A deep dive into polling in 2020 v. 2016 by @Nate_Cohn of @nytimes. The big news today: Even if this year’s polls are as bad as the 2016 state polls, Joe Biden has enough of a lead to win.
“Of course, the polls won’t be exactly as wrong as they were in 2016. They could understate support for Donald Trump by an even greater degree. But there are good reasons to believe that many causes of 2016’s poll misfire are less likely this time around:
“More pollsters now weight by education, which ensures that voters without a college degree make up an appropriate share of the sample. Many state polls had far too many college graduates four years ago, leading them to underestimate Mr. Trump.
“There are far fewer undecided voters, who ultimately broke toward Mr. Trump across the Upper Midwest. A similar late break among undecided voters this time would be less consequential.
“A more stable race. Our estimate of the polling error in 2016 is a little unfair to pollsters: We’re looking at the average error over the final three weeks of the race.
“That includes polls taken after the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape and before the Comey letter. Those polls showed Mrs. Clinton with a commanding lead. The final polls were more accurate, if still biased toward Mrs. Clinton.
“This time it’s probably less likely that the polls will swing greatly over the last few weeks of the race. After all, they’ve been far more stable over the last few months than they were at any point in 2016.
“That doesn’t mean that we’re immune to another misfire. Indeed, most polling misses happen precisely because the causes can’t be anticipated.
“That’s why our tables on this page also include the polling miss from 2012, when surveys underestimated President Obama. But it also means there’s no reason the polls couldn’t be off by even more than they were four years ago.”
Thanks to @NastyOldWomyn for flagging this article.
“Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes & regulations, but that’s only part of the story.
“Tech plutocrats like Thiel & Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy.” newrepublic.com/article/183971…
“ … Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’—Vance embraces a radical ideology hell-bent on destroying government as we know it.
“It’s all in caps, like they’re shouting at us. The content and the form are high-schoolish. It reads as though someone who lacks substance tried to write bumper stickers or poster slogans that sound good but are empty—
“no one, Republican or Democrat, is going to ‘seal’ the border or ‘stop’ inflation. It’s that emptiness, ending with ‘Unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success,’ that captures the hollow spirit of this new Republican platform.
Tales of RFK, Jr., the manchild “with a pathological need for attention”, as told by his family and friends.
“Twenty years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an HBO documentary about the dangers of a nuclear plant on the Hudson River.” apple.news/AxLFAA6lFRYe1s…
“Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister Rory Kennedy, pits the crusading Kennedys, pictured flying in a helicopter over the nuclear facility, against Entergy, the power company.
“The film argued that the surrounding environment would be made uninhabitable if the plant came under terrorist attack.
“THIS WEEK’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS is barely making headlines: On Tuesday, it was revealed that a federal judge found over a year ago that there is sufficient evidence, if believed by a jury, …
to find that Donald J. Trump committed numerous federal crimes in connection with his alleged theft of classified documents and obstruction of the FBI’s attempts to get them back.” thebulwark.com/p/judge-outlin…
“Meanwhile, a second federal judge is dragging her feet getting that case past ‘Go,’ let alone ready for trial before the November election.
“If you want to publicly speak and rant about the pressing and controversial issues of the day, which is all this letter was, do not accept a federal judgeship. It really is that simple.” dorfonlaw.org/2024/05/federa…
I urge you to read this article to see what the American Bar Association used to call “lack of a judicial temperament”, a disqualifying factor for a federal judge.
“It is terrible that federal judges have life tenure and can only be impeached for committing high crimes and misdemeanors. But at least for most of our history they stayed out of the political wars occurring outside their judicial jurisdictions.