This was Trump's election to lose if he remained the non-insane, semi-coherent version of himself that existed in the figment of imaginations of half the electorate. Unfortunately for him, that was never going to survive contact with reality for anyone but the cultists.
Politely pointing out that 0.6% could be significant is fine. That’s not my point. My point is, in a healthy Democracy with good epistemic institutions, going bonkers at a debate would make more than 1 in 300 voters change their mind.
Since the debate he seems to have decided to make immigrants eating cats and dogs his signature issue. He says it constantly, and JD too. So yes, that is bonkers and many of his supporters are saying so. That means that he would be doubling down on what lost him 0.6%, so it would possibly grow.
If you think a philandering, criminally convicted octagenarian who isn't allowed to own a charity in New York after using a child's cancer charity to funnel money to himself deserves to be president, you might be in a cult.
If you think the best man to deal with economic problems is someone who declared bankruptcy six times and has the single largest IRS loss deduction in US history after inheriting over a billion dollars, you might be in a cult.
If you create AI generated Rambo style images of an unfit old man who tried to overthrow a US election, and then decal it across your truck with an American flag background at great personal expense, you might be in a cult.
I'd be interested in LLM supported analyses of these hardened positions, maybe RAG'd against like button analyitcs...and wonder what would happen if like buttons cost $1 per click. 80M voters is a big cult. More cowbell.
Nah, no one said that. Plenty of honest disagreements out there. Trump, Texas A&M, 2015 WeWork, Scientology, and Gwyneth Paltrow are simply in a cult league of their own.
I liked "Grant" throwing A&M in there, too (especially since I'm a Georgia fan). But Gwyneth Paltrow? Did I miss something?
Also, a couple of counters to Nate's points:
1) She's the fresher face, and Trump has been on the ballot twice. So the incumbency penalty cuts both ways.
2) Whatever bump Trump got from Biden's debate and the assassination attempt is evaporating. We're reverting back to his normal, unpopular state.
3) More broadly, we don't know how Trump being a third-time candidate will affect the environment of the race.
For instance, his negatives were sky high in previous campaigns. But now they're inelastic: Fifty-three percent of voters view him unfavorably. That, together with Kamala almost breaking even on favorability, might eclipse all the circumstances that Nate lists in the story. Or might not.
While the economy and Biden's unpopularity are real drags for Harris, part of what's held her back is a lack of familiarity that nearly a third of voters have expressed for -- including a lot of undecideds. That actually could give her more room to grow than Trump in the final seven weeks.
I'm interested to see how Nate's forecast performs in this bizarre season. Seems to me the priors are fairly unprecedented -- it's like 52-card pickup.
Trump clearly hurt himself with his debate performance, but unless you want open borders, Woke social policies, rampant criminal behavior without punishment, extreme climate policy, projection of weakness to foreign adversaries, and an anti-Israel slant to foreign policy you have no other choice but Trump.
Clearly Chairman Xi clearly hurt himself with his performance at the plebiscite, but unless you want bourgeoisie Western capitalism, Taiwanese saboteurs running rampant without punishment, projection of weakness to the American horde, and the Southern territories to go without oil, you have no other choice but Xi.
They tried to pass tough border legislation. They’re against defunding the police. The big rival China is doubling down on solar and EVs while KH is supportive of fracking. so their environment policy is pretty centrist. They’re supporting Ukraine it its fight against Russia, and Biden openly would support Taiwan in a conflict.
I have no problem with conservatism, but KH hardly has a Marxist, dovish, anarchist platform. I’d say the current Dems are to the right of 2020 dems and roughly where Obama was during his terms.
You mean if you believe a complete liar, incompetent, fraudulent, unoath abiding, treasonous, philandering, felonious psychopath who’s done absolutely nothing for America besides causing fear, hate, chaos and division then you have no choice then to blindly put your “faith” (ironically) in voting for Trump. He didn’t fix immigration when he was the president before AND he had the republican majority in the house and senate for 2 years before Covid. He totally inherited a good economy from Obama because it went up between 2016 to 2017 before he became the “president”. I can’t understand why this is even a close race. I’ve never been so disgusted, ashamed and embarrassed to be an American in my life.
Democrats saw first hand in the June debate that Biden couldn't handle the job and forced him out. Republicans saw first hand on Tuesday (and every other day he's opened his mouth) and doubled down on conspiracy theories and blaming everyone but themselves.
Touche'. There is no legitimate answer to the question of why Dems bumped Biden but Repulicans don't have the balls to dump Trump. That's Dear Leader type stuff. right there...
Uh, because voters have actual grievances Trump addresses?
Immigration sucks, trannies are creepy ugly men, and most people who wore masks religiously during COVID should continue to do because you're ugly.
You see, it's more important to me that your life gets worse than mine gets better. We hate you just as much as you hate us. But unlike us, you *only* have soibois in the government to exert your power.
If this thing falls apart, the ensuing conflict will be *extremely* short. You're weak and you're worthless.
Really strange to give Biden as the example where Democrats are a cult. Cults don't force out their leaders. That's not how cults work. When the GOP forced out Trump because he's unelectable, then you will have a point
I regularly hear dissent from non-MAGA on their own politicians. You speak to a woke right MAGA supporter and say x or y Trump policy without attaching a name and they say how stupid it is. Then attach the name and they quickly fall in line. V obedient people. Very easy to manipulate too.
Would make excellent subjects for hypnosis, due to the blind following of Trumps Neorolinguistic programming speeches. Any cult leader who wants to increase their influence needs to look no further than the list of Republicans who voted for Trump. They’re not any different than the many other people/companies that Trump has duped over the years. The funny thing is that what they don’t know is that Trump himself considers them to be stupid suckers. Like McCain wasn’t a war hero. The large part of hypocritical, bullshit, bullying and conspiracy theories tells me that they’re more concerned about the sheer entertainment value that Trump brings to their lives not the policies that he doesn’t even talk about. I bet they’re still writing the network about canceling the Apprentice. That and FINALLY someone in leadership who tells them that they’re still good people even though they’re racist, chauvinist, homophobic, bullies that got picked on in High School and never went to college or enlisted in the military. But, yep, them er patriots all right. Fuck that constitution that is the very foundation of our country.
Yeah, one being interviewed by the comedian on The Daily Show said he’d still vote for him if he shot somebody on the steps of the White House. Then was asked if they were against abortion and said, “Yep, I’m pro-life. How fricking detached do you have to be?
Trump’s biggest mistake was the early debate. Might have been the worst political decision made in a presidential campaign. Had Biden still been in on September 10th we would have had a horrible debate and no time to swap out.
Trump then decided to keep doing what he was always doing after Butler. He could have toned down the dog whistles and called for unity. Nope, he decided to double down on this America is a hellhole rhetoric.
He still might win but right now he was very much up 28-3 and now the game is tied.
>He could have toned down the dog whistles and called for unity.<
Same pattern as during covid. He could have been the unifying, resolute leader leading the country in a fight against a deadly new disease. Would have picked up most of the persuadables and won a second term. Instead we got bleach injections and harassment of mask-wearers. He's just not that good at politics. Mainly, I think, because of deep-seated personality flaws that render him epistemically closed, and incapable of objectively grappling with reality.
I don't think you know what "victim blaming" means. If I say Trump is to blame for getting shot at, that's victim blaming. If I say that Trump failed to make the most of that incident, that's got nothing to do with blaming anyone for anything. It's just an analysis of what happened after the fact.
By a crazy libertarian registered Republican. The attempts to frame it as some sort of left-wing political assassination attempt are ludicrous just like everything else Trump related.
Uh, how can there be no mention of Kennedy's perfectly-timed drop-out when discussing Kamala's lack of convention bounce? It may have been a *little* unclear for a bit where his supporters would go, but the man endorsed Trump and essentially became part of his admin. It makes entirely too much sense that the majority of Kennedy's supporters jumped to Trump, and this is what blunted Kamala's convention bounce and is what's given Trump his current lead in Nate's prediction matrix.
Completely agree. - Kamala’s national polling average has held steady at 48 since the RFK Jr. drop out. Trump has gone from 45 to 47. From a high level, it looks as though RFK’s 4% went 2% to Trump and 2% to undecided. Kamala hasn’t made any gains with those voters.
You nailed it...I said that the other day...could not agree more...But this crowd are not here to look at the real polling numbers...Nate is their polling woobie - they, sadly, flock to him for reassurance. They talk past the things that they can't process by labeling them as "disinformation", or "conspiracy theories" or "cult-like"...the amount of intellectually dishonest discourse that goes on at Nate's waterhole is breathtaking. And you can tell by these lame responses how truly bad our educational system has failed the public especially among the liberal 25-39 crowd. Completely uncurious, unfailingly self-assured (Mommy and Daddy always told them they were the smartest ones in the room), and prone to irrational tantrums when the world they imagine turns out to be a mirage...Trump is going to win, and Nate's model is telling you that, because he's the best there is, right?!?...And I'll wait for your comments on Trump's behavior (I know they are coming)...but it's his policies and Kam-Bam's lack thereof, that makes this an easy one to call...Just watch. #47!
Do you really think he was going to map out a complete plan to overhaul the bloated and ineffective Obamacare fiasco, when Trump is in a debate against three people at once??? But's let's revert to her "true" answers - to what America really heard, shall we? First, David MUIR question: "Madam, Vice President, are people better off now than they were only 4 short years ago? KAM-BAM: "Well, you know I grew up in middle class family (A lie - both her parents where PhDs and she grew up in Canada, and went to school in Quebec at the most prestigious private school in Montreal) and I mowed my lawn in Oakland (ah...ok), and it's because of my completely contrived upbringing, David, that I believe we really need what I call an "Opportunity Economy" where everyone has their "fair share" of free imaginary things provided by the government! MUIR: Hmmm...sounds very, very intriguing, but couldn't that have been done ANY time in the last 3 and 3/4 years, since it sounds like such a great undefined plan? And what does an "Opportunity Economy "actually mean? KAM-BAM: Well, David, I am going to pretend to give people free things (vacant promises, actually) like free housing, free educations, free healthcare, free student loans - you name it. In fact, I'll keep promising free things to people as long as they vote for me - I don't actually intend to do anything FOR THEM, unless they are non-citizens. You get it, right? I'm buying their votes!!! MUIR: Sounds logical, devious and very well thought out, but, Madam Vice President, where will ALL that money come from, and won't ALL of these FREE things definitely make inflation go through the roof, AGAIN??? KAM-BAM: Look David, you weren't supposed to asked detailed questions remember? And you know I don't know crap about Economics - that's for my "team". Further, you know I've never ACTUALLY governed before, so to distract voters, what I like to say instead of concrete answers is that America "needs to be unburdened by what has been???" And if you look at this new Venn diagram, you'll see that I'm full of crap, chocked full of empty platitudes, and that I'm just trying to SAY NOTHING for 2 full minutes, while nervously smiling, and not being fact-checked, as we ALL planned before the debate. Remember??? So, how am I doing, David? MUIR: Well, Kamala, you know I love you, but I have two key following ups I have to ask. First, why is Donald Trump such a racist piece of garbage, and second do what to go to McDonald's with me and the ABC team after the debate to debrief in private on how our plan worked? KAM-BAM: I LOVE MickeyDs!!! I think you know that I pretended to worked there, and I actually have a another Venn diagram, which unveils the secret recipe for their fries!!! Actually, I'm just kidding, David - I'm a complete fraud, I never worked at McDonald's - I'm Vegan...Duh!!!! (Cackling) Muir: I know that, you smarmy trickster - You're such great scammer, Kamala - it just makes you all the more JOYOUS. Can I hug you?
Trump may win, sure! And Kamala Harris may win! It's probably a coin toss right now. But the former president has been making myriad mistakes (maybe re-read the article?), which have eroded his position as "fairly strong favorite" to "fighting for his political life."
(Actually, he's not really fighting. More like, "mailing it in as his political life drains away").
Nate's "article" was an explanation to his liberal following, of all the reasons they should not lose hope in the face of horrible data that his own model is tellign the world ...Every Captain of a sinking ship always tells the bailing deckhands everything is going to be fine or else they stop bailing and the ship sinks faster...get out your life preservers, mates!..it's gonna get wet really wet for ya'll!
Trump has policies? Where, what, when? The only policies he speaks is fear, hate, racism, division, chaos, 2025 and revenge against his adversaries. There’s no intellectual plan, just lies, deception and propaganda.
That's funny...Kam-Bam is about to roll out her 3rd attempt to explain her economic vision to America because the first two times her own party said it SUCKED - like Soviet style price controls, insane taxing on unrealized gains which Dem fat cat donors told her was a NO GO...so after the disaster on Ophra, she's now being trotted out once again for a DO-OVER. Also, if a person lies about working at McDonalds in high school (no record whatsoever - anywhere...hmm) then they are not going to believe your are going to build them a new home - American's are not stupid. And let's not forget, that she has been in office for 3 1/2 years and she MUST embraced that record, which lead to the highest inflation in 40 years and now groceries are 21% higher, gas is 40% higher and housing and rent are through the roof. She is actually asking America, incredibly, to give her a promotion for MASSIVE failures. She was named Border Czar and then let in over 15MM illegals (with no plan at all) who are wreaking havoc on idiotic blue state sanctuary cities in the form of huge crime spikes and displacing American workers (many of them POC) in jobs, housing and school resources. So HARRIS has been a disaster. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Here are TRUMPS Policies: 1) Close the Border on DAY ONE 2) Deport illegals at massive levels because we can afford them in our country, 3) Make American companies produce their goods in the United States, 4) Declare drug cartels as terrorist organizations and then eleminate them with prejudice, 5) Project strength in Foreign Policy (Peace through Strength) - when Trump was in office we had NO WARS. Now we have the largest war in Europe since WW2 (Ukraine) and another in the middle East. We had Peace under Trump and dithering under Biden which emboldened our enemies, 6) Make all NATO countries pay their representative share of NATO, so the US is not footing the entire bill for their security in Europe, 7) Take care of our veterans, who have been sent to the back of the line by Biden in favor of illegal aliens, 8) Leave the abortion issue to be decided at the state level, where voters can actually vote on it based on their local morals (and I'm pro-choice and agree with this) 9) Lower taxes FOR ALL AMERICANS, as he did the first time in office for 67% of people, which GRTEATLY GREW THE ECONOMY, 10) Grow our military and eliminate TOXIC DEI programming, 11) Overturn any insane law that allows Men in women's bathrooms or allows Men to play in women's sports...You sound like a fairly uninformed liberal, who probably will not have read this far, but if you did, I suggest you open your eyes, turn off MSNBC (A toxic America hating network) and start reading and viewing a variety of news so that you can become a much more informed voter...YOU CAN DO THIS...Memorize the Trump policies I just provided you, as a start! Good luck!
Well, you have definitely decided to drink the cool-aid. Do some fact checking and then get back on and share something intelligent. The media doesn’t speak about many of the most important facts. Read articles that are not subjectively politically biased. Take the time to get real information. The man doesn’t know what he’s doing. What the real economic consequences of his policies are. In addition, how can he uphold his oath to office when he obviously has such disregard for the constitutional law. I can’t understand for the life of me, why people have not acknowledged the many, many crimes that he’s committed. Both the ones he’s lost and the upcoming ones regarding trying to overturn the vote in multiple ways, in multiple states, then the riot at the capitol. It’s a fact not an opinion. You have every right to your own opinion, but you don’t get to choose the facts. We are in a bizarrely world never experienced in our lives. News isn’t news it’s purely entertainment. Like no one is covering the FACT that the immigrants that have come in ACTUALLY have an extreme benefit to the country’s economy that totally outweighs any financial support they receive. We don’t have the number of workers needed to pay the current cost of social security benefits. Immigrants pay fed/state/local taxes, yet can never receive social security benefits. In fact, the number of immigrants that continue to receive welfare or other government assistance is far, far less than the number of Americans that receive assistance. The cost of deporting all of the immigrants is not only immoral, but would certainly create an even greater deficit and quite possibly an economic crisis. Something does have to happen at the border. I agree, but if it’s so damn important for republicans, why didn’t Trump accomplish more when his first two years of presidency he had majority Republicans in the House and Senate? Why did he instruct Republican Senators to kill what was a bipartisan bill to help resolve the issue back in Feb? How can his followers conveniently forget and/or ignore all of crimes that he has committed AGAINST America? We have so very much to lose if he wins and the sad and ignorant fact is it will be because people believe his multiple, constant lies and the lies of Faux News.
The Republicans put forth the first border bill and passed it in the HOUSE called HR2. It closed the wide open border and then dealt with immigration nd deportation. IT PASSED IN THE HOUSE and then CHUCK SCHUMMER KILLED IT...DEAD ON ARRIVAL...Where do you get your NEWS???
The "bipartisan bill" had ONE REPUBLICAN from OKLAHOMA, and did not have anywhere near the votes to pass the SENATE OR THE HOUSE, and importantly THE BILL SUCKED. SO that is a HUGE distraction for MSNBC to trot out there but its NOT REAL. They fooled you! Importantly, IT WOULD HAVE ALLOWED 5,000 MIGRANTS A DAY, WHICH IS 2 MILLION PER YEAR - FOREVER, and no added border security - just more "agents" to process more paperwork. I read the bill!!! Who the hell is going to pay for all of these people? There is not plan, they have no food, no homes, nothing - they just being dumped into the country randomly and they are committing a TON of crimes. 67% of ALL crime in Queens, NY is now MIGRANT CRIME -WTFU!!!! So, yes, Trump did not support it so that he could work with Congress to create a better bill - not a crap-ass bill, or ANY BILL, but a GOOD bill that finishes the WALL and restores the TRUMP policies like: Remain in Mexico, stricter asylum, and Title 42...and so on and so on. Biden overturned 73 aspects of Trumps secure wall on his first DAY!!!! WTF!!! And then the FLOOD GATES OPENED...Look it up, Tiger!
You clearly are the "prime" DEM voter - Naive, only top level awareness of the news but nothing too deep and no understanding of the actual details, and very passionately committed to "the cause" - which Dems told us in 2017 was "THE RESISTANCE", which I take as treasonous, but that's my opinion. Soon Trump will be in office (he will) and I hope you start to see the light and understand you are a pawn in a big machine, that has been lied to and manipulated, and that must leave you with an empty, sick feeling that you have let yourself, your family and your country down...Because the DEMs offer you only empty promises and while DJT is not perfect...we knows how get things done. IKO is sad for you...it's gonna be a LONG 12 YEARS AHEAD!!!
IKO MIGRANT UPDATE: YOU might like this one too KRISTA - Brutal details on a the "extreme benefit" THAT MIGRANTS are SHARING WITH ALL OUR CITIZENS - IMAGINE WHAT SHE WAS THINKING AS A 12 YEAR OLD WHILE BEING ABUSED FOR TWO HOURS BEFORE SHE WAS LEFT FOR DEAD LIKE GARBAGE! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jocelyn_Nungaray
ASK LAKEN RILEY WHO WAS WHILE JOGGING ON CAMPUS AND WAS BRUTALLY RAPED AND THEN HAD HER SKULL BASHED IN WITH A ROCK TO THE POINT OF HER BEING UNRECOGNIZABLE, IF THE MIGRANT SCUME WHO DID THAT WAS PROVIDING AN "EXTREME BENEFIT"... That was probably not covered on Rachel Madow. Or JOSELIN NUNGAARY, WHO WAS 12, AND WAS GANG RAPED FOR TWO HOURS BEFORE SHE WAS STRANGLED TO DEATH AND THEN THROWN IN A RIVER - WAS THAT ANOTHER "EXTREME BENEFIT" TO THE COUNTRY??? Who the HELL is sick? IKO says you are SICK PUPPY and NEED SOME COUCH TIME, LADY! I hope you never get harmed by a migrant, because this is just the beginning. IKO is shocked!!! https://nypost.com/2024/10/11/us-news/laken-riley-murder-suspect-jose-ibarra-appears-in-court/
The "bump" concert is based on the A minus B math, and much of the data comes from the time when the opposing party kept out of the news the week of the convention.
In this case, both Harris and Trump went up.
Rear view mirror stuff now. Nate's model is just a model after all.
>>>For instance, she is ahead in Wisconsin by 2.1 points according to Nate’s own polling average, but he has Trump as a slight favorite to win that state. Which means right now, Harris is being dinged by at least 2.1 points in his model. Something just isn’t right<<<
Even *beginning* to make sense of the subtleties of Nate's model is well beyond my pay grade, I'll readily admit. But Nate says something to the effect of: national numbers affect his model's take on state numbers, and vice-versa. The *heavy* advantage enjoyed by Trump in the Electoral College suggests he's got a very solid shot at victory if he's behind by only 2.1 points in the national popular vote. Recall, Biden beat Trump by 4.3 points in the national popular vote in 2020, and STILL came within a 40K vote shift from losing the election! To put it another way, if Trump holds Harris's margin to around two points, he's likely to flip multiple swing states won by Biden in 2020. Maybe one of those states would be Wisconsin.
There's also the margin of error in state polls to consider.
So, my layman's interpretation is something like: in tight swing state contests, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted with respect to the polls given the tightness of the national numbers, and given the fact that the election is still seven weeks away. For the record, (1) I'm voting for Harris; (2) I'm not at all morose about her chances (she could win!); (3) I'm also not *confident* about her chances (Trump could win!). For both candidates, the race appears eminently winnable, and lose-able.
Niki Haley was correct when she said “the first party to get rid of it’s 80 year old candidate will win”
The country has Biden fatigue and Trump fatigue and Trump’s racist/ Putin loving rants and overall craziness makes me wanting this over soon The whole think is stressful to the country Trump needs to go away
Certainly hope there's a hidden anti-Trump vote out there. Otherwise we're looking at becoming Venezuela, incumbent marshalling military, refusing to leave office, election winner fleeing the country. Don't think it can happen? It will. And, his Ace in the Hole is the Supreme Court..
All the reasons Nate mentioned, not the least of which is it's the economy stupid. I've been negative on Harris's chances from the beginning. Big strike against her is she female. A fair amount of the white male working class vote would go her way if if she had a different gender. People often don't operate on facts, but on their gut. Many men will not vote for a woman. If the women and the young people do not turn out in the important States she will lose. And I'm sick just thinking about it.
I'm glad you clearly mentioned that while Trump *should* be losing horribly, given who he is, but that didn't stop 2016 or 2020 either. So many comments on your posts about losing faith in your models because they aren't proclaiming a Kamala wins.
People seem to forget that Trump lost in 2020 by 43K votes total (the difference in the three states that put Biden over the top) and not in a landslide. Biden won the popular vote by 4.5%. The tipping point state was 0.63%.
And all of this happened with Biden having significantly better swing state polling.
You are entirely correct! The Electoral College is a cancer that should be cut out with extreme prejudice. It is absurd to have a country where the minority gets to rule. Other examples are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Or pre-genocide Rwanda.
I appreciate the idea of balancing small state interests against large state interests but now the EC just favors one kind of small state. I think if we uncapped house seats again so that it can properly represent large states again and every state gave out its EVs proportional to vote share, we'd have something like a sane version of the electoral college, but we're never getting that. I hope we get some kind of reform in my lifetime, but that kind of hinges on Trump losing this year and not being able to throw out any election he doesn't like in future.
I arrived at this conclusion a few years ago and nothing since has changed my mind yet. I am so jealous of countries with election seasons that are 3 months long.
Balancing large and small state's interests is done by each state getting two Senators.
The "state's winner gets all EC votes" hurts voters in states in which one or the other party dominates, but does so without regard to the state's size.
Polls were really bad in 2020 so can’t just assume they will be equally wrong and to the same side. 2020 was also a very strange year with the pandemic, etc. I think anyone that is confident in the race being anything other than a coin flip is probably deluding themselves.
The basic liberal "theory" of how to beat Trump is to just show people who he is, and let people abandon him over time.
That theory is not without *any* merit, I mean, people are still figuring it out and abandoning him in 2024, just not in large enough numbers to make this an *actually* viable strategy.
Yep. If Trump loses this election, I will be surprised. Biden had much more of an advantage at this time 4 years ago. Harris is much too close in the popular vote to win in the Electoral College. Sad. Ironically, with the Electoral College the game is indeed rigged. Against the Democrats.
If we lived in a real democracy Trump would never had been President. The whole discussion we have around being up by 4-5 points and losing is insanity. And before people start defending the EC we all know the GOP would be trying to destroy it if they had the majority of the popular vote and lost elections.
Exactly. There's a reason we don't have pure popular vote on everything, but when you get a result that out of line with the will of the people it is just bad. I can already see the "tyranny of the majority" people typing their replies here. Please, before you do that, consider that there are so many ways to balance majority/minority rule and so many of them make so many people so much happier than this shit.
I was thinking, maybe instead of doing away with the EC it would be more feasible to propose something where if a candidate wins the EC but loses the popular vote that that president has to share some power, aka make that presidency "weaker" somehow (since we are amending the constitution anyway skys the limit). Like have the VP candidate of the other side be the VP, and give the VP extra senate votes or something.
My comment was in response to Nate’s claim that we live in a democracy. We don’t so far as electing a President is concerned.
Second, there are ways to effectively eliminate the undemocratic aspects of the EC without a Constitutional amendment. Lookup the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Did you look it up? Probably not. First, the Constitution specifically gives states the power to cast their EC votes in any manner they determine. That’s how some states allocate their EC by Congressional District and others don’t. 100% constitutional. And states representing about 180 EC votes have enacted it. If those states passed it into law that means their legislatures agreed to it, doesn’t it.
Your post argues from emotion. You don’t have a single valid reason why it won’t work.
I guess I’m one of those dumb Dems who think the economy is better. I do have way more in savings than I did four years ago, my annual income is up and when I sold my home I made a killing.
Everyone in my near and extended family is employed and doing well.
I do remember the Trump years, the empty shelves, the hospitals where you couldn’t get treatment, nurses walking, doctors and nurses being abused and even assaulted. Great times Nate
Unlike you, most Americans live on credit, and the cost of financing has shot up an enormous amount under Biden. Coupled that with inflation, and your average paycheck-to-paycheck American is upset.
You mean Covid when you say “Trump years” and you mean one Trump year, 2020. He could have perhaps handled it better, but he didn’t create and release Covid.
No he didn’t, he did constantly lie to his constituents (us) and when he got Covid instead of issuing a statement on it and its potential severity he did his best to downplay it because of his enormous insecurity.
also i wish more people discussed how our inflation was way lower than the rest of the worlds while growing our economy far more. The magic world where the US saw no inflation despire all of our trading partners seeing insane inflation just doesn't exist. The Biden admin saving us from being in a much worse place is genuinely commendable, the global environment they inherited is not their fault. It's like blaming someone for a natural disaster when they ran the recovery better than anyone else could.
I agree. This is the misinfo T sold, thanks to the hi inflation he helped create with the tax cut to please who dint need it, and the mis-managed covid that depressed inflation, that also resulted in most of the 1.1 million deaths.
Biden did allow this "sell" without defending it, fearing it is difficuult to communicate. B even saved the US and the world from plunching into a disastrous recession that everyone and his uncle predicted. He achived a miracoulus soft landing - taming the infaltion to 2.5%, adding over 15 million jobs! We are the envy of the world. I realize, people suffer from inflation badly. But it cud have been much much worse! Are we just thankless?
Forgot to mention that T was handed an an envuable economy and rate of inflation.
Look, on one hand, I get it. Mandatory "sensitivity" seminars, when done poorly, are pretty frustrating to sit through. But to think that Trump would in any way end these is just silly. In fact, it's pretty easy to see that a president who brags about sexual harassment and who paints immigrants with a broad brush might inspire professional organizations - you know, businesses that have to be inclusive to survive and thrive in a 21st century economy - to *create more* of these trainings. Trump probably isn't the solution folks seek because he's part of the cause.
You're telling me you have to sit and listen for an entire seminar? MULTIPLE seminars? And consider that there are people out there with different lives and backgrounds than you?
Someone please think of the children, the dogs and cats!
I like how little context this comment contains. Why does Connor have to attend mandatory DEI seminars at work now? Did Connor say something bigoted to someone else? Or is this more of a thing his work is just doing, and Connor believes this is because of Kamala Harris? Or maybe Connor believes Harris will make it a requirement for everyone across the country to attend DEI seminars, and he's frustrated at this coming requirement that he does not want?
Hard to say. Connor, feel free to weigh in on why you need to attend mandatory DEI seminars at work now, and then we can decide for ourselves whether that seems to be related to Kamala Harris in any way, shape or form.
I think Connor is saying that he hates that he has to live in a multicultural society, and he wants to vote for the person that makes him feel good about his racist thoughts and feelings.
I mean, I think omnicause DEI re-education is laughable bullshit (mostly well-meaning, but bullshit all the same). However, I don't think Connor's employer is doing this because Joe Biden told them to. If anything, the surge in Kendi-ist nonsense *came under Donald Trump*.
Presumably that a lot of people are offended by being asked to think about why white men have more money and power than everybody else, and what might be other ways to run a society. Obviously without knowing exactly what goes on in those seminars, I can't say if it's productive or divisive. But many people simply dismiss the idea out of hand.
And yet, blind interview studies show that people react differently to the same inputs when those inputs have a different name at the top of the resume. Asking people to be aware of that isn't a problem in my opinion, especially in a workforce.
lol, the responses to this comment are the perfectly encapsulation for anyone outside the United States why leftism is unpopular here. They aren't just keyboard warriors, they're the most obnoxiously snide, wannabe intelligent, group of keyboard warriors the basements of this country have to offer.
How very 2016 of your company. Democrats defeated their woke left but the Republican woke right will control your bedroom. You can move job, we can’t move country.
Great reason to throw out democracy. Luckily when Trump crashes the market and you get laid off you won't ever have to sit through any more meetings about respecting your coworkers.
I don't disagree with anything you say here, but the forest-view meta-point is also worth mentioning: this was the *GOP's* election to lose and if they do lose it will be because they nominated a below-replacement level candidate when any non-descript governor with half a track-record and half a clue on the debate stage would likely have wiped the floor with either Biden or Harris.
It's the presidentialization of an effect that has clobbered the GOP in the Senate for a decade now: nominating candidates in primaries who sit too far outside of normal to win winnable general elections. Just a laundry list of would-be Senate winners sitting on the sidelines since 2010: Castle, Lugar, Strange, Norton, Lowden, Brunner, etc. Corey Stewart continually winning GOP primaries in VA on confederate-flag platforms until Youngkin is more of the same.
To whatever degree Trump blows this election that he could have won, the GOP blew it twice as badly by not finding a way to nominate a non-Trump candidate.
That’s the other side of the equation. Part of the GOP’s problem has been bad candidates who have won their primaries and blown winnable races. The other half has been strong candidates who have either retired or not bothered because it was too much of a headache to run in a GOP primary in this environment. It’s been true in many senate races, and this presidential one, too.
Kemp is smart enough to stay out of the way until Trump passes.
If Trump is out of the way in '28, the GOP will have a deep bench of great candidates--Kemp, Haley, Youngkin, and others. Although Kemp might run for Ossoff's Senate seat in '26.
Maybe, the one miscalculation there though is that he’s 60 now. My gut is telling me the next couple cycles, people are going to want to see younger candidates, and we’ll finally see some Gen X and maybe even some elder millennial candidates.
Quick comment. I don’t have a Twitter account. Haven’t had one since 2020. Would it be at all possible for Nate to post his tweets on Substack notes as well?
He does sometimes, but it seems a little inconsistent. One potential reason is he sometimes seems to adopt a much more combative, almost trollish persona on Twitter (something he’s basically admitted as intentional… he seems to have a sort of “when in Rome” attitude about it). Whereas on Substack he tends to be a little bit more even keeled.
I'm sure Nate's a busy guy, esp. when it's just him and 1 partner running Silver Bulletin.
Why ask for special favors that take more of his time when all you need to do is just set up an anonymous Twitter account for free, follow him & selected others of your choice there, and see his stuff there? No one's forcing you to participate on Twitter or to click the terrible "For You" tab in your Twitter feed.
As for the difference in his (or anyone's) persona on Twitter vs. other platforms, it's really a matter of change-of-venue enabling different facets of a personality to express itself.
In a bar it's quite reasonable for occasional clearly-audible "shit" and "fuck" to pop up in the conversational flow.
I know it’s just the two of them. I thought there would be a software/app where you could auto post tweets to Substack. Point well taken. His notes and his model talks are sufficient enough for me to stay a paid subscriber. I just get a little greedy at times.
Not a lot of people out there who are able to share poll insights without bias like Nate does.
As a paid subscriber I"m getting REALLY tired of the more and more open Trump bashing. Not on how he and his team have handled the campaign, this part: "Isn’t Trump a little nuts? (Completely.) How can voters re-elect Trump after his first term, which culminated in a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and wrecked the economy and the fabric of everyday life? (It must be the media’s fault!)". That's just rubbish, as though Trump was to blame for the pandemic happening (lol). It's your site Nate so do what you want, but this kind of thing is a marked shift from before and it looks like the Silver Bulletin has decided to join the truly *endless* ranks of biased media. The sole reason I had subscribed is that there's extraordinarily few places you can get pretty even-handed coverage and data, and I'm *incredibly* disappointed the Silver Bulletin isn't one of those places anymore. Will give it another week or two to see how the coverage goes and then almost certainly cancel subscription. I don't like FiveThirtyEither's actual forecast, but they've done a *tremendous* job btw of presenting moderate coverage in their podcast
"Moderate" journalism isn't saying good things about both sides or balancing the good/bad. It's about reporting facts. It can be objectively and factually true that one candidate has done better/worse things that the other. Reflecting that is not bias.
Only one candidate talked about immigrants eating pets. Only one candidate is a convicted felon who is facing more trials. Only one candidate was impeached for trying to overturn an election and sending a mob to the Capitol. Stating these facts is not bias. And, no, there is nothing comparable that the other candidate has done that is even in the same ballpark to bring up.
Very sensible reflection, completely spot-on with regard to the facts.
What the comment appears to fail to understand is that the underlying issues that matter to the voters, particularly on the Trump side, are SO deep -- for them -- that none of the surface-level bad facts (about Trump) matter to them.
They will vote for Trump regardless of his obvious character and personality flaws because he is more likely to address the underlying issues that matter to his base, period.
Perceived excessive and/or uncontrolled immigration. Weak and/or fiscally-irresponsible foreign policy under the Dems, i.e. the Afghanistan collapse/fleeing, spending hundreds of billions on the Ukraine proxy war, weaksauce response to Houthis interfering with an important oceangoing trade route. Perceived excessive focus on DEI, with the "E" perceived as a stand-in that actually means "equality (of OUTCOMES) and or equitable RE-distribution of wealth/privilege.) Weak & self-destructive long-term energy policy, i.e. cancelling Keystone XL for example. Pandering to the Democratic base by trying to cancel hundreds of billions in student loans -- a cost which is immediately & directly socialized to the rest of the country through inflation.
The laundry list above is the tip of the iceberg, really.
You are kidding yourself if you genuinely believe that Trump voters care about those issues, even mischaracterizing them the way that you did.
Trump supporters are reflexively anti-liberal. That's all they're in for or ever have been, going back decades now. Trump's contribution was to coalesce & codify this sentiment in an exciting and combative way, which I'll grudgingly give him credit for doing.
To the point of this article, however, he is losing the ability to do that and now is running as a derivative, Nu Metal version of the 2016 Trump. It still might work, but he's diminished and this election is harder for him than it should be.
"Trump voters" aren't a single bloc, any more so than "men," "women," "latinos," "asians" or any other broad group.
The depths of the Trump base are obviously highly visible and remarkable in a social-media kind of way, i.e. through their self-caricature. But that's just the dumb lower tier. The same as the dumb, egregiously self-caricaturing base on the left/democratic side.
I don't believe I'm kidding myself at all. I believe that I may have a better ability than many elucidate, enumerate and explain a few of the very complex sets of thoughts/feelings that ultimately cause Voter X to cast a ballot one way -- or the other. I don't think that "being able to elucidate/name/explain" is the same as "being able to think / form opinons."
It costs me time, effort, and franky a little bit of self-respect to even engage in political discussion. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of others with a similar capability for reflection are bothering to _waste their time_ engaging in public discourse? Perhaps I don't represent a "silent majority" but I bet it's at least a 10:1 ratio of those who have a similarly-held strong skepticism vs. willingness to speak about it.
I agree that this election is harder for Trump. I think that's for the same reason it would be for anyone in the upper tercile of life. He's 8 years older than he was in 2016. It's to his credit & health that he doesn't drink/smoke/do drugs, but he's chronically overweight and therefore at a major disadvantage in basic stamina.
Personally I'm doing the obvious, sensible thing that all centrist-ish voters are doing -- preparing myself to accept the consequences & changes that either election outcome will bring.
Of course it's just my opinion, but I very strongly believe that pontificating, screeching, exhorting and all other forms of expressing "Oh Noes, THis COuld BE the END of AMerica" are sound and fury, signifying nothing. That all of that will pass out of the short-attention-span news-and-pundit cycle within a couple months of the declared election result.
Trump's *core* supporters indeed are largely monolithic, certainly relative to other demographics. Pre-dating him, of course. They have been animated by a fundamental antipathy for the left. If you want to highlight the small sliver of Trump voters who vote for what they perceive as the lesser of two evils, then okay.
The self-caricatures on the right vastly outnumber those on the left, dominating their party while their leftward equivalents exist on the margins.
Trump's core generally do not engage in complex thoughts in terms of their political beliefs. Remember, many got off their couch for the first time to vote for Trump in 2016. Again, Trump marshaled these long-standing grievances and converted them into votes & in the process destroyed whatever was left of the intellectual right.
Ascribing complex motives to simple actors doesn't make you more reflective - just wrong
The fact that you see these concerns as "surface level" is why you can't see how foolish it is to expect Trump to address any issue at all with anything other than lip service.
It really is unfortunate that people believe these “deep” things are actually addressable by a single person, or that electing a president who hates the same things they do would fail to worsen the problems.
Trump publicly rants and rave about all sorts of Internet conspiracies and wild ideas. He lies every time he speaks. He and his administration are also in fact directly responsible for the country's response to COVID, and he spent half the time downplaying it and telling people to consider the wonders of bleach. I don't think it's out of line to make a comment he's a little nuts. Most people, myself included, probably think he's far past that point.
It would be journalistic malpractice *not* to point out how far off the rails Trump is. If you are too sensitive to handle the criticism, then work on building a thicker skin. God knows Trump himself could.
She’s right, though. At least when Nate was there, they were one of the only places you could hear media that wasn’t right wing, but also didn’t feel the need to mention “The Insurrection” every three minutes.
If Trump was your parent or grandparent, you'd see that they received round the clock care in a memory care home. I mean, ranting about eating dogs and cats because they heard it on TV? That man is clearly not capable of operating a motor vehicle and who knows what he'll "see" or "perceive" when he's out in public. My grandpa started acting like that and soon after attacked his nursing home assistant, and then my grandma, with his cane. He was not himself and never was again.
Maybe you like his concepts of a plan or 10-20% tariff tax (as we all remember from history class, Smoot-Hawley certainly was the answer to staving off the Great Depression and preventing WWII), and if so, that's OK. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. But looking at Trump and saying with a straight face that he's not out to lunch?
I think you may be looking at it differently than I do. Is Trump a little nuts? Compared to what liberal leftists think is normal? Yes. And, that's a good thing.
No. Trump is crazy by any measure except the one used by his cultists. He can't speak a coherent sentence. He constantly parrots the looniest shit from the bowels of the internet. He hangs out with monstrous people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes. He tried to violently overthrow American democracy. He is not just crazy but a truly bad and noxious individual.
Well, I belong to a group of people who can think whatever they want and say it out loud without getting kicked out of the club. They are called centrists. I agree about Loomer. I don't know Fuentes, but I've heard bad things. You are obviously blessed enough in this life to not know any actual crazy people. Good for you. Have a great weekend.
Thanks for replying. If by "centrist" you mean, "Has a mix of left and right wing views and votes for candidates who are similar", then great.
But a "centrist" of that sort would not only not vote for Trump, they would not vote for any Republican. They would be voting for candidates like Obama, Biden and Harris, all of whom fit this description. Trump and the Republicans are extremists with bizarre and horrifying beliefs: racial hatred, anti worker, a love of dictators, etc etc.
And, you dispute the term "crazy" being applied to Trump & co, but, I mean, it fits! I suppose "unserious" would work even better. What else can you say about someone who babbles about sharks, batteries and bacon? Who just says dumb shit straight from the bowels of Xitter and expects to be taken seriously?
These days, when I hear "centrist" i immediately think "either a believer in weird conspiracy shit" a la RFK Jr or a purveyor of right wing economics but who pretends that this is just way "Very Serious People" think (remember the Simpson - Bowles debt reduction plan). In both cases, they are actually Republicans, but they are trying to hide that fact.
Well, I have views that align with old school enlightenment liberals and some conservative views on culture. I voted for Obama, no one, no one, third party, and this year I will vote for Trump. Why? Because I still support the 1st Amendment in full, females being protected from males in sports, prisons, etc., am sick of the feminization of men (I have 2 grown sons), believe in equality and not equity, do not believe in redistribution of wealth, and think the border should be completely closed for a long while. I also do not like war or Bush, the security state we've lived under since 2001, support abortion up to 16 weeks, and I think we should use an all of the above approach to cheap energy. You can put me where you want me. That's the truth. I probably won't respond anymore, as my family is home now and this is my favorite time. Have a good one.
While I kind of see where you’re coming from, I also know Trump voters who can’t stand the guy. They do think he’s a bit crazy and they don’t understand why he seems to always make situations worse. Do they like his policies, yes, some of them very much, a few not at all. But all of my family who votes for Trump (some of them no longer do) think he has major flaws. I say all this because some things are just objective. Like Trump has charisma, but also he says and does a lot of things that hurt his candidacy and his party. Even his closest allies say this. It’s hard to argue against it.
oh I agree with all of that: Trump is awful verbally and always has been. I don't even think he's a particularly strong conservative candidate: what Nate said in the rest of the article was almost all obviously and verifiably true: if Trump was an even half-decent communicator he'd be walking away with this election. What he's not, however, is crazy in his policies and decision-making
Not to mention the Republicans weren't really notably worse on the pandemic than the Democrats. The Democrats badly overreacted, we did have fairly reasonable outcomes overall, and many places that responded more in line with what the Republicans wanted (Europe) did better.
Yes there were some places that responded very harshly that did very well (SK/NZ), but that was an option for them in a way it wasn't for the US.
I never understand how "COVID handling" is seen as this huge negative for Trump. It seems pretty clear like the people who fucked up the worst were Fauci and his buddies, with a close second to people locking down schools for months/years for little benefit and huge costs.
I assume you are referencing the quote from Woodward in a 19 MAR 2020 meeting, a meeting where Trump said he knew "in FEB" and he "didn't want to start a panic". Which seems a reasonable (if mistaken) stance.
And while for a while the first death was indicated as 29 FEB near Seattle, the consensus among medical professionals has become that the first deaths were likely in early FEB actually and went unnoticed. So not 3 weeks. There were a couple confirmed cases in late JAN.
Should we all wish Trump and the medical establishment had acted more aggressively immediately? Yes of course. But tons of countries made this exact same mistake, not really taking it serious until a couple people started dying and the infection already had its claws in.
In fact, the left was at the time screeching about the "racism" of travel bans or quarantining of people who had recently been to China. Both super reasonable positions.
Walz in MN was releasing mealy mouthed guidance where they were saying "people who have recently been to China are fine and don't worry about them, but also we might quarantine them maybe maybe not."
And basically telling people to get on with their lives and not worry about it right up until the first/second week of MAR when guidance went from "do nothing and certainly don't worry about people who have been to China" to "try to take some small precautions" to "lockdown" in about 3 days.
Pretty much everywhere was saying the same (stupid wishful thinking) thing. Hoping it wouldn't happen here.
As far is what is worse, there is some evidence the vaccine rollout was slow played and delayed a bit to make sure it wasn't going to be ready in time to impact the election because people involved were worried about giving Trump talking points.
And the school learning loss stuff still seems like the biggest single impact beyond the deaths, which weren't really that out of line with the age and health status of our population.
And those were for sure brought to you by Democrats and teachers unions.
Like i said I think trump made a lot of mistakes and Republicans behaved stupidly a lot during COVID. But so did Democrats and I don't see how its handling is clear victory for either side. The Democrats spent a lot of the election run-up poo-pooing the vaccine, and then were furious about hesitancy they helped stoked once Biden got into office.
Oh - and the Woodward tape about the Xi call was Feb 7th.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said
Trump told Woodward that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”
“This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”'
Fund GoF research in a shoddy Chinese lab that has a nonzero chance of being the source of all of this? Lie and dissemble about that, and frankly help the people involved cover up their involvement (whether that is is the ultimate source or not).
Then he proceeded to provide very mixed messaging on masking and regularly lie, provided deceptive framing of the vaccine, and a bunch of other stuff. Lots of deceptive messaging about who was vulnerable. Lots of "your kids could die" messaging in a situation where that was incredibly unlikely and the average age of death in my state was I think north of 83.
Then later on he constantly lied about his previous lies.
Basically the health infrastructure at the highest levels of this country, that was taking a lot of guidance and sometimes overt direction from him, burned through vast amounts of its public credibly over very minor gains, many of them about partisan political considerations.
And yes a lot of people on the right were being total loons. Not defending them. But they weren't "the COVID Czar".
The issue with gain of function research is a real and important one, as is the idea of using frequentist statistics to say “we have no evidence masks work”. A lot of this is shared across the public health establishment, and I want them to fix it. (They have gotten a bit better.)
I really disliked the health establishment unwillingness to talk about making a difference, and instead to talk about “safe” vs “unsafe”. Their advice about travel was really bad, in that they pointed to viral risks for every travel method but did absolutely nothing to try to help people figure out which risks were larger and which were smaller. They were too insistent on abstinence-only health education and not enough harm reduction.
I didn’t see many alternatives doing better though.
Where I lived we had schools and daycares shut down for a super long time, much longer than restaurants and bars. We had fucking parks closed down for a month, and playgrounds for a couple months.
We had a totally bizarre and inefficient testing policy. Where I was hospitalized with a serious mysterious lung infection in late APR, nearly died, and they still didn't test me because "hey you aren't dying now, go home and shake it off it was probably COVID but who knows we don't want to waste a test (also if you start dying again come right back)". Meanwhile less than a week later there were doing roadside spit tests for anyone who said they felt a bit ill.
We had hospitals basically shut down and idled because they were worried about "overcrowding", meanwhile when I was in the emergency room in late APR I think 3/50 emergency beds were occupied, and the whole hospital was just empty. We sort of locked the medical infrastructure down before the spread, and then opened them back up as the real big peak hit. Which...I shouldn't need to say...makes no sense. I am guessing there were some decent number of heart attack and other deaths due to that.
Incredibly sensible things like intentionally infecting young healthy hospital staff to build up a group of immune staff weren't even considered. Frankly immunity period was barely discussed. The disconnect between "the hospitals might collapse in a couple weeks" and "but we couldn't ask 5,000 25-35 year old medical staff to volunteer get the flu to help us keep them running" just showed a fundamental lack of seriousness and and consistency in their response.
Way way too much disinfecting things and worrying about touch transmission, and way way way way way too much highlighting and focusing on the tiny handful of cases of someone under 25 dying (or whatever) almost all of whom had pre-existing serious health issues, and not highlighting that ~85% of people dying were 75+ people already in poor health even for people in that age cohort.
Maybe you are right and the breach in trust was inevitable, but I feel like it could have been handled way way way better. Not that it was some disaster, but I do think the medical establishment generally and Fauci specifically did quite badly, not good.
IDK by the time there were big outbreaks in Spain/Italy in mid FEB it seemed like the cat was already out of the bag in terms of giant US outbreak eventually and I said that at the time.
Young people who contract covid can have long term impairments like decreased lung function even if symptoms are mild during infection. Asking young people to get infected "for immunity" would've been a terrible call.
The quote you're upset about isn't really Nate's opinion though. It's part of a list of reasons that liberals think Trump should be unelectable, and one that he doesn't really seem to endorse since he's link to an article about how liberals are too quick to blame the media for these things.
hmm poor writing if that's the case then - good writing makes things clear in the article itself without having to read external sources. It's possible you're right
Interesting that the headline for this article is that Trump might lose - and then Nate gives the discussion as to why he might lose all of one paragraph, with the rest devoted to why he should win…
The phrase "election to lose" means that Trump is in a strong position and is likely to win, unless he chooses to lose (in an abstract sense, obviously he's not actually making the choice to lose). Silver was saying why Trump was in a strong position, and then saying what decisions he is making that might make him lose.
Precisely- and then ending with “and he might” suggest an article as to how he might lose, not an article about why he should win, filled with a few jabs aimed at Harris voters who apparently comment about how she should be up 20%. A better title for this piece would be “Why it’s still Trump’s election to lose”
I don’t really get the economic critiques. Real disposable income is up 6-7% in the last 2 years and is much higher now than it was pre-COVID, plus consumer sentiment surveys are up a lot in the last 2 years and are close to where they were pre-COVID as well. Citing to your own index as proof that the economy is meh is pretty circular reasoning.
Most people don't think rationally when it comes to economics. We won't have deflation (at least outside of a depression). Wages have risen along with inflation. Purchasing power is almost back to where it was pre-pandemic. Could things be better? Sure?
But comparing Harris to Trump is like saying "hey, it's the 3rd quarter and my QB is playing poorly. Let's grab a rando from the stands and have him suit up-that'll give us a chance".
Trump's inflation plans: what plans? Implement a trade war, jack up prices for everyone, and see inflation go through the roof? Tariffs are a tax on consumers; somebody has to pay the cost of those goods. Either the cost is passed along to the consumer or distributors find cheaper suppliers, but they will still be higher cost than the original suppler. Otherwise, they would already be the suppler of choice.
Oh, and let's deport millions of immigrants who hold jobs nobody wants. Darn, now that new roof I need just went up $7k in cost and I'm paying $100 for someone to mow my lawn, not $40. And I can't find anyone to pick veggies at my farm, so I can't compete.
His economic plans: what plans? I haven't heard a concrete plan from him, other than we'll have so much money from tariffs that we won't know what to do with it all. A 2nd grader could come up with a better plan than this.
You've got to be a pretty darn low information voter to look at Trump in any sort of light and say he has the answers to any economic problem.
Exactly. The plans are horrible B.S. that are unlikely to ever be enacted as they’d cause chaos. Killing international trade? Inviting counter-tariffs?
They might reduce the price of existing lower-end housing. I’ll concede that.
I can understand the consumer sentiment. In my area, housing has gone from fairly affordable to not obtainable by many. Rent has grown almost 100% in 5 years. Groceries are expensive. In many ways things feel worse.
For sure, I am not trying to say the economy is perfect, but Nate’s critiques seem a bit slanted IMO and citing to his own economic index is in and of itself a major flaw to his argument.
I don’t know. Economic data gets way skewed by the hugely rich top 10%. For the long tail of poor Americans it is getting hard to survive, let alone thrive.
I think the point is that what matters more than the economy is how people feel about the economy and a lot of people still feel like the economy is bad. The truth is most people don’t really understand the economy at all (and certainly not comparative macro economics). They feel like grocery prices are high because prices shot up and don’t go back down. They aren’t paying close attention to the fact that most salaries also went up because so many people waste extra income or feel like it’s only a temporary windfall or that it’s purely based on their performance and not bigger economic trends.
Yes but my pushback is about Nate’s framing of the economy and it isn’t about whether the economy is good or bad or whether voters think it’s good or bad. It’s reductionist to say disposable income is sorta flat in the last year and btw remember inflation from 2 years ago and also my proof is my own economic index which happens to support my argument.
There are plenty of legitimate gripes about the current economy. Housing costs are still ridiculous, and housing supply is borderline non-existent in some places. While the inflation rate has dipped back down, the legacy of its high period remains -- the prices aren't coming back down, and are still killing people's wallets. Basic necessities like food are still expensive, healthcare is still expensive, childcare is going off the rails, and a lot of the market seems propped up by hype and fake money -- i.e., money from the top while income inequality and economic stability are still a massive problem.
Nate's economic index factors do seem weird! My impression is they're not based on the consumer sentiment measures that economists use, like the Michigan survey. I hope I'm wrong?
The trend of median wages being up over inflation is only a recent one (2020-2033). The long term trend is one of decreased purchasing power. So young adults entering their home buying years are facing a much different reality than their Boomer and Gen X parents.
The CPI method for housing cost estimates is based on the fictional premise that everyone who owns or rents magically has their payment adjusted every month to that month's "average new rental" cost.
So in fact CPI dramatically overweights current housing prices.
Trump is running way ahead of his numbers in 2020. Swing state voter registration numbers all favor him. Endorsements from former Democrats will help. Kamala’s modest bounce has faded. He’s on track to easily win the electoral college. I’m happy to bet anyone who disagrees actual money on this outcome.
Would you accept uneven odds? If you're right that he'll "easily" win, you should offer a major premium—5 to 1 or something—since you'll still find it profitable.
For as much as Mr. Silver asserts that his readership/commentatorship is very into gambling, it's pretty funny how unsophisticated some of the comments are, don't you think?
Awful lot of people paying $20 a month or whatever it is to basically post "you said that either candidate might win but that is incorrect, my preferred candidate is going to win." At least they understand that they're supposed to offer to bet, or talk about "priors," to show that they're really serious.
I'm serious. Are you? How much? I'm in CA so locked out of political betting sites. Happy to take money from people who think Harris will win. Name your price.
Well the flip side is true. If you think Harris will easily win, then you should offer me odds. But for simplicity's sake, I'll do a straight up 1-1. You in? How much?
I never said I thought Harris would easily win. I actually think she's an underdog, something in line with Nate's prediction. So obviously I'm not going to bet 1-1. You, on the other hand, have two different comments saying that she has very little chance of winning. I would be pretty dumb to bet you except at favorable odds; you would be turning down free money not to give them to me. I think 5-1 is the minimum I would consider based on your level of confidence.
Endorsements from former Democrats? You mean RFK and Tulsi Gabbard? There are many reason Trump may win, but the idea that RFK or Tulsi Gabbard is going to convince historically Democratic voters to pull the lever for Trump seems not anywhere in the top 10. Or are there public endorsements from actual Democrats that I’ve missed?
Polls show RFK supporters breaking for Trump at least 2 to 1. That could be all he needs to tip the rust belt states. We have a Kennedy, you have the Cheneys. I'll take that trade.
Everyone is just going back to whatever camp they came from. Democratic RFK supporters went to Harris, Republican RFK supporters went to Trump. Just so happens that he took from Trump 2 to 1. Not that bullish that they just went back.
Oh. I thought you were talking about endorsements from political families. I must have misread your comment about trading a Kennedy for the Cheneys as being about political families.
Often, you hear that debates don't matter. Certainly, wasn't the case this year! Only reason Ds might win is because of debates - plural. Think we wll be talking about eating cats and dogs for a long time to come.
If the rumors are true that an imminent Ann Seltzer Iowa poll will show Trump with a massive lead, then that means Wisconsin is a likely Trump win. And recent polls with Trump slightly ahead in Michigan also signal a Wisconsin win as MI tends to vote to the left of WI. If WI is a Trump win, then PA is an easy Trump win. Harris has almost no path to victory at this point.
Seltzer is the gold standard, as they always say. That's why they're holding it back. Polls are about trends. The trend is not the friend of Kamala. She's toast.
What are your thoughts on the poll and its implied trends now that it's released and it's much, much closer than the rumors said? Sincerely not trying to go neener-neener or bait you or anything, I do think counterbalancing voices are valuable here and I'm curious. (Should also note for the record that while I'm in probably the furthest-left demo of Nate's subscribers I do think Trump is still pretty likely to win at this point and a significant percentage of whining on both sides has been shoot-the-messengerism.)
Seltzer's Sept 2020 poll had Trump and Biden tied. Trump won by 8. Historically her earlier poll results aren't accurate but her final one is. Let's see what she polls right before Election Day. Trump should win IA by 10+.
He won by 8 in Iowa. Rumors are Seltzer's new poll has him up 15. If he's overperforming his 2020 by 7 in IA, all the other blue wall states will correspondingly move to Trump. Considering Joe won by 44,000 total votes across 3 swing states, that's more than enough for a Trump win.
Yeah, she was pressured to hold back the plus 19 result and re-poll for a more palatable result for Harris. But as we get closer to election day, she will poll for Trump more favorably to maintain her reputation.
Three days ago you said she's the gold standard, now she's a corrupt partisan who willfully holds back results favorable to the right. Couldn't just be the rumors were false. Can you even hear yourself?
Has Iowa moved in the same direction as these other states over the past four years? Has any poll showed these trends of separating or converging between these states?
Florida has actually very notably moved in a different direction from the other southern swing states. As North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas have gotten bluer, Florida has gotten redder.
Agree TX and GA have gotten bluer. NC was a swing state before going red last 2 cycles. NC should be an easy red win again this cycle. Early ballot request numbers look heavily advantageous for R:
And have you looked at any of the dozens of polls of these swing states to see how much they have or haven’t been moving? It seems like that evidence would be at least as relevant as any one poll, no matter how good, from another state. Even if god came down and said that the margin in Iowa will be 15 point in this election, to understand the implication of that for other states I would look at how current polls of Iowa compare to current polls of other nearby states to see if the states have been separating or not.
He won by 8 in Iowa. Rumors are Seltzer's new poll has him up 15. If he's overperforming his 2020 by 7 in IA, all the other blue wall states will correspondingly move to Trump. Considering Joe won by 44,000 total votes across 3 swing states, that's more than enough for a Trump win.
If your only two data points were the 2020 election result, and the rumors of. Selzer poll of this result, then that would be evidence favorable to Trump for sure. But what does this one poll mean in the context of the many, many, many other polls that have been conducted of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, etc that have been conducted in the past four years, and have also released their numbers? We know that a single poll is always off from the true results, even from a “gold standard” pollster. Why put so much weight on even the *rumor* of such a poll?
I'm not just using two data points. New voter registration numbers heavily favor Trump in swing states due to grassroots efforts by Scott Pressler, Turning Point and Chase PA. Early vote requests are way down for Dems (understandable due to 2020 being exceptional due to COVID). National polls like NYT/Sienna show a virtual tie which is off 10 from Biden in 2020 at the same point, and far from the 4 Harris needs to win the EC. Trump is also the strongest closer in modern politics. Add all that up plus the fact that historically polls underrepresent Trump, and he's well on track to a comfortable win.
I was arguing with a different person on here a couple days ago who was trying to say that voter registration numbers point to a Harris landslide. If you didn’t have poll numbers, these registration numbers would be helpful (though I would want to see actual numbers, not just percents), but trying to count them on top of polling is I think a mistake. The nytimes poll from last week is definitely a negative indicator for Harris, and is probably the strongest single indicator you have pointed to. I don’t think it, even with this other information, gives reason to be confident of a Trump win, let alone a comfortable win. It might happen, but I would want to look at *all* the information, not just the ones you are pointing to. That is why I come to this site.
Iowa poll just came out. Trump only up by 4 points in the "gold standard" poll. So Iowa shifted 4 points to the left since 2020. Trump now has no path to victory left because everything will shift left. Am I doing this right?
Seltzer had Biden and Trump tied in Sept 2020. Trump won by 8. Guaranteed her poll will shift more towards Trump in her final poll. Trump will win IA easier by 10+.
Meanwhile, from @realpdata on X, taking PA as an example. All the polls show Trump ahead by 4 to 5 from 2020 to 2024:
Emerson D+5 -> R+1
Marist D+9 -> Tied
InsiderAdvantage D+3 -> R+2
Quinnipiac D+8 -> D+5
NY Times D+9 -> D+4
Suffolk D+7 -> D+3
CBS News D+7 -> Tied
Trafalgar D+2 -> R+2
CNN D+10 -> Tied
Recent polls in CA and NY show Trump doing better by 10+. Unlikely Trump is doing better in deep blue states but not doing better in swing states.
Considering 2020 margins was less than 1% in 3 swing states, it's reasonable to assume Trump is comfortably in the lead in all key swing states.
Yes, because we all know pollsters are immune to pressure to withhold or tweak their results. Seltzer's final poll will be much closer to Trump +8. He will win it +10.
I don’t think he’s acually up just 4 points, i just think it was silly to be out here guaranteeing a +15 poll based on twitter rumors and it’s silly now to be claiming that someone you called the gold standard a few days ago changed her results by over 10 points based on some nebulous outside pressure. But I sympathize with the desire to self soothe in an anxious time, so no harm no foul.
But you were just making speculations based off a rumor that the latest poll would show Trump up 15 in Iowa. Then you didn’t adjust those speculations based on the actual poll results. Now you’re moving the goalposts to say that the poll will be different near the election. Why should we take your analysis seriously?
The Selzer poll came out and showed only a modest Trump lead in Iowa. Does this make you less confident that he’s going to win? Maybe we could adjust the odds, like you could offer 3 to 1 that he’ll win?
This was Trump's election to lose if he remained the non-insane, semi-coherent version of himself that existed in the figment of imaginations of half the electorate. Unfortunately for him, that was never going to survive contact with reality for anyone but the cultists.
Going bonkers at the debate might cost him 0.6.% in the polling average!!
Why do you waste your money subscribing here if you don't understand a 0.6% swing in the polls would be meaningful in this election?
Your tone is unfortunate and your inference false
Why are you such a partisan hack? Trump is still favored to win and your acting like it's a slam dunk for Camela
Now go pet your cats
You bring no value to the discussion.
Politely pointing out that 0.6% could be significant is fine. That’s not my point. My point is, in a healthy Democracy with good epistemic institutions, going bonkers at a debate would make more than 1 in 300 voters change their mind.
In an election this close, losing .6% of the electorate is significant.
Since the debate he seems to have decided to make immigrants eating cats and dogs his signature issue. He says it constantly, and JD too. So yes, that is bonkers and many of his supporters are saying so. That means that he would be doubling down on what lost him 0.6%, so it would possibly grow.
Especially now that Vance has admitted he made it up!
It's the economy stupid.
Sadly, that's the ball game. People can't see past their pocketbooks.
If you think a philandering, criminally convicted octagenarian who isn't allowed to own a charity in New York after using a child's cancer charity to funnel money to himself deserves to be president, you might be in a cult.
If you think the best man to deal with economic problems is someone who declared bankruptcy six times and has the single largest IRS loss deduction in US history after inheriting over a billion dollars, you might be in a cult.
If you create AI generated Rambo style images of an unfit old man who tried to overthrow a US election, and then decal it across your truck with an American flag background at great personal expense, you might be in a cult.
I could do this all day.
I'd be interested in LLM supported analyses of these hardened positions, maybe RAG'd against like button analyitcs...and wonder what would happen if like buttons cost $1 per click. 80M voters is a big cult. More cowbell.
LLMs hallucinate of course, so their analysis may not be that useful.
“80M voters is a big cult”
That’s kinda a self-defeating assertion.
Ignorance is bliss.
Nah, no one said that. Plenty of honest disagreements out there. Trump, Texas A&M, 2015 WeWork, Scientology, and Gwyneth Paltrow are simply in a cult league of their own.
You really got me with "A&M" haha. So very true and all birds of a feather etc agree
I liked "Grant" throwing A&M in there, too (especially since I'm a Georgia fan). But Gwyneth Paltrow? Did I miss something?
Also, a couple of counters to Nate's points:
1) She's the fresher face, and Trump has been on the ballot twice. So the incumbency penalty cuts both ways.
2) Whatever bump Trump got from Biden's debate and the assassination attempt is evaporating. We're reverting back to his normal, unpopular state.
3) More broadly, we don't know how Trump being a third-time candidate will affect the environment of the race.
For instance, his negatives were sky high in previous campaigns. But now they're inelastic: Fifty-three percent of voters view him unfavorably. That, together with Kamala almost breaking even on favorability, might eclipse all the circumstances that Nate lists in the story. Or might not.
While the economy and Biden's unpopularity are real drags for Harris, part of what's held her back is a lack of familiarity that nearly a third of voters have expressed for -- including a lot of undecideds. That actually could give her more room to grow than Trump in the final seven weeks.
I'm interested to see how Nate's forecast performs in this bizarre season. Seems to me the priors are fairly unprecedented -- it's like 52-card pickup.
Trump clearly hurt himself with his debate performance, but unless you want open borders, Woke social policies, rampant criminal behavior without punishment, extreme climate policy, projection of weakness to foreign adversaries, and an anti-Israel slant to foreign policy you have no other choice but Trump.
Clearly Chairman Xi clearly hurt himself with his performance at the plebiscite, but unless you want bourgeoisie Western capitalism, Taiwanese saboteurs running rampant without punishment, projection of weakness to the American horde, and the Southern territories to go without oil, you have no other choice but Xi.
Rather than attempting to be clever, maybe you could try to refute even a single one of my points.
They tried to pass tough border legislation. They’re against defunding the police. The big rival China is doubling down on solar and EVs while KH is supportive of fracking. so their environment policy is pretty centrist. They’re supporting Ukraine it its fight against Russia, and Biden openly would support Taiwan in a conflict.
I have no problem with conservatism, but KH hardly has a Marxist, dovish, anarchist platform. I’d say the current Dems are to the right of 2020 dems and roughly where Obama was during his terms.
You mean if you believe a complete liar, incompetent, fraudulent, unoath abiding, treasonous, philandering, felonious psychopath who’s done absolutely nothing for America besides causing fear, hate, chaos and division then you have no choice then to blindly put your “faith” (ironically) in voting for Trump. He didn’t fix immigration when he was the president before AND he had the republican majority in the house and senate for 2 years before Covid. He totally inherited a good economy from Obama because it went up between 2016 to 2017 before he became the “president”. I can’t understand why this is even a close race. I’ve never been so disgusted, ashamed and embarrassed to be an American in my life.
Democrats saw first hand in the June debate that Biden couldn't handle the job and forced him out. Republicans saw first hand on Tuesday (and every other day he's opened his mouth) and doubled down on conspiracy theories and blaming everyone but themselves.
Cult.
Touche'. There is no legitimate answer to the question of why Dems bumped Biden but Repulicans don't have the balls to dump Trump. That's Dear Leader type stuff. right there...
Uh, because voters have actual grievances Trump addresses?
Immigration sucks, trannies are creepy ugly men, and most people who wore masks religiously during COVID should continue to do because you're ugly.
You see, it's more important to me that your life gets worse than mine gets better. We hate you just as much as you hate us. But unlike us, you *only* have soibois in the government to exert your power.
If this thing falls apart, the ensuing conflict will be *extremely* short. You're weak and you're worthless.
I was about to say this. Case closed.
Democrats forced Biden out because he couldn't win. Trump has at least a 50/50 chance and he's probably the favorite. Not comparable.
If the GOP had nominated anyone halfway sane they'd be walking away with this election.
Really strange to give Biden as the example where Democrats are a cult. Cults don't force out their leaders. That's not how cults work. When the GOP forced out Trump because he's unelectable, then you will have a point
What, you mean when presented with actual evidence, people change their mind, and that's evidence of being in a cult?
How many tries does it take you to tie your shoes in the morning?
I regularly hear dissent from non-MAGA on their own politicians. You speak to a woke right MAGA supporter and say x or y Trump policy without attaching a name and they say how stupid it is. Then attach the name and they quickly fall in line. V obedient people. Very easy to manipulate too.
Would make excellent subjects for hypnosis, due to the blind following of Trumps Neorolinguistic programming speeches. Any cult leader who wants to increase their influence needs to look no further than the list of Republicans who voted for Trump. They’re not any different than the many other people/companies that Trump has duped over the years. The funny thing is that what they don’t know is that Trump himself considers them to be stupid suckers. Like McCain wasn’t a war hero. The large part of hypocritical, bullshit, bullying and conspiracy theories tells me that they’re more concerned about the sheer entertainment value that Trump brings to their lives not the policies that he doesn’t even talk about. I bet they’re still writing the network about canceling the Apprentice. That and FINALLY someone in leadership who tells them that they’re still good people even though they’re racist, chauvinist, homophobic, bullies that got picked on in High School and never went to college or enlisted in the military. But, yep, them er patriots all right. Fuck that constitution that is the very foundation of our country.
A lot of gold and get rich schemes for these people. As long as I don’t need to bail out the I lost my life savings idiots.
Trump knows it's a cult per his past comment about not losing any votes even if he shot someone in the open.
Yeah, one being interviewed by the comedian on The Daily Show said he’d still vote for him if he shot somebody on the steps of the White House. Then was asked if they were against abortion and said, “Yep, I’m pro-life. How fricking detached do you have to be?
Accurate username I suppose
Trump’s biggest mistake was the early debate. Might have been the worst political decision made in a presidential campaign. Had Biden still been in on September 10th we would have had a horrible debate and no time to swap out.
Trump then decided to keep doing what he was always doing after Butler. He could have toned down the dog whistles and called for unity. Nope, he decided to double down on this America is a hellhole rhetoric.
He still might win but right now he was very much up 28-3 and now the game is tied.
>He could have toned down the dog whistles and called for unity.<
Same pattern as during covid. He could have been the unifying, resolute leader leading the country in a fight against a deadly new disease. Would have picked up most of the persuadables and won a second term. Instead we got bleach injections and harassment of mask-wearers. He's just not that good at politics. Mainly, I think, because of deep-seated personality flaws that render him epistemically closed, and incapable of objectively grappling with reality.
I see we're victim-blaming now for how Trump responded to nearly being murdered on live TV.
I don't think you know what "victim blaming" means. If I say Trump is to blame for getting shot at, that's victim blaming. If I say that Trump failed to make the most of that incident, that's got nothing to do with blaming anyone for anything. It's just an analysis of what happened after the fact.
By a crazy libertarian registered Republican. The attempts to frame it as some sort of left-wing political assassination attempt are ludicrous just like everything else Trump related.
Uh, how can there be no mention of Kennedy's perfectly-timed drop-out when discussing Kamala's lack of convention bounce? It may have been a *little* unclear for a bit where his supporters would go, but the man endorsed Trump and essentially became part of his admin. It makes entirely too much sense that the majority of Kennedy's supporters jumped to Trump, and this is what blunted Kamala's convention bounce and is what's given Trump his current lead in Nate's prediction matrix.
Completely agree. - Kamala’s national polling average has held steady at 48 since the RFK Jr. drop out. Trump has gone from 45 to 47. From a high level, it looks as though RFK’s 4% went 2% to Trump and 2% to undecided. Kamala hasn’t made any gains with those voters.
You nailed it...I said that the other day...could not agree more...But this crowd are not here to look at the real polling numbers...Nate is their polling woobie - they, sadly, flock to him for reassurance. They talk past the things that they can't process by labeling them as "disinformation", or "conspiracy theories" or "cult-like"...the amount of intellectually dishonest discourse that goes on at Nate's waterhole is breathtaking. And you can tell by these lame responses how truly bad our educational system has failed the public especially among the liberal 25-39 crowd. Completely uncurious, unfailingly self-assured (Mommy and Daddy always told them they were the smartest ones in the room), and prone to irrational tantrums when the world they imagine turns out to be a mirage...Trump is going to win, and Nate's model is telling you that, because he's the best there is, right?!?...And I'll wait for your comments on Trump's behavior (I know they are coming)...but it's his policies and Kam-Bam's lack thereof, that makes this an easy one to call...Just watch. #47!
I think you mean his concepts of policies, Ikea.
Do you really think he was going to map out a complete plan to overhaul the bloated and ineffective Obamacare fiasco, when Trump is in a debate against three people at once??? But's let's revert to her "true" answers - to what America really heard, shall we? First, David MUIR question: "Madam, Vice President, are people better off now than they were only 4 short years ago? KAM-BAM: "Well, you know I grew up in middle class family (A lie - both her parents where PhDs and she grew up in Canada, and went to school in Quebec at the most prestigious private school in Montreal) and I mowed my lawn in Oakland (ah...ok), and it's because of my completely contrived upbringing, David, that I believe we really need what I call an "Opportunity Economy" where everyone has their "fair share" of free imaginary things provided by the government! MUIR: Hmmm...sounds very, very intriguing, but couldn't that have been done ANY time in the last 3 and 3/4 years, since it sounds like such a great undefined plan? And what does an "Opportunity Economy "actually mean? KAM-BAM: Well, David, I am going to pretend to give people free things (vacant promises, actually) like free housing, free educations, free healthcare, free student loans - you name it. In fact, I'll keep promising free things to people as long as they vote for me - I don't actually intend to do anything FOR THEM, unless they are non-citizens. You get it, right? I'm buying their votes!!! MUIR: Sounds logical, devious and very well thought out, but, Madam Vice President, where will ALL that money come from, and won't ALL of these FREE things definitely make inflation go through the roof, AGAIN??? KAM-BAM: Look David, you weren't supposed to asked detailed questions remember? And you know I don't know crap about Economics - that's for my "team". Further, you know I've never ACTUALLY governed before, so to distract voters, what I like to say instead of concrete answers is that America "needs to be unburdened by what has been???" And if you look at this new Venn diagram, you'll see that I'm full of crap, chocked full of empty platitudes, and that I'm just trying to SAY NOTHING for 2 full minutes, while nervously smiling, and not being fact-checked, as we ALL planned before the debate. Remember??? So, how am I doing, David? MUIR: Well, Kamala, you know I love you, but I have two key following ups I have to ask. First, why is Donald Trump such a racist piece of garbage, and second do what to go to McDonald's with me and the ABC team after the debate to debrief in private on how our plan worked? KAM-BAM: I LOVE MickeyDs!!! I think you know that I pretended to worked there, and I actually have a another Venn diagram, which unveils the secret recipe for their fries!!! Actually, I'm just kidding, David - I'm a complete fraud, I never worked at McDonald's - I'm Vegan...Duh!!!! (Cackling) Muir: I know that, you smarmy trickster - You're such great scammer, Kamala - it just makes you all the more JOYOUS. Can I hug you?
>Trump is going to win<
We seem to have read very different articles.
Trump may win, sure! And Kamala Harris may win! It's probably a coin toss right now. But the former president has been making myriad mistakes (maybe re-read the article?), which have eroded his position as "fairly strong favorite" to "fighting for his political life."
(Actually, he's not really fighting. More like, "mailing it in as his political life drains away").
Nate's "article" was an explanation to his liberal following, of all the reasons they should not lose hope in the face of horrible data that his own model is tellign the world ...Every Captain of a sinking ship always tells the bailing deckhands everything is going to be fine or else they stop bailing and the ship sinks faster...get out your life preservers, mates!..it's gonna get wet really wet for ya'll!
LOL. And yet strangely the TITLE of the article is:
>This was Trump's election to lose. And he just might....The Trump campaign has made a series of major mistakes.<
Like I suggested earlier, you might want to give it a re-read!
I read it...thanks, Socrates.
Trump has policies? Where, what, when? The only policies he speaks is fear, hate, racism, division, chaos, 2025 and revenge against his adversaries. There’s no intellectual plan, just lies, deception and propaganda.
That's funny...Kam-Bam is about to roll out her 3rd attempt to explain her economic vision to America because the first two times her own party said it SUCKED - like Soviet style price controls, insane taxing on unrealized gains which Dem fat cat donors told her was a NO GO...so after the disaster on Ophra, she's now being trotted out once again for a DO-OVER. Also, if a person lies about working at McDonalds in high school (no record whatsoever - anywhere...hmm) then they are not going to believe your are going to build them a new home - American's are not stupid. And let's not forget, that she has been in office for 3 1/2 years and she MUST embraced that record, which lead to the highest inflation in 40 years and now groceries are 21% higher, gas is 40% higher and housing and rent are through the roof. She is actually asking America, incredibly, to give her a promotion for MASSIVE failures. She was named Border Czar and then let in over 15MM illegals (with no plan at all) who are wreaking havoc on idiotic blue state sanctuary cities in the form of huge crime spikes and displacing American workers (many of them POC) in jobs, housing and school resources. So HARRIS has been a disaster. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Here are TRUMPS Policies: 1) Close the Border on DAY ONE 2) Deport illegals at massive levels because we can afford them in our country, 3) Make American companies produce their goods in the United States, 4) Declare drug cartels as terrorist organizations and then eleminate them with prejudice, 5) Project strength in Foreign Policy (Peace through Strength) - when Trump was in office we had NO WARS. Now we have the largest war in Europe since WW2 (Ukraine) and another in the middle East. We had Peace under Trump and dithering under Biden which emboldened our enemies, 6) Make all NATO countries pay their representative share of NATO, so the US is not footing the entire bill for their security in Europe, 7) Take care of our veterans, who have been sent to the back of the line by Biden in favor of illegal aliens, 8) Leave the abortion issue to be decided at the state level, where voters can actually vote on it based on their local morals (and I'm pro-choice and agree with this) 9) Lower taxes FOR ALL AMERICANS, as he did the first time in office for 67% of people, which GRTEATLY GREW THE ECONOMY, 10) Grow our military and eliminate TOXIC DEI programming, 11) Overturn any insane law that allows Men in women's bathrooms or allows Men to play in women's sports...You sound like a fairly uninformed liberal, who probably will not have read this far, but if you did, I suggest you open your eyes, turn off MSNBC (A toxic America hating network) and start reading and viewing a variety of news so that you can become a much more informed voter...YOU CAN DO THIS...Memorize the Trump policies I just provided you, as a start! Good luck!
Well, you have definitely decided to drink the cool-aid. Do some fact checking and then get back on and share something intelligent. The media doesn’t speak about many of the most important facts. Read articles that are not subjectively politically biased. Take the time to get real information. The man doesn’t know what he’s doing. What the real economic consequences of his policies are. In addition, how can he uphold his oath to office when he obviously has such disregard for the constitutional law. I can’t understand for the life of me, why people have not acknowledged the many, many crimes that he’s committed. Both the ones he’s lost and the upcoming ones regarding trying to overturn the vote in multiple ways, in multiple states, then the riot at the capitol. It’s a fact not an opinion. You have every right to your own opinion, but you don’t get to choose the facts. We are in a bizarrely world never experienced in our lives. News isn’t news it’s purely entertainment. Like no one is covering the FACT that the immigrants that have come in ACTUALLY have an extreme benefit to the country’s economy that totally outweighs any financial support they receive. We don’t have the number of workers needed to pay the current cost of social security benefits. Immigrants pay fed/state/local taxes, yet can never receive social security benefits. In fact, the number of immigrants that continue to receive welfare or other government assistance is far, far less than the number of Americans that receive assistance. The cost of deporting all of the immigrants is not only immoral, but would certainly create an even greater deficit and quite possibly an economic crisis. Something does have to happen at the border. I agree, but if it’s so damn important for republicans, why didn’t Trump accomplish more when his first two years of presidency he had majority Republicans in the House and Senate? Why did he instruct Republican Senators to kill what was a bipartisan bill to help resolve the issue back in Feb? How can his followers conveniently forget and/or ignore all of crimes that he has committed AGAINST America? We have so very much to lose if he wins and the sad and ignorant fact is it will be because people believe his multiple, constant lies and the lies of Faux News.
IKO says: HI KRISTA…how’s your TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME GOING? REALITY set in yet????
The Republicans put forth the first border bill and passed it in the HOUSE called HR2. It closed the wide open border and then dealt with immigration nd deportation. IT PASSED IN THE HOUSE and then CHUCK SCHUMMER KILLED IT...DEAD ON ARRIVAL...Where do you get your NEWS???
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2/text
The "bipartisan bill" had ONE REPUBLICAN from OKLAHOMA, and did not have anywhere near the votes to pass the SENATE OR THE HOUSE, and importantly THE BILL SUCKED. SO that is a HUGE distraction for MSNBC to trot out there but its NOT REAL. They fooled you! Importantly, IT WOULD HAVE ALLOWED 5,000 MIGRANTS A DAY, WHICH IS 2 MILLION PER YEAR - FOREVER, and no added border security - just more "agents" to process more paperwork. I read the bill!!! Who the hell is going to pay for all of these people? There is not plan, they have no food, no homes, nothing - they just being dumped into the country randomly and they are committing a TON of crimes. 67% of ALL crime in Queens, NY is now MIGRANT CRIME -WTFU!!!! So, yes, Trump did not support it so that he could work with Congress to create a better bill - not a crap-ass bill, or ANY BILL, but a GOOD bill that finishes the WALL and restores the TRUMP policies like: Remain in Mexico, stricter asylum, and Title 42...and so on and so on. Biden overturned 73 aspects of Trumps secure wall on his first DAY!!!! WTF!!! And then the FLOOD GATES OPENED...Look it up, Tiger!
You clearly are the "prime" DEM voter - Naive, only top level awareness of the news but nothing too deep and no understanding of the actual details, and very passionately committed to "the cause" - which Dems told us in 2017 was "THE RESISTANCE", which I take as treasonous, but that's my opinion. Soon Trump will be in office (he will) and I hope you start to see the light and understand you are a pawn in a big machine, that has been lied to and manipulated, and that must leave you with an empty, sick feeling that you have let yourself, your family and your country down...Because the DEMs offer you only empty promises and while DJT is not perfect...we knows how get things done. IKO is sad for you...it's gonna be a LONG 12 YEARS AHEAD!!!
IKO MIGRANT UPDATE: YOU might like this one too KRISTA - Brutal details on a the "extreme benefit" THAT MIGRANTS are SHARING WITH ALL OUR CITIZENS - IMAGINE WHAT SHE WAS THINKING AS A 12 YEAR OLD WHILE BEING ABUSED FOR TWO HOURS BEFORE SHE WAS LEFT FOR DEAD LIKE GARBAGE! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jocelyn_Nungaray
ASK LAKEN RILEY WHO WAS WHILE JOGGING ON CAMPUS AND WAS BRUTALLY RAPED AND THEN HAD HER SKULL BASHED IN WITH A ROCK TO THE POINT OF HER BEING UNRECOGNIZABLE, IF THE MIGRANT SCUME WHO DID THAT WAS PROVIDING AN "EXTREME BENEFIT"... That was probably not covered on Rachel Madow. Or JOSELIN NUNGAARY, WHO WAS 12, AND WAS GANG RAPED FOR TWO HOURS BEFORE SHE WAS STRANGLED TO DEATH AND THEN THROWN IN A RIVER - WAS THAT ANOTHER "EXTREME BENEFIT" TO THE COUNTRY??? Who the HELL is sick? IKO says you are SICK PUPPY and NEED SOME COUCH TIME, LADY! I hope you never get harmed by a migrant, because this is just the beginning. IKO is shocked!!! https://nypost.com/2024/10/11/us-news/laken-riley-murder-suspect-jose-ibarra-appears-in-court/
Agree.
The "bump" concert is based on the A minus B math, and much of the data comes from the time when the opposing party kept out of the news the week of the convention.
In this case, both Harris and Trump went up.
Rear view mirror stuff now. Nate's model is just a model after all.
Nate has mentioned this in previous pieces, but yeah, the Kennedy drop-out seems to have been an added headwind for Harris.
>>>For instance, she is ahead in Wisconsin by 2.1 points according to Nate’s own polling average, but he has Trump as a slight favorite to win that state. Which means right now, Harris is being dinged by at least 2.1 points in his model. Something just isn’t right<<<
Even *beginning* to make sense of the subtleties of Nate's model is well beyond my pay grade, I'll readily admit. But Nate says something to the effect of: national numbers affect his model's take on state numbers, and vice-versa. The *heavy* advantage enjoyed by Trump in the Electoral College suggests he's got a very solid shot at victory if he's behind by only 2.1 points in the national popular vote. Recall, Biden beat Trump by 4.3 points in the national popular vote in 2020, and STILL came within a 40K vote shift from losing the election! To put it another way, if Trump holds Harris's margin to around two points, he's likely to flip multiple swing states won by Biden in 2020. Maybe one of those states would be Wisconsin.
There's also the margin of error in state polls to consider.
So, my layman's interpretation is something like: in tight swing state contests, a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted with respect to the polls given the tightness of the national numbers, and given the fact that the election is still seven weeks away. For the record, (1) I'm voting for Harris; (2) I'm not at all morose about her chances (she could win!); (3) I'm also not *confident* about her chances (Trump could win!). For both candidates, the race appears eminently winnable, and lose-able.
I love you Nate but disagree
Niki Haley was correct when she said “the first party to get rid of it’s 80 year old candidate will win”
The country has Biden fatigue and Trump fatigue and Trump’s racist/ Putin loving rants and overall craziness makes me wanting this over soon The whole think is stressful to the country Trump needs to go away
Certainly hope there's a hidden anti-Trump vote out there. Otherwise we're looking at becoming Venezuela, incumbent marshalling military, refusing to leave office, election winner fleeing the country. Don't think it can happen? It will. And, his Ace in the Hole is the Supreme Court..
You sound pretty confident trump will win. Why?
All the reasons Nate mentioned, not the least of which is it's the economy stupid. I've been negative on Harris's chances from the beginning. Big strike against her is she female. A fair amount of the white male working class vote would go her way if if she had a different gender. People often don't operate on facts, but on their gut. Many men will not vote for a woman. If the women and the young people do not turn out in the important States she will lose. And I'm sick just thinking about it.
Rate Cut.
I'm glad you clearly mentioned that while Trump *should* be losing horribly, given who he is, but that didn't stop 2016 or 2020 either. So many comments on your posts about losing faith in your models because they aren't proclaiming a Kamala wins.
People seem to forget that Trump lost in 2020 by 43K votes total (the difference in the three states that put Biden over the top) and not in a landslide. Biden won the popular vote by 4.5%. The tipping point state was 0.63%.
And all of this happened with Biden having significantly better swing state polling.
You are entirely correct! The Electoral College is a cancer that should be cut out with extreme prejudice. It is absurd to have a country where the minority gets to rule. Other examples are Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Or pre-genocide Rwanda.
I appreciate the idea of balancing small state interests against large state interests but now the EC just favors one kind of small state. I think if we uncapped house seats again so that it can properly represent large states again and every state gave out its EVs proportional to vote share, we'd have something like a sane version of the electoral college, but we're never getting that. I hope we get some kind of reform in my lifetime, but that kind of hinges on Trump losing this year and not being able to throw out any election he doesn't like in future.
Time for some bitter medicine: you guys need a parliamentary system.
- No electoral college.
- Winner has majority of seats and can therefore pass most of their intended legislation.
- No need for overblown primary system, as everyone including opposition leader has been performing politically on TV for the entire current term.
I arrived at this conclusion a few years ago and nothing since has changed my mind yet. I am so jealous of countries with election seasons that are 3 months long.
Balancing large and small state's interests is done by each state getting two Senators.
The "state's winner gets all EC votes" hurts voters in states in which one or the other party dominates, but does so without regard to the state's size.
Polls were really bad in 2020 so can’t just assume they will be equally wrong and to the same side. 2020 was also a very strange year with the pandemic, etc. I think anyone that is confident in the race being anything other than a coin flip is probably deluding themselves.
The basic liberal "theory" of how to beat Trump is to just show people who he is, and let people abandon him over time.
That theory is not without *any* merit, I mean, people are still figuring it out and abandoning him in 2024, just not in large enough numbers to make this an *actually* viable strategy.
I think there is a strong chance that polling has over adjusted and now support for Trump (and anti Trump sentiment) are being under-counted.
Yep. If Trump loses this election, I will be surprised. Biden had much more of an advantage at this time 4 years ago. Harris is much too close in the popular vote to win in the Electoral College. Sad. Ironically, with the Electoral College the game is indeed rigged. Against the Democrats.
If we lived in a real democracy Trump would never had been President. The whole discussion we have around being up by 4-5 points and losing is insanity. And before people start defending the EC we all know the GOP would be trying to destroy it if they had the majority of the popular vote and lost elections.
Exactly. There's a reason we don't have pure popular vote on everything, but when you get a result that out of line with the will of the people it is just bad. I can already see the "tyranny of the majority" people typing their replies here. Please, before you do that, consider that there are so many ways to balance majority/minority rule and so many of them make so many people so much happier than this shit.
I was thinking, maybe instead of doing away with the EC it would be more feasible to propose something where if a candidate wins the EC but loses the popular vote that that president has to share some power, aka make that presidency "weaker" somehow (since we are amending the constitution anyway skys the limit). Like have the VP candidate of the other side be the VP, and give the VP extra senate votes or something.
I’d consider it, but that would require a change to the Constitution. Hard sell.
My comment was in response to Nate’s claim that we live in a democracy. We don’t so far as electing a President is concerned.
Second, there are ways to effectively eliminate the undemocratic aspects of the EC without a Constitutional amendment. Lookup the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Did you look it up? Probably not. First, the Constitution specifically gives states the power to cast their EC votes in any manner they determine. That’s how some states allocate their EC by Congressional District and others don’t. 100% constitutional. And states representing about 180 EC votes have enacted it. If those states passed it into law that means their legislatures agreed to it, doesn’t it.
Your post argues from emotion. You don’t have a single valid reason why it won’t work.
Great. Show me the actual part of the Constitution that it violates. Which Article specifically?
I guess I’m one of those dumb Dems who think the economy is better. I do have way more in savings than I did four years ago, my annual income is up and when I sold my home I made a killing.
Everyone in my near and extended family is employed and doing well.
I do remember the Trump years, the empty shelves, the hospitals where you couldn’t get treatment, nurses walking, doctors and nurses being abused and even assaulted. Great times Nate
Unlike you, most Americans live on credit, and the cost of financing has shot up an enormous amount under Biden. Coupled that with inflation, and your average paycheck-to-paycheck American is upset.
You mean Covid when you say “Trump years” and you mean one Trump year, 2020. He could have perhaps handled it better, but he didn’t create and release Covid.
No he didn’t, he did constantly lie to his constituents (us) and when he got Covid instead of issuing a statement on it and its potential severity he did his best to downplay it because of his enormous insecurity.
also i wish more people discussed how our inflation was way lower than the rest of the worlds while growing our economy far more. The magic world where the US saw no inflation despire all of our trading partners seeing insane inflation just doesn't exist. The Biden admin saving us from being in a much worse place is genuinely commendable, the global environment they inherited is not their fault. It's like blaming someone for a natural disaster when they ran the recovery better than anyone else could.
Facts matter to most people have faith
Inflation at 2.5 a fact
I agree. This is the misinfo T sold, thanks to the hi inflation he helped create with the tax cut to please who dint need it, and the mis-managed covid that depressed inflation, that also resulted in most of the 1.1 million deaths.
Biden did allow this "sell" without defending it, fearing it is difficuult to communicate. B even saved the US and the world from plunching into a disastrous recession that everyone and his uncle predicted. He achived a miracoulus soft landing - taming the infaltion to 2.5%, adding over 15 million jobs! We are the envy of the world. I realize, people suffer from inflation badly. But it cud have been much much worse! Are we just thankless?
Forgot to mention that T was handed an an envuable economy and rate of inflation.
If you have a high-six or seven+ figure net worth, sure.
Not everyone has that.
If your net worth is five figures or less--even negative--you're eating it in this economy.
I didn’t see you weren’t, I don’t know you. I spoke to my own situation.
God knows I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth, one that had been reused of course.
I thought inflation benefits people with debts and no savings, and hurts people with savings by devaluing it.
If your savings are in the stock market and the market is outpacing inflation, then your savings will do well.
Only if you have fixed interest rate debt.
I have to attend mandatory DEI seminars at work now. This is not about Trump, you dolts.
Look, on one hand, I get it. Mandatory "sensitivity" seminars, when done poorly, are pretty frustrating to sit through. But to think that Trump would in any way end these is just silly. In fact, it's pretty easy to see that a president who brags about sexual harassment and who paints immigrants with a broad brush might inspire professional organizations - you know, businesses that have to be inclusive to survive and thrive in a 21st century economy - to *create more* of these trainings. Trump probably isn't the solution folks seek because he's part of the cause.
You're telling me you have to sit and listen for an entire seminar? MULTIPLE seminars? And consider that there are people out there with different lives and backgrounds than you?
Someone please think of the children, the dogs and cats!
Oh no, not seminars!
I like how little context this comment contains. Why does Connor have to attend mandatory DEI seminars at work now? Did Connor say something bigoted to someone else? Or is this more of a thing his work is just doing, and Connor believes this is because of Kamala Harris? Or maybe Connor believes Harris will make it a requirement for everyone across the country to attend DEI seminars, and he's frustrated at this coming requirement that he does not want?
Hard to say. Connor, feel free to weigh in on why you need to attend mandatory DEI seminars at work now, and then we can decide for ourselves whether that seems to be related to Kamala Harris in any way, shape or form.
Fighting wokeness with Trump is like fighting a fire with kerosene
Sounds like you need it.
Try paying attention.
What's it about?
I think Connor is saying that he hates that he has to live in a multicultural society, and he wants to vote for the person that makes him feel good about his racist thoughts and feelings.
I mean, I think omnicause DEI re-education is laughable bullshit (mostly well-meaning, but bullshit all the same). However, I don't think Connor's employer is doing this because Joe Biden told them to. If anything, the surge in Kendi-ist nonsense *came under Donald Trump*.
This. Fighting wokeness with Trump is like fighting a fire with kerosine.
This is what it's about. This kind of sneering attitude for the last four years. Good luck in November.
I notice that you're not willing to say what it *is* about because you cannot articulate a non-racist way of explaining your disdain of DEI seminars.
You’re really not helping.
For some it’s about the fact that Trump and the GOP enjoy a lot of support from white supremacists.
People like Nat are fucking hilarious.
How about providing a cogent argument, instead of snark.
I rather agree though I’ll vote for Harris. Elected Democrats are better than my officious, college friends
Not helping.
Oh no! I hope that's not what Connor is saying :(
Presumably that a lot of people are offended by being asked to think about why white men have more money and power than everybody else, and what might be other ways to run a society. Obviously without knowing exactly what goes on in those seminars, I can't say if it's productive or divisive. But many people simply dismiss the idea out of hand.
“Equity” is just a sugarcoated euphemism for “discrimination.“ DEI is actually pretty offensive in practice.
And yet, blind interview studies show that people react differently to the same inputs when those inputs have a different name at the top of the resume. Asking people to be aware of that isn't a problem in my opinion, especially in a workforce.
Once upon a time, diversity workshops focused on helping people stop discriminating in the hiring process. Today, DEI does the exact opposite (for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html)
I hate seminars :(
lol, the responses to this comment are the perfectly encapsulation for anyone outside the United States why leftism is unpopular here. They aren't just keyboard warriors, they're the most obnoxiously snide, wannabe intelligent, group of keyboard warriors the basements of this country have to offer.
How very 2016 of your company. Democrats defeated their woke left but the Republican woke right will control your bedroom. You can move job, we can’t move country.
Great reason to throw out democracy. Luckily when Trump crashes the market and you get laid off you won't ever have to sit through any more meetings about respecting your coworkers.
Plenty of people dislike him but like his policies. They’re voting for him for that reason.
Great rage-bait, @Connor.
I don't disagree with anything you say here, but the forest-view meta-point is also worth mentioning: this was the *GOP's* election to lose and if they do lose it will be because they nominated a below-replacement level candidate when any non-descript governor with half a track-record and half a clue on the debate stage would likely have wiped the floor with either Biden or Harris.
It's the presidentialization of an effect that has clobbered the GOP in the Senate for a decade now: nominating candidates in primaries who sit too far outside of normal to win winnable general elections. Just a laundry list of would-be Senate winners sitting on the sidelines since 2010: Castle, Lugar, Strange, Norton, Lowden, Brunner, etc. Corey Stewart continually winning GOP primaries in VA on confederate-flag platforms until Youngkin is more of the same.
To whatever degree Trump blows this election that he could have won, the GOP blew it twice as badly by not finding a way to nominate a non-Trump candidate.
As someone who still probably would’ve voted for the Dem candidate, Brian Kemp probably could’ve won this year without breaking a sweat.
That’s the other side of the equation. Part of the GOP’s problem has been bad candidates who have won their primaries and blown winnable races. The other half has been strong candidates who have either retired or not bothered because it was too much of a headache to run in a GOP primary in this environment. It’s been true in many senate races, and this presidential one, too.
Kemp is smart enough to stay out of the way until Trump passes.
If Trump is out of the way in '28, the GOP will have a deep bench of great candidates--Kemp, Haley, Youngkin, and others. Although Kemp might run for Ossoff's Senate seat in '26.
Youngkin has the charisma of ceiling fan, and he’s pretty unpopular in his home state.
Maybe, the one miscalculation there though is that he’s 60 now. My gut is telling me the next couple cycles, people are going to want to see younger candidates, and we’ll finally see some Gen X and maybe even some elder millennial candidates.
Quick comment. I don’t have a Twitter account. Haven’t had one since 2020. Would it be at all possible for Nate to post his tweets on Substack notes as well?
He does sometimes, but it seems a little inconsistent. One potential reason is he sometimes seems to adopt a much more combative, almost trollish persona on Twitter (something he’s basically admitted as intentional… he seems to have a sort of “when in Rome” attitude about it). Whereas on Substack he tends to be a little bit more even keeled.
I wish Nate would post somewhere other than X as well, but until/unless he does so you can still access his tweets using Nitter (twitter proxy):
https://nitter.poast.org/NateSilver538/
I'm sure Nate's a busy guy, esp. when it's just him and 1 partner running Silver Bulletin.
Why ask for special favors that take more of his time when all you need to do is just set up an anonymous Twitter account for free, follow him & selected others of your choice there, and see his stuff there? No one's forcing you to participate on Twitter or to click the terrible "For You" tab in your Twitter feed.
As for the difference in his (or anyone's) persona on Twitter vs. other platforms, it's really a matter of change-of-venue enabling different facets of a personality to express itself.
In a bar it's quite reasonable for occasional clearly-audible "shit" and "fuck" to pop up in the conversational flow.
In a library somewhat less so.
I know it’s just the two of them. I thought there would be a software/app where you could auto post tweets to Substack. Point well taken. His notes and his model talks are sufficient enough for me to stay a paid subscriber. I just get a little greedy at times.
Not a lot of people out there who are able to share poll insights without bias like Nate does.
As a paid subscriber I"m getting REALLY tired of the more and more open Trump bashing. Not on how he and his team have handled the campaign, this part: "Isn’t Trump a little nuts? (Completely.) How can voters re-elect Trump after his first term, which culminated in a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and wrecked the economy and the fabric of everyday life? (It must be the media’s fault!)". That's just rubbish, as though Trump was to blame for the pandemic happening (lol). It's your site Nate so do what you want, but this kind of thing is a marked shift from before and it looks like the Silver Bulletin has decided to join the truly *endless* ranks of biased media. The sole reason I had subscribed is that there's extraordinarily few places you can get pretty even-handed coverage and data, and I'm *incredibly* disappointed the Silver Bulletin isn't one of those places anymore. Will give it another week or two to see how the coverage goes and then almost certainly cancel subscription. I don't like FiveThirtyEither's actual forecast, but they've done a *tremendous* job btw of presenting moderate coverage in their podcast
"Moderate" journalism isn't saying good things about both sides or balancing the good/bad. It's about reporting facts. It can be objectively and factually true that one candidate has done better/worse things that the other. Reflecting that is not bias.
Only one candidate talked about immigrants eating pets. Only one candidate is a convicted felon who is facing more trials. Only one candidate was impeached for trying to overturn an election and sending a mob to the Capitol. Stating these facts is not bias. And, no, there is nothing comparable that the other candidate has done that is even in the same ballpark to bring up.
Very sensible reflection, completely spot-on with regard to the facts.
What the comment appears to fail to understand is that the underlying issues that matter to the voters, particularly on the Trump side, are SO deep -- for them -- that none of the surface-level bad facts (about Trump) matter to them.
They will vote for Trump regardless of his obvious character and personality flaws because he is more likely to address the underlying issues that matter to his base, period.
Perceived excessive and/or uncontrolled immigration. Weak and/or fiscally-irresponsible foreign policy under the Dems, i.e. the Afghanistan collapse/fleeing, spending hundreds of billions on the Ukraine proxy war, weaksauce response to Houthis interfering with an important oceangoing trade route. Perceived excessive focus on DEI, with the "E" perceived as a stand-in that actually means "equality (of OUTCOMES) and or equitable RE-distribution of wealth/privilege.) Weak & self-destructive long-term energy policy, i.e. cancelling Keystone XL for example. Pandering to the Democratic base by trying to cancel hundreds of billions in student loans -- a cost which is immediately & directly socialized to the rest of the country through inflation.
The laundry list above is the tip of the iceberg, really.
You are kidding yourself if you genuinely believe that Trump voters care about those issues, even mischaracterizing them the way that you did.
Trump supporters are reflexively anti-liberal. That's all they're in for or ever have been, going back decades now. Trump's contribution was to coalesce & codify this sentiment in an exciting and combative way, which I'll grudgingly give him credit for doing.
To the point of this article, however, he is losing the ability to do that and now is running as a derivative, Nu Metal version of the 2016 Trump. It still might work, but he's diminished and this election is harder for him than it should be.
"Trump voters" aren't a single bloc, any more so than "men," "women," "latinos," "asians" or any other broad group.
The depths of the Trump base are obviously highly visible and remarkable in a social-media kind of way, i.e. through their self-caricature. But that's just the dumb lower tier. The same as the dumb, egregiously self-caricaturing base on the left/democratic side.
I don't believe I'm kidding myself at all. I believe that I may have a better ability than many elucidate, enumerate and explain a few of the very complex sets of thoughts/feelings that ultimately cause Voter X to cast a ballot one way -- or the other. I don't think that "being able to elucidate/name/explain" is the same as "being able to think / form opinons."
It costs me time, effort, and franky a little bit of self-respect to even engage in political discussion. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of others with a similar capability for reflection are bothering to _waste their time_ engaging in public discourse? Perhaps I don't represent a "silent majority" but I bet it's at least a 10:1 ratio of those who have a similarly-held strong skepticism vs. willingness to speak about it.
I agree that this election is harder for Trump. I think that's for the same reason it would be for anyone in the upper tercile of life. He's 8 years older than he was in 2016. It's to his credit & health that he doesn't drink/smoke/do drugs, but he's chronically overweight and therefore at a major disadvantage in basic stamina.
Personally I'm doing the obvious, sensible thing that all centrist-ish voters are doing -- preparing myself to accept the consequences & changes that either election outcome will bring.
Of course it's just my opinion, but I very strongly believe that pontificating, screeching, exhorting and all other forms of expressing "Oh Noes, THis COuld BE the END of AMerica" are sound and fury, signifying nothing. That all of that will pass out of the short-attention-span news-and-pundit cycle within a couple months of the declared election result.
Trump's *core* supporters indeed are largely monolithic, certainly relative to other demographics. Pre-dating him, of course. They have been animated by a fundamental antipathy for the left. If you want to highlight the small sliver of Trump voters who vote for what they perceive as the lesser of two evils, then okay.
The self-caricatures on the right vastly outnumber those on the left, dominating their party while their leftward equivalents exist on the margins.
Trump's core generally do not engage in complex thoughts in terms of their political beliefs. Remember, many got off their couch for the first time to vote for Trump in 2016. Again, Trump marshaled these long-standing grievances and converted them into votes & in the process destroyed whatever was left of the intellectual right.
Ascribing complex motives to simple actors doesn't make you more reflective - just wrong
The fact that you see these concerns as "surface level" is why you can't see how foolish it is to expect Trump to address any issue at all with anything other than lip service.
It really is unfortunate that people believe these “deep” things are actually addressable by a single person, or that electing a president who hates the same things they do would fail to worsen the problems.
Trump publicly rants and rave about all sorts of Internet conspiracies and wild ideas. He lies every time he speaks. He and his administration are also in fact directly responsible for the country's response to COVID, and he spent half the time downplaying it and telling people to consider the wonders of bleach. I don't think it's out of line to make a comment he's a little nuts. Most people, myself included, probably think he's far past that point.
It would be journalistic malpractice *not* to point out how far off the rails Trump is. If you are too sensitive to handle the criticism, then work on building a thicker skin. God knows Trump himself could.
Bye, Claire. Take care.
I admit I didn't expect to read "I prefer 538 because they have less of an anti-Trump bias"
Their podcast, solely. I don’t read their content
She’s right, though. At least when Nate was there, they were one of the only places you could hear media that wasn’t right wing, but also didn’t feel the need to mention “The Insurrection” every three minutes.
But, now Nate *isn't* there. Isn't 538 the one that took Rasmussen out of its polling averages for being right-wing?
If Trump was your parent or grandparent, you'd see that they received round the clock care in a memory care home. I mean, ranting about eating dogs and cats because they heard it on TV? That man is clearly not capable of operating a motor vehicle and who knows what he'll "see" or "perceive" when he's out in public. My grandpa started acting like that and soon after attacked his nursing home assistant, and then my grandma, with his cane. He was not himself and never was again.
Maybe you like his concepts of a plan or 10-20% tariff tax (as we all remember from history class, Smoot-Hawley certainly was the answer to staving off the Great Depression and preventing WWII), and if so, that's OK. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. But looking at Trump and saying with a straight face that he's not out to lunch?
I think you may be looking at it differently than I do. Is Trump a little nuts? Compared to what liberal leftists think is normal? Yes. And, that's a good thing.
No. Trump is crazy by any measure except the one used by his cultists. He can't speak a coherent sentence. He constantly parrots the looniest shit from the bowels of the internet. He hangs out with monstrous people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes. He tried to violently overthrow American democracy. He is not just crazy but a truly bad and noxious individual.
Well, I belong to a group of people who can think whatever they want and say it out loud without getting kicked out of the club. They are called centrists. I agree about Loomer. I don't know Fuentes, but I've heard bad things. You are obviously blessed enough in this life to not know any actual crazy people. Good for you. Have a great weekend.
Thanks for replying. If by "centrist" you mean, "Has a mix of left and right wing views and votes for candidates who are similar", then great.
But a "centrist" of that sort would not only not vote for Trump, they would not vote for any Republican. They would be voting for candidates like Obama, Biden and Harris, all of whom fit this description. Trump and the Republicans are extremists with bizarre and horrifying beliefs: racial hatred, anti worker, a love of dictators, etc etc.
And, you dispute the term "crazy" being applied to Trump & co, but, I mean, it fits! I suppose "unserious" would work even better. What else can you say about someone who babbles about sharks, batteries and bacon? Who just says dumb shit straight from the bowels of Xitter and expects to be taken seriously?
These days, when I hear "centrist" i immediately think "either a believer in weird conspiracy shit" a la RFK Jr or a purveyor of right wing economics but who pretends that this is just way "Very Serious People" think (remember the Simpson - Bowles debt reduction plan). In both cases, they are actually Republicans, but they are trying to hide that fact.
Well, I have views that align with old school enlightenment liberals and some conservative views on culture. I voted for Obama, no one, no one, third party, and this year I will vote for Trump. Why? Because I still support the 1st Amendment in full, females being protected from males in sports, prisons, etc., am sick of the feminization of men (I have 2 grown sons), believe in equality and not equity, do not believe in redistribution of wealth, and think the border should be completely closed for a long while. I also do not like war or Bush, the security state we've lived under since 2001, support abortion up to 16 weeks, and I think we should use an all of the above approach to cheap energy. You can put me where you want me. That's the truth. I probably won't respond anymore, as my family is home now and this is my favorite time. Have a good one.
So basically you hate trans people (specifically trans women) and immigrants, and some how that makes you a centrist. Got it.
Liberal leftists like Dick Cheney?
Someone on the left sure does. They are advertising their Bush era Conservative votes like they are winning something other than more war.
While I kind of see where you’re coming from, I also know Trump voters who can’t stand the guy. They do think he’s a bit crazy and they don’t understand why he seems to always make situations worse. Do they like his policies, yes, some of them very much, a few not at all. But all of my family who votes for Trump (some of them no longer do) think he has major flaws. I say all this because some things are just objective. Like Trump has charisma, but also he says and does a lot of things that hurt his candidacy and his party. Even his closest allies say this. It’s hard to argue against it.
oh I agree with all of that: Trump is awful verbally and always has been. I don't even think he's a particularly strong conservative candidate: what Nate said in the rest of the article was almost all obviously and verifiably true: if Trump was an even half-decent communicator he'd be walking away with this election. What he's not, however, is crazy in his policies and decision-making
Not to mention the Republicans weren't really notably worse on the pandemic than the Democrats. The Democrats badly overreacted, we did have fairly reasonable outcomes overall, and many places that responded more in line with what the Republicans wanted (Europe) did better.
Yes there were some places that responded very harshly that did very well (SK/NZ), but that was an option for them in a way it wasn't for the US.
I never understand how "COVID handling" is seen as this huge negative for Trump. It seems pretty clear like the people who fucked up the worst were Fauci and his buddies, with a close second to people locking down schools for months/years for little benefit and huge costs.
Trump knew the virus was air borne and much worse than the flu 3 weeks before the first US death.
He is on tape admitting that.
But he pretended everything was fine.
What did the Dems do that was at all close to that?
I assume you are referencing the quote from Woodward in a 19 MAR 2020 meeting, a meeting where Trump said he knew "in FEB" and he "didn't want to start a panic". Which seems a reasonable (if mistaken) stance.
And while for a while the first death was indicated as 29 FEB near Seattle, the consensus among medical professionals has become that the first deaths were likely in early FEB actually and went unnoticed. So not 3 weeks. There were a couple confirmed cases in late JAN.
Should we all wish Trump and the medical establishment had acted more aggressively immediately? Yes of course. But tons of countries made this exact same mistake, not really taking it serious until a couple people started dying and the infection already had its claws in.
In fact, the left was at the time screeching about the "racism" of travel bans or quarantining of people who had recently been to China. Both super reasonable positions.
Walz in MN was releasing mealy mouthed guidance where they were saying "people who have recently been to China are fine and don't worry about them, but also we might quarantine them maybe maybe not."
And basically telling people to get on with their lives and not worry about it right up until the first/second week of MAR when guidance went from "do nothing and certainly don't worry about people who have been to China" to "try to take some small precautions" to "lockdown" in about 3 days.
Pretty much everywhere was saying the same (stupid wishful thinking) thing. Hoping it wouldn't happen here.
As far is what is worse, there is some evidence the vaccine rollout was slow played and delayed a bit to make sure it wasn't going to be ready in time to impact the election because people involved were worried about giving Trump talking points.
And the school learning loss stuff still seems like the biggest single impact beyond the deaths, which weren't really that out of line with the age and health status of our population.
And those were for sure brought to you by Democrats and teachers unions.
Like i said I think trump made a lot of mistakes and Republicans behaved stupidly a lot during COVID. But so did Democrats and I don't see how its handling is clear victory for either side. The Democrats spent a lot of the election run-up poo-pooing the vaccine, and then were furious about hesitancy they helped stoked once Biden got into office.
Tons of countries were not called by President Xi.
Trump had a chance to lead and decided to attack and ignore instead.
Oh, and for the record, San Francisco and Florida have very similar age demographics. You can look up the covid death rates.
Oh - and the Woodward tape about the Xi call was Feb 7th.
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said
Trump told Woodward that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”
“This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”'
What did Fauci actually do wrong? People like to blame him as a figurehead as though he did anything.
Fund GoF research in a shoddy Chinese lab that has a nonzero chance of being the source of all of this? Lie and dissemble about that, and frankly help the people involved cover up their involvement (whether that is is the ultimate source or not).
Then he proceeded to provide very mixed messaging on masking and regularly lie, provided deceptive framing of the vaccine, and a bunch of other stuff. Lots of deceptive messaging about who was vulnerable. Lots of "your kids could die" messaging in a situation where that was incredibly unlikely and the average age of death in my state was I think north of 83.
Then later on he constantly lied about his previous lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-OqyUtDar4
Basically the health infrastructure at the highest levels of this country, that was taking a lot of guidance and sometimes overt direction from him, burned through vast amounts of its public credibly over very minor gains, many of them about partisan political considerations.
And yes a lot of people on the right were being total loons. Not defending them. But they weren't "the COVID Czar".
The issue with gain of function research is a real and important one, as is the idea of using frequentist statistics to say “we have no evidence masks work”. A lot of this is shared across the public health establishment, and I want them to fix it. (They have gotten a bit better.)
I really disliked the health establishment unwillingness to talk about making a difference, and instead to talk about “safe” vs “unsafe”. Their advice about travel was really bad, in that they pointed to viral risks for every travel method but did absolutely nothing to try to help people figure out which risks were larger and which were smaller. They were too insistent on abstinence-only health education and not enough harm reduction.
I didn’t see many alternatives doing better though.
Where I lived we had schools and daycares shut down for a super long time, much longer than restaurants and bars. We had fucking parks closed down for a month, and playgrounds for a couple months.
We had a totally bizarre and inefficient testing policy. Where I was hospitalized with a serious mysterious lung infection in late APR, nearly died, and they still didn't test me because "hey you aren't dying now, go home and shake it off it was probably COVID but who knows we don't want to waste a test (also if you start dying again come right back)". Meanwhile less than a week later there were doing roadside spit tests for anyone who said they felt a bit ill.
We had hospitals basically shut down and idled because they were worried about "overcrowding", meanwhile when I was in the emergency room in late APR I think 3/50 emergency beds were occupied, and the whole hospital was just empty. We sort of locked the medical infrastructure down before the spread, and then opened them back up as the real big peak hit. Which...I shouldn't need to say...makes no sense. I am guessing there were some decent number of heart attack and other deaths due to that.
Incredibly sensible things like intentionally infecting young healthy hospital staff to build up a group of immune staff weren't even considered. Frankly immunity period was barely discussed. The disconnect between "the hospitals might collapse in a couple weeks" and "but we couldn't ask 5,000 25-35 year old medical staff to volunteer get the flu to help us keep them running" just showed a fundamental lack of seriousness and and consistency in their response.
Way way too much disinfecting things and worrying about touch transmission, and way way way way way too much highlighting and focusing on the tiny handful of cases of someone under 25 dying (or whatever) almost all of whom had pre-existing serious health issues, and not highlighting that ~85% of people dying were 75+ people already in poor health even for people in that age cohort.
Maybe you are right and the breach in trust was inevitable, but I feel like it could have been handled way way way better. Not that it was some disaster, but I do think the medical establishment generally and Fauci specifically did quite badly, not good.
IDK by the time there were big outbreaks in Spain/Italy in mid FEB it seemed like the cat was already out of the bag in terms of giant US outbreak eventually and I said that at the time.
Young people who contract covid can have long term impairments like decreased lung function even if symptoms are mild during infection. Asking young people to get infected "for immunity" would've been a terrible call.
The Kamala Krowd pays to hear what they want. Democracy's survival is on the ballot after all!!!!!!!!111one!!?!!!!!!!
thank you for your contribution to the discourse
The quote you're upset about isn't really Nate's opinion though. It's part of a list of reasons that liberals think Trump should be unelectable, and one that he doesn't really seem to endorse since he's link to an article about how liberals are too quick to blame the media for these things.
Reading and parsing information is hard for MAGA types.
But of course they believe Trump was being sarcastic when he admitted he lost in 2020.
hmm poor writing if that's the case then - good writing makes things clear in the article itself without having to read external sources. It's possible you're right
This was what I was about to write. It was a list of reasons for the hypothetical liberal,who doesn’t understand why Trump isn’t down 20 points.
Interesting that the headline for this article is that Trump might lose - and then Nate gives the discussion as to why he might lose all of one paragraph, with the rest devoted to why he should win…
The phrase "election to lose" means that Trump is in a strong position and is likely to win, unless he chooses to lose (in an abstract sense, obviously he's not actually making the choice to lose). Silver was saying why Trump was in a strong position, and then saying what decisions he is making that might make him lose.
…to which he devoted one paragraph.
"Was" is doing a lot of work in the headline, implying that he's no longer in the strong position he was before.
Precisely- and then ending with “and he might” suggest an article as to how he might lose, not an article about why he should win, filled with a few jabs aimed at Harris voters who apparently comment about how she should be up 20%. A better title for this piece would be “Why it’s still Trump’s election to lose”
I don’t really get the economic critiques. Real disposable income is up 6-7% in the last 2 years and is much higher now than it was pre-COVID, plus consumer sentiment surveys are up a lot in the last 2 years and are close to where they were pre-COVID as well. Citing to your own index as proof that the economy is meh is pretty circular reasoning.
Most people don't think rationally when it comes to economics. We won't have deflation (at least outside of a depression). Wages have risen along with inflation. Purchasing power is almost back to where it was pre-pandemic. Could things be better? Sure?
But comparing Harris to Trump is like saying "hey, it's the 3rd quarter and my QB is playing poorly. Let's grab a rando from the stands and have him suit up-that'll give us a chance".
Trump's inflation plans: what plans? Implement a trade war, jack up prices for everyone, and see inflation go through the roof? Tariffs are a tax on consumers; somebody has to pay the cost of those goods. Either the cost is passed along to the consumer or distributors find cheaper suppliers, but they will still be higher cost than the original suppler. Otherwise, they would already be the suppler of choice.
Oh, and let's deport millions of immigrants who hold jobs nobody wants. Darn, now that new roof I need just went up $7k in cost and I'm paying $100 for someone to mow my lawn, not $40. And I can't find anyone to pick veggies at my farm, so I can't compete.
His economic plans: what plans? I haven't heard a concrete plan from him, other than we'll have so much money from tariffs that we won't know what to do with it all. A 2nd grader could come up with a better plan than this.
You've got to be a pretty darn low information voter to look at Trump in any sort of light and say he has the answers to any economic problem.
Exactly. The plans are horrible B.S. that are unlikely to ever be enacted as they’d cause chaos. Killing international trade? Inviting counter-tariffs?
They might reduce the price of existing lower-end housing. I’ll concede that.
Well Trump does say he loves the uneducated. Worked pretty well for him in 2016. And, I think it will again this election.
I can understand the consumer sentiment. In my area, housing has gone from fairly affordable to not obtainable by many. Rent has grown almost 100% in 5 years. Groceries are expensive. In many ways things feel worse.
For sure, I am not trying to say the economy is perfect, but Nate’s critiques seem a bit slanted IMO and citing to his own economic index is in and of itself a major flaw to his argument.
I don’t know. Economic data gets way skewed by the hugely rich top 10%. For the long tail of poor Americans it is getting hard to survive, let alone thrive.
The lowest wages growing fastest doesn’t mean much when even the increased earnings still leave the worker unable to afford the essentials.
I think the point is that what matters more than the economy is how people feel about the economy and a lot of people still feel like the economy is bad. The truth is most people don’t really understand the economy at all (and certainly not comparative macro economics). They feel like grocery prices are high because prices shot up and don’t go back down. They aren’t paying close attention to the fact that most salaries also went up because so many people waste extra income or feel like it’s only a temporary windfall or that it’s purely based on their performance and not bigger economic trends.
Yes but my pushback is about Nate’s framing of the economy and it isn’t about whether the economy is good or bad or whether voters think it’s good or bad. It’s reductionist to say disposable income is sorta flat in the last year and btw remember inflation from 2 years ago and also my proof is my own economic index which happens to support my argument.
There are plenty of legitimate gripes about the current economy. Housing costs are still ridiculous, and housing supply is borderline non-existent in some places. While the inflation rate has dipped back down, the legacy of its high period remains -- the prices aren't coming back down, and are still killing people's wallets. Basic necessities like food are still expensive, healthcare is still expensive, childcare is going off the rails, and a lot of the market seems propped up by hype and fake money -- i.e., money from the top while income inequality and economic stability are still a massive problem.
Nate's economic index factors do seem weird! My impression is they're not based on the consumer sentiment measures that economists use, like the Michigan survey. I hope I'm wrong?
If you want anything other than food, energy, healthcare, childcare, or housing, then yeah, prices are way down.
Anyone have any good recipes for a color TV?
Good thing median wages are up more than inflation, hmm?
The trend of median wages being up over inflation is only a recent one (2020-2033). The long term trend is one of decreased purchasing power. So young adults entering their home buying years are facing a much different reality than their Boomer and Gen X parents.
Sure, and that certainly matches several decades of life in California.
But the topic is current inflation and evaluating Biden, so the recent trend is what is relevant.
Housing doesn't account for housing.
The CPI method for housing cost estimates is based on the fictional premise that everyone who owns or rents magically has their payment adjusted every month to that month's "average new rental" cost.
So in fact CPI dramatically overweights current housing prices.
Trump is running way ahead of his numbers in 2020. Swing state voter registration numbers all favor him. Endorsements from former Democrats will help. Kamala’s modest bounce has faded. He’s on track to easily win the electoral college. I’m happy to bet anyone who disagrees actual money on this outcome.
Would you accept uneven odds? If you're right that he'll "easily" win, you should offer a major premium—5 to 1 or something—since you'll still find it profitable.
For as much as Mr. Silver asserts that his readership/commentatorship is very into gambling, it's pretty funny how unsophisticated some of the comments are, don't you think?
Awful lot of people paying $20 a month or whatever it is to basically post "you said that either candidate might win but that is incorrect, my preferred candidate is going to win." At least they understand that they're supposed to offer to bet, or talk about "priors," to show that they're really serious.
"you said that either candidate might win but that is incorrect, my preferred candidate is going to win." -- Pure gold.
I'm serious. Are you? How much? I'm in CA so locked out of political betting sites. Happy to take money from people who think Harris will win. Name your price.
Figure out how to use a VPN and bet your house.
You'll get rich!
Well the flip side is true. If you think Harris will easily win, then you should offer me odds. But for simplicity's sake, I'll do a straight up 1-1. You in? How much?
I never said I thought Harris would easily win. I actually think she's an underdog, something in line with Nate's prediction. So obviously I'm not going to bet 1-1. You, on the other hand, have two different comments saying that she has very little chance of winning. I would be pretty dumb to bet you except at favorable odds; you would be turning down free money not to give them to me. I think 5-1 is the minimum I would consider based on your level of confidence.
Bet as much as you want.
Just click on the link JT gave.
Endorsements from former Democrats? You mean RFK and Tulsi Gabbard? There are many reason Trump may win, but the idea that RFK or Tulsi Gabbard is going to convince historically Democratic voters to pull the lever for Trump seems not anywhere in the top 10. Or are there public endorsements from actual Democrats that I’ve missed?
Polls show RFK supporters breaking for Trump at least 2 to 1. That could be all he needs to tip the rust belt states. We have a Kennedy, you have the Cheneys. I'll take that trade.
Everyone is just going back to whatever camp they came from. Democratic RFK supporters went to Harris, Republican RFK supporters went to Trump. Just so happens that he took from Trump 2 to 1. Not that bullish that they just went back.
That's not the case. What poll shows that?
The Kennedy family very publicly politically disowned this member of the family several weeks ago.
No one was voting for the Kennedy family. About 5% were seriously considering voting for RFK.
Oh. I thought you were talking about endorsements from political families. I must have misread your comment about trading a Kennedy for the Cheneys as being about political families.
Your wish is my command:
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Often, you hear that debates don't matter. Certainly, wasn't the case this year! Only reason Ds might win is because of debates - plural. Think we wll be talking about eating cats and dogs for a long time to come.
If the rumors are true that an imminent Ann Seltzer Iowa poll will show Trump with a massive lead, then that means Wisconsin is a likely Trump win. And recent polls with Trump slightly ahead in Michigan also signal a Wisconsin win as MI tends to vote to the left of WI. If WI is a Trump win, then PA is an easy Trump win. Harris has almost no path to victory at this point.
Trump won Iowa easily in 2020 and lost every "blue wall" state.
Not to mention making that sort of prediction based on literally one poll out of dozens (hundreds?) two months out is just silly.
Seltzer is the gold standard, as they always say. That's why they're holding it back. Polls are about trends. The trend is not the friend of Kamala. She's toast.
Hey Ed Y, how did that Selzer Gold standard work out for ya? 🤣
Selzer's final result was bang on. Her Sept 2020 poll had the race tied. Trump won by 8. Her early polls are not good. Let's see her final one.
What are your thoughts on the poll and its implied trends now that it's released and it's much, much closer than the rumors said? Sincerely not trying to go neener-neener or bait you or anything, I do think counterbalancing voices are valuable here and I'm curious. (Should also note for the record that while I'm in probably the furthest-left demo of Nate's subscribers I do think Trump is still pretty likely to win at this point and a significant percentage of whining on both sides has been shoot-the-messengerism.)
Seltzer's Sept 2020 poll had Trump and Biden tied. Trump won by 8. Historically her earlier poll results aren't accurate but her final one is. Let's see what she polls right before Election Day. Trump should win IA by 10+.
He won by 8 in Iowa. Rumors are Seltzer's new poll has him up 15. If he's overperforming his 2020 by 7 in IA, all the other blue wall states will correspondingly move to Trump. Considering Joe won by 44,000 total votes across 3 swing states, that's more than enough for a Trump win.
You sure were right about that poll being interesting.
Except it is Trump only up by 4, not 15.
Iowans like Trump so much that Selzer has it a MoE race.
Yeah, she was pressured to hold back the plus 19 result and re-poll for a more palatable result for Harris. But as we get closer to election day, she will poll for Trump more favorably to maintain her reputation.
Three days ago you said she's the gold standard, now she's a corrupt partisan who willfully holds back results favorable to the right. Couldn't just be the rumors were false. Can you even hear yourself?
Her final results are very accurate. Her early results are not. Check the historical records.
You are confused.
Have you figured out how to place a bet yet so you can get rich?
Yes, let's bet. How much? I'd rather take money off people like you.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪
Has Iowa moved in the same direction as these other states over the past four years? Has any poll showed these trends of separating or converging between these states?
It's unrealistic to think that IA and FL would move +5 to +10 for Trump, and other swing states not move significantly for him as well.
Florida has actually very notably moved in a different direction from the other southern swing states. As North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas have gotten bluer, Florida has gotten redder.
Agree TX and GA have gotten bluer. NC was a swing state before going red last 2 cycles. NC should be an easy red win again this cycle. Early ballot request numbers look heavily advantageous for R:
2020: D 51.5%, R 16.6%. Total: 737,347
2024: D 38.6%, R 22.5%. Total: 161,034
A net swing of 19 points so far.
And have you looked at any of the dozens of polls of these swing states to see how much they have or haven’t been moving? It seems like that evidence would be at least as relevant as any one poll, no matter how good, from another state. Even if god came down and said that the margin in Iowa will be 15 point in this election, to understand the implication of that for other states I would look at how current polls of Iowa compare to current polls of other nearby states to see if the states have been separating or not.
Well from @realpdata on X, taking PA as an example. All the polls show Trump ahead by 4 to 5 from 2020 to 2024:
Emerson D+5 -> R+1
Marist D+9 -> Tied
InsiderAdvantage D+3 -> R+2
Quinnipiac D+8 -> D+5
NY Times D+9 -> D+4
Suffolk D+7 -> D+3
CBS News D+7 -> Tied
Trafalgar D+2 -> R+2
CNN D+10 -> Tied
Recent polls in CA and NY show Trump doing better by 10+. Unlikely Trump is doing better in deep blue states but not doing better in swing states.
Considering 2020 margins was less than 1% in 3 swing states, it's reasonable to assume Trump is comfortably in the lead in all key swing states.
Ed is this serious analysis or are you making a joke about the transitive property.
Don’t say trans in Ed’s presence!
He won by 8 in Iowa. Rumors are Seltzer's new poll has him up 15. If he's overperforming his 2020 by 7 in IA, all the other blue wall states will correspondingly move to Trump. Considering Joe won by 44,000 total votes across 3 swing states, that's more than enough for a Trump win.
If your only two data points were the 2020 election result, and the rumors of. Selzer poll of this result, then that would be evidence favorable to Trump for sure. But what does this one poll mean in the context of the many, many, many other polls that have been conducted of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, etc that have been conducted in the past four years, and have also released their numbers? We know that a single poll is always off from the true results, even from a “gold standard” pollster. Why put so much weight on even the *rumor* of such a poll?
I'm not just using two data points. New voter registration numbers heavily favor Trump in swing states due to grassroots efforts by Scott Pressler, Turning Point and Chase PA. Early vote requests are way down for Dems (understandable due to 2020 being exceptional due to COVID). National polls like NYT/Sienna show a virtual tie which is off 10 from Biden in 2020 at the same point, and far from the 4 Harris needs to win the EC. Trump is also the strongest closer in modern politics. Add all that up plus the fact that historically polls underrepresent Trump, and he's well on track to a comfortable win.
I was arguing with a different person on here a couple days ago who was trying to say that voter registration numbers point to a Harris landslide. If you didn’t have poll numbers, these registration numbers would be helpful (though I would want to see actual numbers, not just percents), but trying to count them on top of polling is I think a mistake. The nytimes poll from last week is definitely a negative indicator for Harris, and is probably the strongest single indicator you have pointed to. I don’t think it, even with this other information, gives reason to be confident of a Trump win, let alone a comfortable win. It might happen, but I would want to look at *all* the information, not just the ones you are pointing to. That is why I come to this site.
Well from @realpdata on X, taking PA as an example. All the polls show Trump ahead by 4 to 5 from 2020 to 2024:
Emerson D+5 -> R+1
Marist D+9 -> Tied
InsiderAdvantage D+3 -> R+2
Quinnipiac D+8 -> D+5
NY Times D+9 -> D+4
Suffolk D+7 -> D+3
CBS News D+7 -> Tied
Trafalgar D+2 -> R+2
CNN D+10 -> Tied
Recent polls in CA and NY show Trump doing better by 10+. Unlikely Trump is doing better in deep blue states but not doing better in swing states.
Considering 2020 margins was less than 1% in 3 swing states, it's reasonable to assume Trump is comfortably in the lead in all key swing states.
Is this the Iowa poll you were referring to?
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2024/09/15/iowa-poll-donald-trump-iowa-lead-shrinks-as-kamala-harris-replaces-joe-biden/75180245007/
If so, would you revise your prediction to say that Harris has a good chance of sweeping the blue wall states?
Whoops! Lmao
You went quiet about that Iowa poll. What happened?
Iowa poll just came out. Trump only up by 4 points in the "gold standard" poll. So Iowa shifted 4 points to the left since 2020. Trump now has no path to victory left because everything will shift left. Am I doing this right?
Seltzer had Biden and Trump tied in Sept 2020. Trump won by 8. Guaranteed her poll will shift more towards Trump in her final poll. Trump will win IA easier by 10+.
Meanwhile, from @realpdata on X, taking PA as an example. All the polls show Trump ahead by 4 to 5 from 2020 to 2024:
Emerson D+5 -> R+1
Marist D+9 -> Tied
InsiderAdvantage D+3 -> R+2
Quinnipiac D+8 -> D+5
NY Times D+9 -> D+4
Suffolk D+7 -> D+3
CBS News D+7 -> Tied
Trafalgar D+2 -> R+2
CNN D+10 -> Tied
Recent polls in CA and NY show Trump doing better by 10+. Unlikely Trump is doing better in deep blue states but not doing better in swing states.
Considering 2020 margins was less than 1% in 3 swing states, it's reasonable to assume Trump is comfortably in the lead in all key swing states.
In the future it’s probably worth giving a more skeptical eye to wherever you heard that rumor.
Yes, because we all know pollsters are immune to pressure to withhold or tweak their results. Seltzer's final poll will be much closer to Trump +8. He will win it +10.
I don’t think he’s acually up just 4 points, i just think it was silly to be out here guaranteeing a +15 poll based on twitter rumors and it’s silly now to be claiming that someone you called the gold standard a few days ago changed her results by over 10 points based on some nebulous outside pressure. But I sympathize with the desire to self soothe in an anxious time, so no harm no foul.
But you were just making speculations based off a rumor that the latest poll would show Trump up 15 in Iowa. Then you didn’t adjust those speculations based on the actual poll results. Now you’re moving the goalposts to say that the poll will be different near the election. Why should we take your analysis seriously?
Even if pollsters are susceptible to pressure, people who circulate rumors online have incentives of their own.
Maybe you’re confusing Iowa for Michigan or Pennsylvania.
The Selzer poll came out and showed only a modest Trump lead in Iowa. Does this make you less confident that he’s going to win? Maybe we could adjust the odds, like you could offer 3 to 1 that he’ll win?