So, as Halloween rapidly transitions to Dr. Tongue’s 3D Election (Ooh, scary, kids) we have some things to keep in mind.
At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver has all but wrapped up his own analysis of pre-election polls with his site giving Trump only a 10 percent chance of winning the election. It used to be at least 15%. “And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons: Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day. Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day. ” Furthermore: “At the same time, though, a 2016-style polling error wouldn’t be enough for Trump to win. …I’ve taken our final polling averages in 2016 and shown how they compared to the actual results. And then I’ve shown what the results would be based on this year’s polling average if the polls were exactly as wrong as in 2016 in exactly the same states.
“Takeaway? Joe Biden would win. In fact, he’d win 335 electoral votes, including those in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. A lot of these wins would be close — he’d win by around 2 points in Arizona and Wisconsin, by and less than 1 point in Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania, so he’d have to sweat a bit, but he’d win.”
Silver’s caveat: “And note that, with his 10 percent chance, our model is specifically referring to a legitimate win; we do not account for what we call “extraconstitutional shenanigans,” by Trump or anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.”
If you watch MSDNC, Steve Kornacki has been showing a national Electoral College map showing some states in the bag for Biden (the West Coast besides Alaska, Nevada, most of the Northeast besides Pennsylvania) and some in the bag for Trump (most of the Rocky Mountains besides Colorado and New Mexico, most of the Deep South) and other states (Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida) as toss-ups. Without the toss-ups, Biden starts with a base of 232 electors. Trump starts with 125.
In a way this is telling, because it helps explain why Democrats, with 16 years between Bush v. Gore and the Trump election, didn’t do a damn thing to reform the Electoral College, because in large respect it still favors them. When it doesn’t, it’s because the Republican can win certain key states with lots of electors (other than California and New York, of course). This is also why Republicans think that dirt does vote, and why they’re so easily impressed by a 2016 election map that showed a sea of red states despite losing the popular vote by 3 million or so. Republican votes are spread out, except in Texas and Florida, and Trump won because some of those states Hillary Clinton was counting on, and normally would be able to count on, broke Trump’s way.
Of course this means the two campaigns have to focus on those states. Everyone’s been looking at the huge early vote in Texas, and thinking, ‘Oh, THIS is the year Texas turns blue.’ Well, they say that every election, they said it when Beto O’Rourke was running against Senator Ted Cruz, and every time it never actually happens, partly because of voter suppression schemes like Governor Abbott restricting ballot access to one station per county. However, the fact that Texas has already exceeded 2016’s total vote indicates the scheme isn’t working. Still, I feel safe in predicting that Trump is going to keep Texas.
Winning Texas is not the point, and I suspect Team Biden knows it.
The point is to be just competitive enough that Republicans will lose Texas unless they spend time and money shoring up a territory that would have been considered totally safe not long ago. And given that the Trump campaign has pissed away its campaign budget like a cokehead pisses away Atlantic City casino money, that means they have to perform triage and decide where they have to fight, because now they have to fight everywhere, but can’t.
The Republicans can keep Texas, and Florida, and maybe even Pennsylvania, but they would have to lose Minnesota and Wisconsin. If they do that, they may lose Iowa. They focus on those places, they may have Pennsylvania, Ohio and the Great Lakes, but they could lose Arizona and maybe even Florida.
They lose Florida, it’s probably over. They lose Texas, it’s REALLY over. As in, 1932 over.
Remember this: Officers study tactics. Generals study strategy. Real generals study logistics.
But again, none of this could matter, because Trump has one advantage that he didn’t before, which is that he IS the president and could use the office to cheat his way out of a lawful election in the same way that he’s bullshitted his way out of everything else.
MSN reproduced a guest column at CNN’s website (Fuck You, CNN) from Russian genius and Putin refugee Garry Kasparov in which he finds his former situation very much like this one:
“Normal people don’t like to imagine terrible events, which is why autocrats consistently surprise them. (As when I wrote here back in April that it would seem logical to someone like Trump to try to sabotage the US Postal Service if he thought it could help his electoral chances. Unimaginable, until it happened.)
“You could make a very long list of things pundits insisted autocrats would never do that they eventually did. I made such a list myself, about Vladimir Putin. In my 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming,” I called it the “Putin would never” list. It included things like taking over private media companies, arresting Russia’s richest man for dabbling in politics and invading Georgia and Ukraine.
“Doesn’t Putin realize how bad this looks?” became the experts’ refrain after he crossed line after uncrossable line. As if he cared how things looked. Why should he? Dictators don’t ask “Why?” They only ask, “Why not?” They don’t stop unless someone stops them. No one stopped Putin.
“For years, my colleagues and I in the Russian democracy movement warned that Putin was building a dictatorship. Even when it was crystal-clear that Russian democracy and civil society had been gutted, the free world fiercely resisted acknowledging that truth.
“Putin laid bare the huge disconnect between autocrats and normal people — the autocrats’ ability to do things that simply don’t occur to people with a sense of decency and a respect for norms and traditions. Autocrats are aware of the consequences they might face for the damage they do, but they believe they can avoid those consequences by staying in power, forever if necessary. Trump might have been indicted several times over were he not protected by his office, and a sense of impunity tends to make one sloppy.
“Trump no doubt believes that he has more to lose by leaving office than by fighting — lawlessly or not — to stay. The oligarchs and thugs he so admires surely agree. They won’t easily let go of such a lucrative investment — one of their own kind in the Oval Office.
“Putin and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, to name two, have surely reaped many benefits from Trump, beyond political ones. It will take years to untangle the web of his financial dealings and how the treasure and might of the United States was exploited to serve the President’s personal interests and those of his cronies.”
Which is why Trump really has no reason NOT to get his goons to intimidate voters, get his judges to throw out massive amounts of legal votes just cause they can, and get his handpicked Supreme Court to flat-out ignore all precedent and declare that the original intent of the Constitution is that Donald Trump can do anything he wants, not cause he’s the President, but because he’s Donald Trump. And then he’ll spend the next four years flashing that retarded toad grin and campaigning for TRUMP 2024: “Sure you’ll be dead of coronavirus by then, but before that, YOU’LL STILL GET TO MAKE LIBERALS CRY!!”
And that’s why pretty much everybody thinks the only way to shut down that possibility is to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that’s means you need a Democratic blowout. Problem is that the demographics in that sea-of-red Midwest will keep even the most wild Biden victory from being a 1984-level blow-out where Reagan was re-elected and Walter Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota. And now the polls in Iowa and Pennsylvania are tightening up: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2020/10/31/election-2020-iowa-poll-president-donald-trump-leads-joe-biden/6061937002/ “J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., said while men are more likely to support Trump and women to support Biden, the gender gap has narrowed, and independents have returned to supporting the president, a group he won in 2016.
“The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing,” she said. “There’s a consistent story in 2020 to what happened in 2016.” But, she said, “Neither candidate hits 50%, so there’s still some play here.”
So given that Election Day itself still hasn’t happened, we have to hope that the early vote for both candidates is at least as much a factor as the Tuesday vote, and that said early vote favors Democrats.
Probably the only hope there is that Trump’s lookit-me-Mommee need for attention and his subsequent compulsion to keep holding rallies even after getting infected with Trump Virus himself have created supersoaker events that have, according to a Stanford study, led to 30,000 coronavirus cases traceable to the rallies with over 700 deaths. This includes people who were subsequently infected by contact with attendees, but it’s hard to say how many of them were Biden voters.
Oh sure, I shouldn’t wish death on anybody, but it’s not like anyone put a gun to these people’s heads and told them to go out and catch coronavirus just to show the rest of us how butch they are. Indeed, if anybody’s using weapons to threaten voters, it’s these guys.
And yet, with Trumpniks being so afraid of losing their object of ego identification, and Trump so afraid of indictment, you have to expect these people to fight like the cornered rats they lick, both at the ballot box and in the courtrooms. So a lot of these states – especially the ones both candidates need, like Pennsylvania – could be subject to legal hassles for weeks or months. Like Florida in 2000.
Christ Jesus on a pogo stick, is this gonna come down to fucking Florida AGAIN?
Well, that would make 2020 that much more 2020, wouldn’t it?