Omnibus Politics Thread: Campaign 2016 EditionFollow

More like you don't like that he's not giving Hillary a wide enough margin, right?

Did you like him due to his accuracy, or did you like his predictions?

As I said, I liked him primarily due to his ground reports on the Obama and McCain campaigns in terms of field offices, coordination, etc. The predictions part was secondary since he was doing essentially the same thing that Electoral-Vote (and ElectionProjection.com) was doing years earlier. In 2012 it became more all about the numbers and I found his stuff less interesting aside from when he showed Strategic Visions to be a fraud.

I've always cared more about the state by state numbers anyway and found the top line "82.4% chance of winning!" bit to be kind of silly.

Policy is hard, let's go shopping!

Just wish the character issues weren't based on ones from Drawn Together.

Finished my plans. Going to vote after all because why the hell not, take my family to the aquarium, lunch and cheesecake, then come home and watch the series finale of This Country because I can't imagine the US lasting another year after this episode.

Edited, Nov 7th 2016 2:32pm by lolgaxe

Spin doesn't require payment Joph. I also never said it was a fake letter. Just a strange one. Yes. It's strange when the person who violated you further leaks information allowing the press to locate you, and instead of blaming that person, you blame... The FBI? Because...? Not sure. They re-opened a completely unrelated investigation because they happened to find some additional emails on a laptop that was collected as part of the investigation into the crime committed against her. And that has bearing on the media finding her how exactly?

It doesn't. It makes zero sense. Hence my comment. I have no clue about her personal opinions or agenda, or lack of one. But leaping to blaming the FBI for what happened seems incredibly bizarre to me. And given bits like this in the article:



One might reasonably speculate that someone with that strong a view on the election itself might just take the opportunity to lash out at the FBI, not really for anything they did relating to her personally, but because what they did hurt a politician she was supporting. And she'd not need anyone to pay her for that, right? And a media, largely also made up of people slanted in the same political direction, might choose to focus on that angle of the story, since it allows them to shift the story from Clinton's email woes to how the FBI's reveal about Clinton hurt a victimized teenage girl.

Associative reasoning is alive and well. That's what I see this story as.

I thought gbaji was going to "spend the rest of the election cycle drunk".

He types well for being so hammered.

Thought this was an interesting read.

The rules for winning the election are the same for both candidates and are not hidden from either of them. Saying "candidate A would have won if only the rules were different", is a completely meaningless point. If we selected candidates by Alphabetical Order instead of voting, then Clinton would have won as well (unless, I suppose we used their first names). Or we could choose by height. Or video game contest, or whatever. Again though, that meaningless speculation.

Same deal with the article that was linked. In the world we live in, even the uninformed and under educated get a vote. Both sides know this going in, and the rules are the same. To paraphrase a famous quote: it's the worst system, except for all the other ones we could try (a couple of which were mentioned and are, frankly, far far worse. And no, that's not because I haven't spent time thinking about them, as the author suggests. They are just awful ideas).

you're welcome?

A subjective evaluation of the result as "bad" is irrelevant since it's based on the authors personal view of the candidate who won. It's irrelevant because whether the author personally thinks the candidate is "good" or "bad" does tell us at all whether the process used to elect said candidate is "good" or "bad". And to make that determination, you must take away the subjective opinion of the candidates themselves. It's the process we're examining, right?

I think someone else (in the other thread I think?) mentioned the idea that liberals who are right now shouting about how the EC is broken should stop and examine whether they'd be saying that if the results were reversed. If Trump had won the majority of the popular vote and Clinton had won the EC vote, would they be arguing that the EC was broken? I'd wager none of them would. Which means they are not actually arguing about the process we use to elect a president, but complaining about the outcome that resulted from that process.

Which is a particularly terrible reason to make any sort of change in our process. It's like all the folks who hate the filibuster when their party is in power and it's used against them, but are suspiciously silent on the issue when their own party does the same thing when they are in the minority. The wheel does turn. Pretending to oppose the process when you really just don't like the result is a bit dishonest, but also incredibly short sighted (well, if you honestly expect anything to happen except whining, that is).


One of the thoughts I had about the people protesting and rioting (pretty much exclusively in heavily Democrat states), is that part of their anger is that their votes effectively had no effect on the outcome because they were living in a state that was a foregone conclusion in terms of EC votes. I get that. But the solution there is if they really really want to change things, maybe go move to a red state and live there. Of course, it's possible that those who do that might just find that by leaving the highly concentrated liberal bastions of the big cities in blue states for the smaller towns and communities of the red states, they might just find themselves actually meeting real conservatives from those states that they currently think are populated by nothing but uneducated, mouth breathing, racist, bigoted, sexist hicks and discover that they aren't those things after all. And they might actually, for the first time in many of their lives, actually have a conversation with someone who may explain why they are conservative, and they might just find out that some of their reasons for being conservative and voting GOP are actually quite reasonable and make complete sense given where they live and the economic conditions they're in.

One needs only look at an electoral map to see the problem. And it's even more pronounced when you look at a county by county map. States that are strongly blue may only have say 60-65% Dem votes in a presidential election (certainly enough to win the state safely), but that percentage is concentrated in a small number of geographical areas within the sate, where the rate of Dem voters is likely much higher (like 85-90%). So you've got a serious echo chamber going on in those populations, where they just don't even hear or interact with conservatives. Every time I hear someone say that they don't understand how anyone could vote conservative, for Trump, for X bill, or whatever, my thought is that this is a problem of ignorance on their part. It's one thing to say that you understand the other guy, but disagree, and be able to state why you disagree, but when you state that you don't even understand why anyone would vote differently than you, you're basically declaring your own ignorance of one whole half of our political narrative.


That's a problem with many liberals right now. It's why they are eternally shocked and surprised by election results like this (although, I'm personally inclined to give them a bit of a bye on this one). It's also one of the reasons why the EC methodology is so critically important. It forces a party to find a way to appeal, not just to a single demographic living in tightly packed urban regions, but to a more diverse set of voters. IMO, that's a very very good thing to have in place. And no, this isn't just about one party versus the other. The GOP could just as easily be the party that has most of its supporters squished together in big cities with the Dems out in the areas in between. The same "rule" should apply in both cases. The side that can appeal to a sufficient number of voters in a sufficient number of different types of areas (urban, suburban, and rural), across a sufficient number of states (which may themselves have different issues they care about), should logically produce the policies most likely to at least address the needs of most people in most areas in most states and in most living conditions.

If we elect a president who only represents people who live in high density urban areas, that's kind of a problem, isn't it? You run the risk of alienating your phone sanitizers, right? And in our case, the role of phone sanitizers is being played by the folks who actually grow and transport the food that arrives magically in your grocery store, or that makes the plastic in your phone case, or the steel and aluminum that your mass transit system is made out of, or a massive number of things that big cities absolutely rely on, but most of the people living there don't actually think about because it's just always there and they never see it being made nor really have a clue how it gets there. There's a real danger of such closeted thinking. Which is ironic because people who live in large cities tend to pride themselves on how worldly they are. But they are woefully uninformed about a whole lot of things about how the world actually works. When you've never seen a steel mill, or a dairy farm, or any kind of farm that wasn't some celebrities hippy co-op which makes people feel good, but couldn't feed a tiny fraction of the population, it's easy to denigrate those who work in those industries. It's easy to attack the companies that make those things, pass laws mandating how they do it, in increasingly bizarre ways, and otherwise drive their industries into the dirt in many cases out of pure spite for them, or just plain ignorance.

And that's a problem. Those kids in Seattle and San Fransisco who are rioting? They're free to move to Montana or Idaho and take up farming, or working in a factory, or on a ranch, or any of a number of other things that might actually give them a better perspective as to why not everyone agrees with them. I'm sure they wont though. Which is why I give their protests exactly the weight they deserve.