abff08f4813c

Good news for a change! So I wonder - is the change due to Duke's endorsement? The racists switch from voting from the GOP guy to Stein now because that?

But there's a reason for caution here, as the poll has a margin of error or 2.1% and the change to the duopoly candidates is smaller than this.

Namely, Harris staying at 49% isn't affected and the GOP guy goes down from 47% to 46% when Stein is added (49/47 w/o vs 49/46 w/).

With that margin of error, it could easily be the other way around, (so 48/47 w/ in the extreme case).

The margin of error is such that the poll is basically useless.

I’ve been told this absolute bullshit consistently for 40 fucking years

So the thing is the above can be entirely unrelated to the below

while universal healthcare polls in the 80% approval range as long as you don’t actually call it “universal healthcare.”

Wouldn't it be a huge irony if the 80% that approves all live in safe blue and red states, while the 20% that don't approve all live in the battleground states?

Being in denial of the reasons for the former doesn't actually solve the problem, it will just cause Dems to lose the Electoral College.

That aside, I do recall laughing when Mitt Romney started campaigning against the ACA, and then Obama thanked Romney for the idea (the ACA being based on an earlier universal healthcare scheme for a State that Romney promoted and successfully implemented as its governor).

I suppose you've hit the nail on the head actually - progressive policies can be a win if they're appropriately branded and marketed in the right way to that demographic. But that goes to the point from Vox that I echoed earlier - the campaign has to be tailored to win over the swing voters specifically, rather than the average American - and the former can actually look quite different from the latter.

The thing is progressive policy gets the votes Harris is chasing here too
He flipped red states by flipping moderate voters with progressive policy.

I suspect this worked in part because he tailored his policy and his messaging in the battleground states, specifically so his policy would appeal to the swing voters there. (Another part is that progressive policy is just that good, naturally.)

So this may work again for Harris, but the messaging has to be done in a tailored way.

Even if we lose some votes, progressive policy is a net gain.

That's the fear - that an untailored, or badly or wrongly tailored, policy might cause more damage - a net loss of votes in the battleground states overall, where we can't really afford that loss.

Well, it's not this straightforward. I'm not sure where you got your numbers and percentages from, but working on the assumption that they are correct:

It also matters where the votes come from. If the remaining 40% is all clustered in California and New York, and they all are convinced to go out and vote, and also vote blue, that doesn't have an effect on the outcome.

Why? Electoral College.

See this chart, showing that split ticket voting (in particular, folks who voted all Republican EXCEPT for the President, where they voted Biden) was about 4% out of everyone who voted in 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2020/10/PP_2020.10.21_split-icket-voting_0-01.png

Also, look at the small margins that Biden won on the swing states according to https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency. So what this could mean, assuming that the 4% holds generally, is that the 4% difference cause by split ticket voting is greater than the margin that Biden won in those swing states. So without winning those folks - those moderate Republicans - over, the Dems lose the Electoral College and thus the Presidency.

This is just plain wrong. Vox says it better than I can,

It reflects wishful thinking and a rigid set of political priors — namely, that Democrats’ political problems always stem from insufficient motivation of base voters — more than a cold, hard look at what the electoral and demographic data say.

Source: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/1/29/16945106/democrats-white-working-class-demographics-alabama-clinton-obama-base

Also, keep this in mind,

Campaigns tailor their messages for swing voters, who are not demographically representative

Source: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/22/13713148/electoral-college-democracy-race-white-voters

The campaign of Harris knows what it is doing. This, sadly, is indeed what it takes to win.

Yes, please.

Right on the 2nd point.

On the 1st ... hope it's not true. The current GOP candidate is already saying Biden is being too hard on Israel and not helping them enough. So going with Dem is still the best way. That said, would likely benefit the Dems if somehow further escalations didn't happen or got delayed until after the election...

Well, the world has seen and allowed for much sillier and dumber things that.

But the interesting thing here is that a lot of countries don't acknowledge the opposite. For example, this is the US's official position on the One China Policy:

The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.

The US acknowledges that Chinese .. have a view, and doesn't challenge it. But never does the US say that Taiwan is a part of China.

In fact, the US gave the Six Assurances to the gov't on Taiwan later, one of which is,

Has not altered its position regarding the sovereignty over Taiwan

And if I'm understanding correctly, the US is just one of a number of countries that refuse to state or concede outright that Taiwan is a part of China. They may not spell out the opposite (realpolitik as a price to engage with the PRC), but it's still a case where silence can speak volumes, I think.

TBF, that would have been when Nate Silver was running the show. But he left and 538 is using a new, untested model now.

On reflection, your reasoning makes more sense. But I checked and it seems like they haven't published the non-confidential report yet on the DMA website at https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-concludes-online-social-networking-service-x-should-not-be-designated-under-digital-2024-10-16_en so it's hard tell what they were thinking. Probably will be clearer once the report is finally published.

I think that's what they were trying to do with the GPS tracking, and why the Russians started spoofing the GPS location. So the illegal terminal would think it's in Poland or some other part of the EU rather than being in the conflict area.

I wonder though if GPS is the end here though. The actual signal from the terminal to the Starlink satellites itself - that can probably be triangulated. Perhaps with less accuracy than GPS but ... so do all the things you said, plus: if the triangulated signal somehow doesn't match the GPS coordinates by too big a difference, shut the terminal down.

There still remains the case of Russian military units killing a Ukraine unit and stealing the terminal before they have a chance to deactivate it. However, first eventually HQ will realize that the unit is unaccounted for and cancel it so it only has a limited window to be used, and second it would cost the Russians quite a bit in human life to acquire terminals in this manner, hopefully high enough that they won't be willing to pay it at all.

My reading of Nate Silver's article suggests that the OC (original commenter's) comment is right though. Quote from the article:

the movement could just be random variation in the polls — if Harris really is ahead nationally by 3 points and in the Blue Wall states by about 1 point we’d expect her to have better and worse weeks that vary around that average.

Sounds like phantom momentum to me. And Nate also agrees with the part about there being Republican bias in the polls,

First, are polls from Republican-aligned firms more favorable to Trump this cycle? Yes, ... Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally in this simple average. But when you look at only Republican-aligned firms, she’s up by only 2.0 points. Removing those polls from the average brings Harris up to a 3.4 point national lead. These aren’t huge differences, but they’re not nothing. Combined with a similar pattern in state-level averages, polls from Republican-leaning firms could push polling averages — and by extension forecasts — rightward.

This last sentence is important so I'll repeat it,

Combined with a similar pattern in state-level averages, polls from Republican-leaning firms could push polling averages — and by extension forecasts — rightward.

Of course Nate believes, as you state, that he's able to account for it by adjusting for the house effects and such. Which would overcome the flood.

He then seems to go on and justify that his house effects are accurate by comparing with pollsters whose averages are excluding Republican polls (thus avoiding the bias completely) and saying that he winds up with the same result as them.

However, it's really interesting to note that most of the polling averages he compares with don't include as many GOP polls.

In fact it's Nate's own average that is the lowest in favor of Harris. In fact I think 538 is the only other one that does even include those GOP polls.

And somehow these are the ones that show the GOP candidate with a lead.

In fact, VoteHub - the one using only high quality nonpartisan polls - actually has Harris winning the Electoral College currently., 270 vs 268: https://polls.votehub.com/

Electoral College average
Harris 270, Trump 268
National Average
Harris +2.3
Tipping Point (MI)
Harris +0.1
Electoral College Bias
R +2.2

Now Nate can easily justify this as a tiny difference within the margin of error. And he's be right, of course. But I feel that this shows, even after all the hard and brilliant work by Nate and folks, the flooding by the GOP polls seem to be off by just enough to push things over the edge. Ignore them for more accurate data, and the picture looks different.