The US 2020 Presidential Election & Attempts To Overturn It

[tantalus]

It's definitely not a given that 2020 Trump overperforms 2016 Trump. Practically all the polls showed him losing by a large margin, with an expectation of a large turnout that was expected to harm Trump and possibly push this into blowout territory. Which is what you would expect from a historically unpopular President running in the worst pandemic and a damaged economy and people turning out like literally never before to vote.

Trump 2020 doing so well is a MAJOR overperformance to expectations. It's even still possible he wins! It's even still possible (though dramatically less likely) the GOP is near parity or even majority in the House!

I am not particularly fond of the GOP either, but I am not voting for this woke, socialist, pack the courts and states bullshit. If this election and a 2022 Red Wave motivates the Dems to throw all these morons under the bus and the Court doesn't get packed, I can start feel comfortable voting for someone like Pete or Klobuchar.

Trumps performance against this backdrop is definitely a big one to chew on.

[tantalus]

Networks Cut Away, CNN Calls Trump ‘Pathetic’ After Speech Falsely Claiming He’s Been Cheated

Multiple TV networks — including MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News and ABC News — cut away from a speech filled with falsehoods from Donald Trump in which he baselessly claimed he was being cheated in the election, spread misinformation about the legality of mail-in ballots and falsely claimed he had won if only the “legal” votes were counted.

Brian Williams, describing MSNBC’s decision to cut away, said, “It was not rooted in reality and at this point, where our country is, it’s dangerous.”

“Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States,” Williams also said. “There are no illegal votes that we know of, there has been no Trump victory that we know of.”

On CBS News, Norah O’Donnell cut away to correspondent Nancy Cordes to fact-check Trump’s misleading statements that his numbers were “getting whittled away miraculously” after Election Day.

“There was no miracle there. Every single election analyst was shouting from the rooftops before the election that that’s exactly what was going to happen, that in-person voting was going to be counted first, it would make it look like the president was ahead, but then as you started counting the mail-in ballots, that it could start to shift,” Cordes said.

Though both CNN and Fox News aired Trump’s remarks uninterrupted, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted that it was “the most dishonest speech he has ever given while Jake Tapper said on-air that Trump’s statements were “pathetic” and a “feast of falsehoods.”

“That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over, but he just hasn’t accepted it and he wants to take everyone down with him, including this country,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper added.

On Fox News, host Martha MacCallum also said that the supposed “evidence” and “proof” of election misconduct that Trump alleged would need to be “produced.”

As of Thursday evening, a winner has not been projected in the presidential race between Trump and Biden.
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God I can't wait until news organizations can stop airing this insanity for all the world to see

How to even measure the long term damage..... I get nervous that this kind of thing can strengthen the opponents of democracy in countiries that can go one way or the other in the coming decade. Into the sphere of russia/china or join the list of democracies. I admit its easy to overstate the influence that this can have. I am thankful that democratic counties in east asia have fared well in the pandemic.

[tantalus]

I don't mind taking a chance with this above process if they cannot tilt the Supreme Court to embrace their more extreme dumbassery. I am obviously not going to vote for Bernie, but if Mayor Pete wants to raise my taxes and possibly strike a grand bargain on spending reductions, whatever, I am more willing to take a chance on that than with 9 liberals on the Supreme Court deciding in 10 years that wearing a MAGA hat is Fighting Words and is therefore excluded from 1st Amendment protections. These people are authoritarian fools when they DON'T have political power, I certainly am not going to trust them WITH political power.

Again, since this probably is not clear: I do not like Trump. I very much despise Trump. I would have voted for Hillary if she were a Republican and appointed GOP justices. I would have voted for Hillary even over McCain, who I did not vote for, because McCain was an idiot. I voted for Pat Quinn to raise my taxes in IL because our state was borderline bankrupt. I would not vote for President in 2020 if not for the above dynamic, because I don't like Trump and Biden is a total fool. But I've voted against every Dem in the last DECADE because of this dynamic, and there is literally nothing in the last DECADE to make me change my mind even a little bit, because they just keep leaning in further and harder.

Hopefully, HOPEFULLY, this election serves as a warning sign to Democrats to NOT be complete morons. I don't want Christian theocrats and a bankrupt nation anymore than you do, but I sure as hell don't want idiots like my sister-in-law running shit.

So the political and economic policies are big issues that could in theory shift and possess fluidity.

But the red lines and ultimate problems are cultural issues and free speech issues? And how these could track over time? Am I getting you right?

[Albany Rifles]

Biden now ahead in both Georgia & Pennsylvania

[astralis]

Fox has called the election.

Congratulations, President-elect Biden, Vice President-elect Harris.

[InExile]

Trump loses, America is great again!

[TopHatter]

Fox has called the election.

Congratulations, President-elect Biden, Vice President-elect Harris.

Can't find a link to that

[astralis]

https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/s...10866516905984

[TopHatter]

https://twitter.com/DecisionDeskHQ/s...10866516905984

That's not Fox News...

[astralis]

my mistake! Fox Decision Desk and the Decision Desk HQ are different organizations.

oh well, the media call will probably be within a few hours. Thus far, Vox has called it.

[statquo]

Nothing wrong with one term, Donald.

[InExile]

Trump has lost, the margin in Pennsylvania will be outside the recount range when counting is complete based on that most outstanding ballots are going to Biden almost 4:1

As said above, only a matter of time before it’s called by the networks

[TopHatter]

The polling industry blows it again

The pollsters got Donald Trump wrong — again.

When all the votes are tallied, Joe Biden isn’t going to win the popular vote by double digits. Trump lost Wisconsin by a point, not the 17-point defeat one survey suggested. And Trump obviously didn't go down in an election night landslide, as some polls suggested would happen.

It wasn’t just the public polls that suggested Tuesday would be a big Democratic night. Much of the private polling on which both parties rely suggested Biden would win solidly, and they expected Democrats to benefit down the ballot.
Now that it hasn’t happened, pollsters are wondering whether their methods are fundamentally broken — or just unable to measure Trump’s support, specifically.

“This is not just a few public pollsters out there that missed it. This is something that is unique to this election,” said Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “It just seems to be that if the name ‘Donald Trump’ is on the ballot, all bets are off when it comes to the polls being right.”

It’s impossible to quantify the magnitude by which the polls missed the mark until the vote count is complete — but Trump clearly overperformed in many of the battlegrounds, winning some toss-ups comfortably and running close in states where Biden had big polling leads.

Trump is blaming the polls for his seemingly likely defeat. Delivering a defiant statement in the White House briefing room on Thursday, Trump falsely claimed that the polls were “election interference, in the truest sense of that word.”

The public polls, Trump alleged without evidence, “were designed to keep our voters at home, create the illusion of momentum for Mr. Biden and diminish Republicans’ ability to raise funds.”
Trump claims that election projections are based on fraudulent votes

Nonpartisan media and academic pollsters do not rig their surveys to harm Republicans’ political prospects.

But there’s no doubt that public polls of the presidential race missed the mark, especially in key states. One popular explanation is that "shy Trump voters" hid their true intentions in interviews with pollsters.

There's little evidence that poll respondents are lying, however. More pollsters believe it’s actually a difficulty reaching voters more likely to support Trump in the first place, either because they’re harder to find or are less likely to take phone surveys even if reached.

“The continuing and growing problem of nonresponse is something that we have to look at quite closely,” said Don Levy, the director of the Siena College Research Institute, which partnered with The New York Times for dozens of battleground-state polls.

After 2016, pollsters engaged in an effort to examine their methods, searching for something that could explain how they missed Trump's victory. The leading cause, they concluded, was the widening chasm between how more highly educated Americans vote versus those who did not graduate from college.

But even weighting their surveys to increase the number of white voters without a college degree wasn't enough this year.

While the polls generally underestimated Trump, the errors were more acute in some states. In Wisconsin, which has mostly completed its count, Biden won by seven-tenths of a percentage point, 49.6 percent to 48.9 percent. But that’s after taking an 8.4-point lead into Election Day in the FiveThirtyEight average.

Other states where the polls missed: Ohio, where Trump had an advantage of 0.8 points in the FiveThirtyEight average, currently shows an 8.2-point lead for Trump in the vote count. In Florida, preelection polls showed Biden up by an average of 2.5 points, suggesting the Democrat had a slight edge in an election he’s currently trailing by 3.2 points.

There were some polls that hit the mark in those states. Trafalgar Group, which says it tries to account for respondents who lie to pollsters about their support for Trump, performed well in Wisconsin (Biden +1 in their last poll) and Florida (Trump +2). But the firm also released other polls that overstated Trump’s position, like a survey in too-close-to-call Georgia that showed Trump leading by 5 points, and one in Michigan that gave Trump a slight edge in a state he lost by 3 points.

Still, the more common miss for public pollsters was in the other direction. The ABC News/Washington Post poll in October showing Biden ahead by 17 in Wisconsin got a lot of ink as an outlier, but the problems were more pervasive than that. The final New York Times/Siena College polls in Wisconsin and Florida had Biden up 11 points and 6 points, respectively.

In some of the states, the polls were spot-on. Biden’s 1.2-point lead in the final average in Georgia looks very close to the still-undecided outcome, and the polls showed Biden 2.6 points in Arizona, where the count is still ongoing. In Iowa, the average understated Trump — but the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll correctly saw Trump and GOP Sen. Joni Ernst surging at the end.

But those were generally the exception.

Down-ballot, the polling performance appeared even worse than at the presidential level. Democrats thought their party was favored to win back the Senate and gain upwards of a dozen House seats. Instead, their path to the Senate majority is much narrower than before, and they lost seats in the House.

Internal polls in both parties showed GOP Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Sara Gideon locked in a tight race in Maine, where third-party support was seen as denying either candidate a majority of the vote and giving Gideon an advantage in the state's ranked-choice system. Instead, Collins is slightly above 50 percent in the current vote count and isn’t in danger of losing even if she dips just below that mark.

At the House level, many of Democrats’ top challengers fizzled despite rosy polling, and some incumbents thought to be secure went down, such as freshman Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.).

Four years ago, when Trump was first elected, the national polls came close to nailing Hillary Clinton’s 2.1-point popular-vote margin, showing her ahead by about 3 points. It was the swing-state polls that faltered.

This time, Biden’s popular-vote lead is expected to grow in the coming weeks, as more votes are tallied. But it won’t come near the 8.4-point lead he had in the final average, which included some surveys that showed him ahead by double digits.

“We know that there’s a lot of Democratic vote that hasn’t been counted in states that haven’t been called and in states that don’t matter,” said Murray, the Monmouth pollster.

It will take weeks to determine the magnitude by which the polls missed Trump again, and the industry is hoping its critics will wait for more information before drawing conclusions.

“It will take weeks for election officials to carefully count all early, absentee, in-person and provisional ballots,” read a statement from the American Association for Public Opinion Research on Thursday. “As such, it is premature to make sweeping judgments on the polls’ overall performance before all the ballots are counted. Patience is necessary.”

Already, the polls don’t look quite as wrong as they did Tuesday night, when Trump led the vote counts in the three Great Lakes “Blue Wall” states he flipped in 2016. Since then, Biden has been declared the winner in Michigan and Wisconsin — albeit by smaller margins than the polling suggested — and appears poised to take the lead in Pennsylvania.

In the coming weeks and months, pollsters will be poring over targeted surveys and voter files to figure out whom they missed and where.

"We will do a systematic analysis to look state by state, demographic by demographic" at what went wrong, said Siena's Levy. "I mean, that’s what we have to do. And we have to wait until all the votes are in."
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The polling industry isn't dead until the Dems and GOP drop polling like a bad habit...but pollsters have got a long long way to go before they can reestablish any credibility.

[Firestorm]

So Biden seems to be leading in states where the Democrats actually lost some House seats. Overall, they have underperformed in the House and their situation in the Senate isn't any better than before the election. IMO this is evidence that a statistically significant number of people might have voted for Biden but also voted Republican for down-ballot races (or not voted at all).

This could be because of their personal dislike/disgust for Trump as a person and a Presidential candidate. If that is True, another candidate like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio might have blown Biden away perhaps? Democrats have a big problem on their hands for the future either way.

[TopHatter]

Trump, the Pathetic Loser
On Thursday night, staring down the abyss of defeat, President Trump marched into the White House briefing room and did what he has always done when backed into a corner. He unfurled lies. He claimed everything is “rigged” against him. He inflated his accomplishments to vertiginous heights.

All while the votes against him in decisive battleground states ticked higher and higher, a silent metronome in the background relentlessly counting toward his political demise.

While Trump’s bluster might have been enthralling in the past—or at least hard to look away from, like a car accident—this time, the television lights made his typical bronze glow look like mortuary makeup. He was a political dead man walking. Everyone knew it. Even him. His tone was grave, which only made his lies all the more loathsome.

One would expect a man in his final hours to reveal his innermost, truthful thoughts while in such a terminal state. Trump, however, delivered the opposite of a deathbed confession. Feeble and stumbling, he kept pushing the Kool-Aid on anyone who would sip it.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” he said.

“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided,” he said after campaigning for months against mail-in ballot systems.

“We can’t have an election stolen like this,” he said, without any evidence anything was stolen.

“As you know, I’ve claimed certain states,” he said—as though the act of making a “claim” on a state entitled him to win in.

It was all loser talk from a cult leader who would rather force the ending of democracy than face the end that is coming. Either way, President Trump is talking about taking everyone around him down with him. Because if he really means what he says, and he wants to use all the powers invested in him as president to hunt down supposed “fraud” and ensure that he can stay in power, where does that road lead? Straight toward dictatorship.

Tonight, Trump’s sycophants and enablers find all their dreams that his presidency would be the most consequential and important in American history crashing down around them. We should all remember Trump as he presented himself in this monumental moment. As a babbling, incoherent, conspiracist. Our greatest presidential embarrassment.


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