Etiquette question:

M has been our housekeeper for 10 years. We love her whole family a lot and they've become family friends. M connected us w her friend, A, who we hired to be a care-taker/bilingual tutor for kids remote school.

When we met w A, we had a serious conversation about masks and decided to merge households and be masks-off. M goes to many houses and has other jobs, and so she has been mask-on since she resumed cleaning our house in June. And we wear masks when she's here.

This wednesday, both M and A will be here at the same time. We think everyone should wear masks.

Etiquette: should I text A and M together to say "hey guys, here's the mask plan for wednesday " and implicitly acknowledge their friendship? Or should I just text A, since nothing is really changing for M?

I think you're massively overthinking this. Either way would be fine.

I am definitely overthinking it!

I'm worried that if I only text A, I'm sending a message about differing class statuses between her and her friend.

My paranoia about appearing classist or racist, let me show you it.

If you text both of them you're also acknowledging to M that you don't wear masks around M.

That said, I'd go ahead and text both of them. Something like, "M -- thanks for your recommendation of A, [he,she] has been great and will be here on Wed. A -- in consideration of M being there we should all make sure to wear masks."

5.1: -M +A

ok, good. That'll work. Thanks, Nick!

I am increasingly disgusted and sad that my expectations of dumb-kids-with-guns-hyped-on-Internet-bullshit political violence are coming true, and hope that I am wrong to expect Democrats to fold like cheap paper airplanes on November 4, in the face of more threatened violence.

We just got back home today. 8 weeks, 2 continents, 5 grandparents, 6 PCR tests, 1 ER visit. We are very ready to get the Infanta back in daycare.

9 The go/no-go decision date for my ski trip to Austria is in mid-November. It's hard to imagine that anything will have changed enough that unrestricted US entry into the EU will be permitted then.

8 My annoyance of the moment is people smart enough to know better saying that Pelosi should use the 'power of the purse' to shut down various Trump abuses. The House has the power to shut down the entire US government on October 1, 2020. That means everything, though, including the stuff we want/need, with no picking and choosing. There's not some other power of the purse that doesn't require an agreement with McConnell and Trump.

Our university classes started last Wednesday, mostly in person. Since then, cases in the town have gone from averaging 3-4/day to 45 in today's report. And that doesn't necessarily include students who give their parent's address (because parent's insurance). The official message is that case counts aren't the only thing that matters.

Preventable deaths to own the libs.

It took me forever to realize that the other part of Trump's relentless attacks on mail-in voting and fraud (besides actually suppressing the vote) is that he's surely obsessed with claiming a popular vote win. He was caught off guard by the results in 2016 and wasn't able to get together a campaign of lies about his popular loss early enough, but he's making up for lost time now. Regardless of the EC results, if Biden wins the popular vote, it is fraudulent, that's the story, and once you remove those fraudulent Democrat ballots, Trump will be shown to be the people's choice. Right?

I don't think he can win the EC with anything resembling a fair vote.

13:. That's still his claim for 2016 isn't it? Has he ever conceded that he lost the popular vote?

11/12 is so depressing.

That means it's working.

13: on Friday I got the following text message: "Are you ready to Make America Great Again? Join our team today. Request your absentee ballot now: republicansvote.com"

I have no idea how they got my phone number, have been registered as a Democrat for decades and have never voted for a republican in my life.

12, 16: It is depressing. But I don't think it's to own the libs at this level; it's fear that otherwise the university will be in too dire financial straits, and that the state (even run by dems) won't bail them out. So complete failure of government and failure of nerve. The university doesn't update its dashboard on weekends. I'm afraid to look in the morning.

Trick to get you to cast invalidly?

18: OMG. I got a text message that says: "Joe Biden is a puppet for the Chinese Communist Government. Don't let the Fake News tell you otherwise. Know the truth about China Joe: [bit.ly link]"

I was planning on voting for Joe Biden but if he is a puppet of the Chinese Communist Government, perhaps I should reconsider.

We've gotten two poll calls today. The second called like five times to try to get us to finish.

22: would you like the bit.ly link?

No thanks, I can do my own research. YouTube seems to have a lot of videos with people that are very smart about this kind of thing.

Normally the only political texts I get are from people thinking I'm my dad (who doesn't even have a cell phone, who knows) trying to get out the Democratic vote.

Now I am getting texts to my own name about how the extremist Democrats are trying to steal the election and I need to show Mr. Trump my support. Are they just saying "fuck it" to these expensively collected mailing lists and just texting every person in the country?

I too am getting electoral spam from some Trump campaign. I had assumed that it was for someone with a similar address, since I get dozens of such every day. But possibly he's spamming the world at random. Including people who have never been US citizens in their lives.

27: My husband got texts from a Democratic candidate and wrote back that he was a Canadian citizen living in the US and couldn't vote, and they wrote back apologizing and saying they would take him off their list.

I have a real email I only give out out to people I know (or small personal services like doctors) and a sacrifice email I shop with. The sacrifice email gets Trump spam.

That's odd, but the texting I've been doing includes a LOT of wrong numbers. The most common is just a response saying we have the wrong number, but some people get really offended. "I've had this number for ten years and am NOT Kelly!" The messages we send all start with "Hi $firstname" so it should be easy to identify those. As far as I can tell, a lot of it is out of date voter records, but there are also just data entry errors. There are also people who registered using their parent's number and then changed "This isn't Sarah. It's her mom, but I'll make sure she votes!"

AJ has been amused that this org texted "all" targeted voters in MI and got me but not him. (We registered at the same time and have voted in the same elections.) Also, texting systems have an automatic opt-out if you reply "stop" with no punctuation.

30: I used that feature when I got Bloomberg spam. I just really resent random people texting me. It feels like somebody came into my home without knocking.

I get lots of pro-Trump Arizona-related texts addressed to my first name. I did get a text to my first name with a different last name so I wonder if some how my California number (which I've had for over 15 years) somehow got associated with her.

31: Same. I find it invasive and don't feel I can text back to get it to stop (like with spam calls, I feel it'll get worse once they know a real person is at the number).

Also Apple needs to make it easier to block numbers (and report spam I guess?).

32: Verizon lets me block calls - at least some. They say "Potential Spam".

I like to think they have a message for the sender about how they could be a spammer if they only applied themselves.

I believe I've mentioned that we've join a pod for Atossa's school year. (Five kids, they're all enrolled in the same school, although not all in the same class. The pod leader comes from a private company and provides some adult supervision while the kids both do school stuff and during downtime.) We opted to host for the first week. Today is the first day of school. We thought we were ready. Then, last night, Atossa woke us up a little before midnight with a fever and a stuffy nose. And again a little before 2 AM. So the pod moved to someone else's house for the first week, Atossa is home with us being coerced to not hide from the Teams screen, I'm taking this afternoon off, and we're hoping she's not sick with anything serious and we can get her into the pod before next week...

Best wishes. One minor but real piece of stress we've had all summer is playing "allergies or Covid." We're a family that is really good at allergies.

I don't know how this would end up on a political mailing list, but the only way I can think of that someone would think my dad has a cell phone and it's my number, would be because I ordered something online to ship to him, and it required a contact phone number, and I put my phone number. If the DNC bought Zingerman's customer database because people who buy marcona almonds and The World's Best Cherry Jam, Harvested On One Farm In Mackinack, Michigan Since 1930 are all Democrats, they're probably right but it will lead to mistakes.

30.1 is very right in my experience too. I think part of it is the early phone banking was at least partially devoted to cleaning the list.

I'm really skeptical that all this voter texting is going to drive turnout in any meaningful way. I mean, sure, voter interaction is good, but if one side of the interaction is just choosing texts from a pre-defined script as part of an app, and the other side is responding out of a perceived social obligation, is that really a meaningful interaction?

Balance whatever positive response you do get against those of us who genuinely resent the intrusion, and its likely a wash.

Maybe texting was a special secret weapon that helped Obama in 2008 but that was a long time ago and it is no longer a novel thing.

I've heard that a low-ish info voter needs to hear the name of a down ballot candidate 7 times. Or maybe it was 5. Anyway, if true, it's a good reason for bulk-calling, texting.

Obviously, no need to send texts for Biden or Trump.

We're organizing a post-card thing this cycle. The trick is how to make sure it all gets properly reported under the campaign finance rules.

Back when we were canvassing, we never encountered anyone that we thought we influenced. Everyone was highly aware and highly motivated.

In other times, I'd say that ballot parties would be useful, since we all have our ballots and it is more cheerful to fill them out with a bunch of people shouting out questions about propositions. But we can't have those these days and I'm giving money before we go off-grid. Assuming that I can go offgrid, because there's a fire near the cabin we were going to.

Our pod school thing is supposed to start next week. The state has thrown us a curve ball by "clarifying" what "remote learning cooperatives" can do... and introducing a web form to narc on violators. It appears we're going to be filing paperwork to legally become a small private school. Which has no particular requirements! Never have I felt so uncomfortably aligned with the racists and religious conservatives who have made this possible, against my general political beliefs in the matter (that private school and homeschooling should be across-the-board illegal).

My wife found a better Pod Governess Learning Coach situation than the one she had previously been going for. Essentially she'll be running a one-room schoolhouse for 5 kids out of an old downtown former church. I don't think the state is putting in any paperwork requirements because Live Free or Die.

We now prefer "and".

homeschooling should be across-the-board illegal

I have never heard anyone having this opinion. You think the state should be able to take your kids for the bulk of each waking day?

It's only half of days (180 in Pennsylvania).

Some googling tells me I'm ignorant and homeschooling is illegal in the entire nation of Nazistan. This is a view that would seem to require a very high degree of trust in democratic institutions and the good faith of agents of the state. I'm generally happy to send my kids to public school, but I'd be very upset if the I didn't have the option of pulling them out.

Germany is the famous one, but also Japan, Sweden, etc. Homeschooling was of questionable legality in most of the US until the late 80s/early 90s. I met someone a few years ago who was illegally homeschooled in Spain, which lead to all kinds of hijinks when she got to high school and college ages and needed to interface with the official system. Weirdly it all worked out perfectly fine, something tells me that would have played out differently in Germany.

Can you do a home-based charter school? That's pretty much the same thing except it sends tax dollars to a private, barely-regulated company.

20: It had not occurred to me that trickery might be afoot. One more thing to worry about! I think like everyone else getting these messages, it's just random spam. I will try ydnew's suggestion of replying "stop," see what happens, and report back.

29: I also have an email account for just family and friends, another one for commenting, another one for ordering merch, and another one for collecting spam, with really long, easy to remember passwords for each, like La-majestueuse-égalité-des-lois,qui-interdit-au-riche-comme-au-pauvre-de-coucher-sous-les-ponts,-de-mendier-dans-les-rues,-et-de-vole-du-pain. Which is not a completely accurate quote because I added an Oxford comma.

I think campaigns are texting so heavily this cycle mostly because it's very cheap in terms of campaign resources (which in this context mostly means volunteer time). I doubt anyone has a clear sense yet of how effective it is or what the tradeoff between reaching new voters and alienating people looks like in practice.

I have not gotten any texts or emails from the Trump campaign so far, thank God.

Trump himself sent me a dick pic picture of a mushroom.

I have no idea why that seemed funny to me as I was typing it out. I have no idea why I didn't realize sooner that it's not funny. I have no idea, full stop.

54: 54:

The pivot to high-end video graphics continues.

50, I thought the cunning bit was misspelling "voler", but then I realised that it was a deliberate distraction so hackers wouldn't notice the comma.

Virtual school started today for the girls. I am wiped out, but we survived. And Lee just called to apologize for being verbally abusive toward me, because she couldn't remember whether she ever had. I think it's better for her to be self-aware than not but buy is it going to be a long journey yet to get to that.

The real treasure is the friends you meet along the way.

Or not.

I guess Biden is in Pittsburgh talking about Trump's propensity for violence. He was just down the street.

So the chances for having a Biden sign in my yard this year just went from slim to none, as apparently the Biden campaign has opted against freely distributing signs through local party organizations in this swing state, but rather now expects local party orgs to pony up some money to pay for them.

Apparently this is a practice pioneered by the Clinton campaign in 2016. But I guess she won this state by almost 3,000 votes, so who am I to question the wisdom of the strategy?

You could just throw the Biden team twenty bucks for a yard sign.

Our county Democratic committee is handing out signs to anyone (if you know about the email stating as much). I would get one but I'm on a cul-de-sac so the only effect it would have is on the immediate neighbors. Not worth the risk.

This isn't a swing state so presidential signs are always at a minimum. I've seen one in a very affluent part of Rockville and one by the driveway of what I think is an organic farmer who hosts an annual foraging festival and makes money by sustainable landscaping consulting. Good to see that he's enthusiastic.

Correction, those are the two I've seen this week. There are a few.

One of my neighbors has a sign reading "Home of a Beloved Teacher at (Some School)". I keep wanting to get a life-sized Sting cut-out to put behind it.

It seems like there is a shit-ton of Trump signs around. Many are standard-issue Trump signs, but there are also a lot that are very creatively painted, as if someone with a lot of talent took great pains to artistically demonstrate just what an asshole they are.

The Democrats are totally losing the sign-war here. Driving around you would think this is a much redder area than it is.

57: not cunning enough to fool you, and the misspelling was inadvertent. Maybe that's not such a strong password after all.

re Biden signs: Pulled the old Obama/Biden signs from 2008 out of the basement where they were decorating the walls and put them out in the yard. Everyone on my block is a Democrat and most of the signs are Black Lives Matter.

Feel very fortunate to not know any trumpeter pawns.

I saw an "Any functioning adult 2020" lawn sign yesterday.

The NYT did a video reconstruction thing of the shooting of the Trump supporter, like they did for the shootings by Rittenhouse. AFAIK no one has been charged in the Trump supporter death, but the story multiple times highlights a "possible gunman". That's waaaaaaay out on a limb for the NYT so they must know something more than what they show in the videos.

If someone was shot, you can infer a gunman.

I didn't see any Trump signs in Morro Bay where I just was, but several signs for the zero-chance GOP candidate for Congress there ("The Voice of Reason"), and some bathroom graffiti "VALLEY GO HOME - NO 559, 661" which I think means "When we set up as a tourist town we didn't mean Hispanic tourists."

The sentient murder bots aren't coming for at least two weeks.

71: Spherical, I presume.

To clarify- not just text saying that there was a possible gunman, but in the videos circling a guy with a caption "possible gunman" when there's no video of him actually doing the shooting, just being nearby. It reminds me of some idiot right wing sites after the marathon bombing who ruined some Indian kid's life by using videos to "prove" he was the bomber. For the Times to do that I'm guessing they have sources who are pretty confident he'll be charged with the shooting.

Maybe it was Palin?

Moving it to the new thread.

Supposedly the Russians have a hack of Michigan voter rolls. That could explain why more stupid calling is happening there. And also why the president of the United States is a Russian asset.

Surely the thing about Biden is that no one is actually enthused about him, right? And that's why there are no yard signs? We're all voting Not-Trump and hoping that carries the day?

(On another note, I had a dream a month or so ago that I voted in the primary for Buttigieg and was very embarrassed about it. I voted for Bernie and it was one of the last public things I did before going into quarantine. Voted and got the last haircut of 2020. It was a beautiful day. I was totally exhausted from stress and practically fell asleep in the barber's chair but sort of managed to enjoy the bike ride.)

~~
And on another "can anyone talk Frowner down from total existential dread" note: So Trump is apparently ginning up to distribute some kind of sugar pill fake vaccine before the election. That probably won't happen, right? Because what if we get a vaccine that doesn't actually work (leaving aside the "makes it worse" scenario) and the pandemic just....never ends? Rich people bubble off from the rest of the world, the economy deteriorates and covid is just endemic if you're poor and you either survive it or you don't and if you survive your lifespan is shortened by heart and lung damage?

I mean, I see this scenario where there's just basically a covid underclass forever. Rich people will be allowed to travel internationally if they test negative right before the flight, the borders will be closed to everyone else and we all just accept that the new life expectancy for working people is, like, fifty or something.

Actually, I've grown quite fond of Joe Biden.

But I don't think the sugar-pill vaccine is likely. I don't think even enough of his supporters would take it.

There's also a "ByeDon" sign a few doors down from me. Not sure if that counts.

I also suspect the disease will eventually have a real vaccine and won't continue to circulate.

That probably won't happen, right? Because what if we get a vaccine that doesn't actually work (leaving aside the "makes it worse" scenario) and the pandemic just....never ends?

Trump isn't the emperor of the world, so even if he produces a fake vaccine in the US, other countries will continue to work on a real vaccine.

Surely the thing about Biden is that no one is actually enthused about him, right?

I couldn't tell you how representative she is, but I have at least one FB friend who's been actively stanning for Biden since last fall. NYC, so we don't do yard signs, but she just proudly posted a pic of her Biden/Harris tote bag. Middle aged 2d gen Nuyorican.

I just worry that another country's vaccine won't be approved here if Trump is re-elected - it would involve admitting that he and his practices aren't the very best.

And I tell you what, I think Trump is going to be re-elected. I wish I did not think this but everything I'm reading (11% of Republicans say they lie on the polls and say they're not voting GOP versus 5% of Democrats, for instance, which means the GOP vote is much bigger than it polls as) suggests that he's going to win, he won't even have to refuse to recognize the results. And then there'll be fireworks - attacks on universities, lots more violence, blue state bankruptcies because there won't be any federal pandemic aid, ACA act and the Medicaid expansion gone, etc etc.

News today is that the Biden/Harris camp has decided to distribute lawn signs after all. Sounds like they are running a fine operation over there.

Er, 5% of Democrats say they're not voting Dem. It would be absolutely bang on 2020 the other way around.

Yes, there will probably be a Trump announcement of a vaccine of some sort in late October, probably even some high-profile stunt administering of it. It will have as much substance as other Trump announcements. Will it convince enough people in the right places to tip the precarious balance? I don't think so, but what do I know. The balance might not even be that precarious.

Here's Andy Slavitt:

https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/1300620770389958657

(That's mid-thread, read both up and down from there, and follow him in twitter if you do twitter and don't follow him already.)

I'm still highly unenthusiastic, but I'll vote for the ticket.

(11% of Republicans say they lie on the polls and say they're not voting GOP versus 5% of Democrats, for instance, which means the GOP vote is much bigger than it polls as)

I can't believe this is a validly measurable number. "I lie on polls that ask me who I'm going to vote for, but tell the truth on polls that ask if I lied on the first polls"? Trump might win, we should absolutely not get complacent, but I think believing his winning is more likely than not is poorly founded.

Joe is growing on me. I pretty much always hated Trump the maximum amount, but as the stakes in the election become clearer and increasingly dire, I realize how much common ground Joe and I have.

They tried the "unskewed polls" thing with Mitt Romney in 2012 and all the people who believed it were in shock when he didn't win.

I find myself wondering who John Roberts will vote for.

93: But weren't the polls all screwy in 2016 at least partly because of hidden Trump voters?

89: I do follow Andy Slavitt, although I missed that thread (all the rest of my twitter lately is either Bree Newsome Bass with some very dark prognostications or cat videos...I wish that Bree Newsome Bass seemed less plausible, but I've been following her for a couple of years now and she's very astute. Some of the cat videos are pretty good, at least.)

More and more I just think that a critical mass of Americans basically want an authoritarian government. They don't understand what this entails and treat it as basically an aesthetic choice because they're racist and badly educated, but they actively want what little they understand of Trumpism. And in five years or so, when we've finally destroyed NIH and the universities and there are massive internal refugee camps, etc, they'll all have completely forgotten that there was ever any alternative and they definitely won't believe that there's any way to fix, eg, the raging fires that have consumed most of California, massive drug shortages, closed borders, etc. It's not that we'll always have been at war with Oceania, it's that we'll always have been unable to go to Canada.

I think a clear Trump win is even worse than Frowner posits. But no sure thing at this point.

I've come to thinking Biden probably is the right guy for this moment, and a decent transitional figure in the turn of the generational page.

Here I go again, playing star again.....

95.1 I think there was a methodological issue with state polling not sorting by education? National polls were right.

95.2 I follow BNB as well, and share her frustration with people (as I think about it) who can't tell the difference between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.

96 before seeing 95.3, but I stand by 96.1.

95 Here, Frowner: https://twitter.com/GorditosGatitos/status/1299104083324866560

What if the poor cat uses the hot tap next?

99:That is a good cat video, but I defy anyone to top this:
https://twitter.com/PrimaryPlaythru/status/1296807314134114309

Be sure to watch the whole thing - there's a twist.

79: There are actually lots of Biden signs around my neighborhood. Frequently right next to the Black Live Matter signs that started appearing earlier. During the primary season there were Sanders and Warren yard signs in my neighborhood, but I don't think I saw a single Biden yard sign.

I'm not sure there are more Biden signs now than there were Clinton signs in 2016, but what is definitely different is that I have only seen one Trump sign in 2020 -- in 2016 there were quite a bit more.

There are no Trump signs in my neighborhood this year. In 2016, there were at least a few. There are still more BLM or "No Room to Hate" signs than Biden ones.

101 That is good

I suspect that the Trump voters are still there*, but Fox has them terrified that if they put up a Trump sign, antifa will attack them.

*In my area, there are still some cheaper houses and those are often filled by working-class white people.

Realistically, I think that putting up a Trump sign in my neighborhood would now get your shunned. And probably got you shunned in 2016.

Latest polling of the military does not look good for Trump.

putting up a Trump sign in my neighborhood would now get your shunned

Cancelled, Moby. The word is cancelled.

I should get a Biden lapel pin.

85: I hope there are more people like that. I desperately want others to be enthused for Biden even though I think it's an objectively incorrect position.

A long time ago I read an SF short story, possibly by Gene Wolfe, in which in the far future almost everyone was atheist but somehow huge fans of the few remaining nuns. The protagonist was just gutted when he encountered a priest or a nun or something who had lost his/her faith because the protagonist wanted to live in a world where someone had faith even if he couldn't himself. This sounds like upside-down Lacanianism somehow. Anyway, there were also robots, and it basically describes my position vis a vis Biden, except in the story the robots were benign and we only seem to be getting the job-taking kind and the General Dynamics clearly-designed-to-turn-a-village-into-a-freefire-zone kind.

And some t-shirts.

Boston Dynamics? Anyway, I requested my ballot last week and will of course vote for Biden. Even my housemate, who basically never votes, seems to have requested a ballot to vote for Biden.

95: There are no shy Trump voters (or at least there weren't more of them than shy Clinton voters). Shy voters are almost entirely mythical. The secret sauce of polls is they have to weigh the sample for who in the sample is actually going to vote. They do this through demographics, and more uneducated people voted than predicted (based on historical patterns). This is consistent with your theory of who wants a dictatorship.

Yeah, I find Maritza's (the Biden stan) existence incredibly comforting. I don't agree with her politics, but they lead her to being an intensely interested and committed centrist Dem, and if there are enough of those out there, that's Biden's enthusiastic base.

Latest polling of the military does not look good for Trump.

Yes, I saw that. Cheering but not unexpected. When I was working with them a few years ago, my unscientific impression was that there were very few soldiers who were actually positively pro-Trump. There were a lot who were anti-Clinton; I mean virtually all of them. The white officers were voting third party because they hated them both; the white ORs were voting Trump because they wanted rid of Clinton; the black ORs and officers were voting Clinton, but not happily; the Latinos weren't voting.
But if you look at the demographics, a lot of the US military is non-white and a lot of the senior NCOs and virtually all the officers have degrees. Not obvious pro-Trump.

113: Actually OI think many state polls did not even weight by education (or try to balance it) so they were "skewed" towards the educated even if there was not an uptick in non-college voting rate.

I think many Americans are fine as long as they can drive where they want and hsve easy parking when they get there.

115: And of the military folks I know* (or parents thereof) they are very aware of his lies and misrepresentations about the military (Veteran's Choice, pay raises etc.) and his actions viewed as antithetical to military discipline.

*Admittedly not a random sample.

116.last: Fine with any government. (Until they are not years down the road.)

113: I got the impression from the Slow Burn podcast that there definitely were shy David Duke voters.

1. I thought the conclusion was that 2016 polls were fine. It was:
- the pundits who were overconfident, and
- the utter rat-fucking by Comey who hopefully punches himself in the nuts every morning for what he's done to the country.

2. The story in 110 reminds me vaguely of San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

National polls were okay. Swing state polls were off for the reasons described above -- insufficient weighting for less educated whites. Adjustments have been made.

NYT's Cohn previews what would become the eventual conventional wisdom here.

And state polls, in particular, understated Mr. Trump's support in the decisive Rust Belt region, in part because those surveys did not adjust for the educational composition of the electorate -- a key to the 2016 race.

Pollsters have adjusted.

Everybody has adjusted how they treat rural Pennsylvania.

Following-up on 120.1 this is a good retrospective: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/

Another myth is that Trump's victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they'd been, on average, since 1968.

Why, then, had so many people who covered the campaign been so confident of Clinton's chances? This is the question I've spent the past two to three months thinking about. It turns out to have some complicated answers, which is why it's taken some time to put this article together (and this is actually the introduction to a long series of articles on this question that we'll publish over the next few weeks). But the answers are potentially a lot more instructive for how to cover Trump's White House and future elections than the ones you'd get by simply blaming the polls for the failure to foresee the outcome. They also suggest there are real shortcomings in how American politics are covered, including pervasive groupthink among media elites, an unhealthy obsession with the insider's view of politics, a lack of analytical rigor, a failure to appreciate uncertainty, a sluggishness to self-correct when new evidence contradicts pre-existing beliefs, and a narrow viewpoint that lacks perspective from the longer arc of American history. Call me a curmudgeon, but I think we journalists ought to spend a few more moments thinking about these things before we endorse the cutely contrarian idea that Trump's presidency might somehow be a good thing for the media.

...

Most of the models underestimated the extent to which polling errors were correlated from state to state. If Clinton were going to underperform her polls in Pennsylvania, for instance, she was also likely to do so in demographically similar states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.
Several of the models were too slow to recognize meaningful shifts in the polls, such as the one that occurred after the Comey letter on Oct. 28.
Most of the models didn't account for the additional uncertainty added by the large number of undecided and third-party voters, a factor that allowed Trump to catch up to and surpass Clinton in states such as Michigan.
Some of the models were based only on the past few elections, ignoring earlier years, such as 1980, when the polling had been way off.

I just got a COVID test. (I'm having some minor surgery on Friday so it's a requirement.) It wasn't too bad; a nasal swab, but not the kind that goes all the way back to stab your brain. Just about three-quarters of an inch in each nostril for ten seconds.

Or as I call it, "typical red light stop."

123: Didn't the polls generally show that it was going to be a close election? The whole 99% certainty that Clinton would win didn't have much to do with the polls - it was based on some deep ridiculous faith in the sanity of the American voter.

I resemble that remark.

126: And incredibly Kevin Drum still believes - https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/08/america-is-a-decent-country-thats-why-donald-trump-will-lose-in-november/

126: A plurality of American voters supported Clinton. (I bet you didn't know that!)

I do detect a lot of that this year, when you'd think people would know better. Trump is less likely than Biden to win a fair election, but what reason do we have to believe there will be one of those?

The more they press on Biden's age the more I think Trump really did have a stroke.

The more Trump spontaneously denies having a series of mini-strokes, the more I think Trump really did have a series of mini-strokes.

Fuck, man. Can you imagine the chaos of that evening inside the White House? If Trump's getting rushed to the hospital, they've got to be running scenarios and some of those scenarios have to include that a bunch of close-to-Trump people are going to prison. And that they have absolutely no Plan B for this election. (I mean, their Plan A is pretty weak, but there's nothing for Plan B.) I hate every fucker in the White House, and I do like to picture that they're living in scared misery and that the dissonance occasionally breaks through and howls in their ears. I would also like to picture that some of them know that they're at high risk of a spectacular collapse, that comes closer day by day or could happen any moment if Trump rages out, and that they feel constant strong dread.

They can't all have Trump's lifetime of training in the power of positive thought. They must falter sometimes.

I don't think there are too many who falter that much. People wander around without masks right up until they get a ventilator shoved down their throat and die. Michael Cohen repented, but not until he got busted. Some others -- John Kelly, Jeff Sessions, Jim Mattis -- went to some trouble to distance themselves from the crimes. But they are gone.

The whole Trump Thing is denial and a rejection of shame. GW Bush was personally embarrassed by Katrina and the Great Recession, and it showed. Trump's incompetence has led to a shutdown of society and a couple hundred thousand excess deaths, but he has the sense to know that the problem that needs to be solved is too much Covid testing. That's why his ratings are stable while Bush got crushed. Denial turns out to be a very potent strategy. Will it be enough? Stay tuned ...

Okaaayyyyy, but maybe they falter while they see the linchpin for all of this having a series of mini-strokes.

Maybe. But if a stroke renders Trump incoherent and intellectually dysfunctional, who is going to notice? How much brain do you actually need to do what he does?

I do think it is a comforting thought to suppose that Bannon has been having some bad moments.

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I'm thinking some enterprising Unfogged commenters need to buy this place and run it Golden Palace style. Its charming AF.

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135: As I said back when, "How could they tell?"

126: Sam Wang (who is dead to me and I will never read another word he writes) claimed his model gave Clinton a 99% or so chance of winning.

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NMM to David Graeber. Holy shit he was young.

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I don't see anything about it. I've grown to hate Graeber, but if he died suddenly I would feel bad about it.

His wife just tweeted it https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1301504647769792512

I was waiting for the sequel: Debt: The First 5,025 Years.

Holy shit. How awful.

So did we ever figure out whether or not Apple was founded in the basement of some disenchanted IBM engineers in the 80s?

One time, we decided we were going to keep and raise frogs on the garage. So we caught a bunch of frogs and put them in buckets in the garage. They all died overnight, I guess because frogs can't live in buckets even if you put in grass and water for them to consume.

On topic because a few years later, we bought an Apple IIe.

Oh, what a shame. I was certainly nitpicking the book, but I thought it was valuable, just with some sloppy details.

I'm guessing that's not darb.

Right, it was me.

That actually was my guess.

The Republicans sent me a mailer reminding me that Sanders and Biden support each other. Which seems strange because Biden and Sanders have been sending the same message to my email.

It's a sign of decreasing polarization and emphasis on finding areas of agreement.

In re David Graeber: Because he could be kind of a jerk online and may be known in these circles primarily for that, I wanted to say that I've heard a lot from anarchists who knew him offline about what a kind, helpful person he was and how non-arrogant he was even after he became famous.

I've got to say that I'm sad. He was a towering figure as anarchists go, he introduced a couple of important big ideas into popular discourse and he managed to be a famous straight white male academic leftist while not racking up sexual harassment or sexual assault complaints. You feel like a big tree has fallen and there's a gap in the canopy.

144. Not true. It has always annoyed me that he doubled down on it when it was called out. Still, too young.

152: Yeah, the personality traits you need to look like a good and dignified person online are by no means the only way to be a good person. He was a valuable scholar, and I don't see any reason not to believe he was a good guy.

145. They need something to sit on that's clear of the water, or they drown.

My guess is that they all died of hypothermia. They had a dry spot.

There was no internet to look up frog care.

Day four of virtual school and I have gotten none of my own work done all day, got closer to a panic attack than I have in a long long time. I've been trying the Moby-frog-care approach to online learning, but I'm still needed because there's no standardized ways teachers make their google meet links available and so no one ever knows where to look and I have to be asked every time. And the "move odd numbers to this column and even numbers to this one" assignment that took 30 seconds of work was a pdf where you couldn't actually move the numbers, so instead I had her highlight them in different colors and I hope that's good enough for the teacher. Plus they're working on ipads, so there are all the meltdowns about how when you touch the spot where you want to type it often ends up below that line, which makes turning in worksheets awkward and ugly. I've only had to turn off outside electronics for one child, but that's probably because the other two worked from their rooms and came to me when they had problems so I couldn't tell when they were ignoring class to play. Obviously a great use of everyone's time! (Plus I'm a little bitter that I have to provide two meals by 11 am, because even if they're responsible for the first one it doesn't totally get me off the hook. By 11:45, I was being asked about dinner. Eff em ell.

There's a fine line between Eff Em Ell and Eff Em All.

On the topic of economics, Graeber actively removed knowledge from the world. We are now collectively dumber and less informed because of his writings on the topic. The notorious Apple quote wasn't an outlier -- it was typical of his slipshod relationship to scholarship on economic topics. He wrote an article for the New York Review of Books last year that was genuinely one of the worst things on an economic topic that I've ever read -- you'd be better off listening to Larry Kudlow or James Cramer, and they are idiots. He was trying to argue in favor of some MMT position on central banks, and he couldn't even be bothered to understand the MMT position, let alone the mainstream position that he was contrasting it to.

The Debt book was fun, but its net effect is the endless parade of dudes scratching their chin and saying money is debt, actually. Every crackpot One Weird Trick to Run the World Economy starts with "money is debt, actually". I haven't read his bullshit jobs book (I did read an article he wrote to promote it), but the net effect is that now every job anyone doesn't like is bullshit. Would this job exist in some future anarchist utopia that exists in our heads? No? Then it's bullshit. A couple of years ago Jayadev and Bowles wrote a paper on what they called "guard labor", which is jobs that exist to enforce property rights. The point behind this is that property is itself a costly institution, and part of calculating the consequences of introducing property rights is calculating the costs. This is a sensible and important point. But is it fun? No. Calling jobs bullshit is fun.

Graeber is very much the Man of the Hour, in that he fits the current culture of glib explanations that are emotionally satisfying. He was grist for the mill of half-informed opinions that sound smart. He wasn't the worst influence in that culture, but he was one of many inputs in a production process that produces ignorance. So, I hate him. I didn't hate him enough to wish actual ill on him -- I would have preferred for him to live a long life to contemplate the error of his ways. But I hate him.

On my way to the beach with Pola and another friend

160 I've actively tuned out everything I ever learned about economics -- and I definitely did not learn as much as I was supposed to to get that BS -- but I've been having fun lately telling folks about the trillion dollar platinum coin, and how, we've kind of just decided to act like we have some, even without actually coining any. Go ahead and think of that clip from that Adam Sandler movie where the guy says that everyone is dumber for having listened to Sandler -- that's the cheer I'm spreading these days.

I recently discovered that the trillion dollar coin would settle an argument in economics, so they should do it. There's an argument that there's a difference between direct monetization and the government issuing debt that the Fed immediately buys up. This argument is from a Chicago-school economist, so therefore wrong, but they should run the experiment so that I can win an online argument.

Here's a comment by Graeber in 2018 calling Brad DeLong a serial liar and a stalker.

162. I thought the whole point of fiat money was that you didn't have to mint the trillion dollar coin. You just pretend to have one. Or ten. Or a trillion. Whatever you need at the time.

I was reminded of the CT seminar on Debt lo these many years ago, and had a quick skim: Graeber does not come out of that well on a professional or a personal level.

Yeah, the trillion dollar coin only exists as an idea because of internal US politics. It's not really necessary. It became a thing because in theory Obama could have done it unilaterally to avoid the debt ceiling law.

Yes, exactly. Both the 164 and 166. And as we see, you don't even have to pretend to have one: once you accept the possibility, you can just hand wave the debt away even without the coin.

Agree with Frowner above re Graeber, everyone I've seen who knew him IRL had very good things to say about him. Unfortunately he was ill-served by his online presence, he was thin-skinned and prickly and very quick to take offense. But he genuinely moved the needle on issues of poverty and income inequality. He made the world a better place, even if he got on a lot of people's nerves. I think dsquared is fair https://twitter.com/dsquareddigest/status/1301681779825410050

Eh, I'm skeptical. There is a tendency to reduce mass movements to brand names. We've been in an era of increasing inequality. (The causes of which were already being debated by economists in the 90s.) Eventually people were going to notice. It's not like the result of the financial crisis was going to be "inequality sure is great!"

"Greed is good."

163.2: Just the form of that post -- really a series of link-less insults making broad accusations -- renders it dubious.

|| I just got a letter from the DOD asking if I'm still interested in getting documents responsive to a FOIA request I sent them in May 2010. I bet this isn't even a record. |>