California May Have a Random Celebrity Republican as Governor Soon

[lpetrich]

Dude, you're kind of splitting hairs here. Here's what Wikipedia says about Obama's win: (snipped for brevity)

At least you *tried* to do some research.

 List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin - most Presidential elections don't have big popular-vote margins, and using electoral-vote margins or number of states carried is just plain cheating.  List of United States presidential elections by Electoral College margin

 

[TomC]

Dude, you're kind of splitting hairs here. Here's what Wikipedia says about Obama's win: (snipped for brevity)

At least you *tried* to do some research.

 List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin - most Presidential elections don't have big popular-vote margins, and using electoral-vote margins or number of states carried is just plain cheating.  List of United States presidential elections by Electoral College margin

But if we're sticking to the subject, race/gender bigotry amongst the electorate, the popular vote is the most salient number. Both Clinton and Obama handily defeated their white male opponents, according to the U.S. people. That strongly suggests that we aren't as racist or misogynistic as certain people insist that we are.

Of course, there's a raft of other factors. I'm pretty sure the Democrats could have run Bozo the Clown in 2008 and won. Because the disastrous effects of Republican policies were far and away the most important considerations of voters.

Similarly, in the recent California recall, I don't think Larry Elder's race played any significant role. It's what he said that motivated voters. If anything, his race played a tiny part because a black candidate espousing his policies is a curiosity. That got him media attention. A white guy saying the same things would have been a nothingburger.
Tom

 

[Elixir]

 List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin - most Presidential elections don't have big popular-vote margins...

Funny how ONLY Republicans ever win while losing the popular vote... Not that they ... CHEAT or anything...

Both Clinton and Obama handily defeated their white male opponents, according to the U.S. people. That strongly suggests that we aren't as racist or misogynistic as certain people insist that we are.

Doesn't suggest that to me - unless we have different meanings for "we". It only suggests (to me) that there are not as many American racists as there are Americans who are not - or try not to be - racist. But our racists, as demonstrated by the critters who have crawled out from under their rocks in the last 5 years or so with Trump's encouragement, are really REALLY racist bigots, no less so than Germany's Nazis of the 30s-40s.

 

[Politesse]

Similarly, in the recent California recall, I don't think Larry Elder's race played any significant role. It's what he said that motivated voters. If anything, his race played a tiny part because a black candidate espousing his policies is a curiosity. That got him media attention. A white guy saying the same things would have been a nothingburger.
Tom

Well, there was his platform, too. Republicans favor brainless celebrities as political candidates when possible; learning about candidates whose names you don't already know from tv and radio would take more work.

 

[TomC]

Similarly, in the recent California recall, I don't think Larry Elder's race played any significant role. It's what he said that motivated voters. If anything, his race played a tiny part because a black candidate espousing his policies is a curiosity. That got him media attention. A white guy saying the same things would have been a nothingburger.
Tom

Well, there was his platform, too. Republicans favor brainless celebrities as political candidates when possible; learning about candidates whose names you don't already know from tv and radio would take more work.

Sorry I was unclear.

By "What he said..." I was mainly referring to the platform he said he would institute if elected.

Californians didn't like the idea of emulating Mississippi, so they got motivated to vote

Tom

 

[Politesse]

Similarly, in the recent California recall, I don't think Larry Elder's race played any significant role. It's what he said that motivated voters. If anything, his race played a tiny part because a black candidate espousing his policies is a curiosity. That got him media attention. A white guy saying the same things would have been a nothingburger.
Tom

Well, there was his platform, too. Republicans favor brainless celebrities as political candidates when possible; learning about candidates whose names you don't already know from tv and radio would take more work.

Sorry I was unclear.

By "What he said..." I was mainly referring to the platform he said he would institute if elected.

Californians didn't like the idea of emulating Mississippi, so they got motivated to vote

Tom

I meant the media attention; it was nearly guaranteed him for two reasons, either of which would have worked.

Personally, I do not understand why the media reacts to conservative Blacks with such feigned shock; do white people really meet black folks so rarely as to believe that they are somehow a politically homogenous group? They never have been.

 

[Derec]

Does that mean Trump was a great candidate?

Yes. He managed to capitalize on people's general discontent with the political establishment and to peel enough votes from Hillary to breach the "Blue Wall".

Could you explain what you mean by horrible? What was horrible about Clinton?

As a candidate she sucked. She made it all about her and her gender. She did not campaign enough in the Midwest. She made stupid comments like "basket of deplorables" that turned people off.

 

[lpetrich]

California Recall Election Results: Live Map - The New York Times

62.7% - 37.3% with 94% counted. Above thresholds for recall, estimates from polls.

Looks like the failed recall will beat all the polls of it - their largest No fraction is 60%.

 

[ZiprHead]

Does that mean Trump was a great candidate?

Yes. He managed to capitalize on people's general discontent with the political establishment and to peel enough votes from Hillary to breach the "Blue Wall".

Could you explain what you mean by horrible? What was horrible about Clinton?

As a candidate she sucked. She made it all about her and her gender. She did not campaign enough in the Midwest. She made stupid comments like "basket of deplorables" that turned people off.

Yeah, like the "deplorables" were ever going to vote for her. Not to mention she was right.

Do you have a list of these

Forget it. This is getting into derail territory.

 

[lpetrich]

The vote is now No: 62.2%, Yes: 37.8%, with >95% of the vote counted.

This is close to my earlier extrapolations.

I then counted up the votes in all the counties with 95% or less votes counted, and I used various assumptions about those counties with >95% counted.

With those counties at 96%, 98%, and 100% counted, I found 94.4%, 95.6%, and 96.9% of all counties counted.

There are 22 counties with <= 95% counted, from Lake with 39% to Marin and Inyo with 95%. The state has a total of 58 counties in it.

 

[lpetrich]

The vote is now No: 62.1%, Yes: 37.9%, with >95% of the vote counted.

The counts are not much different, with Shasta and Sacramento joining Marin and Inyo at 95% counted.

Opinion | Republicans’ trail of destruction may haunt them - The Washington Post

Indeed, part of the lesson of the California recall is that spotlighting Republicans’ extremism is a winner for Democrats. At times it seemed as if California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was running against Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott (and his abortion bounty law) and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis (and his insistence on banning lifesaving vaccine and mask requirements).

Republicans and their media surrogates are quick to point out that California is a deep-blue state, but GOP extremism on these issues certainly motivated Democrats to turn out — something Newsom’s campaign worried about for months. There is nothing like the specter of misogynistic antiabortion policy or Republicans’ willful refusal to fight a deadly pandemic to engage the Democratic base. Moreover, in stressing these issues, Democrats do nothing to alienate independents or sane Republicans. To the contrary, there are broad coalitions in favor of mask and vaccine mandates and against spying on and harassing women seeking an abortion.

Larry Elder did very little to disavow Republican extremism. When Republican activists objected to him conceding that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of last year's Presidential election, he begged for a "mulligan". He didn't even try to stand by his statement, saying something like "We conservatives pride ourselves on being the mature ones, the realists, the ones who are willing to accept painful truths. There is one that we need to accept. It is that a left-wing extremist got elected President fair and square. There wasn't any massive Democrat election fraud. We ought to be good conservatives and accept it, rather than act like crybaby liberals."

 

[blastula]

Why do you think it is undemocratic?

It's been explained already. It allows for a new governor to be chosen by a small minority, and a smaller number than the sitting governor got against a recall. There are better recall methods.

Or misused?

Recalls should be over serious malfeasance, not for simple political disagreements. Those can be settled at next election.

And you'll probably reelect his incompetent ass too just because he has a D next to his name.

Yes, because of the D and that he is competent.

we don't care that you don't like somebody he stood next to.

You don't care he is standing next to a racist, anti-American and anti-Semitic terrorism supporter?

BLM-L.A. leader and anti-Semitism

I guess in the modern Democratic party no leftists are beyond the pale, no matter how extremist or vile.

That person that I (and probably he) had never heard of was not on the ballot. I guess you don't know how elections work.

That was the Dem's strategy, to not run any known Dems. I questioned it at first, that it would backfire if the recall did pass, but it turned out to be the right call because it set it up as more of a choice between a Dem and a Republican, and it's hard for a Republican to win statewide at this time.

It was a strategically sound move, but the downside is that you are stuck with Governor Goodhair.

Regardless of your unasked for piddling opinion, we're good.

 

[lpetrich]

What Larry Elder wanted:
 Mulligan (games) - "A mulligan is a second chance to perform an action, usually after the first chance went wrong through bad luck or a blunder. Its best-known use is in golf, whereby it refers to a player being allowed, only informally, to replay a stroke, although that is against the formal rules of golf. The term has also been applied to other sports, games, and fields generally. The origin of the term is unclear."

The vote is now No: 62.1%, Yes: 37.9%, with >95% of the vote counted.

The counts are not much different, with Marin, Shasta, and Inyo Counties at 95% counted. Sacramento and Los Angeles Counties are now >95%.

That makes the fraction counted 95%, 97%, or 99%, depending on whether the >95% are 96%, 98%, or 100% counted.

 

[Keith&Co.]

It was a strategically sound move, but the downside is that you are stuck with Governor Goodhair.

Regardless of your unasked for piddling opinion, we're good.

'Stuck with.'
Odd term for someone who got a landslide win from the state's voters. They're stuck with the favorite.

 

[Jarhyn]

It was a strategically sound move, but the downside is that you are stuck with Governor Goodhair.

Regardless of your unasked for piddling opinion, we're good.

'Stuck with.'
Odd term for someone who got a landslide win from the state's voters. They're stuck with the favorite.

Man I sure do hate it when I go to do something and I get stuck with getting exactly what I want! Really busts my chaps it does!

 

[lpetrich]

The count continues, though slowly.

The vote is now No: 62.0%, Yes: 38.0%, with >95% of the vote counted.

The counties <= 95% have dropped from 20 to 15, with Shasta, and Inyo Counties at 95% counted, and with Marin and Sonoma Counties now >95%. The most populous of the <= 95% counties are San Joaquin and Kern Counties. SJ Cty is just south of Sacramento Cty, and Kern Cty contains Bakersfield.

The No vote is slowly dropping, and my estimates of the fraction counted are 95.6% - 97.5% - 99.4%. Only 75,000 votes need to be counted, out of nearly 13 million votes.

 

[thebeave]

The count continues, though slowly.

The vote is now No: 62.0%, Yes: 38.0%, with >95% of the vote counted.

The counties <= 95% have dropped from 20 to 15, with Shasta, and Inyo Counties at 95% counted, and with Marin and Sonoma Counties now >95%. The most populous of the <= 95% counties are San Joaquin and Kern Counties. SJ Cty is just south of Sacramento Cty, and Kern Cty contains Bakersfield.

The No vote is slowly dropping, and my estimates of the fraction counted are 95.6% - 97.5% - 99.4%. Only 75,000 votes need to be counted, out of nearly 13 million votes.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1XgFsitnQw[/YOUTUBE]

 

[lpetrich]

That 75,000 is my estimate for the counties with <= 95% counted. For the counties > 95%, I tried out 96%, 98%, and 100% counted.

The current "No" fraction, 62.0%, is a bit less than my prediction from 75% to 94% counted, 62.1% to 62.3%.

The final prediction of 538 was No 57.3% and of RCP was 58.3%.

I couldn't find any discussion of why this victory was so good. Democrats opposing Larry Elder? Republicans being discouraged because of their claims of election fraud?

-

I must discuss ways in which polls can be in error.

One way is sampling bias, reaching an unrepresentative selection of would-be voters. That was the great flaw of the Literary Digest's 1936 poll of the US Presidential election. It was a massive effort, but it focused on such things as car registration lists, things that were biased to more affluent people. By not correcting for this sampling bias, they got an embarrassingly wrong prediction of who would win.

Another way is statistical error. If one repeats random samples from a population, one will get different samples each time, and their statistics will be different. How much different can be calculated for some statistical distribution.

Considering the case of two choices, I set them to 1 and 0, and I find the statistics on the average value and how much it varies.


The choices have a probability p of being 1 and (1-p) of being 0. Their average is p, and the "standard error of the mean", the standard deviation of different samples' value of the mean is 1/sqrt * sqrt(p*(1-p)) for n samples. That factor of 1/sqrt is a very general one, and it is very useful for making rough estimates of sampling error.

For 1000 samples and p = 0.62, the SEM is 1.5%

That's for one standard deviation. Using a normal distribution for being less than 1, 2, and 3 standard deviations, the probability is 0.68, 0.95, and 0.9973.


The current result is about 3 stdevs greater than 538's final result, so it's barely more than what one would expect from sampling error.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

It was a strategically sound move, but the downside is that you are stuck with Governor Goodhair.

Regardless of your unasked for piddling opinion, we're good.

'Stuck with.'
Odd term for someone who got a landslide win from the state's voters. They're stuck with the favorite.

Apparently not that many people wanted to get stuck with Larry Elder the idiot.

 

[Shadowy Man]

'Stuck with.'
Odd term for someone who got a landslide win from the state's voters. They're stuck with the favorite.

Apparently not that many people wanted to get stuck with Larry Elder the idiot.

Makes you wonder why anyone would want to be stuck with someone bad when they could be stuck with someone significantly worse.