Harris for President Thread (2 Viewers)

[MT15]

We can use this for just general Harris talk - related to schedule, crowd sizes, interviews and such. Things that don’t fit in the economic thread or in the general election thread.

I just saw this: a packed house in Savannah, GA. Around 7-9k people came out in the rain and waited in line. Another 80k were watching it live online at one point - just on the campaign YouTube account. That’s a lot of enthusiasm, in a red part of GA.

 

[Optimus Prime]

I have never gotten a pro-trump vibe from him. When he was with 538 the pod casts were very left leaning. He is just a numbers guy. He also is trying to avoid what happen with Hillary when his model gave her a 71 out of 100 chance of winning. He is always trying to account for the unknown vote. Even the last polls from 2020 had Biden with a larger lead than the actual, with the exception of national polls.

He is more about being right than favoring one candidate over another.

I don't know how long Silver has been polling but I think nailing 2008 turned him into a God among men and but he took a heavy hit after 2016

 

[GrandAdmiral]

I have never gotten a pro-trump vibe from him. When he was with 538 the pod casts were very left leaning.

Agreed.

 

[Nebaghead]

I don't know how long Silver has been polling but I think nailing 2008 turned him into a God among men and but he took a heavy hit after 2016

The big thing he predicted was the house and senate races in 2008. 2016 hurt him because the model works as a chance and not a percentage. For those who come from SSF, 28-3 gave the Falcons a 98% chance to win in game probability and we know how that worked out. There is always a chance, just the odds change. Right now his model has it 55 to 45 chance with Trump winning 55 out of 100 times. He says this is still a toss up because 10 point difference in odds can’t be predicted with any certainty.
I don’t have the pay option, but he keeps saying if Harris’s numbers hold and his model quits accounting for a convention bounce the odds will flip and the longer she holds the current leads it will continue to grow towards her. It is like the score in a game, the less time left to make up ground, the better or worse the odds are depending on who is leading.
I think this is the bottom of Harris’s support as Trump isn’t gaining any ground, he just got an increase from a 2 point adjustment. Also, it sounds like RFK Jrs endorsement help stop the trend they were seeing with the DNC bounce.

 

[MT15]

I have never gotten a pro-trump vibe from him. When he was with 538 the pod casts were very left leaning. He is just a numbers guy. He also is trying to avoid what happen with Hillary when his model gave her a 71 out of 100 chance of winning. He is always trying to account for the unknown vote. Even the last polls from 2020 had Biden with a larger lead than the actual, with the exception of national polls.

He is more about being right than favoring one candidate over another.

I don’t believe that any longer. I believe he has turned to the right since leaving 538. It’s fine we can each have our opinions.

 

[Nebaghead]

I don’t believe that any longer. I believe he has turned to the right since leaving 538. It’s fine we can each have our opinions.

Do you have any links or articles he has written that gives you that impression?

 

[MT15]

Do you have any links or articles he has written that gives you that impression?

Not handy. It’s just an opinion formed from reading his tweets and reading what others think. Not a huge deal. If I find another example I will bookmark it.

 

[Nebaghead]

I don’t believe that any longer. I believe he has turned to the right since leaving 538. It’s fine we can each have our opinions.

Also, him leaving 538 had to do with Disney/ABC/Espn purging large contracts a couple years ago, not some kind of disagreement with what the site is doing.

 

[MT15]

Also, him leaving 538 had to do with Disney/ABC/Espn purging large contracts a couple years ago, not some kind of disagreement with what the site is doing.

Yeah, I know. Didn’t mean to imply that.

 

[LA - L.A.]

It has been sound for the last couple of elections.

It wasn't sound in 2020 or 2022 elections. Just saying. How many election cycles does he need before he stops using outdated methods?

 

[LA - L.A.]

I don't know how long Silver has been polling but I think nailing 2008 turned him into a God among men and but he took a heavy hit after 2016

Even a blind nut finds a squirrel every now and then. Silver, like hurricane models, got an accurate hit once and a lot of people mistake what was mostly luck for mostly skill. It happens with all prognosticators of every kind.

One night I was watching TV with my stepbrother and friends when the Pick 3 lottery numbers were about to be drawn. On a lark, I blurted out 3 numbers which ended up being the numbers drawn. We all knew it was dumb luck random chance, but we also couldn't help but wonder if maybe it was something more. A few nights later, same scenario except not a single number I blurted was drawn. Silver's track record of accuracy, if you ignore all of his postmortem rationalizations he makes after he was inaccurate, does not impress me.

If he can't foresee the unforeseen that causes his inaccuracies, then he can't be relied on to be accurate. Just like the NWS knows better than to rely on any single hurricane model as more accurate than any others, no one should rely on Nate Silver's projections to be any more or less accurate than anyone else's projections.

If we treat all polling like we treat all hurricane models, there is a clear trend of the election steadily moving in favor of Harris winning. Harris winning is soundly in the cone of uncertainty and Trump winning is at the very edge of the cone. Just as with hurricanes days from landfall, everything can change with so much time before the voting ends on November 5th.

 

[Nebaghead]

It wasn't sound in 2020 or 2022 elections. Just saying. How many election cycles does he need before he stops using outdated methods?

There was no convention in 2022. He even says he made adjustments because Covid and other factors impacted the 2020 election. Again, odds are odds and not guarantees, ie there is always a chance.
He is extremely open about what is happening now and why, yet people complain he is some kind of Trump supporter when he is just running the numbers against his model.

 

[SamAndreas]

There was no convention in 2022. He even says he made adjustments because Covid and other factors impacted the 2020 election. Again, odds are odds and not guarantees, ie there is always a chance.
He is extremely open about what is happening now and why, yet people complain he is some kind of Trump supporter when he is just running the numbers against his model.

I don't think we're complaining. The issue appears to be one of belief, or more to the point my disbelief.

In my case, and me having a statistical math background, I can see that current polling is not being done in a scientific way.

Currently too many people hang up on the pollsters robots for those polls to have a shred of scientific aspect about them.

Opt in Internet voters panels does not fix it.

Even the in person pollsters with real humans talking on the phone to folks is not working now because too many folks are hanging up on them as well. Too make that worse phone scammers occasionally use the trappings of being a pollster to kick off an array of scams.

If anyone calls me and tells me to touch a button on my phone I hang up. Too many phone scammers have made it an imperative that I do not start punching buttons on my phone during a phone call, and hang up. Real people do not demand that I punch buttons on my phone instead of talking with them.

If conditions change polling might work again. We would need to see all phone systems being tied to an address. If some of the phones are not tied to an address, there is more error introduced. Too many cell phones in the hands of the younger set are not tied to an address for even in person interviews to work.

 

[Optimus Prime]

There are lots of differences between the presidential candidacies of Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, but, rhetorically at least, there’s one disparity that stands out. In 2008, when Clinton lost to Obama in the Democratic primaries, she referred to putting “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling”.

Accepting the Democratic nomination in 2016, she said: “We just put the biggest crack in the glass ceiling.”

And later that year, when she held what would turn out to be her terrible, deflated election night party, it was at the Jacob K Javits Centre, a convention hall in Manhattan that has, er, a glass ceiling.

It’s notable, therefore, that several weeks into Harris’s candidacy, she’s not touching Clinton’s ceiling with a 10ft barge pole.

As a piece of imagery, the glass ceiling got very old very quickly, so that even by the time Clinton had it on heavy rotation, it was already emptied of meaning.

Even without the phrase’s “all right, Grandma” vibe, it makes basic political sense for Harris to avoid using an image associated with the failed candidacy of the only other woman to be a major-party nominee for president.

What’s curious is the decision her team has apparently made not only to eschew that particular phrase, but to handle with slightly more delicacy the nature of her candidacy.

If Harris wins, she will, of course, not only be the first female president, but the first Black female president, and the first president, woman or otherwise, of south Asian descent. Pointing out this fact is not a major rhetorical part of the campaign……..

I suspect this comes from studying Clinton’s defeat. Lots of people – not all of them men – don’t like the first-female-president approach.

It makes them roll their eyes. It risks triggering either a speech about how girls these days outpace boys at high school and men are the underdog or, from the other direction, the observation that, without a class metric, the designation “woman” is politically meaningless.

(It also risks provoking Susan Sarandon to pop up on TV to say: “I don’t vote with my vagina.” Literally nobody wants this.)

Also: it’s boring. The facts are self-evident. Harris is a woman of colour on the left in a country where, of the last 46 presidents, all but one has been a white man.

She does not need to go the vote-for-me-to-make-history route, which risks sounding either narcissistic or victim-claiming, while reminding extremely large constituencies in the US just how much they hate women in general and powerful women in particular.

It is an avoidance that also seems tailored to meet Trump’s particular and very successful brand of misogyny.

Somehow, the fact Harris hasn’t made a big thing of being a woman is denying Trump an opportunity to do the same……

Kamala Harris is steering clear of Hillary Clinton’s feminist messaging – and it’s working | Emma Brockes

This Democratic campaign isn’t about breaking the ‘glass ceiling’. Maybe that’s the best way of beating Trump, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

www.theguardian.com

 

[MT15]

Mark Halperin is out there pouring cold water on Harris’ chances in PA. Before worrying about his sources and/or opinion, it’s worth the time to look back.

 

[Taurus]

Mark Halperin is out there pouring cold water on Harris’ chances in PA. Before worrying about his sources and/or opinion, it’s worth the time to look back.

I don't see any reality where Dems split their tickets with Cheato as their choice for POTUS and a Dem for the Senate. In fact, the most likely scenario to me is the opposite. Harris for Pres and an R for Senate "to keep her in check" or whatever.

 

[MT15]

New voter registration data for PA since Harris became the nominee (in July, when she had it sewed up). The numbers are eye-popping, to say the least.

 

[LA - L.A.]

Mark Halperin is out there pouring cold water on Harris’ chances in PA. Before worrying about his sources and/or opinion, it’s worth the time to look back.

I don't have to look past his video about PA to see two glaring credibility issues:

1. He picks only 3 questions out of the poll that people said they trust Trump on those issues. So what? Did voters say those issues are the most important to them? What did voters say about who they trust more on women's reproductive rights and general equal rights for all?
2. He didn't say squat about the most meaningful poll question, "Out of Harris and Trump who would you vote for?" Funny how so many people always gloss over those numbers.

 

[LA - L.A.]

New voter registration data for PA since Harris became the nominee (in July, when she had it sewed up). The numbers are eye-popping, to say the least.

The only the things that could possibly cause Harris to lose PA with those registration numbers would be so catastrophic that Harris losing PA would be the least of our worries.