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The US 2020 Presidential Election & Attempts To Overturn It

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  • Originally posted by DOR View Post

    Have you ever even looked at the intentionally anti-China TPP, and all those other nations that signed on ?

    No, I didn't think so.
    Both parties were not interested in TPP so no.

    Quick search in the Democrat manifesto and there is no mention

    So what about it ?
    Last edited by Double Edge; 01 Nov 20,, 16:59.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by astralis View Post
      DE,



      so, what you're saying is that Trump's foreign policy isn't succeeding in getting allies to stick their necks out against China.

      but...Biden's victory is the "escape hatch" that China is betting on?

      if Trump's policies aren't succeeding, what need does China have for an escape hatch?
      Oh! i'm not saying it isn't succeeding.

      If people are in the same room as Pompeo evidently they agree but they don't speak up about it. All sorts of excuses offered. Not diplomatic, unnecessary etc.

      This is the US setting the pace, setting an example and being the leader.

      Everything people in the region said the US should be doing before Trump entered office.

      I posted a speech Pence gave at the Hudson Institute over a year back here and asked people whether the administration was serious about going after China or whether it was hot air.

      A year later it's pretty clear it was not hot air.

      Takes time for people to come around. They have to eventually or submit to China.

      Listening to a talk the mention was made that Bush had his eye on China in the early 2000s after that incident with the planes bumping. The China test i like to call it.

      Then 9/11 happened and focus shifted so here we are twenty years later at the same point.
      Last edited by Double Edge; 01 Nov 20,, 17:02.

      Comment


      • Traveling with Trump is a cognitive dissonance carnival

        TAMPA, Fla. —

        The rhythms seem routine, but for those in the “pool,” the small, rotating group of White House reporters who shadow the president, it’s important to note them all.

        Air Force One takes off, then lands; a pool report is emailed to other reporters. President Trump takes the stage and says all kinds of things. Then he dances — dances? — as “Y.M.C.A.” plays at max volume. More pool reports. We take off again, and it all repeats somewhere else.

        After five years of covering Donald Trump, setting my alarms to his tweets, watching and wondering about him from the 2015 Iowa State Fair to the Oval Office, from New Delhi to Detroit, I was back in the bubble with Trump last week for a final, frenzied campaign swing — three days, six rallies, seven states and almost seven hours of speeches — as he fights for reelection.

        Even one hour with Trump can be dizzying. His speeches ramble, his staff frequently is clueless as to his plans, and normal functions often veer towards chaos. The sensory overload can become disorienting, a vaudevillian alternative-reality show — Cognitive Dissonance, the Musical.

        Crowds cheer and jeer every incendiary claim, eager to act as props and amplifiers. As he excoriated the media at an event in Lansing, Mich., I looked up to see a woman staring into our enclosure with a mask emblazoned with the words, “The Media is the Virus.” At least she wore a mask.

        When you’re surrounded by thousands of euphoric red-hatted supporters, it’s easier to doubt polls that show Trump trailing or tied with Joe Biden in battleground states.

        After hearing the same incendiary rally speech six times, it’s easier to grow inured to Trump’s ho-hum denials of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people, his angry calls to stop Americans from voting, the raucous chants to lock his opponents up.

        And when you get home, you can’t get “Y.M.C.A.” — the 1970s gay cruising anthem turned global disco hit and now Trump anthem — out of your head.

        We started Tuesday in cold rain in Lansing, finishing that night in even more frigid Omaha, where thousands of rallygoers waited hours for buses after we were wheels-up for Las Vegas. Seven people, police said, were hospitalized for hypothermia.

        Before returning to Washington late Thursday, we stopped in steamy Tampa, Fla., where more than a dozen people who’d come to cheer Trump suffered from heatstroke and collapsed as he railed on stage about Hunter Biden’s laptop and supposedly dishonest media.

        Metaphors, if you’re looking for them, are often more abundant than masks. Less than half of Trump rally attendees, always crowded closely together, usually wear them.

        Supporters appear to accept Trump’s breezy assurances that if he could recover from COVID-19 — thanks, he would note, to 12 doctors overseeing his care in the presidential wing at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and an experimental drug cocktail unavailable to the public — they could too.

        His apocalyptic renderings of a Biden presidency, replete with lost jobs and urban unrest, sounded a lot like the current reality for millions of Americans.

        “If you vote for Biden, it means no kids in school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas and no Fourth of July together,” Trump said Wednesday in Goodyear, Ariz. “Other than that, you have a wonderful life.”

        The Trump supporters in these crowds don’t care about the gaping holes in his arguments. They don’t mind his coarse behavior. They revel as he toggles between full-throated rage and offhanded sarcasm, exhorting and chuckling, taking selfies and videos, the consummate performer.


        Trump’s glib flattery — his campaign only sets up big video monitors at important rallies, he fibs at every stop — is as authentic as professional wrestling. But crowds roar with approval at his jibes and insults, ready to deliver their lines on cue: “Four more years!” “Lock her up!” “CNN sucks!”

        When White House reporters take him literally, as we must, we become the butt of the joke, too dense to understand the president’s bond to his supporters — a bond based on identity more than ideology, raw emotion over reason and one that may be unbreakable.

        But it goes both ways. When Trump’s at a rally, his hermetically sealed world and the feedback loop it creates gives as much affirmation to the president as he delivers to his fans.

        Leaving the stage, he struts across the tarmac to the plane in cold rain or sweltering heat, pumping his fists, determined to look strong. He eschews a ride in the Beast, the black presidential limousine rolling beside him, just in case.

        The press pool walks a few feet away, cameras snapping and rolling. The images are a big reason why he still holds large rallies in a pandemic — more powerful in Trump’s view than any tut-tutting from Biden, who speaks to smaller crowds at greater distance, chiding Trump for acting irresponsibly.

        Trump is determined to re-create the come-from-behind triumph of the 2016 campaign, visiting as many states as he can, shouting until he is hoarse, even as a majority of voters view his rallies as potential super-spreader events for the coronavirus.

        He plans to hold 10 rallies in seven states in the final 48 hours before Tuesday, when voting ends. (Good luck to that pooler.)

        Trump has worked assiduously to engineer a last-minute game-changer that might shift attention from the pandemic. It won’t be easy: Half a million coronavirus cases were recorded last week, 99,000 on Friday alone, the most since the pandemic began, and hospitalizations for COVID-19 soared in state after state.

        But when the pool got aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, handouts had been placed in our seats promoting an imminent Fox News interview with Hunter Biden’s former business associate, Tony Bobulinski. Each handout was scrawled in thick, black marker: “MUST SEE TV!”

        As we flew from La Crosse, Wis., to Omaha, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany popped her head into the press cabin and pointed to TV monitors as the interview aired. “You guys should watch,” she said.

        But White House efforts to manufacture a scandal around Hunter Biden’s business dealings have fallen flat, mainly due to the lack of credible evidence that Joe Biden was involved.

        On Wednesday morning, the pool was ushered into a small ballroom in Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. There was no event on our official schedule, and White House aides said they didn’t know what to expect. Given Trump’s penchant for the big reveal, would he show up with Bobulinski?

        But then seven local business representatives walked in, summoned simply to endorse Trump and praise his economic record.

        It was a standard event for any other campaign, one with a policy focus and validators for local TV. But it was highly unusual for Trump, who tends to obliterate calibrated messages with real-time reactions to headlines and the bombast he knows will excite a crowd.

        As he stumped that afternoon in Arizona at Bullhead City and Goodyear, he ripped Biden as the leader of a “crime family” and complained that the unsubstantiated scandal wasn’t getting enough attention.

        On Thursday in Tampa, he ranted about Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security chief of staff who’d just outed himself as the anonymous administration official who wrote a 2018 New York Times column blistering the president.

        “It’s like a horrible, treasonous, horrible thing that you can do this and you can get away with it,” Trump said about a U.S. citizen exercising his constitutional right to criticize the government.


        Reading off the teleprompter, Trump touted the positive news that the nation’s gross domestic product had shot up in the third quarter, a partial recovery from the pandemic-induced economic crash last spring. But he couldn’t stick with it.

        “Weekly jobless claims — this is boring, but it’s really good — just hit a seven-month low,” he said.

        Polls show Trump has lost many of the suburban women who backed him in 2016, partly over his handling of the pandemic. But his sexism is rarely far below the surface.

        Although millions of women lost their jobs, or saw their family finances upended in the pandemic, Trump reassured women in Lansing: “We’re getting your husbands back to work.”

        A day later in Goodyear, he called GOP Sen. Martha McSally on stage to make her case for reelection, but needled her as she rushed up the steps, almost apologizing to the crowd for offering time to a lawmaker whose potential defeat could cost his party its Senate majority.

        “Just come up fast. Fast. Fast. Come on. Quick,” Trump said. “You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick. Come on.”

        He placed no time restraints on the three men who followed McSally at the microphone.

        Trump’s final, frantic surge of rallies underscore how little the former reality TV star has changed in the White House. These carnivals of passion sustain him emotionally, but may not be enough to sustain his presidency. The narcissism could be self-defeating.

        After five years of following Trump, I can hear the frustration in his words, thinly veiled by his anger and professions of confidence, the fear that he may soon become what he hates most of all — a loser.

        He’s upset about having to run against Biden, the Democrat who worried him so much that he tried to pressure Ukraine’s leader last year to announce a bogus investigation. That led to Trump’s impeachment by the House, a permanent stain on his presidency.

        Leaning against the lectern, Trump tries to chip away at his opponent’s affability, perhaps his main political asset, with brusque, bitter words.

        “He’s not a nice guy,” Trump insists, spinning a story about how Biden won the Democratic nomination thanks to help from other candidates determined to bring Trump down, and not because Biden is popular.

        “He shouldn’t even be the candidate,” the president groused, seemingly aware there are realities even he is powerless to change.

        ______________


        “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

        Comment


        • A safe, sane way to navigate election night — and beyond

          We all need to be clear-eyed about the social and political volatility heading into Election Day: The chances of sporadic violence, significant unrest or voting issues are quite high, according to basically every federal and state official monitoring voting and its aftermath in 2020.

          But all of us — Democrats, Republicans, independents alike — can do our part to minimize the drama and darker scenarios.

          1. Vote and then chill until late Tuesday night. There'll be dumb rumors, wild speculation and armchair projections, all of it meaningless.
          • There's no chance you have even a clue who wins until Florida, Georgia and North Carolina are counted and reported.
          • More likely, you will need to wait for clear-cut results in Pennsylvania, where it will take days to count all mail-in votes.

          2. Don't expect a quick, clear winner: We can't stress enough the chance of it taking days to fully count mail-in and absentee votes, to determine the real outcome in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
          • Be patient: COVID and the mail-in torrent make this election unlike any other.

          3. Brace for the possibility of a "Red Mirage." We first told you about this term, coined by the Democratic data firm Hawkfish, on "Axios on HBO" before Labor Day:
          • Because polling and modeling shows Republicans are more likely to vote in person and Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, early counts could look heavier for the GOP than the final result, when absentee votes are all counted.
          • So the trends could look more Trump-friendly than the final outcome. This is not a partisan belief; it's a simple fact. (See the full "Red Mirage" segment.)

          4. Don’t share social-media posts that aren't from a source you trust and know well. Period. Too many people share too much garbage too often.
          • Only pay attention to sources of information you trust and can validate with 100% certainty. Measure twice, tweet once (or, better yet, never).

          5. Don’t overreact. You might see images on cable or social media of protests, or what seem like massive voter intimidation or issues. This can often seem bigger or more widespread than it is.
          • Top officials tell us they fear Russia or other actors plan to amplify even the smallest issues to sow chaos. So don't assume the worst.

          6. Expect that President Trump may refuse to accept results, if he loses.
          • Why? Because he has told us he will fight the voting rules and results all the way to the Supreme Court. Watch his actions more than his words.
          • Here's a small sign of what may lie ahead: As reported by the N.Y. Times, the Trump campaign — citing the possibility that "multiple states will require recounts" — is raising money to continue ballot fights into mid-December:
          7. Don’t hyperventilate about court cases. There will probably be many. But wait until there are actual verdicts and appeals to appraise the significance.

          8. Brace yourself for 78 days of drama and turmoil from Nov. 4 through the inauguration.
          • No one working for Trump or Joe Biden thinks the post-election period will be remotely normal. Even if you get the result you want, anticipate months of wild maneuvering and protests.
          • Here, too, keep it in perspective and don’t make matters worse by sharing or overreacting to false or misleading reports.

          What's next: The nation is headed into a firestorm. There's no way it's orderly or normal, or even necessarily over when it seems over.
          • All we can do is be smart about what’s to come, and wise in our responses.
          ____________
          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

          Comment


          • 2. Don't expect a quick, clear winner: We can't stress enough the chance of it taking days to fully count mail-in and absentee votes, to determine the real outcome in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
            I'm really hoping this is the year that Texas flips.

            the entire GOP strategy at this point is to invalidate any vote not counted by November 3.
            There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

            Comment


            • Originally posted by astralis View Post

              I'm really hoping this is the year that Texas flips.

              the entire GOP strategy at this point is to invalidate any vote not counted by November 3.
              Oh no, they're not even bothering to wait until Election Day to invalidate votes...especially in Texas. I wonder what they're so afraid of...

              Texas Supreme Court rejects Republican-led effort to throw out nearly 127,000 Harris County votes

              A legal cloud hanging over nearly 127,000votes already cast in Harris County was at least temporarilylifted Sunday when the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by several conservative Republican activists and candidates to preemptively throw out early balloting from drive-thru polling sites in the state's most populous, and largely Democratic, county.

              The all-Republican court denied the request without an order or opinion, as justices did last month in a similar lawsuit brought by some of the same plaintiffs.

              The Republican plaintiffs, however, are pursuing a similar lawsuit in federal court, hoping to get the votes thrown out by arguing that drive-thru voting violates the U.S. constitution. A hearing in that case is set for Monday morning in a Houston-based federal district court, one day before Election Day. A rejection of the votes would constitute a monumental disenfranchisement of voters — drive-thru ballots account for about 10% of all in-person ballots cast during early voting in Harris County.

              After testing the approach during the July primary runoff with little controversy, Harris County, home to Houston, set up 10 drive-thru centers for the fall election to make early voting easier for people concerned about entering polling places during the pandemic. Voters pull up in their cars, and after their registrations and identifications have been confirmed by poll workers are handed an electronic tablet through their car windows to cast ballots.

              In a last-minute filing to the Supreme Court, litigious conservative Steven Hotze and Harris County Republicans state Rep. Steve Toth, congressional candidate Wendell Champion and judicial candidate Sharon Hemphill sought to have the votes declared illegal. They argued that the drive-thru program was an expansion of curbside voting, and under state election law should only be available for voters with disabilities. The same argument had been made in an unsuccessful previous legal challenge from Hotze and Hemphill — along with the Harris County Republican Party — filed at the state Supreme Court hours before early voting began.

              Curbside voting, long available under Texas election law, requires workers at every polling place to deliver onsite curbside ballots to voters who are “physically unable to enter the polling place without personal assistance or likelihood of injuring the voter's health.” Posted signs at polling sites notify voters to ring a bell, call a number or honk to request curbside assistance.

              The Harris County Clerk’s Office argued that its drive-thru locations are separate polling places, distinct from attached curbside spots, and therefore can be available to all voters. The clerk’s filing with the Supreme Court in the earlier lawsuit also said the Texas secretary of state’s office had approved of drive-thru voting. Keith Ingram, the state’s chief election official, said in a court hearing last month in another lawsuit that drive-thru voting is “a creative approach that is probably okay legally,” according to court transcripts.

              Plus, the county argued in a Friday filing that Texas's election code, along with court rulings, have determined that even if the drive-thru locations are violations, votes cast there are still valid.

              "More than a century of Texas case law requires that votes be counted even if election official[s] violate directory election laws," the filing said.

              The challenge was the latest in a flurry of lawsuits on Texas voting procedures filed in recent months, with Democrats and voting rights groups pushing for expanded voting access in the pandemic and Republicans seeking to limit voting options. In this case, the lawsuit filed Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to close Harris County’s 10 new drive-thru polling places and not count votes that had been cast at them during early voting.

              The court has recently ruled against other last-minute challenges on voting access by noting that the cases were filed too late, and that changes to voting procedure during an election would sow voter confusion.

              Since the first Republican challenge to drive-thru voting was filed on Oct. 12, the Texas secretary of state and Gov. Greg Abbott had both ignored requests from reporters and Harris County officials to clarify their positions on whether the process was legal. Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent a letter to all local election officials claiming that most voters can’t legally vote at drive-thru locations, fueling speculation that the all-Republican Supreme Court would use the case to invalidate ballots already cast. The court rejected the case the next week, with a lone dissent from Justice John Devine.

              The new challenge by Republicans again asked the court to reject drive-thru voting as an illegal expansion of curbside voting, and went further by also asking the court to issue an order rejecting votes already cast.

              “Unless stopped, illegal votes will be cast and counted in direct violation of the Texas Election Code and the United States Constitution and result in the integrity of elections in Harris County being compromised,” the petition to the court said.

              The county clerk's office countered that the first challenge to drive-thru voting had already been denied, and the second filing came much too late.

              "Hotze filed a petition contesting drive thru locations on the third day of early voting which this Court already denied," the clerk's Friday filing said. "He filed this second petition two-and-a-half weeks into early voting, six days before Election Day, and after fifty percent of registered voters have already voted."

              The tens of thousands of votes are still in flux, however, as the federal courts now weigh the issue. Hotze and the others asked the district court this week to toss the votes, arguing the county's implementation of drive-thru voting violates the U.S. Constitution. The campaign of Texas' Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, MJ Hegar, along with national Democratic campaigngroups have asked to intervene in the lawsuit — following a national trend in Republican-led fights against voting expansions during the tumultuous election.
              ______________
              Imagine being so batshit desperate to hold onto power that you stoop to these kinds of desperate measures.
              “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

              Comment


              • Speaking of batshit desperate to hold onto power....

                Trump Plans to Declare Victory on Election Night

                President Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's "ahead," according to three sources familiar with his private comments.
                • That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.
                Behind the scenes: Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.
                • For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
                Why it matters: Trump's team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.

                Details: Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state's final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.
                • Trump's team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have "stolen" the election.
                • Trump's advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.
                What they're saying: Asked for comment, the Trump campaign's communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he's going to say so."
                • Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump "will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results."
                Reality check: Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on Nov. 3.
                • Many states won't be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.
                • In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.
                • Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it's a close race, this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.
                • Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC's "Meet the Press" today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, "so, yes, it will take longer" to count.
                • "I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that's mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days," Boockvar said.
                What we're watching: Miller, on ABC's "This Week," predicted 290+ electoral votes for Trump on election night, and he claimed Democrats are "just going to try to steal it back after the election."
                • He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as "hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense."
                Between the lines: Trump advisers are more optimistic about winning than they were three weeks ago, based on my conversations with multiple senior campaign officials over the past week, including two officials with direct knowledge of sensitive internal data.
                • They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he's doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.
                • Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn't figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.
                • But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.
                _____________

                I think we all knew Trump was going to do that....question is, how will his followers react if Biden overtakes him as the count continues?
                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                Comment


                • Since FDR only 3 presidents who wanted a second term have not gotten one: Ford, Carter, Bush 41. All 3 had peace and an economic crisis. No president with a war or a good economy has lost re-election. To quote The Mouth of the South, "It's about jobs stupid". How people feel about their economic future is likely to decide the winner. Biden's message going into the home stretch has been less than optimistic about the future of the economy. If he loses, and I hope he does, it will because he channeled his inner Jimmy Carter.

                  There is also a lot of evidence for a submerged "shy Trump" vote. It was noticed in 16 and seems to be present again. This could be worth 3% or more vs the polls. Finally, Biden seems to be collapsing in Iowa. Late race collapses in battle grounds tend to reflect trends that impact all battle grounds. In the case of Iowa, the undecided independents are falling into the Trump camp. Hopefully this holds true for PA and Florida as well.

                  I think Texas and Georgia are safe given Trump's polling among minorities.

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by zraver View Post
                    Since FDR only 3 presidents who wanted a second term have not gotten one: Ford, Carter, Bush 41. All 3 had peace and an economic crisis. No president with a war or a good economy has lost re-election. To quote The Mouth of the South, "It's about jobs stupid". How people feel about their economic future is likely to decide the winner. Biden's message going into the home stretch has been less than optimistic about the future of the economy. If he loses, and I hope he does, it will because he channeled his inner Jimmy Carter.

                    There is also a lot of evidence for a submerged "shy Trump" vote. It was noticed in 16 and seems to be present again. This could be worth 3% or more vs the polls. Finally, Biden seems to be collapsing in Iowa. Late race collapses in battle grounds tend to reflect trends that impact all battle grounds. In the case of Iowa, the undecided independents are falling into the Trump camp. Hopefully this holds true for PA and Florida as well.

                    I think Texas and Georgia are safe given Trump's polling among minorities.
                    Trump's chances have certainly improved, albeit extremely late in the game. Iowa and Florida are certainly reasons for him to cheer. Iowa is something of a given but I'll be surprised indeed if Florida doesn't break for him. He needs a massive surge on Nov 3rd though and he must have Pennsylvania. You might even say it's a "keystone" to his victory.

                    I'm not terribly convinced about the shy Trump voter though. As Electoral-Vote.com pointed out, if there were significant number of shy Trumpers, it would likely be reflected with Trump being behind the GOP Senate race numbers:


                    More on "Shy Trump" Voters
                    For our part, we remain very skeptical that there is any meaningful shy Trump effect. Here are three major reasons:
                    1. The existence of any "shy" effect (whether shy Trump effect, or shy Tory effect, or Bradley effect) is hotly debated, since the effect—if it exists or has ever existed—is invariably subtle enough to potentially also be explained by movement within the margin of error.
                    2. In 2016, the final national polling average for Hillary Clinton was 46.8% and for Trump was 43.6%, a gap of 3.2%. When the votes were tallied, the final percentages were 48.2% for Clinton and 46.1% for Trump, a gap of 2.1%. Again, that is a very subtle difference, and could easily be explained by movement within the margins of error and/or a late Comey-inspired break toward Trump that was not captured by polls.
                    3. The best evidence of a shy Trump effect in 2016 was that he did about 1 point better in Internet polls than he did in telephone polls. The theory here is that people are more likely to lie to a human being than they are to a computer. But even if that theory is correct, there is no equivalent gap in this year's polls—Internet and telephone polls are producing nearly identical Trump results in 2020.
                    With all of this said, we wanted to try to find a different way to approach this problem. And it occurred to us that there are 34 states that are holding two different statewide federal elections this year, one for president and one for the U.S. Senate. Presumably, if some meaningful number of people were embarrassed to admit their support for Trump, he should be running behind some/many/all of the Republican Senate candidates. And yet, that is clearly not the case. Here are the polling averages for the GOP Senate candidates and Trump (one asterisk indicates a candidate defending a seat currently held by a Republicans, two asterisks indicates a candidate defending a seat they currently hold; for the Georgia special election we combined the totals of the two leading Republicans):
                    State Republican Candidate Senator Support Trump Support Difference
                    Alabama Tommy Tuberville 53.7% 57.7% Trump +4
                    Alaska Dan Sullivan** 42% 46.5% Trump +4.5
                    Arizona Martha McSally** 45.5% 47% Trump +1.5
                    Arkansas Tom Cotton** 69% 61.5% Cotton +7.5
                    Colorado Cory Gardner** 39.5% 40% Trump +0.5
                    Delaware Lauren Witzke 27% 35% Trump +8
                    Georgia David Perdue** 46.5% 47.3% Trump +0.8
                    Georgia Special Kelly Loeffler**/Doug Collins* 45.2% 47.3% Trump +2.1
                    Idaho Jim Risch** 53% 57.2% Trump +4.2
                    Illinois Mark Curran 25% 39.9% Trump +14.9
                    Iowa Joni Ernst** 45.7% 46.4% Trump +0.7
                    Kansas Roger Marshall* 46% 50% Trump +4
                    Kentucky Mitch McConnell** 51% 57% Trump +6
                    Louisiana Bill Cassidy** 52% 56.5% Trump +4.5
                    Maine Susan Collins** 42% 39.7% Collins +2.3
                    Massachusetts Kevin O'Connor 26% 28.3% Trump +2.3
                    Michigan John James 42.6% 43.5% Trump +0.9
                    Minnesota Jason Lewis 40.5% 43.3% Trump +2.8
                    Mississippi Cindy Hyde-Smith** 53% 56% Trump +3
                    Montana Steve Daines** 49.3% 52.3% Trump +3
                    Nebraska Ben Sasse** 47% 51% Trump +4
                    New Hampshire Corky Messner 40% 42.4% Trump +2.4
                    New Jersey Rik Mehta 30.3% 37.3% Trump +7
                    New Mexico Mark Ronchetti 40.5% 39% Ronchetti +1.5
                    North Carolina Thom Tillis** 45% 47.6% Trump +2.6
                    Oklahoma Jim Inhofe** 56.5% 59.5% Trump +3
                    Oregon Jo Rae Perkins 35% 39% Trump +4
                    Rhode Island Allen Waters N/A 31.7% N/A
                    South Carolina Lindsey Graham** 47.2% 50% Trump +2.8
                    South Dakota Mike Rounds** N/A 51% N/A
                    Tennessee Bill Hagerty* 56% 54.5% Hagerty +1.5
                    Texas John Cornyn** 47.5% 48% Trump +0.5
                    Virginia Daniel Gade 38.3% 40.3% Trump +2
                    West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito** 53% 58% Trump +5
                    Wyoming Cynthia Lummis* N/A 66.3% N/A
                    As you can see, Trump is running ahead of the Republican Senate candidate in 30 of 36 races. There are three where there has been no Senate poll to serve as a basis for comparison, and just three where Trump is lagging the Republican Senate candidate. Quite clearly, voters who plan to vote a Republican ticket (and some who plan to vote a split ticket) have no concerns about admitting to their support for the President.

                    That doesn't necessarily preclude the existence of a population of shy Trump voters, but for those folks to exist, the following would have to be true:
                    1. The voter is planning to vote Democratic/third party for U.S. Senate
                    2. The voter is honest about their senatorial choice
                    3. The voter is also planning to split their ticket and vote for Trump
                    4. Despite four years of him in the White House, the voter still sees Trump as "embarrassing"
                    5. So, the voter is dishonest about their presidential choice
                    Again, anything is possible. But from where we sit, it takes an awful lot of bending and twisting to try to make the data conform with the existence of all these alleged shy Trump voters.
                    _____________
                    “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                    Comment


                    • Trump adviser falsely claims Democrats could "steal" electoral votes

                      Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller falsely claimed on Sunday that Democrats would try to "steal" electoral votes after election night if President Trump appears to be ahead, signaling a coming legal fight over mail-in ballots that are counted after Nov. 3.

                      Reality check: Electoral College votes are not awarded until December, and no state ever reports its final count on election night — despite Trump's insistence that the election should end on Nov. 3 and that the courts should not allow ballots to be counted in the days following.

                      The big picture: Amid massive early turnout, Americans are expected to vote by mail in record numbers this election — and polling has found that more Democrats than Republicans said they would mail ballots.
                      • Many of those votes won't be counted by election night, as states process more mailed ballots than they ever have before.
                      • That delay could mean that Trump will appear to lead on election night, which would shift as more Democratic votes are tallied.
                      • Trump has baselessly accused Democrats of trying to "steal" the election by pointing to efforts that expand voting access, such as extending mail-in ballot deadlines in Pennsylvania and building an in-person voting center in the California suburbs.
                      Between the lines: Trump has repeatedly declined to say whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election if he loses to Joe Biden.
                      • He told reporters in September that he believes the Supreme Court may have to decide the result, after claiming that the only way he can lose the election is if it is "rigged."
                      • The Trump campaign is reportedly raising money to continue ballot fights into mid-December, per the New York Times.

                      What they're saying: "If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range," Miller said on ABC's "This Week."
                      • "And then they're going to try to steal it back after the election. We believe that we will be over 290 electoral votes on election night.
                      • "So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we're still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected."
                      ____________

                      Ah the sour stench of desperation and delusion...
                      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by Double Edge View Post

                        Oh! i'm not saying it isn't succeeding.

                        If people are in the same room as Pompeo evidently they agree but they don't speak up about it. All sorts of excuses offered. Not diplomatic, unnecessary etc.

                        This is the US setting the pace, setting an example and being the leader.

                        Everything people in the region said the US should be doing before Trump entered office.

                        I posted a speech Pence gave at the Hudson Institute over a year back here and asked people whether the administration was serious about going after China or whether it was hot air.

                        A year later it's pretty clear it was not hot air.

                        Takes time for people to come around. They have to eventually or submit to China.

                        Listening to a talk the mention was made that Bush had his eye on China in the early 2000s after that incident with the planes bumping. The China test i like to call it.

                        Then 9/11 happened and focus shifted so here we are twenty years later at the same point.
                        Which speech? Can you link it or PM?
                        Politicians are elected to serve...far too many don't see it that way - Albany Rifles! || Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it - Mark Twain! || I am a far left millennial!

                        Comment


                        • Trump closing argument is ... anybody's guess

                          Four years ago, candidate Donald J. Trump closed out his long-shot challenge with a steady and surprisingly disciplined reliance on nine words he repeated over and over again: "Build the wall," "Drain the swamp," and "Lock her up." Stemming from his remarkably effective campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again," it was the most readily digestible message since Franklin D. Roosevelt urged voters not to "change horses midstream.”

                          Now, President Trump is concluding his run for a second term with a broad, shotgun-style message that is diffuse, disjointed, and undisciplined. In place of the tight message of 2016, Trump has uttered in just the last seven days of his 2020 campaign almost 200,000 words and what often seemed to be just as many messages. A challenger's stretch-run clarity and simplicity have been replaced by an incumbent's disdain for anything that appears scripted, edited, or—most of all—short.

                          When he finished talking in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, at 9:55 p.m., at his last rally Saturday night—his fourth of the day in the key battleground state—Trump had spoken more than he had in any week of his presidency, a prodigious achievement for a man who loves the microphone and the spotlight. At his 17 rallies since last Sunday in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Trump spoke nearly 183,000 words, matching the New Testament in length. Unfortunately for the president’s hopes in Tuesday’s election, they were all aimed at the converted, the Trump acolytes willing to cast aside their masks and ignore state pandemic restrictions to hear him preach. And even biblical scholars skilled in parsing the words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would find it challenging to take the Gospel of Donald and distill it down to a memorable closing argument able to move undecided voters.

                          The same is true about Trump’s final burst of tweets. In 2016, he heeded the advice of his campaign team and showed great restraint in the run-up to Election Day. There is no sign of similar restraint in 2020. In the final seven days of the last campaign, from Nov. 1 through Nov. 7, Trump sent out only 81 tweets and 8 retweets, an average of fewer than 13 a day. This year, in the seven days ending Saturday night, Trump blasted out 294 tweets and 146 retweets—almost 63 a day.

                          The tweets four years ago stayed pretty much on message, promising to “make America safe and great again,” pledging to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, and blasting “Crooked Hillary.” This time, the tone has been far darker, the attacks more biting. Many of the most memorable—48 of them—went out between midnight and 7 a.m., reflecting the late-night and pre-dawn musings of a president down in the polls. It was 1:40 a.m. Friday morning when Trump, who was angry at an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on Pennsylvania’s ballots, warned that “Biden will destroy the United States Supreme Court. Don’t let this happen!” Seventeen minutes later, at 1:57 a.m., he added, “If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus 1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well."

                          The president has 87.3 million followers on Twitter. Still, the televised remarks at his many rallies matter more in the final days before Tuesday. It is at those rallies that the True Trump is on display, especially when he refuses to heed the prepared speech scrolling on the teleprompters in front of him. He even jokes about his resistance to sticking to one message. In Tampa on Thursday, he told the crowd that his advisers were pushing him to talk about the economy. After a long attack on Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and five times asking “Where’s Hunter?—Trump admitted that many GOP advisers don’t like it when he goes off on such tangents.

                          “It’s crazy,” he said. “Some people said—I get a call from all the experts, right? Guys that ran for president six, seven, eight times—never got past the first round, but they’re calling me up: ‘Sir, you shouldn’t be speaking about Hunter. You shouldn’t be saying bad things about Biden because nobody cares.’ I disagree. Maybe that’s why I’m here and they’re not. But they say, ‘Talk about your economic success. Talk about 33.1 percent [GDP increase], the greatest in history.’ Now, look, if I do—I mean, how many times can I say it? I’ll say it five or six times during the speech: 33.1.”

                          On Monday, he got off on a tangent about the Space Force before asking the crowd, “Should we get back to the teleprompter or just keep going? Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t need a teleprompter?” On Sunday, he went on a nine-minute detour about Air Force One, how many generators it has, how his hair gets mussed up when he leaves the plane, the plane’s colors, and his negotiations over a replacement fleet. “I hope you people are interested in this,” he said at the end. “Now, isn’t this better than being on a teleprompter?”

                          His aides would dissent—and probably wince at his reaction on the occasions when he does read what’s on the screen. In Tampa, he did briefly talk about weekly jobless claims before abruptly injecting, “This is boring.”

                          Certainly it was if you compared it to his comment, delivered in Tampa, that Rep. Adam Schiff has a “watermelon head." Or his suggestion in Allentown on Monday that John Kerry failed as secretary of State because he liked to ride bikes.


                          At every rally, Trump took his audience on a dizzying journey through what was on his mind at the moment, omitting hardly any subject and airing every conceivable personal grievance, gripe, or pet peeve.

                          Here are the topics he touched on in his final week of rallies: (As befitting Trump's own speeches, they're in no particular order.)

                          Fake news, big tech, historic prosperity, dangerous lockdowns, Biden tax increases, Trump tax cuts, nostalgia for 2016, crippling depression, GDP increases, the pandemic, soon-to-be-seen vaccines, turning the corner, his big crowds, Biden’s small crowds, Hunter Biden, the "Biden Crime Family," social media, the unveiling of “Anonymous,” Fox News, the networks, guns, the Second Amendment, unemployment, his favorite reporters, President Obama spying on his campaign, China's bribery of Biden, Russia, Adam Schiff, RINOs, Mitt Romney, Hispanics, African Americans, rioting, socialists, Biden’s declining mental state, Kamala Harris, “AOC plus three,” Antifa, law and order, the debates, cars, his own hospitalization, Barron, Melania, his doctors, European lockdowns, Walter Reed, the corrupt political establishment, endorsements from Jack Nicklaus and Lou Holtz, Biden’s "lids," the stock market, allies, the wall, Iran, Israel, the embassy, immigration, refugees, the travel ban, drug prices, opioids, Abraham Lincoln, police, no apologies, governors who shut down their states, fracking, gas prices, the oil industry, windmills, the Green New Deal, the Paris climate accords, Crooked Hillary, states cheating on vote counts, mail ballots, Biden not truly having grown up in Pennsylvania, his own experience voting, steel, the Supreme Court, NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, China, a return to normalcy, anchors who cried when he won in 2016, reporters asking Biden about ice cream, saving suburbs, the women’s vote, debate ratings, a laptop from hell, manufacturing, God, churches, truckers, circles at Biden rallies, his own taxes, Merry Christmas, a coming tax cut, feeling like Superman, hidden voters, the Space Force, Mexico, gun confiscation, ISIS, rebuilding the military, saving statues, "Pocahontas," the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders, the cost of the video he was showing at rallies, 60 Minutes, veterans, and the contention that he is the first president ever to have crowds shout, “I love you.”

                          There were flashes of message discipline, however fleeting. In Lititz, Pennsylvania, after one hour and 21 minutes on the dais, he finally distilled his campaign message to just 18 words: “We must finish the job and drain that very deep and very nasty swamp once and for all."

                          The only speech of the week that was cohesive, compact, and disciplined on the whole was the shortest—a 21-minute stop Friday night in Rochester, Minnesota. There were few real detours or diversions. He made his most biting assessment of Biden, calling him “a grimy, sleazy, and corrupt career politician.” And he offered the kind of economic message his staff craved. “We are building the biggest, strongest, and most prosperous middle class in human history,” he stated, reading from the teleprompter. “I am fighting for higher wages, more jobs, more opportunity, and we will keep it right there and we will bring it right here to the U.S.A. where it belongs.”

                          In a weeklong blizzard of almost 200,000 words, those stood out as something resembling a theme. Like snowflakes in a blizzard, though, they quickly melted. In the four Pennsylvania rallies the next day, he again pushed the teleprompter aside. In Newtown, he mocked Biden’s sunglasses and went into great detail about the merits of concrete plank or rebar in a border wall. In Reading, he mocked Biden’s drive-in rallies as “Honk, honk, honk, honk, honk” and said he could knock Biden to the ground without his fist, but with just “a slight slap."

                          The crowd loved it. Trump beamed. He was still off message, but very much in his element.
                          ____________

                          “Should we get back to the teleprompter or just keep going? Isn’t it nice to have a president that doesn’t need a teleprompter?”

                          Yeah, when you're on an (allegedly broken) teleprompter, we get pearls of wisdom about the Revolutionary War like:

                          "Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rocket’s red glare it had nothing but victory. And when dawn came, their star-spangled banner waved defiant."


                          But, you know, it's Biden that's failing mentally.
                          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                          Comment


                          • So, tomorrow is the big day?

                            Comment


                            • And Biden yelled gibberish at a Corolla, a Yaris, a Prius and a few Accords.

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by Versus View Post
                                So, tomorrow is the big day?
                                Yep. What happens is anybody's guess.

                                Although 93,000,000 people have already voted.
                                “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

                                Comment

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