IheartIheartTesla

For the Senate, I am still holding out hope that the polls are off by a bit primarily from turnout models being off. I read on 538 that there is a good chance young voters may turn out closer to 2016 rather than...2014 say. Also, as I said before, ND only has 300k people expected to vote....so a few points here and there is not a huge barrier to overcome.

I am an Indian transplant to the US, and I can say without irony I have 0% Indian (native american) ancestry in me.

Your take is where I am as well (although things can change in 2 weeks), but just a quick word about ND. When everyone talks about 'points' we should probably note that only ~ 290k people will vote in ND so a 1% swing is only 3000 people....individual voters and GOTV and small scale efforts can have an incredible effect there, TV ads maybe not as much. I've also heard the native american population is hard to poll, but also hard to get to the polls. Anyway, the point is that with small populations a lot more is possible.

I tried to do this role-playing you suggested, but got distracted by thinking about the lawsuit Trump had against him for racist landlord practices, him hating "black people counting his money" and his full page ads about the Central Park 5 (and his refusal to admit he was wrong). Let me refocus on the "skewed statistics" (aka inflation by 1) that universities got to tout because of Warren claiming NA ancestry.

She didnt gain anything. This is a nothingburger compared to the millions of dollars Trump, his dad, his sons...probably even his butler have defrauded from the IRS and the US government using their real estate shell games. And the millions of lies Trump has told. Lets keep things in perspective Its just playing on his field, which is annoying....but I believe the play for Warren is to use transparency in her life to highlight Trump's evasions when it comes to taxes etc.

Umm...the report itself places her at approximately 8 generations removed, so (1/2)^8*100 ~ 0.39% which is twice what the average white American has. I dont know conservative clown math, so I may be wrong...but they must have taken the 10 generations number and got to 0.09%, which is disingenuous argle-bargle. Anyway, I am guessing she got told she had NA ancestry through oral history, which she assumed to be true, and this is a way of confirming it.

2020 is too far away. For the 2018 map, the last week or so have been bad for the Democrats in the Senate - can be put down to Heitkamp/Beto/Bredesen losing ground to their opponents. The problem with all of these are that they are in quite red states and a little bit of it is probably Republicans coming home. Manchin, the exception, is still holding steady and I havent seen any great movement in his lead (I guess Tester is also an exception to that rule) Of course, things can change in a few weeks.

Didnt hurt that he used to babysit Matt Damon and his brother, I guess.

Yes, people make the same argument about Bill Gates too (he was real mean to his underlings, but his charity work currently helps a lot of people). For most people, empathy fatigue happens when they cant empathize with large groups of people, and invariably all calls for charity focus on one key person or event to personalize it for them. For people like Gates (and maybe LBJ, dont know as much about him), it may be the reverse, where they empathize more with the plight of the many but are terrible at individual relationships. However, seeing the latter was willing to escalate the war in Vietnam, I'm not sure how much that theory holds.

Heitkamp needs support for reelection too, and her vote was a no. AND she is underwater in the polls right now while Manchin is up by a fair bit. So actually he has a bit more wiggle room to vote no.....and he may not.

Manchin is 'undecided' because he doesnt want to be the deciding vote, and he would vote yes if he knew the votes were there. So I am guessing no one knows as of now whether the votes are there for confirmation. Its like those game theory/riddle questions where you have to figure out where each person is leaning based on incomplete information from other sources.

"If you're happy and you know it jazz your hands" "So no one told you life was gonna be this way...jazz hands" and so on.....

That pick-up truck story is somewhat scary because...well, I live in Michigan. I have yard signs and bumper stickers and whatnot supporting Democrats....havent seen any pushback from that yet, but still, I cant deny some of the folks around these parts are loony tunes. The article was a bit short on facts, so presumably in the next few days we will learn for sure if it was home-grown terrorism.

Imma take a break from the Kavanaugh coverage and note something about the Senate race in Tennessee. According to 538s model, the polls only have Bredesen up by a little, but the 'fundamentals' (such as they are) favor Blackburn. With this in mind, according to them Blackburn is at 60% chance to win in TN. So this is one of those places where the claim is that the partisan lean of TN (~23 points) will overwhelm the lead in the generic ballot, so that the polls may be off by ~ 3 points. Seems to be one of those few cases where there is an explicit case that the polls are off. Guess we'll have to wait and see....

There is no way an FBI investigation will be concluded in one week. Things dont happen that quickly, particularly in what can be considered a 'cold' case. Don't know what kabuki theater this is, but it is more cover for Flake rather than anyone else (he may truly be undecided and needs a week to process)