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Re: US Politics Thread
This is fascinating. Here's why Donald Trump continues to lead that L.A. Times poll.
How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages
There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.
He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.
And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.
How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.
Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.
Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump’s margin by 1 point in the survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists.
He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the U.S.C./LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4. Mrs. Clinton surged once he was out of the sample for the first time in several weeks.
How has he made such a difference? And why has the poll been such an outlier? It’s because the U.S.C./LAT poll made a number of unusual decisions in designing and weighting its survey.
It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey.
Not all of the poll’s choices were bound to help Mr. Trump. But some were, and it all combined with some very bad luck to produce one of the most persistent outliers in recent elections.
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
Re: US Politics Thread
According to this, Obama actually never had a supermajority for more than a few weeks, at most. I don't have time to go back and verify the claims, but I remember some of these events.
Even if you want to argue they lacked a super majority, they had a clear majority (your article even argues that at no point did he drop below 58 Senators) for the first 2 years. Furthermore, arguing about being filibustered is pointless, as they used reconciliation to pass Obamacare, and had no problem removing the filibuster in 2012 when it suited their purpose (something the GOP has refused to do).
The reality is that Obama and congressional Democrats had no interest working with the GOP. Obama couldn't even rally all of the Democrats to support his original plan for health care reform. I'm not excusing the behavior of the GOP, specifically their current refusal to bring a vote on Obama's SCOTUS nominee. But the notion that Obama was somehow hindered during the first 2 years from passing whatever laws he wanted is demonstrably false. This of course completely ignores that according to insider accounts, Obama and his staff were completely unprepared to run Washington at least for the first 12 months - the same issue that would affect Trump since no one in is inner circle has a clue.
Re: US Politics Thread
misterID wrote:I'm kind of interested in the mutiny against Paul Ryan, which looked to be happening even without Trump, the Breitbart crowd who are now running his campaign have been on a quest to oust him since he became speaker. I heard on Bloomberg with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann to not be surprised to see a very productive relationship between Ryan and Hillary, which kind of surprised me as I thought he'd want to sandbag her Obama style for a 2020 run, but he might want to do some damage control and look good to the center. This is getting really interesting.
As soon as you realize Obama was never sand bagged and refused to negotiate with congressional republicans, the sooner you'll realize why half the country considered Trump.
He's a president, not a dictator. The Democrats had a super majority for 2 years and Obama's only legacy is his Affordable Care Act, which is going to be nonexistent after Clinton or Trump assume the Presidency.
I know the constitution isn't required reading anymore, but it clearly outlines how the branches of government work. Nowhere does it say "Congress will create and approve legislation at the request of the President." It's this same head in the sand hand waiving that allows a lot of people to think Hillary is actually a good person and candidate.
You need to pull your head out of the right wing rabbit hole, McConnell said from the outset they weren't going to work with him and their main focus was to make him a one term president. Your party went the crazy tea party direction and refused to do any deal. Your BS revisionism isn't going to work here, bro. Yes, he blew his capital on Obamacare too early, but that does not change the fact they sandbagged him. They had a very flimsy supermajority for a whole six moths. Here's a refresher:
Supermajority myth:
""Many critics of the Obama administration often claim that the President has failed to accomplish anything even when he had a super filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Most mistakenly think that he had a sixty vote Senate for the first two years of his first term and that he squandered that opportunity. These critics are often opponents who continually remind us all, through any hot microphone available, that the President did not live up to his campaign promises as though he were supposed to keep them all at once... Having a filibuster proof Senate majority was only possible under a specific set of circumstances. They began in April of 2009 when Senator Arlen Specter decided to switch from a Republican to a Democrat.
The 60th Senator, Al Franken of Minnesota, was locked up for months in recounts and legal challenges from a very close race with incumbent Norm Coleman. Finally, on July 8, 2009 after eight months of delays, Franken was sworn in as the 60th Democratic Senator (this includes the two independents who caucused with the Democrats). This was the first time Democrats had a filibuster proof majority since 1958.
But six weeks later on August 25, 2009, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy passed away. Technically, it could be argued that the Democrats still had a filibuster proof majority since cloture involves 3/5 of sitting Senators (59 out of 99 is roughly 3/5). But the Senate was in summer recess at the time so it may not have mattered.
One month later on September 25, 2009 Paul Kirk was appointed to fill Kennedy’s vacancy while the special election was going on. Even then this was only because Kennedy himself had requested that the Governor of Massachusetts change the law a week before he died to allow an appointment so the seat wouldn’t be vacant for the remainder of the year. Had he not done so it could’ve been argued that the 60 seat Democratic supermajority would have lasted about six weeks.
In November of 2009 Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, in a poorly run campaign, lost Ted Kennedy’s seat to Republican Scott Brown effectively ensuring the end of the filibuster proof Senate.
On Christmas Eve of 2009, the Senate voted to move forward with the Health Care Reform bill by 60 to 39 votes. As Vice-President Biden noted, it was a big deal.
On February 4, 2010 Scott Brown was sworn in signaling the end of the super-majority.
Depending upon which metric is used, Democrats had a super majority for roughly six months which includes the seven weeks between Franken’s swearing-in on July 8 to Ted Kennedy’s death on August 25 and the four months and nine days between Paul Kirk’s swearing-in on September 25, 2009 to his replacement by Scott Brown on February 4, 2010. This was just barely enough time to pass the biggest and most difficult health care legislation in generations; an event that would likely never have happened under any other circumstances. This also happened under the onslaught of every procedural obstruction the Republicans could put in its path.
President Obama, against advice from many of his advisors, gambled his political capital on this bill and won. And it was a significant battle in what is sure to be a series of battles to come in order to keep the foothold on this particular beachhead. He put the brief super majority to good use and any argument that he squandered it will need to stand next to the impressive accomplishment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010."
Republican sandbagging strategy, Politico 2010 (Republicans just took both houses):
Right now, the tone is a lot different — with Republicans pledging to embrace an agenda for the next two years that sounds a lot like their agenda for the past two: Block Obama at all costs.
And even Obama’s pre-election appeals to cooperation are wrapped in an I’m-still-the-president tone that suggests that Americans will be looking at two opposing camps glaring at each other across the barricades — gridlock all around.
Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Obama frequently reminds voters he believes all the delay in Washington this year is the Republicans’ fault.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/t … z4MtasGJtK
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
EPI 2013:
""regardless of whether they deeply believe that their ideological goal of reducing government spending will help the economy or whether they think that a slowed economy will simply help their own electoral prospects—the facts are simply that congressional Republicans have consistently hamstrung efforts that a large consensus of economists agree would have provided crucial help in lowering American unemployment. Specifically, they have objectively weakened the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), repeatedly filibustered routine extensions of emergency unemployment benefits, blocked aid to state governments, filibustered infrastructure investment, used extreme legislative vehicles like refusing to follow precedent on the typically pro forma votes to raise the debt ceiling to extract more economically damaging government spending cuts, blocked passage of a majority of the American Jobs Act (AJA), demanded counterproductive offsets to fiscal stimulus, and attacked the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the monetary base and other policy responses intended to lower unemployment""
Courtesy of the hill:
"Trust in Boehner eroded after rank-and-file members first learned of the secret talks with Obama, and Cantor was making it clear to those lawmakers that he wasn’t included in the discussions, either.
Just as Boehner and his team began selling the emerging deal, the Gang of Six went rogue. In the dark about the Obama-Boehner talks, the group stepped over their Senate leadership by releasing a plan for cutting spending.
The release of that proposal changed the strategy for Obama.
“I can’t be to the right of Lamar Alexander,” Obama said, referring to the Tennessee Senate Republican who had backed the Gang of Six accord, according to an aide.
The same week, Obama and Biden invited the leader of the Gang of Six, then-Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), to the White House and asked how he had struck the deal.
Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, remembers a conversation with Obama that resembled a lecture on the importance of relationships. The North Dakota senator, who was an early endorser of Obama’s 2008 bid, told him: “Persistence, persistence, persistence.”
By now, cable news networks were running “countdown to default” clocks, while Wall Street banks scrambled to create contingency plans.
Obama brought the top Democratic leaders, Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.), into the Oval Office and asked for support to strike a deal on cutting the deficit by $1.2 trillion. They both quickly agreed, surprising even some in the room by not demanding that the president raise the stakes.
On July 20, Obama came out with a new deficit-reduction figure that was about $400 billion more than he had previously agreed to, though it was far less than the Gang of Six figure.
In staff-level talks before the number went public, a senior administration official said Boehner’s staff appeared willing to consider the offer.
But then for more than a day, Boehner did not return the president’s calls. When he did call back, he said the deal was off.
“When we made our offer, we felt like it was perfectly well-received. Not agreed to, but well-received. The only sign we got to the contrary was the radio silence,” one senior administration official said. “Ultimately the radio silence was broken by Boehner withdrawing from the negotiations.”
In an interview in her Capitol Hill office with The Hill, Pelosi said Boehner probably never intended to make a deal but was looking for a way to blame the president for the collapse of the talks. She said Boehner used the same tactic when he sought a deal to avoid a government shutdown in 2013, but he couldn’t deliver the votes in the House.
“Boehner walked away and said the president had walked away,” Pelosi said. “He couldn’t deliver his side of the deal. If you go to the table and think, ‘I’ll fake you out, I’ll put all this stuff there and you’re not going to accept it,’ then you’re the one who walked away.”
"
Re: US Politics Thread
Poll shows tie in Utah.
Partly, it seems, because of the all-out Utah party revolt against Trump after "the tape" and also because of the rise of independent and BYU graduate Evan McMullin.
This continues to be a fascinating election.
https://www.deseretnews.com/media/photo … 752338.jpg
Is Clinton likely to win Utah. Probably not, but it will be interesting to watch nonetheless. McMullin is statistically within the margin of error of both Trump and Clinton.
That reminds me of reading this a few months back about what it would look like if Clinton won by a landslide.
Utah (+14.2): People are fascinated by Clinton’s prospects of winning in Utah, which went for Romney by 48 points in 2012. But it’s hard to say just how realistic those are. The polls-only model has Clinton just a couple of percentage points behind in the polling average in Utah, but its demographic model projects her to lose it by 16 points — a lot better than 2012, but not particularly close. As with Mississippi, therefore, the odds you assign to Clinton in Utah are highly sensitive to your choice of assumptions. She’s taking her chances seriously enough to make some efforts to campaign there, but is it a wild goose chase — like when Dick Cheney visited Hawaii in 2004 — or part of long-term plan to swing Mormons into the Democratic Party?
Re: US Politics Thread
Election Update: Women Are Defeating Donald Trump
But it seems fair to say that, if Trump loses the election, it will be because women voted against him. I took a look at how men and women split their votes four years ago, according to polls conducted in November 2012. On average, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 7 percentage points among men, about the same as Trump’s 5-point lead among men now. But Romney held his own among women, losing them by 8 points, whereas they’re going against Trump by 15 points.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ele … ald-trump/
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
- Smoking Guns
- Rep: 330
Re: US Politics Thread
Is that an argument to repeal the 19th Amendment?
Haha. Thought the same thing.
Take out women and Trump wins in a landslide. It is crazy. Saw the stats in think on Chris Hayes last night.
