Category Archives: Election

Suggestion

I recommend that Congresspeople not start any sentence, in any situation or context, private or public (and especially not while shouting out to a rally of armed lunatics), with the phrase "Hilter was right".

At the very least, nobody is going to pay much attention to what follows - you just bigfooted your own point. But you also sound like a too-clever jackass.

News

WaPo:

  • Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed through metal barricades at the back of the Capitol building about 1 p.m. Wednesday, running past security guards and breaking fences.
  • Capitol Police ordered evacuations of two Capitol campus buildings — the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building and the Cannon House Office Building, both just across Independence Avenue from the Capitol.
  • Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump called on members of Congress to reject electoral votes Wednesday that would cement their father’s loss. “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore,” Trump Jr. said of GOP lawmakers who oppose rejecting the votes. “This is Donald Trump‘s Republican Party.” Their father then took the stage to claim he won the election.

I'm sure the these things are totally unrelated.

The most fabulous whiner

Then-Future President Trump:

"I think he's probably right. I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine because I want to win. And I'm not happy if I'm not winning. And I am a whiner. And I'm a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win," he said. "And I'm going to win for the country and I'm going to make our country great again."

CNN, August 2015.

Big Prediction

There will be no prosecutions of TrumpCo by the Biden admin. There will be no great cleansing of the political forum. There will be no satisfying smackdown to make up for what Trump put American liberals through for the last four years.

Why? Because prosecuting the previous administration is not what America does. There's no legal reason we don't; we just don't do it. It's one of the norms Trump and McConnell didn't destroy, despite the fact that Trump dangled it in front his audiences every chance he got (Lock Her Up!) - remember, the GOP base truly thinks Obama and Clinton were literal criminals. And they wanted Trump to reach back and prosecute everyone. Yeah, well imagine the state of the country now if they had done it.

But Trump actually did illegal things! OK, here's the tough part: most of America simply doesn't care. They want the government to make their lives better and to stay out of their lives - and they don't care if that's a contradiction, because that's how much thought they put into the whole thing. STFU and make my life better, now. Spending time going after Trump is not going to look like it's making anyone's life better. It will look like government wasting time and energy and it will look like political theater and people will not like it. The laws Trump broke didn't affect most people directly, and so they aren't clamoring for redress.

Yes, everyone who is demanding that there needs to be a grand cleansing and hammering and scouring is going to be sorely disappointed. But Biden is not an avenging angel. Neither was Clinton, nor Obama. Turns out Trump wasn't either. That's not what Presidents do.

The Dems took their shot at Trump and the GOP Senate blocked it. So we had to vote him out, and we did. And then we got to watch him flailing and trying to spin his loss into a victory. But that's as much satisfaction as we're going to get. Enjoy it.

Check back in four years and see if I was right!

Why the polls got it wrong

So, David: What the hell happened with the polls this year?

David Shor

So the basic story is that, particularly after Covid-19, Democrats got extremely excited and had very high rates of engagement. They were donating at higher rates, etc., and this translated to them also taking surveys, because they were locked at home and didn’t have anything else to do. There’s some pretty clear evidence that that’s nearly all of it: It was partisan non-response. Democrats just started taking a bunch of surveys [when they were called by pollsters, while Republicans did not].

Just to put some numbers on that, if you look at the early vote results and compare it with the crosstabs of what public polls said early voters were going to be, it’s pretty clear that early voters were considerably less Democratic than people thought. Campaign pollsters can actually join survey takers to voter files, and starting in March, the percentage of our survey takers who were, say, ActBlue donors skyrocketed. The average social trust of respondents went up, core attitudes changed — basically, liberals just started taking surveys at really high rates. That’s what happened.