US Elections - furniture shopping with disaster

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 

[Fez]

3 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-fight-partys-future-gop-voters-turn-paul-ryan

Paul Ryan: This month's winner of the "Not Conservative Enough" Award.

One of the national polls asked about Ryan this week, I think it was Bloomberg, and Ryan now is now more unpopular among Republicans than among Democrats. It was 64% of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of Ryan, compared to 61% of Democrats (the other 39% of Democrats don't approve of Ryan; most of them just had no opinion)

[OldGimletEye]

6 minutes ago, Fez said:

One of the national polls asked about Ryan this week, I think it was Bloomberg, and Ryan now is now more unpopular among Republicans than among Democrats. It was 64% of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of Ryan, compared to 61% of Democrats (the other 39% of Democrats don't approve of Ryan; most of them just had no opinion)

With regard to the 39% I think it's because Paul Ryan often gets portrayed as serious policy wonk.

But, really, he isn't that. The root source of all his ideas is Ayn Rand. He is a clown.

[mormont]

3 hours ago, Maya Mia said:

My point is the perception of Trump supporters are uneducated does not bear out in my life at all.

Many Trump supporters (white male ones, anyway) are educated, so you're quite correct about that. He has a lead in the white male college-educated group of a few percentage points.

But the biggest group of Trump supporters and the group where he has the biggest lead is white males without a college degree, where he is leading by a distance (though not as much as Romney, as had been noted). Again: that's not saying that there aren't educated Trump voters. It's just that there aren't quite as many as those without a college degree - who, as Ormond points out, may not always be what we might think of when we hear the word 'uneducated'.

I find it quite believable that your experience is of meeting lots of educated white male Trump voters. They're certainly out there.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

33 minutes ago, BloodRider said:

OMG.  I was hoping to acquit myself of this mess today, but I went to the courthouse and the line was around the building three times and out the door.  More local polls open up next week, so I'll go then.  It was crazy man.  It looked exactly like it did for early voting back in 2008.  I think (from my anecdota) that NC is going for HRC.

Just heard on the news that Google reported a massive spike in searches for phrases including "early voting" right after the debate. 

[Swordfish]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Just heard on the news that Google reported a massive spike in searches for phrases including "early voting" right after the debate. 

And 'bigly'.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Swordfish said:

And 'bigly'.

That was the word I pulled out of the hat last night for my group's drinking game. Thankfully he only said it twice.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Vox and Nate Silver seem to agree with Kalbear regarding Hillary's debate performances. Looks like she's received significant poll jumps after each debate...

 http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/19/13340828/hillary-clinton-debate-trump-won?ICID=ref_fark

[Maester Drew]

I think many of you will enjoy this video from Vox.

Ezra Klein basically goes over how exactly Hillary decimated Trump in each debate. It was incredibly fascinating.

 

EDIT: @Manhole Eunuchsbane already posted the video/article.

[Kalbear]

So people asked me before about why I was saying more voter turnout might mean a Trump win. This'll be long.

The voter turnout in 2012 was 126 million people. While there were more registered than that (about 140m) it was well short of the 200 million mentioned registered voters in this election. If 90% of that voted, we would still have by far the largest turnout in US history, and it wouldn't be remotely close to anything that the US has had either as a percentage (it would be close to 70% - the next highest was 62% with Obama) and as a total amount of voting.

Now, here's where it gets wonky. The way polling works is that they have a sample of voters and break them up into demographic groups, and then weigh them based on those demographics. So, for instance, if you have 10 white male college educated voters, their selections are tallied and then weighed on some value. That value is essentially arbitrary and differs from poll to poll, but is usually correlated with the amount of voters in that group that have voted in the past. So, for instance, if you have 10 white male college educated voters you'd weigh their choices based on how many turned out in the past - which, as you can see from the 538 block, is about 78%.

This is also why one AA man in Illinois who is voting for Trump skews the LATimes/USC poll a bit.

The thing is, however, that all polls are based on this representative weighing, period. And that weight is based on previous elections and turnouts. If you change that significantly - by, say, 30% or more, which would be the biggest change in history - you can have a lot of different results. 

So going back to that tool 538 published, there are some interesting and scary things there. Namely, one of the groups that turns out the least is white men (61%) and specifically non-college educated white people (55%). If you move up the non-college educated white men to 100%, you get a very, very narrow Clinton win. (272 EV). If you move up all white men, you get a slightly better win for Clinton (285). I don't know what happens if you move up white non-college men, but you get the point here - which is that when you add 30% more, there is absolutely no guarantee that those 30% more are going to be in the same proportions as they were before.

And furthermore, the non-registered voters will come more from groups of white men, hispanics, and Asian-Americans than they will African Americans and White women - simply because AA and women tend to have the highest voter turnout. And while Hispanic voting matters it isn't in the right 'places' to affect electoral college voting to any major degree save in Florida. 

So yeah, that's why I think that the polling might not represent what happens. There are a lot of good signs - particularly that in battleground  states the new voting registrations appear to favor Democrats - but it makes the polls potentially based on a lot of assumptions that really aren't fair.

[Kalbear]

4 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Vox and Nate Silver seem to agree with Kalbear regarding Hillary's debate performances. Looks like she's received significant poll jumps after each debate...

 http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/19/13340828/hillary-clinton-debate-trump-won?ICID=ref_fark

Probably more accurate to say that I agree with them, since that's one of the places I got my information. That, and apparenly 70%+ of Republicans don't fucking care about pussy grabbing. 

[Maester Drew]

 

6 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Vox and Nate Silver seem to agree with Kalbear regarding Hillary's debate performances. Looks like she's received significant poll jumps after each debate...

 http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/19/13340828/hillary-clinton-debate-trump-won?ICID=ref_fark

Darn, didn't see you already posted it. I'll edit my post to reflect it.

[Jace, Extat]

11 minutes ago, Maester Drew said:

I think many of you will enjoy this video from Vox.

Ezra Klein basically goes over how exactly Hillary decimated Trump in each debate. It was incredibly fascinating.

Ooh! Neat. Got any more stuff like that?

8 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Probably more accurate to say that I agree with them, since that's one of the places I got my information. That, and apparenly 70%+ of Republicans don't fucking care about pussy grabbing. 

Dude, to then that's a feature not a bug.

[IheartIheartTesla]

As I mentioned before, there is no way we have reached 200 million registered voters. For starters, the number of eligible voters in 2012 was 218 million. A good rule of thumb is that the US population grows about ~10 m a decade, so the number of eligible voters wont be much higher in 2016 compared to 2012. Getting 90% of the entire eligible voting population registered? Not happening or has not happened yet.

Think of the logistics involved in getting 55 million new people entered in. Not to mention that human nature being what it is, I'd say a change from 67% participation to 75% participation would be a big deal and require something transformational (like say a  2008 election). A 67% to 90% jump is unthinkable.

 

[OldGimletEye]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/20/the-chris-wallace-debate-question-that-set-off-a-firestorm/

Quote

“Secretary Clinton, I want to pursue your plan, because in many ways it is similar to the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, which has led to the slowest GDP growth since 1949,” Wallace said.

Chris Wallace Repeats A Republican Meme (maybe inadvertently), which is nonsense, and gives us one more indication why the Republican Party Has Become An Intellectual Trash Pile.

I recall a few years back when some knuckle head on the Cato Institutes's blog posted the results of an Ordinary Least Squares Regression (basically regressing growth on spending), which allegedly showed that the stimulus had lowered economic growth.

The problem with that knuckle head’s regression procedure is that fiscal spending or stimulus is often endogenous to the business cycle. This is a well known problem in estimating fiscal multipliers. Evidently, the quality control department was off, the day that nonsense post got posted.

Or maybe it’s just part of the continuing intellectual slide of conservatism right down into the crapper.

Anyway, various “identification” procedures are used to estimate the fiscal multiplier in econometric work in order to deal with the endogeneity issue. Basically if the identification procedures were not used, then the estimates of the fiscal multiplier would be biased downward.

In simple terms, you have to establish the chain of causality. Evidently, this confuses many conservatives and Chris Wallace.

It’s true that some studies have found the mulitiplier less than 1. But, the bulk of them have found multipliers over 1. And there are good theoretical reasons to think they are over 1 in the conditions we were facing and are likely facing.

And besides the endogeneity issue, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that recessions followed by financial crises are particularly prolonged and severe. This is a point that conservatives refuse to seemingly acknowledge.

And then there is the fact in the long run, the person’s whose plan is likely to cause large deficits that will crowd out private investment, making multipliers less than 1, when labor markets tighten, ain’t Hillary Clinton's. It’s Donald Trump's.

[Maithanet]

7 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

As I mentioned before, there is no way we have reached 200 million registered voters. For starters, the number of eligible voters in 2012 was 218 million. A good rule of thumb is that the US population grows about ~10 m a decade, so the number of eligible voters wont be much higher in 2016 compared to 2012. Getting 90% of the entire eligible voting population registered? Not happening or has not happened yet.

Think of the logistics involved in getting 55 million new people entered in. Not to mention that human nature being what it is, I'd say a change from 67% participation to 75% participation would be a big deal and require something transformational (like say a  2008 election). A 67% to 90% jump is unthinkable.

Agreed.  And anecdotally, I've spoken with several people who I knew aren't registered about getting registered and voting.  They all had various excuses, but in general it was pretty obvious that none of them were actually going to do it.  There are a lot of people that just don't care about voting. 

Obviously my sample of 4 unregistered voters I've spoken to in the past couple of months isn't very convincing.  I'm mostly just talking about how once you get in the habit of not voting, there's a certain inertia that is hard to overcome.  Plus I think some people like never having to do jury duty. 

[S John]

44 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Just heard on the news that Google reported a massive spike in searches for phrases including "early voting" right after the debate. 

Ha, I can believe it.  I'll have to double check but I think I can vote on Monday and I definitely plan to.  Gonna cast my vote and wash my hands of this.  Maybe just Netflix binge 'til the 8th, but I'm just about done with this election.  

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

36 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Probably more accurate to say that I agree with them, since that's one of the places I got my information. That, and apparenly 70%+ of Republicans don't fucking care about pussy grabbing. 

Good article. I have to admit I'm probably not giving her as much credit as she deserves. The point they made regarding the Alicia Machado set-up was especially adept. That said, it works as well as it does because of who Trump is. 

[Swordfish]

44 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

That was the word I pulled out of the hat last night for my group's drinking game. Thankfully he only said it twice.

I was surprised to find out it was a real word, but not surprised to find out he was using it wrong.

[Kalbear]

13 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

As I mentioned before, there is no way we have reached 200 million registered voters. For starters, the number of eligible voters in 2012 was 218 million. A good rule of thumb is that the US population grows about ~10 m a decade, so the number of eligible voters wont be much higher in 2016 compared to 2012. Getting 90% of the entire eligible voting population registered? Not happening or has not happened yet.

Think of the logistics involved in getting 55 million new people entered in. Not to mention that human nature being what it is, I'd say a change from 67% participation to 75% participation would be a big deal and require something transformational (like say a  2008 election). A 67% to 90% jump is unthinkable.

 

Well, it's closer to a jump of 67% to 80% - the eligible voter base is around 240 million right now. 

Apparently a very big part of that registration is heavy efforts to register voters, especially hispanic voters - and especially especially hispanic young voters. 27.9 million Hispanic Americans are now eligible to vote, which is 10 million more than it was in 2008. That alone is a pretty big jump.

I agree that it does seem like a really huge thing - but the ability to register in 2016 is significantly improved compared to 2008, as well as the ability to check your registration status. I'm also wary of dismissing actual data because it seems like it wouldn't be right. Both parties appear to be taking it seriously, and all indications - early voting, early polling, level of engagement in debates - seem to indicate that the number of registered voters is a lot higher.