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US Politics: Fate of congress hangs in the Ballots


A Horse Named Stranger

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It's so typical for the so-called liberal media to feature deSatan (&Trump) almost around the clock, but not, say, Whitmer, or Summer Lee, who faced an insane amount of money (A-PAC) and still won, or AOC winning by more than 40 points. 

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1 minute ago, Mindwalker said:

It's so typical for the so-called liberal media to feature deSatan (&Trump) almost around the clock, but not, say, Whitmer, or Summer Lee, who faced an insane amount of money (A-PAC) and still won, or AOC winning by more than 40 points. 

Come on deep state do your damn jobs and give air time to the communist satanists!

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1 minute ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Come on deep state do your damn jobs and give air time to the communist satanists!

Damn straight!  Commie satanists are more interesting than wannabe dictators like Putin.  Commie satanists for the win.    :devil:  

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19 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Can the Democrats redistrict in NY state before 2024? 

Well, they are getting a second try on the Assembly maps.  But as far as the US congressional map, it sounds like this is it for the decade:

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"That was a dirty deal by Andrew Cuomo and the Senate Republicans back in 2012," said State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, in a July podcast interview with Gotham Gazette. "We should absolutely revisit it. We have now some time to do that. The next redistricting is, of course, a decade away. So we have the opportunity now to do it right and put something on the ballot that New Yorkers deserve."

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42 minutes ago, DMC said:

I wouldn't call those 4 California seats tossups.  The Republicans currently have strong leads in three of them and all four are sorted as likely/lean Republican by ABC.

I don't think there's much doubt that the Republicans will take the House with a small majority.  Nate Silver rates it about a 90% probability now.  The NYT and ABC numbers are all pointing in that direction.

And, unfortunately, the NYT projects a Boebert win by 0.7%.

 

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Sorry if I missed this, but Cortez Masto slightly taking the lead in Washoe is a very good sign.  If she's not losing ground there then it's very likely the remaining ballots in Clark will put her over the top.

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The Republican party has become the Heaven's Gate cult. As long as you are in it you should not complain that bad decisions are being made. 

Opinion | Trump Is a Bust for Republicans
The party’s midterm disappointment is a spectacular reminder that Trump is a drag on the GOP.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/11/10/trump-bust-republicans-00066208

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It’s passing strange to become similarly devoted to a political figure who barely won a fluky presidential election, then lost a winnable reelection bid, before dragging the country through a bonkers attempt to overturn the result, with the episode ending in futility and bloodshed.

The natural response of a party to all this shouldn’t be, “Please, let’s try that again, and in the meantime, allow the former president to be the most important arbiter of our political fate.”

 

 

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6 minutes ago, DMC said:

Sorry if I missed this, but Cortez Masto slightly taking the lead in Washoe is a very good sign.  If she's not losing ground there then it's very likely the remaining ballots in Clark will put her over the top.

Ralston also noted that Douglas County (deep red) had lots of mail coming in, so it would add couple thousand to GoP numbers, but he didnt seem to indicate it would change the overall trajectory.

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11 minutes ago, DMC said:

Sorry if I missed this, but Cortez Masto slightly taking the lead in Washoe is a very good sign.  If she's not losing ground there then it's very likely the remaining ballots in Clark will put her over the top.

Good news for the Senate, but I assume the Governorship in Nevada is (still) gone (from a D perspective).

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1 minute ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Good news for the Senate, but I assume the Governorship in Nevada is (still) gone (from a D perspective).

Probably but Aguilar is very likely to win the SoS race - which is more important from an elections standpoint as Lombardo is only denial-curious.

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2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I know that. And along with mail in ballots they're necessary. But maybe an extra day of physical voting will reduce Republican grumblings.

"Early voting" IS "physical voting." It's not just by mail except in those states where ALL voting is now by mail. In Nebraska you go to your county elections office and vote in exactly the same physical way you do in your polling place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. 

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Political media is broken. So is polling.  They are connected.  Hip-to-hip.

https://popular.info/p/political-media-is-broken?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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... But even if media predictions were correct, they represent a style of political reporting that is dysfunctional. Campaign coverage is increasingly focused on anticipating who will win through polling analysis. But politics is unpredictable, and polls are not nearly precise enough to predict the outcome of a close contest. 

Polls have a number of limiting factors. Pollsters can't know for certain if the people who answer the poll are representative of the population that will actually vote. Most pollsters end up making adjustments to match the expected composition of the electorate. But that is just a guess, using assumptions from turnout in previous elections. The process of finding a representative sample has gotten even harder as more people rely exclusively on cell phones and screen unknown numbers. 

In 2016, the same publications that predicted a Republican "red wave" on Tuesday predicted that Hillary Clinton would easily win the presidency. More and more political coverage treats elections like a horse race, even though this approach has repeatedly proven useless.

Prediction-based coverage comes at a high cost because it crowds out the coverage that voters actually need. To make an informed decision, voters need to know the practical impact of voting for each candidate.

In the case of the 2022 midterms, if Republicans regain control of the House, they will use the threat of a global economic collapse to try to force benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare. We don't have to speculate about this. We know it is true because Republican leaders have said it publicly. But, as Popular Information previously reported, major publications almost completely ignored the potential impact of the election on Social Security and Medicare. 

The political media has substituted polling analysis, which is something only people managing campaigns really need, for substantive analysis of the positions of the candidates, something that voters need. 

Why polling is getting worse

After each campaign cycle, certain pollsters are congratulated for their accuracy, and others are derided for getting it wrong. In 2016 and 2020, Trump overperformed compared to his standing in most polls. So the most "accurate" polls in recent cycles were conducted by partisan Republican pollsters, like Trafalgar Group.

This run of "success" raised the profile of right-wing pollsters and caused the media to become less skeptical. The New York Times noted that while traditional media organizations cut back on the number of polls they commissioned, "there has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters." These Republican pollsters do not "adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection." 

Trafalgar, after conducting only a handful of polls in the 2018 midterm, produced 48 polls of Congressional races in 2022, the most of any pollster. And aggregation sites like FiveThirtyEight rate Trafalgar highly, giving it even more influence. 

But is Trafalgar, which only started in 2016, really accurate? A November 1 poll by Trafalgar in New Hampshire found Republican Don Bolduc leading Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan by 1.3  points. Hassan won by nearly 10 points. A November 7 poll by Trafalger in Michigan  found Republican Tudor Dixon leading Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer by 0.3 points. Whitmer won by almost 9 points.  A November 3 poll by Trafalgar in Pennsylvania found Republican Mehmet Oz leading Democrat John Fetterman by 2 points. Fetterman won by more than 3 points.


These results suggest that Trafalgar isn't actually a better pollster than its competitors. In 2022, another pollster will be the "most accurate." If you have a lot of pollsters producing a variety of results, someone will be the closest. 

 

 

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17 minutes ago, Ormond said:

"Early voting" IS "physical voting." It's not just by mail except in those states where ALL voting is now by mail. In Nebraska you go to your county elections office and vote in exactly the same physical way you do in your polling place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. 

Although it's not always as easy. I voted on election day because my polling place is about a 10 minute walk from my apartment, whereas the closest early voting location in my county was about 4 miles away. And I don't own a car. I could of course have gotten a mail ballot if I wouldn't be able to vote on election day. But if the goal is to have early voting be as exactly accessible as election day voting, it's not. At least not in Virginia.

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3 hours ago, DMC said:

Being able to mail in your ballot up to Election Day - which notably Florida does not have - is not the primary problem.  As we were discussing just yesterday, these aren't the overwhelming portion of uncounted ballots in Clark and Washoe that we're still waiting on - it's primarily the drop boxes.  Same goes for the 619 thousand uncounted ballots in Arizona.  Indeed, election officials point to the drop boxes being open on election day as the main reason for the delays. 

But drop boxes for mail-in ballots are available until polls close on election day in Florida too.  Hell, in 2020 more than 82 percent of the Florida votes were by mail, but they still managed to count and report most of the results before midnight.  Now, maybe this is because more Arizonans than Floridians wait til the last minute to drop off their ballot, or a staffing thing, or because of the different process - I'm pretty sure in Arizona they take all the mail ballots to a centralized location, maybe that slows them down.  But what's annoying is there's no impetus to fix it - again, like Florida blowing a presidential election - even though it's clear if they wanted to they could figure out ways to dramatically speed up the counting.

Yes, you are correct on both counts.

The drop-box ballots in Maricopa County (the majority of Arizona voters) go to central processing unit(s) at the end of Election Day.  There is a certain amount of procedure around lock-in, lock-out to show the chain of custody for the drop boxes as they are transmitted from the local judges of elections to the Maricopa County Commissioners central office personnel.

Then the drop-box ballots have to be separated into two lots.  The first lot includes the ballots with signatures verified at the polling location, and the second lot includes the mail-in ballots, signed on the outside of the envelope, that were placed in drop-boxes.  This sorting process is manual.

The drop-box ballots whose signatures were verified at the polling station get a check for imperfections (torn, mutilated, stuff like that) and go into the automated counting process.  The mail-in signatures on their envelopes are verified with another manual process, then a perfection check, and only then do they process through the automated counting machines.

Most Arizona mail-in ballots are held and either mailed or dropped late in the game - including on Election Day.  Because you never know when a candidate running to sit on the board of the Maricopa Community College System will be arrested for masturbating outside a school, and therefore need to change your vote.

Only ex-pats and military personnel seem to vote and immediately return their mail-in or absentee ballots consistently.

In any case, Maricopa County notified me that my ballot was counted today, so they are working on it.  My personnel view is that Maricopa County has a process that stacks controls on the front side of the process, and these controls do act as constraint points for processing speed.

On the other hand, in my youth I did some volunteer work in other states, and there the controls were on the back end.  This meant quick counts, but imperfect ballots were included in the counts.  So weeks or months later, the counts would get adjusted once the judges of elections either perfected or threw out the exceptions.  In a locale where a lot of the races were forgone conclusions, and registering as anything other than a D or an R meant your vote was wasted, it didn't matter.

Today, however, the margins are much tighter, and particularly in a more urban environment.  So I think that a couple of days to process a more accurate count that seeks to include only perfected ballots is a good and useful practice.  Keep in mind that even in those locales where the verdict has already been given by the press based on interim, unofficial count, the local county commissioners won't issue their final, formal report for a couple of weeks.

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12 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

On the other hand, in my youth I did some volunteer work in other states, and there the controls were on the back end.  This meant quick counts, but imperfect ballots were included in the counts.  So weeks or months later, the counts would get adjusted once the judges of elections either perfected or threw out the exceptions.  In a locale where a lot of the races were forgone conclusions, and registering as anything other than a D or an R meant your vote was wasted, it didn't matter.

I'm sorry but this just isn't true.  Florida's front end controls perform just as accurately as Arizona, California, and Nevada.  Now, it is true that in the last two cycles the margins in Arizona and Nevada are part of why races can't be called as quickly.  Back in 2018 this was the case in the Senate and gubernatorial races in Florida too. 

But elections analysts, myself, and really anyone that can do math still much more quickly were almost certain on how the races were gonna play out because we didn't have to wait on this huge chunk of ballots where it's unknown how they're gonna go.  If Arizona and Nevada just improved that, then Kelly and Lombardo would already be called right now (albeit decision desks may hold off on official calls), as well as probably the SoS races.

To be clear, this isn't Joe Gloria nor any other election worker's fault.  But it's simply false that the AZ, CA, and NV governments can't reform the process to make things quicker.  And this would help against Trump and co. calling the process "corrupt" as Trump is doing today concerning Clark county, forcing Gloria to respond.  But it's annoying that their horseshit puts Dems and the media on the defensive and repeating the mantra "this is the process and there's nothing we can do."  No, we can change the process.

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2 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

It's so typical for the so-called liberal media to feature deSatan (&Trump) almost around the clock, but not, say, Whitmer, or Summer Lee, who faced an insane amount of money (A-PAC) and still won, or AOC winning by more than 40 points. 

Got MSNBC on in the background and Nicole Wallace is currently doing a segment on Whitmer, albeit emphasizing the importance of Dobbs. 

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Thomas Massie sounds positively gleeful at the prospect of a tiny House Republican majority

For those that don't know him, Massie is one of the most far-right members of the House. But in an original Tea Party way, not a MAGA way (e.g., he did not object to any of the electoral slates on 1/6, and in fact was one of the even smaller number of House Republicans who had publicly said prior to the coup attempt that he would not support any objection).

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