President Trump

[JimHow]

Man this video from Simon Rosenberg actually gives me a little hope! Vote early and vote often!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQskb_Edmo4

[JimHow]

I've been watching this fellow lately, he puts out sometimes 2-3 videos a day, he is a major statistics geek, I highly recommend him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdz_wF6M-mQ

[DavidG]

Not getting my hopes up.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
The only poll that matters is the one on November 5th.
And even that one will be subject to attack.

[JimHow]

Orange lost his mind years ago but now he seems to have gone stark raving mad, I’m wondering if it’s because he’s feeling threatened or if it’s part of a campaign strategy.

[DavidG]

And yet, it’s still too close to call.

Here’s another statistical snapshot of the polls, from Nate Silver.

[JimHow]

I'm not going to watch tonight.
I think we are headed for an electoral disaster, and there is not much anybody can do about it.
The country is what it is right now.
I'm going to hide out in my wine cellar for the next four years, wake me when it's over.

[JimHow]

An interesting discussion on polling aggregates. I've never trusted 538.com or Nate Silver, and he provides some good supporting reasons why:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWyfSpvWyEo

[stefan]

>>
I'm going to hide out in my wine cellar for the next four years
>>

Oh, that is why you have been buying so much wine lately: you only had enough for three years.

[Claudius2]

>>
I'm going to hide out in my wine cellar for the next four years
>>

Oh, that is why you have been buying so much wine lately: you only had enough for three years.

Guys
Based on current consumption levels, I’ve got enough for 12-15 years so the next four won’t run down the stash too much.

Putting the US to one side, it really could be worse as Singapore is surrounded by corrupted, cronyist narcissists.

Cheers
Mark

[JimHow]

Lee Kuan Yew must be rolling over in his grave?

[JimHow]

Orange up significantly in the Quinnipiac poll in WI, MI, PA, ugh.

[DavidG]

Just back from a talk and Q&A with Liz Cheney.
Feels like I’m living in a dystopian movie and we’re approaching the climax.

[JimHow]

Three weeks to go, it feels like the Harris/Walz campaign has gone flat, and yet they have the best ground game, the most money, and they always seem to be up by a point or two in PA and NV. Gonna be a nail biter down the stretch.

[JCNorthway]

I listened to a session today from my investment management company. They had a guest who has been a political strategist for the past 20-30 years. After listening to an hour of the various elements influencing the election, his take was that it comes down to last minute moves.

That does not do much for sleeping well!

[Jay Winton]

and Trump held a dance party last night.

[Hm$(still)]

I listened to David Plouffe as a guest on this past Sunday’s Pod Save America. He was certainly not arrogant enough to predict victory but I came away from the interview feeling that he and the rest of the Harris team are supremely competent. His view of the public polling is that it’s largely garbage and should be ignored.

Hm$

[JimHow]

I remember he did a similar interview in the final days back in the first Obama campaign.
Orange has gone completely mad. He is a madman.

[JimHow]

Mark the date, October 16th. Harris seems to have nudged ahead in North Carolina. Let’s go!

[rdaytonjr]

Tried to vote early here in NC. Huge turn out and hour and half wait. We'll try again after the initial swell passes.

[rdaytonjr]

Well Susan and I got in and are votes are cast.

[JimHow]

Well done. Very well done indeed.
I just answered a poll. I usually like to vote on Election Day for the social aspect of it, but I think I might just go into city hall tomorrow and get it done.

[DavidG]

I’ve been voting by mail since 2020. Signed, sealed, delivered last week.

[SF Ed]

Already voted and had my ballot accepted in CA. I can't imagine voting in person again. CA makes it so easy to vote by mail.

[JimHow]

Right now I have North Carolina as the narrowing path to victory for the Democrats.
I have not felt good about Wisconsin (the Florida of the north) from the beginning, and I see us losing Nevada too, I think things like "the Harry Reid Machine" are a myth of the ivory tower crowd, in my experience in politics these so-called "machines" exist only in novels, movies, and college textbooks.

I've given up on GA and AZ, my slimming hopes are that we'll hold MI and PA and pull an upset in NC, and win 276-262. But that is all VERY tenuous.

[JimHow]

Here's my other prediction, you are not going to see any great "record turnout" from either side, in fact I predict an average, below-average turnout.

[JimHow]

I get a kick out of the story in New York Times and the effete comment that Orange Head's vulgarities related to Harris and Arnold Palmer, etc., might "alienate swing voters." Rolling my eyes. Don't they know by now, this is how he operates, sucking the oxygen out of the room, putting on a bib and telling lies at the McDonald's drive through window?

[DavidG]

Yup. I think the die is cast, and we’ll be stuck with 4 years of Trump and all that goes with it.

The following from Nate Cohen in the NYT showed up in my inbox this morning. The pundits and gurus don’t have any better idea of what’s going to happen on Election Day than my pet goldfish. At this point they’re throwing all possible scenarios out there figuring they’ll be able to point to the one that comes to pass and at some point down the road claim they “called it.”

Could Trump Win the Popular Vote but Lose the Electoral College?

By Nate Cohn

Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump are tied at 48 percent in the final New York Times/Siena College national poll of the cycle today.

When minor party candidates are included, Mr. Trump leads by one percentage point.

It goes without saying that this shows an extremely close race — and it’s not the only poll to do so. Over the last week or so, several high-quality polls have showed a tied race or even had Mr. Trump pulling ahead. A Wall Street Journal poll, for instance, found Mr. Trump up three points, while CNBC showed him two points ahead.

The New York Times’s polling average has Ms. Harris’s lead down to one point, as of late Thursday.

All of this raises a possibility that few people would have contemplated at the beginning of the cycle: a Trump victory in the national popular vote.

Democrats have won the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — often enough for many to be lulled into the belief that Democrats have a lock on it. Many of these popular vote victories, however, have been close. A Republican win has been conceivable on several occasions, and even though it didn’t happen, it certainly could have under slightly different circumstances.

If Mr. Trump did win the popular vote this time, it would be straightforward to explain. The poll shows that Ms. Harris faces real headwinds — the kind that would ordinarily cost a candidate the election:

Just 28 percent of voters say the country is on the right track. No party has retained the White House (or won the popular vote) when such a small share of voters think things are going well.
President Biden’s approval rating is just 40 percent. No party has held the White House (or won the popular vote) when the president’s approval rating is that low.
There are deeper challenges for Ms. Harris as well. Mr. Trump has an advantage on voters’ most important issue, the economy, the poll says. And more voters say they trust him on whatever issue they care about most.

Of course, Ms. Harris could easily win the national vote. Mr. Trump has plenty of his own weaknesses — including some that have returned to the fore this week, like his former chief of staff John Kelly’s comment that he fit the definition of a fascist. But together, there’s more than enough here to make it easy to imagine a Trump popular vote victory.

Could Harris still win the Electoral College?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two points but narrowly lost the presidency because Mr. Trump performed well in the relatively white working-class Midwestern battleground states.

Four years later, Mr. Biden won the Electoral College, but his disadvantage in the key states relative to the nation was actually even greater than Mrs. Clinton’s was in 2016. He won the national vote by 4.5 points, but he won the tipping-point state — Wisconsin — by only six-tenths of a point.

With that history in mind, Mr. Trump might seem like a certainty to win if the national vote were tied — let alone if he actually won the national vote. But it may not be quite the lock many believe it to be.

As we’ve reported for more than a year, there are a lot of signs that Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College is fading.

This is partly about demographics: Ms. Harris is holding up relatively well among white voters, who represent an outsize share of the vote in the key Northern battleground states.

It may also reflect something deeper, playing out state by state in the wake of the pandemic, the stop-the-steal movement and the end of Roe v. Wade. All of these events were felt very differently in different states, and they seemed to leave an unmistakable mark on the midterm map.

In 2022, Democrats did well in many key states where democracy and abortion were on the line, while Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive states like Florida or New York. The polls have shown a similar pattern this cycle, with Ms. Harris holding up in the battlegrounds while Mr. Trump puts up double-digit leads in Florida.

As a result, I wouldn’t completely write off a Harris win in the Electoral College even if Mr. Trump narrowly won the popular vote. I’m absolutely not saying it’s likely. It may be a bit too much to ask Ms. Harris to sweep each of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan if she’s losing so much ground elsewhere in the nation. It may seem especially challenging in these particular states, as the polls have erred here in recent cycles. One also wonders whether the Arab American and Muslim population in Michigan, angry over the war in Gaza, might just get Mr. Trump over the edge in this scenario.

But at least in the polling, all the pieces for a Harris victory in the Midwest remain in place, even as her national lead keeps fading. Most obviously, the polls still show it: Ms. Harris is still tied in the Northern swing states, even as she’s barely ahead nationally.

The underlying explanations for a diminished edge for Mr. Trump in the Electoral College remain as well. He’s still making most or even all of his gains among Black and Hispanic voters, who are underrepresented in the Northern battlegrounds. He still shows his greatest strength in the noncompetitive states where Republicans did best in the midterms, like our recent Florida poll showing him up 13 points.

This same pattern even exists within national Times/Siena polls: In our national surveys, Mr. Trump makes huge gains in the places where Republicans excelled in the midterms; he makes no gains at all where Republicans struggled, which includes states like Pennsylvania.

None of this makes a Harris victory without a clear popular vote victory easy or likely. But I wouldn’t write it off either.

[JimHow]

I'm ready to make my final electoral college prediction.
No surprise, it all comes down to Pennsylvania.
I have Trump as the next President of the United States because he wins Pennsylvania.
Incredible.
If Harris were to eke out Pennsylvania, she would win.
But I think the political headwinds are just too much against the Democrats this year, and Trump is going to win.
Among the other "swing states," Harris will win WI and MI, but I see narrow wins for Trump in NC, GA, AZ, and NV.
I just continue to be in awe of the resiliency of the right wing MAGA phenomenon in this country, to me it is the story of this election. Donald Trump could literally be on video shooting down people on Fifth Avenue and his cult would continue to support him. Like, I'm not even joking about that.
I truly pray I am wrong. Come on Keystone State.

Nonetheless, in the end, I'm on record.... I am predicting a Trump victory, 287-251.

If Kamala were to eke out Pennsylvania she would get literally exactly 270 electoral votes and a 270-268 victory, a VERY narrow path to victory, and then all hell would break loose into full blown constitutional crisis, hang on to your hats.

May heaven help us. This country is in a very dangerous place.

[JimHow]

A Trump electoral college victory map, which I am predicting.

[JimHow]

Basically Harris's only narrow path to 270-268 victory, a win in PA, which I am NOT predicting....

[hautbrionlover]

I am not optimistic, and Harris’s path is certainly narrower than Trump’s, but NV, NC and, surprisingly, IA are in play, so I’m not ruling them out

[DavidG]

I'm resigned to another 4 years of Trump. Hopefully only 4 more years. A Harris victory would be a joyous surprise.

I have MI and PA going for Trump. Would love to be proven wrong.

[barsacpinci]

I have faith! Harris will take PA. I just drove thru central PA last week and while a lot of Trump signs in the countryside there were more Harris signs in the towns and cities (Harrisburg, Camp Hill, Selinsgrove, Lewisburg). Towns with colleges like Shippensburg even show Harris signs. My friend spotted one in my apt building there! But those Pennsyltucky places like Johnstown are MAGA nuts.

[PghMike]

Trump enthusiasm looks down to me in PA. Was recently in a rural area north of Pittsburgh that was Trump crazed previously. Not many signs at all. The lack of enthusiasm wins it for Harris.

[Hm$(still)]

https://x.com/gtconway3d/status/1853623 ... Q3HfyX1XaQ

[JimHow]

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania….

[Nicklasss]

9:35 pm, lot of red… but it ain’t Bordeaux.

[JimHow]

Give it a little air....

[stefan]

I live in a very conservative area, and I am sure that many people I know voted for Trump. But NO ONE I know has said that they support Trump. My guess is that they are ashamed of supporting Trump, but consider the alternative worse. Why?

My time has passed...

[JimHow]

It's 10pm and there are still a lot of Blue votes out in Pennsylvania.