The US Presidential election prediction thread

[BFTD]

Absolutely desperate to be persecuted.

We've dropped any pretence of the "good people on both sides" shite, I see.

[FairWeatherFan]

18 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

Why was there an increase in black males voting for the most overtly racist President of modern times?
 

This isn't about this comment specifially but in the wake of the Election in 2016 and now in 2020 the polls predicting the results were considered flawed.

So why wouldn't the polls analysing the demographic make up of voters be any different?

[Bully Wee Villa]

Did the polls get Black voters wrong? I think just about everyone expected that Trump would improve his percentage but that far more extra Black voters would come out to vote for Biden, which is what happened. It is hardly like the daft racist does well with Black voters, indeed his racism probably helped ensure that they would come out in unprecedented numbers in cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta, making a vital difference in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Edited November 15, 2020 by Bully Wee Villa

[ICTChris]

Concession IMO

[GordonS]

19 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

I think your first sentence is self evident.  Now try and answer this one.

Why was there an increase in black males voting for the most overtly racist President of modern times?
 

There is a section of black people - especially men - who accuse other black people of wallowing in self-pity and blaming racism for everything that's wrong in their lives. They've usually been relatively successful themselves and ask that classically naive question - if I can do it, why can't they?

As for why it was more this time than last time, maybe Trump wasn't as bad as they thought he would be? Maybe they hate BLM? Maybe they think the economy will do better under that magnificently successful businessman Trump than the socialist Biden? 

[GordonS]

That's Betfair paid out on Georgia. Just Sportnation holding out on Biden outright, the toleys. 

[BFTD]

19 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

I think your first sentence is self evident.  Now try and answer this one.

Why was there an increase in black males voting for the most overtly racist President of modern times?

I doubt there's any one answer, but I'd imagine a few of them were racist themselves and enjoyed seeing him get tore in to they Latins & Muslamics.

It's a fair assumption that 10% of people will vote for/against everything. There were Jewish people who voted for Hitler, after all. I'm fairly confident that, if we held a referendum on carbonising the UK with our own nuclear weapons, you'd get about that many people who'd vote in favour (or, at least, wouldn't venture out to a polling station to prevent their own atomisation).

[GordonS]

16 minutes ago, BFTD said:

I doubt there's any one answer, but I'd imagine a few of them were racist themselves and enjoyed seeing him get tore in to they Latins & Muslamics.

It's a fair assumption that 10% of people will vote for/against everything. There were Jewish people who voted for Hitler, after all. I'm fairly confident that, if we held a referendum on carbonising the UK with our own nuclear weapons, you'd get about that many people who'd vote in favour (or, at least, wouldn't venture out to a polling station to prevent their own atomisation).

This.

In the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections we had both constituency and regional votes on a single sheet of paper, and they were electronically counted. A few months afterwards the Scotland Office published cross-tables for every constituency , so you could see how many people had voted for each combination. I wish I could find this now but I've tried and failed.

In my constituency there was at least one vote for every possible combination. People voted Lib Dem for the constituency and BNP or UKIP on the region. More of Margo MacDonald's votes came from people who'd voted Labour in the constituency vote than SNP.

There are no two opinions so diametrically opposed that there's not someone out there who holds both.

[O'Kelly Isley III]

Trump losing his shit again as  his million maga march was a flop with 10-15k turning up and the proud boys and assorted right wing misfits were acting like tools at the behest of Trump
  @realDonaldTrump ·7h   ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!   @realDonaldTrump ·7h   Radical Left ANTIFA SCUM was easily rebuffed today by the big D.C. MAGA Rally crowd, only to return at night, after 99% of the crowd had left, to assault elderly people and families. Police got there, but late. Mayor is not doing her job!  

In a remotely sane society Trump would be facing a charge of incitement. Biden will ascend to the Presidency but all talk of 'healing' can be filed under 'Wishful Thinking'.

[Granny Danger]

1 hour ago, FairWeatherFan said:

This isn't about this comment specifially but in the wake of the Election in 2016 and now in 2020 the polls predicting the results were considered flawed.

So why wouldn't the polls analysing the demographic make up of voters be any different?

Exit polls are different from pre-election polls.  Could their be black people saying they voted for Trumpian when they didn’t?  Possible, but I think unlikely.

[FairWeatherFan]

12 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Exit polls are different from pre-election polls.  Could their be black people saying they voted for Trumpian when they didn’t?  Possible, but I think unlikely.

They're not different in that they take a sample of voters and extrapolate on that based on a value they attribute to whatever demo.

Exit polls this year also have the unknown variable of how to consider mail in ballots, early voting, and on the day in person voting which can skew scaling up to be representative of a state/nation. Since it was a record high for alternative methods of than the traditional on the day down the polling station approach.

[topcat(The most tip top)]

Exit polls are different from pre-election polls.  Could their be black people saying they voted for Trumpian when they didn’t?  Possible, but I think unlikely.

Presumably these are the adjusted figures

if that the overall polled level of Trump Support is lower than the overall ballots indicate then the pollsters will have to adjust the raw polling figures to take that into account

If that adjustment is based on the assumption that the distortion is uniform across the board and it isn’t then it makes comparisons between sections less useful

If the overwhelming bulk of the “Shy Trumpets” weren’t black then the adjusted black trump number would be too high.

Which, intuitively, sounds more plausible than black Biden voters refusing to admit it.

[RiG]

An update from the rapidly melting DJT:

 

[BFTD]

"Official sources called this election differently"    Twitter constantly having to come up with new disclaimers just for The Donald.

Can we all do this? ALLOA ATHLETIC WERE GOING TO WIN THE LEAGUE BEFORE LOCKDOWN! COUNT ALL THE GOALS, STOP THE STEAL!

[LongTimeLurker]

18 hours ago, GordonS said:

...There are no two opinions so diametrically opposed that there's not someone out there who holds both.

During STV elections in NI you won't find too many TUV to SF transfers to the point that when you do it is likely to have been a ballot filled out incorrectly. When an electorate is sufficiently polarised you wind up with something very close to a tribal headcount. American politics have not reached that point yet.

What I think some people are missing on here is that if you go back a few decades Democratic politicians were also capable of being blatantly racist and Joe Biden has been around long enough to have been active in that era. He was selected even after being called out by his future running mate during the primaries over some of his past actions probably because the calculation was that the path to victory was more likely to be to shore up support amongst "Reagan Democrat" type voters in the "blue wall" states (he's from Pennsylvania originally) rather than to push an AOC agenda.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/harris-attacks-bidens-record-on-busing-and-working-with-segregationists.html

It should not be surprising that things would became slightly less polarised along racial lines given that backdrop. There were plenty of other issues that some voters may have viewed as more significant to their personal circumstances this time around. In a Texas context, for example, Latino voters who are or have recently been active in the fracking industry were not necessarily automatically going to back Biden if they believed that was more likely to mean prolonged unemployment.

[LongTimeLurker]

22 minutes ago, BFTD said:

"Official sources called this election differently"    Twitter constantly having to come up with new disclaimers just for The Donald.

Can we all do this? ALLOA ATHLETIC WERE GOING TO WIN THE LEAGUE BEFORE LOCKDOWN! COUNT ALL THE GOALS, STOP THE STEAL!

This will probably be the last election where Republican supporters are on Twitter to the same extent as their Democratic counterparts, so the American electorate will probably be even more siloed in information terms next time around. An app called Parler is emerging as the alternative.

[BFTD]

2 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

This will probably be the last election where Republican supporters are on Twitter to the same extent as their Democratic counterparts, so the American electorate will probably be even more siloed in information terms next time around. An app called Parler is emerging as the alternative.

I've seen a few recent things about the whole right-wing social media concept, and the general gist was that it doesn't look as though it's likely to take off as well as expected. A big part of the satisfaction that these folk gain from using social media is from "trolling the libtards", and a sealed-off area where like-minded bigots can agree upon who to hate might not be as appealing to the average drinker of liberal tears.

It will be fun to see the owners of these forums gradually come to realise that platforms like Twitter and Facebook don't censor content because they're woke snowflakes, however. Being held accountable for what you publish is a bitch.

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

38 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

This will probably be the last election where Republican supporters are on Twitter to the same extent as their Democratic counterparts, so the American electorate will probably be even more siloed in information terms next time around. An app called Parler is emerging as the alternative.

They were never on twitter anyway. 90% of them are automated bots and they're not going to go away.

[LongTimeLurker]

1 hour ago, BFTD said:

I've seen a few recent things about the whole right-wing social media concept, ...

They'll talk up the free speech angle and the first amendment in an American context. The difficult part is building up enough users to hit a critical mass but Parler appears to be getting there given they were at 500,000 downloads per day early last week and the messages from Twitter added to Trump's tweets will no doubt have been a huge part of that:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/nov/13/parler-conservative-social-network-free-speech

1 hour ago, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) said:

They were never on twitter anyway. 90% of them are automated bots and they're not going to go away.

The mainstream platforms were happy to host Alex Jones for years given all the traffic he was generating for them right up until he stopped backing no hope fringe Libertarian leaning candidates like Ron Paul and started to seriously subvert what was happening in mainstream politics by backing Donald Trump with Roger Stone very much coordinating everything that unfolded. There has been a massive siloed media market in the flyover states for cranky right wing talk radio over the years. The idea that could never extend into cyberspace seems naive to me and in line with the complacency that there was in liberal elite circles pre-Brexit referendum in the UK and pre-2016 presidential election in the US.

Edited November 16, 2020 by LongTimeLurker

[GordonS]

1 hour ago, LongTimeLurker said:

During STV elections in NI you won't find too many TUV to SF transfers to the point that when you do it is likely to have been a ballot filled out incorrectly. When an electorate is sufficiently polarised you wind up with something very close to a tribal headcount. American politics have not reached that point yet.

What I think some people are missing on here is that if you go back a few decades Democratic politicians were also capable of being blatantly racist and Joe Biden has been around long enough to have been active in that era. He was selected even after being called out by his future running mate during the primaries over some of his past actions probably because the calculation was that the path to victory was more likely to be to shore up support amongst "Reagan Democrat" type voters in the "blue wall" states (he's from Pennsylvania originally) rather than to push an AOC agenda.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/harris-attacks-bidens-record-on-busing-and-working-with-segregationists.html

It should not be surprising that things would became slightly less polarised along racial lines given that backdrop. There were plenty of other issues that some voters may have viewed as more significant to their personal circumstances this time around. In a Texas context, for example, Latino voters who are or have recently been active in the fracking industry were not necessarily automatically going to back Biden if they believed that was more likely to mean prolonged unemployment.

True, though I do know a Catholic couple who voted for the Orange council candidate in Harthill.