News of the Day III

[pete]

[pete]

And even the gains with Hispanics noted in Wasserman's third Tweet may be an illusion if the Latino Decisions poll is accurate. Polling Latinos is difficult, and only certain pollsters know how to do it well.

[tweet]https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1319348576544313346?s=20[tweet]

[pete]

And here's the chaser to the above:

To which those wacky Canadians responded:

[Donnie D]

538 is predicting 15 million more voters in 2020 than in 2016.

I can make an argument that it benefits both sides.

[pete]

You can, but Nate Cohn of the NY Times pointed out that new voters who came into the electorate from the 2018 cycle on skew toward Biden in all the state-level polling they've done this year.

Bear in mind that 15 million includes a whole bunch of pissed off people who didn't show up in 2016 but were the backbone of the blue wave in 2018 and remain motivated for 2020.

[pete]

Pretty cold blooded by the WSJ news division to come out with a story exonerating Biden of the claims Trump made 5 seconds after the debate. I'm sure the WSJ editorial side is pissed right now.

[Puckhead]

Biden was smart not to bring up Ivanka’s China patents Nor his questionable investments in the Phillipines—let alone Trump Moscow that he lied about during the primary. People KNOW trump is corrupt, and they either care or they don’t.

[pete]

In 2004 John Edwards lost the VP debate with Cheney when he ham fistedly brought up Cheney's daughter. People don't like when politicians go after each other's families, especially their kids. It's especially a red line with women voters. Trump, not knowing or giving a damned about women and how they think, just charged head long into doing something that only hardens women voters in their opposition to him.

[Bolthed]

Hardened seniors’ votes against him too, when he said we’re learning to live with Covid. I could practically hear my parents screaming, “No we are fucking NOT!”

[Donnie D]

I’ve had 11 hours to reflect on the debate. It was a better debate. Even with the extremely low bar it wasn’t bad.

I don’t think it changed many minds. Cult 45 is still going to believe that Biden is a career criminal and that Trump is Snow White (who incidentally died last night). They are going to see his stutter as a lack of cognitive thought. Biden voters are going to remember the indifference of Trump on both Covid and the children at the border.

Watching, I couldn’t believe how many times Biden failed to score when the net was wide open. Trump “Russia again, oh boy, here we go again.” Biden: “yes”. Hindsight and no pressure being what it is, I would have liked a response such as, “So you still don’t read your national security briefing books? Your own NHS and FBI directors held an emergency press conference yesterday to say that Russia was impacting the election. That’s why a President has to read the damn books. If you had you wouldn’t have be surprised.” Mrs Donnie D felt he had a chance to really nail him on the Covid response and didn’t. But it’s easy to pick plays apart from the stands and you aren’t on the ice.

I do think some republicans may have “come home”. And I think some on the fence will lose it on the 500 children.

Biden hurt himself on the oil question in Texas and Pennsylvania. Conservative publications are congratulating Trump on his huge win last night such as this from the National Review:

“The final question is not whether Trump won and will be seen to have won bigly by next week, but to what degree Biden’s suicidal talk of ending fossil fuels and denial of the Hunter Biden evidence that cannot be denied implode his campaign early next week or not until Election Day.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...e-post-debate/

it still amazes me that the Bernie Bros were out in force saying that they refuse to vote Biden because 25 years ago a unanimous senate voted on a crime bill that was backed by black leadership. I couldn’t vote for Biden because there’s no difference between the 2. Did you happen to look at the SCOTUS justice Trump appointed ass hole?

[pete]

WRT that National Review piece, cocaine is a helluva drug.

I'll say what I just said in Discord: the contents of the debate were irrelevant. There's 43-44% of this country that support Trump and like Trump and therefore will say he did well last night. The remaining 56-57% of Americans hate Trump's GD guts. They're sick of looking at him. They're sick of hearing him. They just want him gone. He could've gone on that stage and read the phone book and they'd have had the same visceral reaction. So, as I said last night even before the debate, the snap polls on the debate were going to be similar to the national numbers and the only thing that would happen is that voters would just be hardened into their camps. That's just what happened if you look at the four snap polls that came out post debate, which Biden won by 14 (CNN), 11 (Data Progress), 13 (US Politics), and 19 (CBS/YouGov) respectively. The top lines for Biden in each were 53, 52, 52, and 54, respectively. What's Trump's disapproval in the 538 averages? 53.7%. Sometimes the punditocracy, in the desperation to find something to talk about, misses (deliberately) the obvious. The election is a referendum on Trump. A majority of the country hates the bastard. Biden, being a generic and vanilla middle of the road Democrat with a pretty pleasant mannerism, is the perfect vessel to receive those voters. Period.

If you honestly think Trump scored points on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which a lot of people outside the right wing media bubble don't even know about and was debunked in full by the WSJ five seconds after the end of the debate, God help you. If you think Joe Biden really loses anything by saying we shouldn't have fracking on public lands or that we need to transition from oil to renewables to combat climate change and modernize our energy economy, God help you x2. Shit, before he died, even T Boone f'ing Pickens was saying we needed to transition off oil to renewables. Joe's position is not controversial. It's a majority position in PA and probably even in TX, too.

There were always going to be Bernie Bros dead enders. Not a lot of them. I haven't checked on our buddy Zeyk to see if he's still one of them. But they're a minor segment of the electorate with an outsized presence on social media and not worth talking about in an election Biden's on track to win somewhere between 8-12%.

At this point, to me the only major drama left is to see whether Republican intensity of E-day matches the Democratic intensity in early vote. And I could make an argument to you the national and district polls suggest it might not, which is the difference between an 8% win for Biden where he sweeps the Rust Belt and only picks off 2-3 Southern states, and a blood bath where he gets over 400 EV's and Democrats execute a Godfather baptismal scene-like political slaughter that gives them all the political capital they'll ever need to roll in and do a FDR-like first 100 days in 2021.

[Donnie D]

No doubt that this is a referendum on Trump.

[pete]

And, btw, I was just watching someone who was in a focus group last night and he said the only part of the debate that moved people emotionally was the child separation portion of the debate. Needless to say, Trump didn't cloak himself in glory with his answer there.

[Bolthed]

Some say Pinellas County is very representative of Florida in that we are about 50-50 Ds and Rs (registered voters - about 250k D and 248k R and 200k independent).

I voted in person today and cannot attest to the split. It’s impossible to detect. I was hoping to see a lot more Biden supporters, but then I realized that aside from the flag and sign wavers on the road outside the facility parking lot, who’s really buying Biden gear? And who curbs their outspokenness when there are Trumpers within earshot? When I was driving away, I had a pink flag-waving Trumper ladycreature try to talk to me after she gave me a thumbs up and I responded with a thumbs down while shaking my head in disgust. I thought about telling her that her lord and savior doesn’t care if she dies, but then decided against it and rolled my window back up. Serious point, though – most sane people want little or nothing to do with Trumpers in public. Let em think they’re winning bigly. Maybe some will be overconfident and stay home!

Those minions were always going to have a big, visual advantage in enthusiasm. But my guess is we’ve got the numbers. The lines were long – more than an hour wait on Friday before lunchtime. Hell, on Thursday at 2pm the line was more than 30 minutes. So if you get down, remind yourself that , yes, most people want sanity and peace and quiet, and that’s not going to look like people are literally crawling across broken glass. It’s going to look just like this: long lines of quiet people dutifully doing the right thing to save this country from Trump and his followers.

[pete]

I've seen the county and district level polling for Pinellas. You wouldn't be disappointed by it.