American Politics from 2019 on

[Woodbutcher]

Tero, if Trump loses, do you think there is a serious risk of violence from his supporters, who would no doubt proclaim the election to be stolen, again?

For sure. He might even call in some help from Putin or Kim...

[pErvinalia]

Watched a doco last night on January 6 and the lead up. Can't see how there isn't going to be serious violence if he loses again.

[JimC]

And then there'e the question of what he will do to past opponents if he wins. I am trying to be optimistic - it could be argued that his promises of vengeance are bluffs, to keep his bellicose supporters happy, while the reality may be that he will have too many legal constraints to be completely vicious. Maybe I'm being too optimistic...

[Brian Peacock]

Republican 2020 election deniers and Qanon freaks are now on the election boards of many swing counties and states. Rather than simply ensuring that elections are conducted in accordance with the law they've been focusing on disrupting operations and bringing in rules to judge the legitimacy of votes for other parties. I suspect many votes are going to be discounted, and many counts will be delayed and perhaps not signed off without weeks or months of legal wrangling. Trump is going to declare victory on the night whatever happens and regardless of his vote share, which is all his supporters and hackers will need - have ever needed - to justify the use of force. Whether he wins or loses I expect vigilante groups will spring up before inauguration day to enact exactly what his rhetoric has called for - for some MAGAs anything else would simply be un-American.

[Brian Peacock]

Someone please quote that back at me if I turn out to be completely wrong!

[Tero]

NYT morning letter. Democrats are now conservative. At least the working class ones.

If he wins again this year, it will be partly by appealing to people whom Democrats wrongly imagined as loyal progressives — including Black, Latino, Asian American and younger voters. Social class, as Scammon and Wattenberg suggested, can be an even better predictor of a person’s vote than race or age.

Much of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign is also consistent with their arguments. After adopting fiercely liberal positions four years ago, she has reversed course and changed her positions on immigration, fracking and more. Her ads describe her as “a border state prosecutor.” She emphasizes patriotism and economic populism.

Still, it’s a tricky pivot: More Americans describe Harris as “too liberal” (44 percent) than describe Trump as “too conservative” (32 percent), according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last month. I know that many people find that comparison hard to fathom. “The Real Majority” helps make sense of it.

For more: On today’s episode of “The Daily,” Michael Barbaro and I explain why immigration has become such a sore spot for working-class voters.
By David Leonhardt

he referenced this book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Majority

[L'Emmerdeur]

Sweet!

'"No ObamaCare": Here’s How Trump, Johnson, JFK Jr. Plan to Destroy Americans' Health Care'

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson say they have big plans to implement “massive” changes to the entire U.S. food, drug, and health care system—from killing ObamaCare and all its protections, to handing over control of all health, food, and drug policies and agencies to conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—and they’re openly bragging about it just days before Election Day.

Republicans conspired to block every one of Barack Obama’s initiatives even before the 44th President was sworn in to office in January, 2009. They have spent years promising to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, or just end the Affordable Care Act entirely. Donald Trump for over a decade has repeatedly vowed to kill ObamaCare, and repeatedly said he would end it and unveil his new health care plan soon, before admitting during the presidential debate all he had were mere “concepts of a plan.”

...

On Monday in Pennsylvania, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson vowed to kill the Affordable Care Act, which covers tens of millions of Americans, has dramatically slashed the number of uninsured Americans, and offers widespread protections to over 133 million people in America.

“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Speaker Johnson told an attendee at a GOP candidate’s meeting, NBC News reported.

“No Obamacare?” an attendee asked.

“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, before explaining how Donald Trump wants to “go big” in removing regulations.

“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said, per NBC. “These agencies have been weaponized against the people, it’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors and we need this across the board.”

[Tero]

Former GOP Gov of CA Arnold Schwarzenegger says he doesn’t normally do endorsements but he’s making an exception for Harris:

“Rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. Calling America a trash can of the world is so unpatriotic it makes me furious.”

[Brian Peacock]

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trump-as-terminator.jpg (19.95 KiB) Viewed 324 times

[Tero]

Can the male dominted Trump coalition win one more election? My guess: in a way, yes. They will keep the house or senate.

1. Staunch Conservatives (not recent, the always Republicans)

2. Free Marketers (tech boys, Musk)

3. American Preservationists. The people who think there is some idea of "America" that is under attack

4. Anti-Elites (I would include some libertrians, they just hate all of the federal gov't)

5. The Disengaged. People who literally don't care about politics. (there for the show, many of them racists this time around).

https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publica ... ump-voters

[Tero]

Republicans fear this man:

Elias has been meddling in elections, and sometimes successfully overturning them, for most of his career, despite paying lip service on television to calling Republicans who challenge things like noncitizens voting or the lack of election integrity safeguards “election deniers.” In an MSNBC interview, he even called for the disbarment of Republican lawyers who challenge elections like he does, while maintaining that he, the Democrat Party, and their allies should be able to file lawsuits that can tip election results their way.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/de ... rump-wins/

[Tero]

Nate silver mentions voter screens, without explaining one. The polls fix the group to the same ratios as registered voters. Other fixes came about comparing votes and polls in 2020.

Furthermore, as we described this week, likely voter screens have tended to have opposite effects in state and national polls, hurting Harris in the former while helping her in the later. Many pollsters seem to lack confidence in their results this cycle: there may be some herding where it's safer to show a tie or Harris +1 or Trump +1 instead of taking the risk of going out on a limb. And at least one high-quality set of surveys, from the New York Times, have consistently suggested that Harris could win through the Blue Wall states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) despite having mediocre numbers for her in their national polls.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-state- ... e-7-states

[Tero]

Lies: immigransts and jobs. 2020 election stolen. Still main tools in small town PA.

About 20 miles from the city is the small borough of Charleroi, which is set into the steep slopes of the Mon Valley region. It is one of the towns that Trump has singled out recently due to the arrival of Haitian immigrants, which he claims falsely has led to bankruptcy and an increase in crime. Many of Charleroi’s community leaders refute Trump’s presentation and point me instead to a real crisis here: the impending closure of a glassware factory that has operated for 132 years. Hundreds of jobs are on the line after the manufacturer, Pyrex, was effectively bought out by a private equity group.

I meet Heather Roberts, the president of the plant’s union. She has worked here for 18 years and stands next to her aunt, April Sethman, who has been here for more than two decades. Roberts’ father is working inside. Her father-in-law is about to clock off. Her late mother worked here for decades, too. “Once this place goes down, the valley is crushed,” she says. Sethman nods in agreement.

It is a familiar veneer, of which you might expect those in other rust belt communities – to which Trump promised so much and delivered so little – to be wary. But while Roberts and Sethman acknowledge most of their colleagues would rather Trump not talk about immigration and instead focus on their jobs.

A woman in the crowd, her vitriol so sharp that it cuts through the room, shouts: “We know it was stolen. What has been done from then until now?”

Justice tells her he “agrees wholeheartedly” and describes what happened in 2020 as “terrible”, but urges her to put the last election behind her and go out to vote again. Another party member encourages her to sign up as a poll watcher, to root out “the fraud”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/com ... ormous-lie

[Brian Peacock]

Dead-heat poll results are astonishing – and improbable, experts say

...

Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introducing corrective weighting.

Of the last 321 polls in the battlegrounds, 124 - nearly 40% - showed margins of a single point or less, the pair wrote. Pennsylvania was the most “troubling” case, with 20 out of 59 polls showing an exact tie, while another 26 showed margins of less than 1%.

This indicated “not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race”, according to Clinton and Lapinski.

Large numbers of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinion, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling. The absence of such variation suggests that either pollsters are adjusting “weird” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued – or the following second possibility, which they deemed more likely.

“Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results,” they write.

Either explanation “raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest”, they added.

...

[Tero]

Trump is relying on SC. He put in 3 of them.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/ ... ia-ballots
But the court is suffering from scandal. And they want to feel important. I think they will act mostly by law. They did throw out 1600 perferctly good voters who failed to check a box on a form. But mainly the courts, state courts as well, will hold up our pretend democracy.
Where Trump will get gifts from the SC is in his criminal cases.