Fez

You don't think the lack of Biden on the ballot will dampen Democratic turnout in the state? Sherrod Brown has a slim chance of winning as is; he definitely won't if even a slim % of Biden voters stay home because they don't know they can write him in.

I have 20/20 vision in my left eye but pretty poor vision (i forget the exact number) in my right eye. So in my glasses, the left lens is just plain glass (or plastic, or whatever glasses are made of these days) and the right lens has the prescription lens. Meaning theoretically I could get a prescription monocle. I actually briefly looked into it. Mostly as a joke, but maybe something I'd wear from time to time. At the time, I found a couple companies in the UK that made them. But the price didn't seem worth it when most days I would definitely end up wearing glasses instead.

It'll be a disaster for Sherrod Brown if this ends up happening. And a serious fuck-up by Democrats when scheduling the convention to not recognize that Republicans would pull this kind of thing. In past elections, when this issue came up it would've stopped both parties' nominee from being on the ballot so Republicans had to fix it. But this time, the RNC is early enough that Trump's in the clear. I suspect that Democrats will end up doing the official paperwork of nominating Biden a few weeks before the convention to side-step the issue. I hope they do anyway. They'd be very dumb to put all their faith in a lawsuit since there was nothing secret or hidden about Ohio's deadline. They chose to ignore it assuming that the state legislature would step in.

I know LV screens (the good ones historically anyway) are self-reported. But there's simply not that much turnover from election-to-election, so if you're finding so much turnover there's a problem somewhere. Likely in that the sample isn't actually representative. And what I saw (admittedly posted elsewhere, so maybe they were lying) was that respondents' recalled 2020 vote was: Biden: 42% Trump: 32% Did not vote: 34%

It is entirely unrealistic to think that level of ticket splitting could still happen in 2024. Especially a Trump/Senate Democrats split (which the NYT found) instead of a Third Party or Blank/Senate Democrat split. And if we're talking about the NYT poll specifically, their "likely voter model" has 20% of their voters either not voted in the last two midterms, not voted in the last general election, or never voted before. Which, by any reasonable definition, would not make them "likely" voters. Meanwhile, 34% (!) of their registered voters didn't vote in 2020; which also seems very unrealistic. To me, these numbers reinforce that NYT simply isn't getting representative samples without getting dangerously funky in their methodologies.

A couple phrases I've seen from people who saw the movie: "It's leftwing Fountainhead mixed with Metropolis" and "It's Bladerunner meets Julius Caesar" I so want this movie to be great. If it's not, it'll at least be a glorious mess. But greatness would be really cool for cinema.

There's a high risk no matter what, but I think there's less chance of real danger than 2020. The Electoral Count Reform Act closed most of the potential loopholes that Trump could try exploiting. There's no risk of the DOJ or military under Biden getting involved. And SCOTUS has made clear that they're perfectly happy to kneecap everything Biden wants to do but won't overturn actual election results. Though if Biden wins by only 1 state, no matter the margin, I do think there's a chance things go badly simply because there will be such concentrated effort to mess up the process.

Polling is broken, ignore it. Not to say its guaranteed that Biden is doing better than the polls. But the polls themselves have become worthless. The response rates have become too low, so the samples truly aren't random anymore. Which means that the pollsters have developed ever more complex weighting and modeling systems to try to fix their non-random samples. And these systems have become so key to the final results that they either completely control whatever the poll result might be (I saw it pointed out that one pollster, I think it was Morning Consult, that has had every single of their national poll this year being within a 1 point range) OR they get completely thrown off by an anomalous result (a single black woman saying she'd vote for Trump will move the entire final result multiple points). Either way, the polls are no longer representative of the country. And they don't reflect any of the actions that any politician or political operative is making. For instance, the NYT found Trump +6 in Arizona (and +9 with third party candidates). But the recent news is that the McConnell's PAC is writing off Kari Lake in the Arizona Senate Race as a lost cause already. If Trump was really up 6 or more in Arizona, there's no way Lake would be dead in the water already. Likewise, if Trump was headed towards a blowout win, which is what the NYT is suggesting, why would all his surrogates the past couple weeks starting parroting the line about potentially not accepting the election results? That's what you do when you're worried you might lose, not when the election is looking like a victory lap. Again, this is not to say Biden is safe, he's certainly not. But the polls are not a helpful tool anymore.

Yep. I don't think Biden is making foreign policy decisions based on optics, or even based on polling. If he was, he never would've undertaken the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021; which is the original issue that sank his approval ratings. Messaging actions, like the various executive orders trying to forgive student loans, are based on polling I'm pretty sure. But that's it.

I think Biden is straight up a good president. Whether that's from his own personal merits or because he simply has good advisors around him, I can't say. But that doesn't matter; most of the job is being good at delegating anyway. Biden's been dealt a tough set of cards: the aftermath of COVID, rampant inflation, a truly insane opposition party, etc. And in spite of that he has been the consequential liberal President since LBJ (and like LBJ he has a foreign policy problem threatening to overshadow his massive domestic achievements; though at least tens of thousands of Americans aren't dying in it). IMO he's in the upper third of US presidents already (though that's not too hard, there's been a lot of terrible and/or forgettable ones), and if he wins re-election he probably ends up in the top 10.

I would also like to call attention to this story from last week: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-24/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-minister-says-he-would-vote-for-trump-biden-strategy-hurts-israel/0000018f-104e-d70d-a58f-d9ffb9d20000 It's paywalled. But basically, one of Israel's cabinet ministers said that, if he were able, he'd vote for Trump this November because Biden is stopping Israel from freely operating in Rafah and Trump wouldn't. So any successful "sending a message" effort will really just make things worse.

It probably does hurt Biden some. But it would likely hurt him worse to come out against the crackdowns. Lots of pro-Israel suburbanites out there, and they vote at much higher rates than young people. Though on the other hand, they vote Democratic at lower rates. Electorally, Biden doesn't have any great options here. This is a wedge issue for Democrats.

But the President can pardon whoever carried out the order, so it's all gravy. The logical conclusion of this argument, which hopefully SCOTUS realizes, is that it would allow Biden to become a literal dictator if he wanted; since he's the one who currently has the official duties of the president.

No, it basically is. Israel is far more integrated into the global economy than South Africa was, and the global economy is far more inter-connected than it had been. Every major company either invests in Israel, sells products to them, accepts investments from Israel, and/or directly employs Israelis (The US chamber of commerce estimates that 2,500 US companies have Israeli employees). It'd be an enormous effort, potentially impossible, to create fund that definitely excluded all those companies. And, if the fund did exist, it'd certainly entirely be composed of small-cap companies. Small-cap index funds significantly underperform the broader market and this one would do even worse since it'd be leaving out the companies that have become successful enough to participate in multinational operations. And were the endowment to purposefully reduce its market returns to that extent, it'd violate the terms that most endowment gifts have; in other words, donors could break their endowment agreements and clawback their gifts if they wanted. So, no, this is not a step any university would ever take. Maybe they could be convinced to stop investment in weapons manufacturers (and maybe even in funds that include them), maybe. But that'd be a major scaleback from the student demands.

Sure. Except that falls into the "impossible" category. The student demand goes beyond stopping direct investment in Israel/Israeli companies (which the University doesn't do anyway— except building a student center in Tel Aviv that the protesters also want cancelled) and is instead that Columbia University not invest in any company that does any business with Israel or even any index fund that includes those companies. Which means they don't want the endowment fund to be invested in the stock market at all; something the university will never do.