponizing" race and gender. But saying Trump is weaponizing race and gender is not itself weaponizing them... it's denouncing the blatant use of racial and gender bigotry for political ends.
Sorry, but please review the Intro to Logic and Reasoning course I hope you took in school. Just sprinkling ugly words at random in a sentence does not constitute reason.
ah and there we go with the first personal attack.
"If you don't vote for me you ain't Black"
"They gonna put yall back in chains"
'Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president,”'
I can't believe Trump said those things..oh wait, Biden, Biden, Obama.
Like you just don't get it. Your hatred of Trump is so blinding that you can't understand that people like me may not like him, but the other side isn't appealing either.
OK, you don't like, say, carrot cake, so you vote to eat rat poison instead! I'd love to give you heaps of tasty pesto on perfectly al dente fusilli -- or whatever you crave for dinner. But that's not on the menu today.
I'm sorry, but for "interesting" reasons, those are the only two alternatives right now.
We can discuss the "interesting" reasons later, but you won't like that truth ether.
Then think of your country, and the government, and your right to vote,. All are in jeopardy. Trump is no alternative whatsoever. Trump is a destroyer and a wrecking ball. There is only one choice in this election, and that is Harris.
They're not wrong.
Ignoring problems doesn't magically make them go away.
The problem with this comment is the same problem the Harris campaign has. You're blaming the other side not saying why they should vote for Harris. Its the "basket of deplorables". They won't vote for Harris because there's something wrong with them, not her.
Two things can be true at once. Harris can have a bad campaign and there also be a lot of people who are not voting because she's black or a woman (or both).
I could care less about her race or her gender.....she is just an awful candidate that did not earn her "spot" and who will be an even more awful president....it is that simple
I certainly hope she gets a chance to prove you wrong.
DEI candidate: Didn't Earn It.
CRT has joined the room.
Without a doubt. But a good campaign should be able to overcome some of that at least three 1 or 2% that seems to make the difference. Look at Obama. Despite all the Birther stuff and claims he was a Muslim and everything else he still won.
Were you paying attention?
Check out the economic crash that the R's had to fight against.
The Ds got to 60 seats in the Senate.
You're saying the only reason Obama won was because of the recession in 2008? It was a clean slate, no incumbent. The OP was that Harris is losing because she's a woman of color. She doesn't have to win 365 electoral votes like Obama, just 270. She's running a poor campaign.
Yes about Obama. Or that and Palin to be precise, but McCain picked Palin because he needed a miracle and thought there were Hillary voters he could pick up. Given the state of the economy, the fact that Obama only won the popular vote by 7.2% is a good indication. The Ds won the House popular vote by 10.6%.
As to Harris and her "poor campaign", I just don't see it. The tilt in the electoral college is hard for Ds, and the fake news undercurrent is hard to fight.
Also of course, VP's rarely win a straight up election from the VP office. Other than the first 2 ("Founding Fathers" who were technically 2nd place candidates for President), there have been just two.
All the other VPs who became President did so after a break or after the death or resignation of the President.
I love it. That's it! You've got it ---- there's nothing wrong with your candidates, just with the voters! Please, please run the next 14 presidential campaigns on that basis, please?
If these bigotries are baked in to the American electoral system, maybe… don’t run a candidate who is in those categories when Democracy itself is on the line? Run an all-American white male to safeguard our future, and run more diverse candidates in the future when it’s safer.
An all-American white male -- like with initials JB? Yep, that worked... but barely.
And dontcha think JB lost a ton of sleep over his commitment to pick a black, female veep. It seems that he intended, way back then, to run again if we hadn't buried the threat in 3 years. He just forgot about Father Time... or hoped Father Time would forget about him. How'd that work out?
Is Joe Biden the last white male in the Democratic Party? There’s no one under 80 who fits that description?
Yes. Lists of future Dem candidates are either black or ----- not really male.
Vance, on the other hand, he's so white he even has blue eyes. Are blue eyes still legal in this country? I asked that on another forum and someone answered, "Yes, but I'm pretty sure it's racist."
Generation Seinfeld.
Thinks a barely witty retort is a substantial argument.
Thank you, CJ in SF. I know that's the best I'll hear from you, so I treasure it. [:-)
It was basically Biden's own decision -- and such a bad decision that it may undo all the good that he did with the Senate that Trump handed him on a silver platter In GA).
Of course, he did a lot of non-legislative good too. I just hope that there is such a thing as honest history being written in the near future, so we can hear details. He was truly one of the most remarkable presidents since... FDR! No not "one of". But like the other remarkable one, he had a fatal flaw that might undo it all... hubris!
Interesting point!! I think you may have just explained for me why Kamala didn't choose Shapiro to be her running mate, assuming he would have agreed. Baked-in antisemitism, in this country, better to wait, they may have thought.
Actually there are a lot of us who don't like or trust Harris. Has nothing to do with race or gender. I'd love to vote for a woman I felt was actually qualified and who had a real vision for the future beyond "joy". The fact that you put it down to the fact that its because of racism or misogyny is exactly why the left keeps losing these kinds of political races. When you throw anyone who disagrees with you over policy, etc., and say yeah, its really because of this, people not only tune you out, but get seriously tired of it. I don't like Trump the man. In previous elections I once voted 3rd party and once pulled the lever for him but quietly for fear of being labeled by someone like you who actually doesn't seem to be interested in the real reason many voters will vote for him. I'm over the labeling thing now. I'm tired of the left calling everyone who disagrees with them somehow a racist, transphobe, climate denier. None of all are true, but happy to give the middle finger to those who seem to think it is so.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but anyone who ever pulled the Trump lever is not thinking clearly, even about their own self-interest, much less the country or world.
It has nothing to do with political disagreement -- it's a fact. He will pull us and the world into a major depression (with his tariffs, which he can enact without Congress). He will turn Ukraine over to Putin in a month... and if that doesn't bother you, then do you doubt that Poland, etc are next. Is that in YOUR interest? Oh, the Atlantic is a wide, wide ocean, but...
Not to mention the truly unthinkable -- that madman's finger on the nuclear trigger, just craving to show the world the size of his...
And jailing his political opponents. Oh, that's just a joke... campaign oratory, eh? Ask Comey. McCabe. Vindman.
Well, no problemo -- JD Vance will be president in less than a year... sooner if Musk, Thiel etc can get the 25th amendment deployed.
Let me remind you -- first they came for the trade unionists, and I did not protest because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Communists... and I didn't protest because I was not one of them either. Then the homosexuals, ditto. And then the Jews, double-ditto.
And then they came for me... and there was no one left to protest for me!
And who made you G-d to determine that all those who voted for Trump are "not thinking clearly"....this is what is wrong with those who are voting Harris....absolutely no respect for anyone who thinks differently....I voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and will in 2024 and if you ask anyone who knows me, they will tell you I am the most informed and clear thinking person they know :)) Please stop demonizing those of us who think differently than you....we can vote differently but still respect one another....I am a Democrat who loved Bill Clinton....the last Democrat I ever voted for....even he when campaigning for Harris he said what a Trump voter wanted to hear when he was talking about illegals murdering US citizens .... he said something to the effect that they needed to be vetted better....DUH!!!!! See Bill knows best :))
Vetting requires funding. Too bad the Rs don't want to pass that bill.
If you are a single issue voter based only on the statistically insignificant amount of crime by "illegal" aliens, you are of course welcome to do so.
But it is hardly an argument that you are a deep thinker.
I think it's kind of telling that better educated people vote disproportionately for Democrats. Don't you?
Sheila -- can you demonstrate clear thinking about tariffs. To start, what is a tariff and who pays it.
Just for context, I hear Trump saying that someone in China pays the tariffs that the US imposes on, say, steel made in China. Does he say that? Is it true?
Trump seems to be counting on a lot of revenue from tariffs -- his "most beautiful word in the language" -- to pay for the tax goodies he is promising. Is that true? I think he said that in front of the Black correspondents' event.
Because he writes paragraphs on here and thinks he is smart
David, must be nice to be so smart.
David is a hell of a lot smarter than some people here. He is absolutely right on his view of the world and this election. Painful, but true. 82 yo, here, seen a lot. At this point, I consider Trump the most dangerous man on the planet. We elect him at our peril. I won't live to see all the destruction but many of you will.
How is Harris not qualified? Details please. She has many years of experience in elected office.
Oh please....I am from California and she never had to do much to get elected....she fit the bill...woman of color....that is all she wrote
You’re ridiculous. It’s very hard to raise the kind of money you need for even the lowest levels of elected officials. I know highly qualified people from UC Law SF (same law school as Harris) who ran campaigns and failed miserably.
You think that is the reason because that is all you see when you look at Harris.
Provide us with a list of 5 clearly better qualified VPs Biden should have picked.
Pretty sure they were just saying some voters are being influenced by their own biases, not that all trump voters are bigots.
I think their claim that it's the most explicitly bigoted election is tough just because of the lack of counterfactual, but there's a pretty strong case for, as you say, lots of people not wanting to vote for someone who, compared to someone selling themselves as fighting for you, is, as you say, running on a platform of "joy".
Her campaign feels like it's starting to emulate a sign I saw earlier "Trump Safety, Kamal Crime", which is basically the Harris campaign: "we're the good guys, trust us because we're the good guys and don't vote for them, the bad guys" with absolutely nothing substantive to back it up.
I've seen a few minutes of trump speaking. He's an idiot. I don't need to see anymore
Plus -- the implications of #1 and #2 for polling error. Pollees may have gotten over their Trump-shyness -- reluctance to admit voting for Trump to pollsters.
But I bet they are not over their racism shyness, and misogyny shyness -- admitting to pollsters (or themselves) that they just can't vote for a woman or a black. Or, they need to hear more!
So unless the pollsters have put a very heavy thumb on the scale to "correct" for recent misses, they are badly underestimating Trumps' vote share, particular shy racists and shy misogynists.
Remember thee 2008 election joke. Pollster at the doorway of a rural redneck house, housewife standing in the doorway. Pollster, clipboard in hand -- "who are you voting for? Housewife turns and yells out into the house -- Hey, Pa, who we votin' for? Unseen Pa yells back -- we're voting for the n----r!
And why are they votin' for the n----r? Because the economy was utterly melting down in the middle of the campaign.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is how and why we got our first black president -- and probably last for a long, long time. It may have been an incredible candidate and a brilliant campaign, but that's never been enough.
The thing is a lot of people vote based on their identity. People identify as a core identity based on race, religion, sex, country of origin (arabs, europe, israel) and vote. This has always been there. In 2020, my liberal neighbor said all women, immigrants, person of color, gays and all under represented identities should vote for Biden. This year she says they should all vote for Harris. Is she advocating all men specifically white men should vote for Trump? Democrats created this identity politics and they cannot have it both ways.
White men are only 30% of the population In the US
Wasn't it the Teamsters that were to endorse Biden with nearly 70% of their membership voting for him, but when Kamala was introduced with no change in support for the union, they decided not to endorse as only 35% of the membership supported her?
How is that explained? The only variable that changed is from white man to black woman.
Biden is from Pennsylvania and before the last 3.5 years, he was pretty moderate.
Kamala has a past that is not moderate at all. It isn't that difficult.
Whoa there. If Harris is saddled with a "5% bigotry deficit" (with "plenty of studies" to back this up, as you assert), then 𝑤ℎ𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑠 𝑠𝑜 𝑓𝑜𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑎𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑜𝑠𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑠 𝐵𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛'𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡?!
Do you suppose that they were they unaware of these studies?
Or do you suppose that they really don't care about the prospects of a second Trump term? After all, in these intensely polarized times with razor-thin margins in elections, a loss of 5 percentage points in the popular vote spells doom.
It was situational... stirred into the batter from the moment Biden committed to a black female veep, and then baked when -- somehow -- Trump survived and rose again. We can discuss why that happened another day.
Gee, David, welcome to 2008. Barack Obama covered 2/3 of those characteristics and won the presidency… twice. And neither Harris nor Obama are ‘black’ in the traditional sense, so get over yourself. The long and the short of it is that one of these two absolutely horrible candidates will end up being president, and the more that Harris/Walz try to define themselves, the more the public reels from their clumsy efforts. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
I could never understand this. Is she black or Asian? Should black people vote for her or should Asian people voter for her?
And poor you ... Must be lonely hunting for Slaw to vote for.
Is this a racist statement?
Black and Latino men aren't voting for Kamala Harris because she is a woman.
I'll hang up and listen.
"Racist statements" are not the issue. Racist motives for voting are. And politicians explicitly leveraging racist motives to win power are racist tactics, whether the politicians are racist themselves.
And bottom line, using racist tactics to win power are -- at least -- playing with fire. At worst, they are tearing the nation apart for personal gain -- financial, emotional, ideological gain.
If it's not obvious to you that Trump is in the latter category, at least on financial and emotional grounds, then we really have no basis for discussion -- that is a basic fact, and there is no alternative fact.
I sincerely wish you a good and happy life, but please, not at the expense of so much more suffering in a world already suffering enough.
You can't just say things are a fact and then hang up the phone.
Bye Felicia
I'm still here, Felicia. (Nice name -- I assume you know what it means.)
Anyway, do you deny that Trump is explicitly, intentionally and persistently leveraging widespread racist motives in the electorate to win power? That he is activating, stoking and then leveraging such motives rather than trying to calm them?
And do you deny that Harris is trying to reduce racist motives among people, to bring them together rather than tear them apart?
Which do you want?
Totally agree. I've said from day one her being black and female are going to be her biggest hurdles. My belief is her biggest hurdle is being a female, or at least the type of female that she is. She doesn't appear strong, she appears unserious. I think color is secondary. Many women and a lot of men will not vote for a woman. That Harris doesn't appear to be a serious woman gives women more excuse to vote for the strong male, or at least what they perceive to be a strong male.
I love that I ratioed you in one sentence because no one is reading your crazy dribble.
Good work -- take a bow!
And let's meet for lunch on the other side... of the volcano!
Nate says of the Trump Agenda47 site: "Immigration bad! Inflation bad! Drill, baby, drill! At least there’s some sense of direction here. You can click along to the list of 20 promises." He contrasts the Harris issues page: "But of the four sentences, three are just talking about Harris’s credentials and values — not any substantive sort of agenda." When I scroll down a bit on https://kamalaharris.com/issues/ I see a list of ~20 issues with details at roughly the same specificity as Trump's offering. How are these pages (rhetorically) different in a way that supports Nate's argument?
If you look at the issues, it's the same 3 proposals Harris has been discussing for months ($3k child tax credit, $25k downpayment credit for first-time home buyers, $50k small business tax exemption), and the rest are just votes she cast as VP or bills that were passed during the Biden administration
He said "Shapiro"! Take a sip!
I thought we were doing shots, not sips!
This article just acknowledged no breaking news at all: what the media and Dems already quietly said and Reps loudly said about her during her entire vice presidency, which is that she’s an empty suit with no vision, ideas, or character
Baseless comment by someone who isn’t familiar with her
Also a sexist comment by Claire
lol explain how it's sexist, would love to hear
Because you present a negative fact about her without any evidence to back it up - in fact her whole career path indicates the exact opposite of what you are portraying.
You’re the one who tied my negative opinion to her gender, so your projection of that is inherently sexist. My criticism neither referenced her gender or based it on any female specific characteristic: you did that.
What?
Oh, I think she has character. Trump has zero character. Which is why he is so dangerous. It's the ideas and vision part that are a problem for Harris. She appears to have difficulty staying on point on focus. Drifts off into the ephemeral and esoteric far too often, does not answer questions with specific points. I'm voting for her because the alternative is unthinkable. But she is a frustrating candidate, of that there is no doubt.
Harris flip flopping is the epitome of lacking character.
Sorry, but the persuasion part of the campaign has been over for a while. There are few 'undecided' voters left anyway to be persuaded. Rather, there are far more voters who made up their minds, who may not vote because in every election, there are quite a few of those - for many different reasons. Usually, those voters are part of the group that doesn't usually vote.
Now, it's up to the campaigns to move those voter's butt off the couch and into the voting booth. Whichever campaign does that, wins. It's about execution at this point in time. The pundits had their say. Now, the campaigns infrastructure that sits behind the scenes has to show what it is made of.
Turnout operations matter in a big way. But at the end of the day, people are voting for candidate. Kamala Harris comes off as a sorority sister who failed up her entire life. Donald Trump comes off as a shady, ethically challenged lawyer.
I know who I'd rather have working for me if I'm pissed off and I want results.
What a sexist comment. Failed up? That’s ridiculous. She’s highly intelligent. She went to a great law school (same as mine, but a year before me, so I’m biased), was a leader there, won multiple difficult elections, for SF DA, CA DG, senate. Do you know how difficult it is to raise money for and win elections? You don’t get to where she is by failing up. She did an excellent job at each level of her career and was chosen to continue at the next election.
Pro tip, women can fail up just like men. The only sexist one here is you.
I was referring to the sorority sister part of the comment when I said it was m sexist. The rest of my reply addressed the failed up.
This is actually succinct and well said. Don't love Trump at all either, but like you, I know who I'd rather have working for me of the 2.
The flaw in that logic, is he is NOT working for YOU. Trump has no conception of what it means to be responsible for anyone other than himself.
Hopefully most here have lived long enough to be able to see through that.
If people in this country are that naive that they actually believe Trump will be working for them, I have a wonderful bridge they may want to buy. This is just shocking rationalization from what should be intelligent people.
This comment is nuts to me. Leaving anything we know about the candidates aside, if you asked me if I'd rather have a sorority sister or a shady lawyer in charge, I'd choose the sorority girl every time. Sorority girls get shit done. Lawyers are creeps who tell you lies and steal your money.
Well, that's why this is a great country. You and I can disagree on who's the best person to take us forward. I may not agree with who you think is a better choice to lead the nation, but, I still respect you and,I respect your choice.
I'm not even talking about the best candidate. I'm just saying your metaphor really doesn't work for me, because it's clearly intended to show the choice as a no-brainer. But I feel a deep mistrust of all lawyers and I love boss bitches who get shit done.
Trump isn't working for you, he's working to enrich himself
This is the exact type of article Nate should stay away from. Give me data, do not give me your own personal opinion on Kamala’s website. Not only is it horrible analysis based on nothing but it’s not why anyone is here. This is almost as bad as Nate’s article where he said Trump won the debate if you watched with your tv muted because he’s taller.
Nate is an awful pundit and an even worse epidemiologist. Unfortunately he’s become convinced he’s awesome at both.
Good analysis. One typo: "Of course, sometimes you do need to call in poker. A lot, in fact: there are occasions when it’s strictly a better play than calling or folding. " I think you meant "better play than raising or folding."
"Trump’s running a Billboard Lawyer campaign" funny juxtaposition, and very true.
Harris is a progressive populist and doesn't know how to take a principled stand on anything. It's too late for her to pivot away from that and she's incapable even if she had more time.
C’mon Nate, there’s a ton of policy info on Harris’s website. Just scroll past that first paragraph. Far more in depth than Trump’s.
Nate posts an article with his opinion.
Liberals on this site freak out, call others racist, call polls fake.
Liberals wonder why no one likes them.