My prediction is that nothing will come of this in terms of the election. The sad thing—the very sad thing—is that Trump’s nomination has allowed Hillary Clinton to get away with things that would otherwise have harmed her with the electorate had she been running against anyone else. And the sad thing about Hillary Clinton’s nomination is that it has allowed Donald Trump to get away with things that would otherwise have harmed him had he been running against anyone else.
I have a question for those who think Trump is the Master Persuader
In the third debate, there was a moment when Trump muttered “nasty woman” in response to Hillary.
Let’s not even worry about what she had said or done prior to that, or whether his remark about her was justified. For the purposes of this post, let’s just take those questions off the table and stipulate that she is indeed a nasty woman who had said something nasty and who often does, and that he was fully correct in describing her that way.
My question is for those people who think Trump is a Master Persuader, as Scott Adams has been saying for a long time. How does this remark of Trump’s fit into that framework? Do you think it does? Do you think it was an error? Does it make you rethink the “Master Persuader” idea about Trump at all?
Because to me—and as I said, let’s forget about whether he was right or wrong about Hillary for a moment—it was a tactically stupid thing for Trump to do, one of many.
Now, in that Scott Adams post I just linked to, Adams seems to think that, prior to Trump, most people believed that other people are 90% rational. I probably am a person who believes in rationality more than most people do, and if you had asked me about it prior to Trump I would have said that most people are not primarily rational—and that is especially true in certain arenas, of which political decision-making is most definitely one. Nor do I believe most people see people as 90% rational; I have no idea why Adams says that.
At any rate, Adams indicates that he himself believes the following:
Trump says and does whatever he needs to do in order to get the results he wants. And apparently he does it well…
The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal. Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90% irrational and acts accordingly…
If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).
Adams wrote that back in March, when the primaries were still in full force. There is no question that Trump managed to hammer on the emotions of enough GOP primary voters to beat the other GOP contenders, although never to “persuade” the majority. His appeal was not entirely emotional—there was content to it, as well. But I don’t think anyone disagrees with the idea that he tapped into already-existing emotions in what became his base.
But what’s happened in the general? To me, just in the tactical sense, Trump is still playing to the emotions of his base. Nasty woman is a good example. The base loves it; “yes, stick it to her!” But if persuasion and appeal to emotion is the key to getting voters on your side, and if Trump wanted to actually win the general, that statement made no sense.
Trump’s base is already firmly and safely in his pocket. He knows that. His base would crawl over the proverbial broken glass to vote for him. They don’t just think Hillary Clinton is nasty, they think she’s much worse than that and that she’s (fill in the blank with whatever pejorative word you want). He no longer has to persuade his base of a thing.
But he can’t seem to stop playing to his base. Why? He had to have known—and his advisors have to have been telling him—that in that final debate one of his main tasks was to persuade (there’s that word again) as many people as possible among those who don’t yet support him that he is stable, able to control himself, not impulsive—and not anti-woman.
His “nasty woman” remark wasn’t going to persuade anyone that Hillary is a nasty woman unless that person already thought Hillary was a nasty woman. And it most definitely wasn’t going to persuade anyone of what was Donald Trump’s emotional task (not his rational task) during that debate: to show as many people as possible that he’s under control of his emotions. In fact, that remark of his indicated the opposite: that he is given to juvenile, schoolyard taunting, in particular against women but perhaps even in general. And some of listeners might think that perhaps he would do this sort of thing as president—some time when he needed to be diplomatic, thoughtful, and controlled instead.
Trump also gave his opponents a golden opportunity to market his remarks in the same way that Hillary’s “deplorables” became a meme.
So, once again—how does this remark of Trump’s fit into the Master Persuader framework? Do you think it does? Do you think it was an error? What do you believe Trump was trying to do here, and why? Was it successful? What does it say about him?
I’d also like to point out the content/process distinction I made a while back, when I was analyzing Christie’s attack on Rubio for repeating himself in one of the GOP debates:
When I was studying interpersonal communication and how to track an argument, one thing that was very much emphasized was the difference between content and process. Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are arguing. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else””for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext.
Trump is a candidate who uses process arguments (or remarks) more than most candidates do. It’s his specialty, and it’s part of his emotional “persuasive” appeal to his supporters. It’s also a big part of the reason for his unfavorable ratings among others, and his failure to be leading Hillary in the general. Process arguments and process remarks/gestures are not always purely irrational, but they sometimes are irrational and they definitely tend to appeal on a more emotional and less rational level than content remarks/gestures. So they fit right into Adams’ “Master Persuader” argument about the prevalence of irrationality in the human decision-making process.
“Nasty woman” was a process remark of Trump’s. And as I said earlier, it wasn’t the least bit persuasive, except to those who already agreed with him. And it solidified the idea many people have that Trump is even nastier than Hillary. If Trump loses—and I believe he will—it will be mostly for this reason: he has failed to persuade people that he is stable on an emotional level.
Trump and Clinton: policy and character
Yesterday Trump outlined a policy to help black Americans. Here’s his speech on the subject.
Too bad few people are listening. And, as I’ve said before, they’re not listening because Trump is not trusted. And not just not trusted by black Americans—not trusted by a broad swathe of people in this country.
You might say that Hillary Clinton isn’t trusted, either. And why should she be? However, she is certainly trusted in one sense: to continue the liberal/left policies of the Democratic Party.
And a great many people are quite happy indeed with those policies. Trump needed to win the trust of most of those who aren’t happy with them, and so far he hasn’t. And he has pretty much run out of time.
Also, for small government conservatives, this sort of statement of Trump’s doesn’t sit well at all (from his speech yesterday):
If I’m President, and the executives at Ford Motor Company announce they are moving their plants and jobs to Mexico, I will pick up the phone and make a simple call. I will tell those executives that if they move their factories to Mexico, I will put a 35% tax on their product before they ship it back into the United States. We won’t let your jobs be stolen from you anymore.
As a capitalist and businessman, Trump certainly knows why those jobs have been “stolen” (which of course is the demagogic word for it). He also knows—or should know—that he can’t just make a “simple call” and pass a tariff like that, although presidents are given a lot of tariff power:
When it comes to aggressively raising tariffs, however, his proposals appear to be unique within the 2016 field in either party.
There’s not a lot of detail to Trump’s suggestions, making them hard to fully evaluate, but trade experts from across the political spectrum warn that most of his threatened tariffs would violate decades of binding trade deals negotiated by previous administrations and agreed to by previous Congresses.
“That 20% tax would be an absolutely straightforward violation of probably every trade law the United States has with any other country,” Joshua Meltzer, a fellow in global economy and development at the Brookings Institution, told msnbc.
“All of our existing agreements lock us into lower tariffs,” Claude Barfield, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who supports lowered trade barriers, told msnbc.
“Absolutely illegal,” Robert E. Scott, director of trade and manufacturing research at the Economic Policy Institute and a strong critic of past trade agreements like NAFTA, told msnbc when asked about Trump’s 20% import tax.
Trump’s tariff obsession harkens back to the partisan politics of the 19th and early 20th century, when Republicans championed high tariffs in order to protect business from competition while Democrats argued the tariffs punished the working class by raising prices. This split was one of the fundamental divides between the parties until after World War II, when the U.S. led international talks to lower tariffs around the world that had been widely blamed for worsening the Great Depression.
When Trump described something similar in an interview last July, here’s how it went:
Todd asked Trump to elaborate on his promise to punish US companies that move factories to countries like Mexico. Trump used one of his favorite examples: Carrier, the air-conditioner manufacturer that moved a plant from Indiana to Mexico.
“There will be a tax to be paid. If they’re going to fire all their people, move their plant to Mexico, build air conditioners, and think they’re going to sell those air conditioners to the United States, there’s going to be a tax.”
“What kind of tax are you thinking?” Todd asked.
“It could be 25 percent. It could be 35 percent. It could be 15 percent. I haven’t determined. And it could be different for different companies. We have been working on trying to stop this…because we don’t know what we’re doing.”
Todd did not raise the objection that selective application of taxes to products sold by different businesses opens the door wide to abusive enforcement. However, he did point out that the targeting of individual companies wouldn’t make it through the World Trade Organization. But Trump waved him off. “It doesn’t matter. Then we’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out. These trade deals are a disaster, Chuck. World Trade Organization is a disaster.”
This is the problem that a person who tries to seriously evaluate many of Trump’s proposals faces: Trump doesn’t sound as though he’s really thought things through or is aware of the details. Sometimes I think it doesn’t sound as though he even cares about whether things he proposes will work or not. Mexico paying for the wall was the first thing that got attention in that respect, but there have been many many others.
All of that, in turn, keep driving the conversation back to “character.” Who is this Trump person, and why is he running for president, and what might he actually do, and is there any reality to the promises he makes?
Many people who cannot stand Hillary Clinton are voting for Trump in desperation (I may even end up being one of them, but I really don’t know). But many people are not willing to roll the dice that wildly, and all the arguments to tell them they should do so ring hollow to them.
Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:
When Luntz’s focus-group participants are asked what they think is wrong with the country, he said they always have an answer, and it’s usually a “very deep, very emotional, very personal” one. “Often, we’ll have women and men almost in tears” when talking about issues like the depletion of manufacturing jobs and unemployment in general, their feelings of a lost sense of security or their concerns about police.”
“Trump spoke to those people,” he said. “This candidate tapped into something unique [but] has absolutely lost his focus.”
The problem with Trump’s campaign, Luntz argued, “is that it’s become too much about him and not about the people he represents.”…
Trump has proceeded to alienate the people who helped him get the nomination by spending time attacking the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, decades-old allegations against former President Bill Clinton and the opening of his new hotel in Washington, D.C.
“Every day there’s another batch of emails, and every day we learn more about what she has done,” Luntz said. “No one knows about it because he speaks so loudly that all the cameras are on him, removing the oxygen in the room that should also be about her,” he added.
“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear,” he said. “It’s not how loudly you speak ”” and he speaks way too loudly ”” but what people learn from what you say. And people don’t learn anything from Donald Trump.”
To test this theory, Luntz said he recently presented news reports on Clinton’s emails to a focus group, “and it changed an entire room of undecided voters.” But once he showed the group Trump’s own attacks against Clinton over her emails, Luntz said, “They all went back to being undecided.”
He added, “Not only did he not win them over, he actually turned them off because his language is wrong, his presentation is wrong.”
You can complain all you want about how the discussion lately has been too much about character rather than policy. But there’s a reason for that. To care what a candidate says about policy, you have to trust that the candidate means what he or she says and is not just conning you. You have to trust in the candidate’s basic stability and seriousness.
Right or wrong, too many people don’t trust that about Trump, and he has done little or nothing to convince them otherwise. And that’s true of many people who would otherwise be inclined to agree with many of his policy recommendations. For those who agree with Clinton’s policies, they certainly do trust her—to be ruthless in implementing them, and to have a full grasp of the details of them.
Therein lies one big difference, and that difference helps give Clinton her edge in this election.
About that binary choice
Here’s a post that makes the case for voting for Evan McMullin rather than Clinton or Trump.
An interesting option for those who have decided not to vote for Trump or Clinton.
Congress, the Hillary Clinton presidency, and the nuclear option
This post posits what is of course still a hypothetical: a Hillary Clinton presidency.
We don’t know that she will be elected. It is not impossible that Trump could win the whole thing. It is just highly unlikely, and I really don’t think it will happen. So I’m speculating on what I think will happen, knowing that the future is full of unknowns.
When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, one of the difficult things for conservatives was that he had a compliant Congress to do his bidding. The Republicans had done so very poorly that they didn’t even have the 41 votes necessary to stop liberal legislation in the Senate, although they finally gained exactly that number with the surprise election of Scott Brown of Massachusetts (although it couldn’t stop Obamacare because the Democrats used the technique of reconciliation to pass it).
However, despite what some people say, the Republicans in Congress were able to stop some of the Obama agenda after they gained the ability to muster at least 41 votes in the Senate, and after they gained the House in 2010. That’s why the Democrats in the Senate triggered the nuclear option for judicial appointments in November of 2013, when they still controlled both the presidency and the Senate but the Republicans had gained enough senators to block judicial confirmation under the old (non-nuclear) rules.
When the GOP took control of the Senate in 2014, the nuclear option ceased to make sense, because the GOP could now block Obama’s appointments without it (which they did for Obama’s attempt to put Garland on the Supreme Court). And it was not just Garland they stopped, either; there were others, but you don’t hear much about that from the people on the right whose self-appointed task it is to tear down the so-called GOPe as do-nothings.
A lot of people probably didn’t remember that the nuclear option had already been used that way by the Democrats in 2013 for judicial appointments (I barely remembered it myself, and I’m a blogger), but it had been. That’s why it should have been no surprise at all when Harry Reid mentioned recently that the next Senate will probably activate the nuclear option for judicial appointments, too. Most Americans who don’t follow the details of politics probably don’t pay attention to the ins and outs of this, but the bottom line is that the motivation to activate the nuclear option comes into play when a president and Senate are controlled by the same party, but the opposition party has more than 41 votes in the Senate.
That’s one of the reasons why which party controls Congress is exceedingly important, and why gridlock can be a good thing when a president whose agenda you distrust and/or fear has been elected. And that’s why the possibility of Trump’s negative coattails in 2016 looms large. If Hillary Clinton becomes the next president and the Democrats take control of the Senate with the GOP retaining more than 40 seats, that’s when the nuclear option for judicial appointments (the thing Reid is referring to) would once again come into play.
Recently Reid has only been talking about the using the nuclear option for judicial appointments rather than for votes on more general issues in the Senate, and there’s a reason for that. The reason (IMHO) is not that Reid and/or the Democrats in Congress would be so loathe to exercise their full power because they respect the institution of the Senate and its moderating traditions too much. The reason is that, without control of the House as well as the Senate and presidency, it wouldn’t do the Democrats much good to exercise the nuclear option for other things because normally legislation needs to be approved by both houses of Congress. And the reason the nuclear option for judicial appointments is tempting even when a party controls only the Senate and the presidency but does not control the House is that House approval is not needed for federal judicial appointments, which are confirmed by a vote in the Senate only.
That’s not rocket science, but it’s a bit complicated and requires a certain interest in politics to follow and understand, and it’s easy to forget some of the details. That’s one of the reasons it’s easy for people to get the wrong idea about what’s possible and what’s not possible in the interactions between Congress of one party and a president of another party. It also makes clear why the situation in which Hillary would be president and both houses of Congress would be in Democratic hands (similar to what occurred at the beginning of Obama’s first term in office) is to be very much feared.
My hunch is that if Hillary is elected president and the Democrats were to end up with majorities in both the Senate and the House (something I don’t think will happen, but which is important to prevent), there is a good chance that Democrats would invoke the nuclear option not just for judicial appointments, but more generally, in order to maximize Democratic power to do things without interference from the 40+ GOP senators. Those 40+ GOP senators would really be the only thing potentially standing in their way, except a Supreme Court that is highly unlikely to do oppose them. However, if the GOP retains the House (which is likely to do), the Democrats would probably retain the nuclear option for judicial appointments only, because on other issues the House would retain its ability to thwart the Democratic aims to a certain extent.
Of course, a President Clinton could do as Obama did—which was to go around Congress and use executive power as much as possible, and dare the GOP to stop him/her.
All of this just further drives home the fact that, whoever you choose to vote for at the top of the ticket, it is exceedingly important to go to the polls and vote for Republicans in Congress. And it also explains why Ted Cruz has been busy saying that a Republican Senate could and would continue to block any Hillary SCOTUS appointment, just as they did after 2014 with Obama.
In summary, assuming a President Clinton, it is of the utmost importance that the GOP holds the House, which it seems likely to do. But the Senate outlook is very iffy—so please make sure to vote and not stay home.
The brilliant Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker
Not just O’Conner, but Stapleton too. And the script. All brilliant, I think.
People remember Archie as a buffoon, and the show as a comedy. But it was much more than that, and the acting was superb:
Podesta and the “oversampling” on polls
There’s a meme going around to the effect that Wikileaks has exposed a John Podesta email that proves that polls are rigged to favor Democrats through oversampling of Democrats. Commenter “blert” (among others) described it yesterday this way:
We have Podesta’s emails where he dictates to the pollsters how to spool up Hillary’s numbers…
Podesta’s emails explain just how easy this is to do in our era of total databases and selection algorithms.
The Podesta emails blert is referring to contain statements such as these:
Attached are the state by state polling and research recommendations from the ATLAS product that have been compiled into one document…
Hey, when can we meet? I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February. By market, regions, etc. I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.
When I read that I immediately thought it likely that Podesta was referring to internal polls, because of the use of phrases like “our polling.” Pollsters such as Gallup and Rasmussen—the sorts of polls the public relies on to gauge the popularity of various candidates—are nearly always supplemented in campaigns by private or internal polling used by each candidate to assess certain aspects of the race. This latter type of polling is performed differently than public polling (Gallup et al) and results are not made public.
And it turns out that that’s what was going on when that email of Podesta’s was written back in 2008, during the Democratic fight for the nomination:
…[The email discusses] what appears to be internal polling (not public ones published by media organizations). And oversampling in this instance means polling more people in a specific demographic group for analysis — not ignoring Republican voters to suppress their votes…
The email, one of thousands of Podesta emails released by Wikileaks, is a January 2008 exchange between Democratic strategists and employees of the Atlas Project, a political polling and data firm.
Atlas sent over 98 pages of polling and media recommendations that includes several recommendations to oversample minorities, independent voters and Democrats in certain states.
Experts told us the technical term for this is “stratified disproportionate sampling,” but most pollsters use “oversample” as a shorthand. It’s done not to skew the polls, but to gauge the attitudes of specific demographic groups, who would not be a statistically large enough group to analyze if sampled randomly.
For example, in a national sample of 1,000 eligible voters, only 12.5 percent, or 125, would be black. To accurately gauge black attitudes on certain issues, a pollster may oversample 500 black eligible voters (four times more than the random sample). Then, in analyzing the full sample, the sample of blacks would be assigned a weight of 0.25 to represent the overall population.
“If the analysis of the group is done separately, it is simply a large sample of that group. If combined with all respondents the oversample is weighted down proportionately so that the overall sample is representative of the population as a whole,” said Charles Franklin, the director of Marquette Law School Poll. “This is a standard procedure and does not mean the weighted sample gives disproportionate weight to the oversampled group.”
And yes, that quote was from Politifact, which tends to lean to the left. But the information seems to be factually correct and relevant, and to make sense. Until evidence comes up to the contrary (which certainly could happen; these things are not written in stone), I would tend to believe it, and to assume that it correctly describes that particular Podesta email.
I think it is important to realize—as most here do—that the left lies, and the MSM lies, and they shouldn’t be automatically trusted. But it is also important to realize that the right sometimes lies too, and the media on the right lies, and they shouldn’t be automatically trusted. This story about Podesta fit in so very nicely with Trump’s “rigged election” charge that it probably seemed to Trump and several pundits on the right to be too tempting to ignore, and too potentially useful to avoid making use of—even if it had to be twisted and misrepresented to do so.
Do you like being lied to? I don’t. I didn’t like being lied to by the left—in fact, that’s one of the things that sparked my political change. And I don’t like being lied to by the right. Enough bad things about the left were revealed by the Wikileaks email dump that there’s no need to make stuff up or mislead about it. But it seems they just couldn’t help themselves.
Meanwhile, Michael Totten reports on what’s been brewing in the Democratic Party
Michael Totten went to the Democratic Convention and talked to a lot of Bernie Sanders delegates and supporters:
I asked them to tell me the biggest problem they had with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment, to narrow it down to one or two things. I got a variety of answers.
“Our biggest problem,” a young man said, “is her lack of integrity.” Everyone nodded. They had other complaints, though, that set them far apart from Clinton and the party’s establishment and placed them firmly in the camp of the alt-Left.
“The Democratic Party hasn’t gotten rid of patriotism yet.” This was a complaint.
“Chants of USA, USA were disturbing. I felt like I was in Germany in the 1930s.”
“They brought out the flag and sang the national anthem.”
“You have a problem with the national anthem?” I asked.
“It makes me uncomfortable.”
“Every country in the world has a national anthem,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“Just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.”
Some surprised me again by agreeing with Trump’s lambasting of NATO. “These entangling alliances are going to get us into World War III.” At least two of these Sanders delegates said that the United States should completely disarm and have no military at all, like Costa Rica.
…[A] party espousing these ideas would find it extraordinarily difficult to win a general election. The alt-Left is no more palatable to moderate swing voters than the alt-Right. That, I suspect, is one of the unspoken reasons that the Democratic establishment wanted to muzzle these people, why it wanted to push them so hard that they do not come back, why it wanted Bernie Sanders beaten.
I asked everyone at the table if they intend to quit or to keep fighting inside the party. All said that they would keep fighting. None said that they would vote for Clinton. As far as they’re concerned, she’s a Republican.
…These young millennial delegates are the rising generation. They preferred Sanders over Clinton by a margin so overwhelming that the word “landslide” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Their collective vote was more like a tectonic shift that forced a new mountain range up out of the plains.
There’s nothing inevitable in politics, but these delegates, if they take over the Democratic Party in the future, will control the platform and the messaging, and their extreme views, combined with their generation’s startling disregard and even contempt for democratic and broadly liberal principles, will scare the daylights out of moderates in the party and could easily trigger an existential crisis. Don’t think it can happen? Nobody saw the rupture of the Republican Party coming.
That’s a pretty chilling set of responses. But at the same time, it’s fairly typical leftist stuff that’s become much more mainstream and more common, especially among the young.
Will such a rift take place for the Democrats? I don’t think so. I think the party will continue to move inexorably to the left in a more incremental fashion as a whole, as it has already been doing during the last couple of decades (some would say since FDR) and particularly during the Obama years. And it will do that in part by ejecting those who won’t move leftward with it (Joe Lieberman, anyone?).
However, one little quibble with Michael Totten about this statement of his: “Nobody saw the rupture of the Republican Party coming.” I certainly did four years ago, and I very very much doubt I was the only one:
One thing I believe is that, if Romney loses this election, the right will start tearing itself apart in anger. That’s another thing the left banks on…I already see some evidence of it in articles and comments from the right that accuse Romney of not wanting to win, of not going on the attack enough, of not doing whatever it might be that the brilliant armchair strategists would be doing if they were running for president, an election they of course would win by dint of their brilliant strategy. If Romney loses, the RINO theme will rise again undiminished, and the hatred of the “Republican establishment.”
My opinion of what’s going on is quite different: if the American people re-elect Obama despite his failures, lies, betrayals, immaturity, gaffes, arrogance, destructive foreign policy, demonstrated leftism, small-mindedness, lack of leadership, executive power-grabs, fiscal irresponsibility, and a host of other negatives I may have forgotten to list but which have been operating for the last four years, then it will prove that the American people have fundamentally changed in the direction they want this country to take, and it will require some major upheaval to reverse that trend.
Trump was merely the symptom of a huge rift that had already occurred before he declared himself a candidate. He leapt into that already-existing gulf, and pushed with all his might to widen it.
He has succeeded in that endeavor.
Early voting in Florida: fun with statistics
You can have a lot of fun with statistics.
At Gateway Pundit, an extremely pro-Trump blog, there’s a post entitled, “YUGE! Trump Leads Early Voting in Florida By 120,000 ”“ A First For Republicans in The State” [hat tip: Artfldgr].
Sounds good for Trump, doesn’t it?:
…[Trump’s] lead in early voting [in Florida] is a first for Republicans.
The News Alert blog reports:
Florida Shocker: Republicans Winning By 120,000 Votes In Early Voting. #Trump the FIRST Republican EVER to win early votes in FL! #TrumpPence16.
BREAKING: #Trump the FIRST Republican EVER to win early votes in FL! #TrumpPence16 pic.twitter.com/PzefGCEAfE
”” ALWAYS TRUMP! (@Always_Trump) September 23, 2016
If you follow that link to News Alert you can study for yourself what is actually being said as to what dates are being compared, and what kind of voting is being compared. They say that, as of 9/23/16, the total number of Republican early voters (the reference to “early voters” is in the headline of the post) was 880,234 and Democratic early voters was 759,184. They also say that in 2012, when Obama won Florida, the breakdown for the parties in early voting was 43% Democrat vs. 40% Republican.
But note that the 2016 figures were reported as of September 23, 2016 and are represented by numbers. The set of figures for 2012 are reported as percentages, and are as of November 1, 2012. In Florida, what happens between September 23 and November 1? Well, a lot more people vote, and they vote in different ways (more about that later in this post).
Those are also figures for the party affiliation of voters, not for their actual votes in terms of who they voted for or plan to vote for. So that headline at Gateway Pundit was doubly misleading. These aren’t actually votes for Trump, they are about party affiliation of ballots requested. And the comparison of the early voting in 2012 (by November 1) to the early voting in 2016 (in late September) was comparing two very different animals, as well. “Early voting” in Florida is defined this way:
Early Voting is defined as “casting a ballot in person prior to Election Day at a location designated by the Supervisor of Elections and depositing the voted ballot in the tabulation system.” The voter uses the same type of voting equipment that is used at the polls on Election Day. In all elections when there is a state or federal office race, early voting is required to be available. Early voting may be offered in county, municipal and other local elections.
Actual “early voting” just began yesterday in Florida, so those September 23 statistics can’t be referring to early voting, although the November 1 statistics from 2012 include it.
If you want to see what’s really been going on in 2016 up to this point, the site has been updated recently to read that 733,605 absentee ballots have been requested so far by Democrats and not returned and 704,440 absentee ballots have been requested by Republicans and not yet returned. So on that score, the Democrats are now ahead.
It also says at that site that 556,058 Republican absentee ballots that were requested have been returned, and 525,076 Democratic absentee ballots have been returned. So there is a slight lead for Republicans on that statistic alone. Therefore, that last statistic might show some sort of weakly good news for Trump. But digging deeper, you’ll find it’s actually not good news at all [emphasis mine]:
In two must-win states for Trump, North Carolina and Florida, Republicans are clinging to narrow leads in the total number of mail-in ballots requested. Yet in both states, Clinton is ahead of President Barack Obama’s pace four years earlier ”” and the GOP trails Mitt Romney’s clip.
Any diminishment of the GOP’s mail-in ballot lead is a matter of concern for Republicans because Democrats typically dominate early in-person voting in both states, which will begin over the next 10 days.
“Democrats have narrowed already the advantage that the Republicans had in 2012,” said Michael McDonald, whose United States Election Project offers detailed analysis of early and absentee voting patterns.
So, to recap: the optimistic news for Trump reported by Gateway Pundit was achieved by comparing a statistic on which Democrats usually lead—total early votes—from four years ago with a 2016 statistic in which Republicans usually lead by more than they’re leading now. It is a case of cheerleading the troops with a clever use of misleading and mismatched statistics.
Gateway Pundit tells you to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain:
CONFIRMED: Early Voting Data Shows Trump Lead ”“ Ignore Trolls Who Say Otherwise
CONFIRMED: Early Voting Data Shows Trump Lead ”“ Ignore Trolls Who Say Otherwise
DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED WITH EARLY VOTING DATA ”” IGNORE ALL TROLLS WHO SAY OTHERWISE
DO NOT LISTEN TO THE CORRUPT MEDIA”“ We Know Hillary’s Plan. It was revealed by Wikileaks”¦
LEAKED CLINTON INTERNAL DOCUMENT: Discourage Trump Supporters with Bogus Polls and Declaring Election Over
So do not listen to the lying media”“
Trump is leading in early voting data””
All caps; now, that’ll do it!
And here’s a quote that Gateway Pundit offers from someone named Reddit the Donald, about the whole thing:
First, Republicans are turning in their mail-in ballots in higher numbers than the Democrats in Florida. Yes, that site claims that more Democrats received their mail-in ballots, but it shows that more republicans actually give enough of a shit to vote i.e. Trump is inspiring more people to vote than Hillary (this means that more Pro-Trump independents will vote than Pro-Hillary independents).
Of course, people would say that McCain and Romney held a higher lead with mail-in ballots in Florida than Trump (assuming that most republicans will vote for the republican candidate ”” which they most likely will). That is true, but it is highly misleading. If holding a lead in mail-in ballots actually mattered, then both McCain and Romney should have won Florida, yet they did not.
The first sentence of that second paragraph invalidates the first paragraph, because if the Republican mail-in ballots in this Year of the Trump are running behind when Romney ran, than it does not show that Trump is inspiring more people to vote than Hillary is, any more than the even greater lead in Romney’s mail-in ballots in 2012 meant that Romney was inspiring more people to vote than Obama was.
And of course, that second paragraph’s last sentence is illogical. No one is implying that mail-in ballots matter in the absolute sense in terms of leading to victory; no one except the Trump cheerleaders, that is. The Romney forces certainly aren’t arguing it, since they know that Romney won on that metric and lost the state overall in the general election.
And yet I can pretty much guarantee that many people find those pro-Trump arguments very credible indeed. As Trump would say: sad.
[NOTE: By the way, when I saw those glowing pro-Trump headlines from Gateway Pundit, I went there to read about it with an open mind. I certainly believed it very possible that they were reporting on an actual phenomenon, and that perhaps Trump was doing better in Florida than had been expected. When I got there, however, and checked out the information in the links, I found a very different story—one either of blatant deception or ignorance.
Some people will say that I should stop reporting gloomy news. But I’m a realist, and I believe in reporting what’s true. Lies only lead to more deception—including what may be the most destructive thing of all in this case, self-deception.]
Obamacare…
…marches on with double-digit premium hikes.
Sometimes I get tired of typing the words “no surprise.” But it’s no surprise.
Sad news: Steven den Beste has died
Unless you were around in the early days of the blogsophere, you may not have heard of Steven den Beste, and the news that he has died may not mean much to you.
But to those of us who remember him, he was a giant. I wrote a post about him in 2005, and I’ll reproduce excerpts from it now:
I miss Steven Den Beste.
No, I never met him; and yes, I know he’s not returning to political blogging…
He’s very ill; and, what’s more, even if he weren’t, I don’t get the sense that he’s the type who would respond to pleadings from his audience…He’s the type who makes up his mind and that’s it. No looking back. At least that’s what I imagine.
But I still miss him, and hope he’s doing well. I think, when I reflect on it, that he was my favorite blogger. There was nothing easy about him; no cheap shots, no funny stuff. He didn’t pander, and he was the hardest worker imaginable, churning out reams of lucid prose on a daily basis. I never understood how there were enough hours in a day for him to write as much as he did, even if he was working round the clock. And of course I didn’t know at the time that it was done at enormous physical cost to him because he was suffering from a progressive degenerative illness. When he quit blogging about a year ago in July, 2004, he cited both the illness and a massive psychological burnout that seems to have come from the fact that almost all the mail he got—and he got a lot of it—was negative.
I felt guilty, having never written him an e-mail myself that let him know how much I admired and appreciated his work. I wrote one afterwards, but he never replied, nor did I expect him to. I like to think it was because he was inundated with similar missives.
Den Beste had never impressed me as being the type to care whether people appreciated him or not, though. In fact, Bill Whittle famously called him the “Krell Mind Machine”–and those of you who read the book The Forbidden Planet in your youth and loved it (as I did), or saw the movie, will understand what Whittle was getting at. But I suppose even the most cerebral of us—and Steven Den Beste was nothing if not cerebral—have feelings, too (something that should be glaringly obvious, but is sometimes clear only in retrospect).
To those of you who got into reading blogs after Den Beste had retired and who don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to visit his archived writings. Here’s a guide. Of course, it’s not the same as reading his analyses at the time he wrote them. For example, during the buildup to the Iraq war, when the US was presenting its case (interminably, it seemed) to the balky UN, I recall that it was Den Beste who had the best (yes, puns are irresistible) writings on the situation. He was the one I relied on.
You had to be patient to stick with Den Beste—he wasn’t what you’d call a quick read. Step by laborious step, he’d take the reader through a beautifully and logically reasoned argument or explanation, and he didn’t really care how long it took. He respected his readers and figured they were up to the task—and for him, they were. He sometimes dealt with minutiae and technical things (after all, he’d been an engineer), and some of his posts were arcane. If on a certain day he wanted to write about something obscure and tech-y, or anime—well then, that’s what he wrote about that day (and that’s the day I might take a break from his blog). But most of the time he worked large, weaving together examples from disparate sources in new and unexpected—and, above all, deep—ways, bringing the sharp order of his mind to the chaos of politics and world events.
As Den Beste himself put it (and he put it best) in this essay about the process by which he wrote his articles, he used an “internal mechanism” which was especially “good at…finding non-obvious relationships.” That was indeed his specialty. In the same essay, he says: I write about something because I’m compelled to, because it’s often the case that if I don’t, then I can’t get it out of my head. Putting my thoughts into print relieves an internal pressure which also isn’t easily described.
That came across in his essays. He seemed to be a pressure cooker of some sort: throw in a bunch of data, seal the top, add heat, and the pressure would build until—voila!—out came a tasty feast, in his case an intellectual one, cooked in far less time than conventional pots and normal pressure could ever accomplish. It’s not surprising he burnt out. Even if he hadn’t had an illness, I can’t imagine anyone keeping up that sort of pace.
Den Beste was a master of the long essay form and a blog pioneer, beginning in early 2001, when most of us had never even heard the word “blog.” I’m a practitioner of the medium-to-longish essay myself, and I tip my proverbial hat to Den Beste for setting the bar very very high.
Den Beste had been in ill health for many years. RIP.
[NOTE: Some of the links in the above passage from that 2005 post no longer work.]
Harry Reid says the Senate is set for the nuclear option
No surprise whatsoever:
Reid, who has previously floated changing the rules in 2017, added to TPM that if Republicans “mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion. So I’ve set that up. I feel very comfortable with that.”
In 2013 Senate Democrats changed the filibuster rules on most of Obama’s nominees, allowing them to get approved by a simple majority, but left the 60-vote hurdle intact for Supreme Court nominations.
However, the 2013 shift ”” the most significant change to Senate floor procedure in decades ”” has sparked years of backlash from Republicans, who warned that it undercuts a minority party’s ability to block a president’s nomination.
The reason the Democrats are poised to do this isn’t just because they are expecting to take the Senate, it’s because they are also fully expecting to continue to control the presidency with the election of Hillary Clinton. The nuclear option only makes sense when a president is of the same party as those exercising it, as I pointed out about a year ago:
As I said, on the day when Republicans are no longer in control of the Senate, Democrats will jettison the rule themselves if they see a need to do so.
That said, I don’t think McConnell’s objection [to activating the nuclear option last year] is a fake or theatrical one. This would be a huge, huge, and risky step (it’s not called “nuclear” for nothing), and to what end? To have Obama veto any bill that is passed?
When there is a president of the opposite party in the Oval Office, the nuclear option just leads to a veto. That’s the reality of presidential power. And that’s why it didn’t make sense for the Republicans to jettison the rule during the Obama years. They calculated that they didn’t want it in place until 2016, when a Republican became president, as they fully expected to happen prior to the revelations of the 2016 campaign season. Then it would mean something. And if they lost both the presidency and the Senate in 2016 (which looks increasingly likely to happen), they certainly didn’t want it to already be in place at their own hands, so they would have no valid objections to its continuing when it would harm them and benefit the Democrats.
But mark my words: I predict that if Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2016, and the Senate passes into Democratic hands, and the Democrats in the Senate then go about exercising the nuclear option (I believe all those things will occur), a lot of angry people on the right will yell that it once again proves how wimpy and awful the GOP members of Congress are, because they didn’t do it when Obama was president. The fact that it would have been mostly to no avail because of the veto would probably be lost on most of those people or ignored by them, and in their anger they’ll take it out on the remaining GOP members of Congress and thus guarantee even greater Democratic control of our entire government.
If that sounds gloomy—well, sorry, but I guess it is.