, 11.04.2020 08:39 AM

Your morning Kinsellian key messages

Just did some radio. Here’s what I said. You’re welcome.

33 Comments

  1. david says:

    S.N.A.T.U.
    Situation Normal All Trucked Up.
    Hmmmmm

  2. Greg says:

    I sure hope you are correct Warren. This fellow Calgarian would strongly prefer zero more years of Trump.

  3. I won’t be part of those who will automatically shit on pollsters saying they missed it in 2016 and again this year. Au contraire, it’s not about methodology — or even revised methodology. You nailed it ages ago when you wrote about shy Trump/Republican voters. In short, in both campaigns Republicans went out of their way not to be as frank or honest with pollsters compared to Democrats. In my book, that’s it right there.

    • The Doctor says:

      Obviously the polls were off, but that whole thing about the “shy Trump voter” is still just a theory. It hasn’t been proven in any scientifically valid, empirical way.

      One of the problems with that theory is that as we all know, the USA is incredibly polarized, and as a result there are lots of places (e.g., rural Alabama) where it’s socially undesirable to be a Democrat and/or Biden supporter. So wouldn’t that mean that there are a whole bunch of shy Biden voters as well?

      I’m not saying it’s not a thing, I’m just saying it’s not actually proven and we should wait for all the facts and data to come in.

      It could for example be a weighting/sampling error rather than people deliberately not telling pollsters their views. I could see the Hispanic voter factor coming into play there, e.g., pollsters may have been relied on outdated assumptions about Hispanic voters being a Democratic party-voting monolith, when that’s clearly not the case.

      • Doc,

        I take your points but all I can say is that I personally would be a lot more shy about making the big reveal that I’m for Trump as opposed to being for Biden. LOL.

        As for Latinos, Miami-Dade was entirely predictable: those commercials labelling the Democratic agenda as socialism or worse, were a stroke of genius. Everyone already knows that Cuban and Venezuelan Americans are long already in the bag for Trump first and Republicans second.

        • the real Sean says:

          I think its a bit simpler than that… I suspect that hard conservative / Republican folks are more likely to screen their phone calls and or just hang up on every phone number they don’t recognize.

    • the real Sean says:

      At the end a lot of the polls only had Biden up by 7%. About 4.5% off. In 2016 they had Hillary winning by about 3.5% and she only won by 2%. So, actually, no, the polls are not WAAAAYYY off as is commonly thought. They just aren’t EXACT.

  4. Steve T says:

    I like your optimism – here’s hoping it plays out. I’m less optimistic that Trump and his minions will allow this to be finalized anytime before Christmas. They will take a scorched earth approach, and prove once and for all they don’t really believe in democracy.

    On a semi-related matter, I suspect there will be a major upheaval in the polling industry after this election. As with this side of the border, polls are almost irrelevant now. It’s not really the fault of the pollsters (people have reasons to lie, when asked for their voting intention), but in any case their poll results are meaningless.

    • The Doctor says:

      Steve, on your latter point, David Graham wrote a good piece about this in the Atlantic the day after the election. His point — which I agree with — is that it’s not just that pollsters are mis-calling elections. It goes beyond elections. We rely on pollsters and opinion surveys for all sorts of things beyond elections. We rely on them, for example, to tell us what percentage of our fellow citizens support or oppose abortion, or attend church, or are vegan or whatever. What if all of that is unreliable, or at least inaccurate?

      The related point Graham makes is that in a world where many of us live in like-minded bubbles and silos (e.g., urban vs rural, college educated vs. non), we rely on polls and surveys to tell us what other people who are not like us think.

      • For most polls, outside presidental polls in swing states, being 2-3% off isn’t a huge deal.

        • The Doctor says:

          Darwin, you’re correct on that point and really we need to wait for all the results to be final before we know how big the miss is.

          That said, it looks like the bigger misses may have been in some of those Senate races, e.g., South Carolina, Iowa (big time), North Carolina, which weren’t even close. Also at this point it looks like Susan Collins won, and that was a substantive miss.

  5. Poor Donny. Maybe he should go crying to his mother. Oh, right.

  6. the real Sean says:

    If they stopped counting right now (1:25 Eastern) and called the states Biden is winning, I believe Biden is at 270 exactly. Joe Biden is indeed going to win this thing.

  7. The Doctor says:

    I love Trump’s legal position this morning: you must stop counting votes in Pennsylvania, where I am currently ahead. And you must continue counting votes in Arizona and Nevada, where I am currently behind.

    Priceless.

    • Steve T says:

      Ah, he has become more finessed now. He is saying they must stop in Michigan (where he is behind), because they couldn’t be there to watch the boxes being opened. WTF?
      The approach for the entire Trump administration is basically: every person who isn’t part of the Trump Cult is actually a secret operative of the Democrats, and must be cast out. Jim Jones would be proud!

      • The Doctor says:

        There was a great split screen on twitter this morning, on one side Trump supporters screaming “count the votes!” and on the other side Trump supporters screaming “stop the count!”.

        These people are like beyond parody.

        • Doc,

          Now you know why the tenets of my Catholic religion on contraception are completely ignored by yours truly. The reproduction of blithering idiots is already way too widespread.

  8. duojet says:

    I’ve been following the action in Pennsylvania.

    Biden is averaging about 73% on today’s vote tallies.

    Most of the counties with large % of uncounted votes are very Democrat, so this trend is likely to continue, and Biden will win Pennsylvania by 40K votes.

  9. Mark D says:

    Looking at the way things are shaking out with the remaining states, and given that this is 2020, I think we may be headed to the absolute worst case scenario, which is an electoral college tie at 270-270.

  10. Trump proved once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that he remains The-Moron-In-Chief when he said he’d go straight to the SCOTUS. Too funny and entirely predictable.

  11. Miles Lunn says:

    I think Biden likely wins this. Pennsylvania should flip, Arizona while tightening probably narrowly goes for Biden and even Georgia he has a narrow edge. But fact Trump came as close to winning is downright scary. Trump will likely lose, but Trumpism is not dead, it is unleashed. Many thought 2016 was a fluke, it was not. There is a large part of the US population that like demagogues like him.

    • Peter Burnet says:

      Or maybe they just don’t like the Dems. It’s fine to celebrate, but nobody should be crowing. With Biden winning the presidency (probably), the Dems holding the house (narrowly), the GOP, the Senate (again, narrowly), and a more conservative SCOTUS, the gridlock will continue, which may mean either they will be forced to cooperate and swallow their ideological purity or they’re headed for another civil war. Not a good night for activists who think they sing with the angels, whether tea party or AOC types. Big transformative projects aren’t likely to go anywhere.
      Trump probably lost because too many people thought he is an appalling human being who discredited the presidency, not for anything he did or tried to do, and Biden may have won because enough independents craved decency and normalcy. But I can’t believe any thinking being thinks this election signaled anything at all about where the American public wants to go on policy.

      • Peter,

        They hate socialism with the rabid appetite of a fanatic, that is, until they turn 65, when they suddenly become Karl Marx and want every Medicare benefit in sight, whether the country can actually afford it or not. Human nature: so predictable.

      • The Doctor says:

        You’re right on that count, and part of the confounding thing there is that a lot of hardcore Trump supporters, like Trump himself, are kind of agnostic on policy. Trump actually couldn’t care less about policy, it bores him.

        Like Charlie Sykes said, Trumpism is mostly about owning the libs and throwing chunks of raw meat to the base. It’s all culture war, all the time.

        • Peter says:

          I’m as happy Trump probably lost as you are, but to just blithely blame their disappointments on some mythical Trump “base” of baccy-chewing crackers goes a long way to explaining why the Dems keep on coming up short. Trump increased his vote by almost four million over 2016. He increased his share of almost every demographic EXCEPT white males and independents. His Hispanic support jumped markedly, probably giving him Florida and Texas, and his share of the black vote increased significantly. The Dems are reeling from (and already infighting over) their Congressional losses and the GOP made gains in state legislatures, which they already control by a margin of two thirds. And all this happened with the Dems having the overwhelming support of most of the media, academia, the cultural community and high-tech social media firms. If the Dems don’t start looking in the mirror and stop rotely blaming some mythical base of know-nothings, racists and other crazies, they will be wiped out again in 2022, just as happened to Clinton and Obama. Why are progressives so prone to responding to their failures by finding ways to preen their moral superiority and give themselves compliments?

          This (from a Trump-hater) is a much more mature take on their challenges.

          • The Doctor says:

            Peter, I like Damon Linker, and I listen to him every week on the Bulwark Beg To Differ podcast.

            Bill Maher actually makes the same argument (albeit with a lot more humor and scatology) quite frequently on his show: the people you disagree with are numerous, they’re not going away, and we have to find some way to acknowledge that and get along.

            That said, I don’t think either the Republican or Democratic Party is ever going to get their shit together in any way that you or Damon Linker or Bill Maher might like, because the most extreme, hardcore members will always exhibit these kind of inward-looking, insular, narcissistic tendencies. The further you are on the extreme edge, the more impossible it is for you to imagine how anyone else on the planet could see things differently from you. I think in that respect, extreme political partisans lack a certain kind of empathy that people closer to the center are more likely to have.

          • Peter says:

            You may be right, Doc. The grip the “bases” have on the party machines may just be too strong. Here is another take on the outcome from the very astute Matt Taibbii, a Sanders-supporting leftist who has been writing about the elitism of the Dems, woke activists and the corporate media for some time and, like the similar Glen Greenwald, is now being deplatformed by institutional progressives. I have been struck for some years at how many progressives today continue to believe they speak for the “little people” while raining contempt on them the minute they don’t vote the right way. Up here, too, and obviously in Britain. If Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath today, the Joads would be dismissed as racist, know-nothing fundies.

    • Miles,

      Poor Trump, he’s going to have to concentrate going forward on GoFundMe since a lot of bills are on the way! What an exciting change it will be to actually pay up.

      • The Doctor says:

        True perhaps, but as some people have observed (correctly I think), Trump can make an absolute shitload of money starting something like Trump TV (many people have said he should just take over OANN or take up a prime time slot on Fox). FFS he has tens of millions of rabid cult member fans who would consume his excrement if he told them to.

        Apparently he made a ton of money on the Apprentice and that was actually the one time in his life he really made serious money on his own (as opposed to inheriting it from Daddy and pissing it away on casinos that went bankrupt etc.). And then post-Apprentice, he plowed that dough into golf course resorts that have been hemorrhaging money.

        The irony is the guy is great at being a celebrity but he’s such a narcissist he want to play at being a successful business man, which he actually sucks at.

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