Testy Calibrate
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Damn. That will be exciting
I agree.Damn. That will be exciting
I agree that that will be a problem for downballot candidates, candidates like those Senators.But if Trump manages to throw out votes not for him (e.g., states get rid of mail in ballots for whatever logic they can muster) won’t a lot of votes for democratic senators get thrown out too?
Seems like another party realignment is in the works.New polls show Mr. Trump’s support is collapsing nationally, as he alienates women, seniors and suburbanites. He is trailing not just in must-win battlegrounds but according to private G.O.P. surveys, he is repelling independents to the point where Mr. Biden has drawn closer in solidly red states, including Montana, Kansas and Missouri, people briefed on the data said.
Nowhere has Mr. Trump harmed himself and his party more than across the Sun Belt, where the electoral coalition that secured a generation of Republican dominance is in danger of coming apart.
It hurts, doesn't it?Even in South Carolina, Republicans have grown deeply concerned about Senator Lindsey Graham’s re-election campaign, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has had several sobering conversations with Mr. Graham, according to Republicans familiar with the discussions.
Some right-wingers gloat about all the people who move from blue states to red ones. But many of these people take their politics with them, making these states turn purple if not blue. Something that annoys a lot of Republican long-time residents.“Racism and misogyny and demagoguery and being just hateful and cruel and intolerant are not things in the Southwest that play very well,” said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat. She said Republicans had left a wide space for her party in her region by clinging to “messaging that’s 40 years old” on issues like immigration and climate.
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Texas’s growth has been explosive: Over 1.5 million new voters have registered since 2016, a third of them in the diverse, transplant-filled counties that include San Antonio, Houston and Austin. The anger toward Mr. Trump has emboldened Democratic candidates to run more audacious campaigns.
I don't see how any sensible person can think that Trump did a good job with the virus.... She said she believed Mr. Trump still had more ground to lose with the professional class and that his bout with the coronavirus was not helping.
“The fact that he has it is kind of a living example of how he has mismanaged and misjudged this virus,” she said, adding, “The Chamber of Commerce Republicans, business Republicans, who may have been on the fence, I think they’re breaking now for Biden.”
GOP sees falling Trump stock as growing threat to Senate majority | TheHillIn the House, the Sun Belt appears to represent the area of greatest peril for the G.O.P., as Democrats make inroads not only in the suburbs but in outer-ring communities that are typically whiter, older and more conservative.
That was evident, quite literally, from the Glendale, Ariz., home of Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency room doctor who is challenging a Republican incumbent in an exurban district that Mr. Trump carried by 10 points.
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If the election here unfolds like many Arizona Republicans are dreading it might, they will in two years have lost the presidential race, both Senate seats, both chambers of the state legislature and watched as voters approved a ballot measure levying a surtax on the wealthy for increased education funding.
While having zero self-awareness.Trump is “not doing so well” in some states he won handily four years ago, the lawmaker said, “so we worry right now.”
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Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist, said the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis carries dire political implications.
“That’s the one issue, obviously, he doesn’t want to talk about. He’s taken big pains from day one to say it’s not an issue, it’s a flu, it’s a hoax, it’ll go away, there will be a miracle. And all of a sudden it came home to roost,” Jarding said.
“There’s nothing worse that could have happened to this president, who’s been trying to convince America that he’s done a great job, but he couldn’t even do a great job in his own house,” he said.
Even Mitch McConnell joined in, doing something that he rarely does in public: criticize Trump.Martha McSally, the Arizona senator trailing the former Nasa astronaut Mark Kelly by a significant margin, attacked Trump for his repeated attacks on her predecessor, John McCain. “Quite frankly, it pisses me off when he does it,” she said in a debate this week.
The Texas senator John Cornyn slammed Trump this week for “creating confusion” over coronavirus and “letting his guard down” as the pandemic spread across the nation.
“My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” he said.
Republican Susan Collins is being challenged by Democrat Sara Gideon and Independents Lisa Savage and Max Linn.Ranked-choice voting only comes into play if no candidate receives a majority — that is, 50% plus one vote. That happened in 2018 in Maine's 2nd Congressional District. Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin received a plurality but not a majority, and after voters' second choices were counted, Democrat Jared Golden won the seat.
RealClearPolitics - Election 2020 - General Election: Trump vs. BidenFirst off, polls don’t predict. Each poll is a snapshot of what the electorate is thinking at the time of the poll. Only when a series of polls agree over a period of time can we make short-term predictions — and only if current conditions hold or change only modestly.
The RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight averages are a good approximation of where the race stands. The deficiency is that they include some bad polls and polls that are up to two weeks old, which makes them lag current conditions.
So don't wring your hands about voter suppression and shy Trumpies. Model those effects.
Good, bad and ugly: Making sense of the presidential polls | TheHill - good article on polling.
RealClearPolitics - Election 2020 - General Election: Trump vs. BidenFirst off, polls don’t predict. Each poll is a snapshot of what the electorate is thinking at the time of the poll. Only when a series of polls agree over a period of time can we make short-term predictions — and only if current conditions hold or change only modestly.
The RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight averages are a good approximation of where the race stands. The deficiency is that they include some bad polls and polls that are up to two weeks old, which makes them lag current conditions.
National President: general election Polls | FiveThirtyEight
A further problem is the media's liking polls with dramatic results, even if those polls are flawed in some way, like low sample size. The article's author recommends dismissing polls with fewer than 800 people polled. Relative sample error is roughly 1/sqrt(sample_size)
Using a probability model of probability p for one outcome out of two and (1-p) for the other outcome, the average is, not surprisingly, p for the first outcome, and the standard deviation of the variation of it is sqrt(p*(1-p)/N) for N samples. So for p = 1/2, it is (1/2)/sqrt(N).
It's their mess, and they should be made to sit in it. Their Trump-loving and Trump-enabling is coming back to bite them, and I'm enjoying every bit of it.Here’s how grim things look for House Republicans three weeks out from the election: They’re struggling to win back seats even in conservative bastions like Oklahoma and South Carolina, where Democrats staged shocking upsets in 2018.
About a half-dozen seats fall in that category — the lowest of low-hanging fruit for Republicans. But most private and public surveys from both parties show either dead heats or the Democratic incumbent with a modest lead, a startling position for a crop of candidates running in Trump country. The seats were won in 2018 by Reps. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.), Max Rose (D-N.Y.), Xochitl Torres Small (D-N.M.), Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), Ben McAdams (D-Utah) and Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.).
Their success stems from Democrats’ massive fundraising advantage as well as some Republican recruitment struggles. And in a few places, Trump has become so toxic that he’s dragging down GOP candidates where he was once overwhelmingly popular.
Jessica Taylor on Twitter: "In Alaska, the Times/Siena poll found independent Senate candidate Al Gross — who is running as the Democratic nominee — trailing incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by about 8 percentage points, with third-party candidate John Howe’s support at 10 percent.
And in South Carolina, the Siena pollsters found that Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham continues to face a far closer race than expected, with Democrat Jaime Harrison just 6 percentage points behind his rival and riding a wave of momentum. In 2014, by comparison, Graham won reelection by more than 15 percentage points.
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One Alaska poll released this week, from Harstad Strategic Research, found Gross leading Sullivan by 1 percentage point, though that’s well within the 4 percentage point margin of error. A survey taken slightly before Harstad’s, Alaska Survey Research’s September 25 to October 4 poll, found Sullivan ahead by 4 percentage points.
Looks like neck and neck in SC.Cook also now rates South Carolina as an outright toss up, and Data for Progress found Harrison with a 2 percentage point edge over Graham in early October — again within the poll’s 3.5 percent margin of error. A Quinnipiac University poll taken in late September found Harrison and Graham tied, while a CBS News poll taken in the same period found Graham to have a 1 percentage point lead.
In CO, both Dems and Reps are scaling back spending on their candidates, because they expect the race to have a clear winner -- John Hickenlooper (D), unseating incumbent Cory Gardner (R).The work of pollsters and forecasters suggest a Democratic majority in 2021 is looking like an increasingly realistic outcome: According to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast, Democrats are favored outright in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, and North Carolina against Republican incumbents; Montana and Kansas — in addition to Alaska and South Carolina — could be in play as well.
After hitching their wagons to Trump, he is now dragging them down with him. But it ain't over till it's over -- famous baseball coach Yogi Berra.There are some areas of concern for Democrats, however. In Alabama, where Democratic Sen. Doug Jones won an improbable victory against Republican Roy Moore in 2018, Republicans are favored to unseat the Democratic incumbent. And the race in Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is up for reelection, is also shaping up to be competitive.
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The good news for Democrats is that Gross and Harrison aren’t the only Democratic candidates swimming in money. From July 1 through the end of September, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue processed $1.5 billion in donations, ensuring the party’s slate of candidates will be very well funded heading into the last three weeks of the race.
These current polling and fundraising successes have some Republicans sounding the alarm: Republican pollster David Flaherty told the Denver Post this week that “the train wreck and implosion of the president will bring a historic number of other Republican candidates down, and if you don’t believe that then you have your head in the sand.” And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz raised the specter of “a bloodbath of Watergate proportions” for his party on CNBC last Friday.
Here's a TX Dem female candidate that I like: Donna Imam - Vote Donna US CongressJoe Biden and Donald Trump are neck and neck in the latest poll in Texas. And Democrats are raising record amounts of money there. Here's how they hope to shift the Lone Star state with the help of powerful women:
Sima Ladjevardian, whose family escaped the revolution in Iran, is now running for Congress in the eighth most expensive congressional contest this November. Though a victory is a tough target, she's part of a group of women shaking Texas's political scene
Natalí Hurtado, whose Honduran-born mom gained asylum in the US, grew up in Houston and is contesting a seat in the city. Donald Trump's victory in 2016 is what prompted her to run for office
Gina Ortiz Jones, a gay former Air Force intelligence officer raised by a single mother from the Philippines, is also running for office in Texas — and she believes that women, angry with how Trump is handling the pandemic, are ready to vote him out
These women encapsulate a demographic shift in Texas, where white people now make up only 25% of the state’s population. While the diversity trend generally favours Democrats, the party hasn't been able to convert that into big national victories
Beto O’Rourke, who came very close to ousting Ted Cruz in the 2018 Senate race, is heavily involved in these campaigns, forming a group that is mobilising Democrats to vote in the State House races — which for him are what matter most in the long term
O’Rourke's group is just one of many in Texas that are trying to engage communities of colour in civic activities. The killing of George Floyd has also energised them to vote in record numbers in a state that has frequently had a low turnout