My point about voters is that everyone you EVER interact w on political twitter, at political events falls into the tails of this distribution (2.5%). Most people who watch mainstream major networks news, read @nytimes or @WAPO,watch Sunday shows would fall within the 13.5% bands
Although there are certainly some primary voters who hail from the two 34% areas, the bulk of the two party's primary electorates come from the right & left flank of this graph, which means the far left & right are far more extreme than average & even the center and mods are more
conservative and liberal than the average electorate. For all the convo about the Dem primary, polling consistently shows only about 40% of all people who plan to cast ballots in it, people who as a group are already non-representative of the whole country, have watched a debate
Much of the people sitting in those two 34% bands are America's "disengaged" (as @pewresearch calls them). They aren't particularly ideological, but bc of that, they aren't all that inclined to participate (although this is NOT the only thing driving our low participation rates).
So when I give public lectures and interviews I try to remind my audiences that if they are hearing me talk, they are in the 1%. And when they look around confused I clarify, "no, no, not the income 1%, the information 1%. Th engagement 1%. And this is the crisis that underlies
every other crisis we have in American politics."
I want to add this follower Q to the thread in case other people need this frame of reference. Very good Q!
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Welcome to the Upside Down:
It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy
Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee.
There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.
I’ll be calling this feature This is America, after Shirer’s (heavily censored) live radio show from the 1930s and I’ll be offering this service only to paid subscribers because I need to keep the lights on. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, I have no dental insurance so please consider converting your old newspaper subscription money into The Cycle and I will watch the decline of democracy so you don’t have to.
Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment
We’re humans, we like certainty.
In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.
Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.
Why?
Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking
Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy
January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it.
By March, Dachau concentration camp was opened with its inaugural prisoners: members of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and other prominent Hitler critics. including some members of the Reichstag which Hitler’s allies would join with the National Socialists to voluntarily dissolve to give Hitler near total power.
From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
“Nazi persecution of political opponents exacted a terrible price in human suffering. Between 1933 and 1939, the criminal courts sentenced tens of thousands of Germans for "political crimes." If the police were confident of a conviction in court, the prisoner was turned over to the justice system for trial. If the police were unsatisfied with the outcome of criminal proceedings they would take the acquitted citizen or the citizen who was sentenced to a suspended sentence into protective detention and incarcerate him or her in a concentration camp.”
🧵General Election Update
Are the Polls Really Narrowing?
When we say Republicans are flooding the zone with partisan polls to set a narrative that Trump can win, the data above is what we mean.
Here I have highlighted the one poll in the past 3 days which comes from a reliable pollster and that is the one that still shows Harris +4 among likely voters. 👆
In addition to the Polls Narrowing Mirage, we have some good hard data points we can look at to get a sense of where the race is, and what we might expect in terms of its outcome. Record-shattering early vote data from both Georgia and North Carolina suggests Democrats are very motivated to vote, even more so than in 2020.
🧵24 Days to Go, I Wanna be Sedated:
As Election Day Nears, Race Remains a Toss Up
As the final 3 weeks begins, the race between Harris and Trump remains a toss up, with a modest Harris lead in the polling aggregation and within margin of error polling in most of the swing states.
There is nothing I can do to give you absolution, this is (and always has been) a race that will come down to a few thousand votes in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona and will be much tighter than in 2020.
There are precisely two polls that show Trump winning and both are from partisan pollsters.
If you asked me which campaign I’d rather be in terms of being positioned to win, I’d still choose the Harris campaign who will not need to rely as heavily on Election Day voting. Trump’s lies about early/absentee voting is clearly still effecting Republican voter behavior with Republicans way underperforming the early vote aside from two notable exceptions: Arizona and Nevada, which is definitely a red flashing warning light for Democrats.
🚨Trumps Closing Message: Kamala's Agenda is They/Them, Not You
The Trump Campaign is Going All In on Men. Will It Work?
Elections are usually games of addition. That is what makes the Trump campaign’s 2024 strategy of purging voter rolls in swing states they control like Virginia and Georgia so unique: their goal is subtraction.
Nearly every state conducts routine maintenance on its voter registration rolls to keep them up to date and prevent fraud. Federal law requires these routine “purges” be completed 90 days prior to the election, a deadline Alabama Republicans simply ignored now that the Republican Party has abandoned the rule of law.