With The Conversation keeping this site’s regular US correspondent busy, a quick post of my own on the US election campaign, and a forum for the discussion thereof. The big news from my perspective is that, after all the noteworthy forecasters closed for refurbishment following Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Nate Silver has lifted the lid on his Harris-versus-Trump model.
The model launches with a 61.3% win probability for Trump and 38.1% for Harris, the balance presumably reflecting the possibility that one candidate or the other doesn’t survive until November. These numbers suggest a model with a judiciously wide zone of uncertainty around projections that superficially look very encouraging for Trump. Silver’s model records an essentially dead head on the national popular vote, and doesn’t credit Harris with a better than even chance unless she lands at least two points clear. State-level projections find Trump more likely than not to flip Wisconsin (just), Michigan and Pennsylvania (a little further ahead), Nevada (a little further again) and Arizona and Georgia (both about as strong for Trump as North Carolina, which he carried in 2020).
The Economist’s model is still on ice, but its page explaining its methodology is well worth reading. Its charts comparing the predictiveness of its poll-based and “fundamentals” models going back to 1948 are particularly interesting in finding that the latter have the superior record – certainly at predicting the result 150 days out, but even unto election day itself. However, one of its parameters does not seem to me to be quite as fundamental as all that, being a poll-based measure of presidential approval.
The question of polls-versus-fundamentals was the focus of a critique by Nate Silver of the new model developed by FiveThirtyEight, the enterprise formerly synonymous with Silver but now bought out, LucasFilm style, by Disney. Its new incarnation is overseen by G. Elliott Morris, of whom Silver says he is “not a fan”. This was producing remarkably bullish results for Biden up until it was put on ice, which evidently wasn’t persuading too many senior Democrats. As well as criticising a lack of transparency, Silver observes that the model seems to be overwhelmingly favouring fundamentals, despite its supporting data suggesting that fundamentals should in fact be viewed as less predictive than polls. Its thesis, Silver argues, is that – as of July 21 – “Joe Biden is a reasonably clear favorite to win the popular vote because he’s an incumbent, and it’s too early to really update that assumption based on the polling or anything else”.
“I say this Walz guy will be a disaster, looks like a killer”
And don’t the kids look terrified of him
Tim Walz looks like a benign, well turned out 60 year old white guy.
I’d never heard of him until a week or so ago. He seems like a safe choice, if Kamala wants to go “safe”.
Walz has dark eyes, women find that attractive, could nullify his negatives with them, big gamble. Minnesota probably viewed as Lower Canada rather than U.S.A by many voters, last 2 from there: Humphrey split the [D] vote with Wallace, Mondale trounced.
While Robert La Follette did well in 1924, winning the icicle States won’t win the Presidency.
The poll posted by BT up thread has Trump leading by 4% in Penn. It’s logical to presume that if Shapiro were to be chosen by Harris, that deficit would be wiped out overnight. Here’s the thing, having a person very close to the seat of power is like a political aphrodisiac.
And don’t the kids look terrified of him
Looks like teachers herding kids in for a photo op.
Pretty sick, imo.
edit:
All little girls.
Unless a private school, where are the little boys mobbing this guy?
That pic is a bit off, imo.
Why, exactly, are people treating this like the primary factor in selecting a VP candidate on a site that’s supposed to be about data?
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Where is your data refuting it?
“The model estimates that having a VP from Pennsylvania would improve a ticket’s margin in the Keystone State by slightly more than 0.4 percentage points. ”
https://www.natesilver.net/p/could-josh-shapiro-win-kamala-harris
PA is looking to be very close. And they lost the home-state effect when Biden dropped out. And it is 19 ECs. The pathways for a Harris victory without it are few.
Now, sure, the home-state effect shouldnt be the primary factor. But if everything else is equal, then Harris will be thinking;
There are three tight races in the rust belt
A VP candidate from the rust belt will campaign heavily in the rust belt as a local, not an outsider.
The GOP VP is from the rust belt.
“Looks like teachers herding kids in for a photo op.”
Here’s a better example of what you’re describing, when Republicans rolled back child labour laws
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“All little girls.
Unless a private school, where are the little boys mobbing this guy?”
Super weird response
Shapiro has been my pick for weeks.
All little girls ‘mobbing’ the guy, whose idea was that?
Pretty weird pic, imo.
The photo causing so much angst for one PBer is probably related to the Minnesota budget signed by Walz on 24 May. It has a heavy emphasis on children and young people.
Pretty weird pic, imo.
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Happy people smiling. I can see why the far right dont like it. Where is the fear? Where is the loathing? Where is the misery? Booooooo.
It’s staged, children are being exploited, only girl children in the pic with Ogre-like pol.
What’s that all about?
Until someone can put forward a plausible explanation, the verdict must be:
Weird.
Mostly Interested @ #561 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 1:02 pm
Same.
Please get help, Badthinker.
Nice try to co-opt weird, Badthinker. Sounds like you’re a little jealous that its worked so well against your ticket. It doesn’t suit you.
I think any of these guys would be a good choice. Obviously the weird thing is hitting right wing hopes as going by some comments on here. Fact is that right wing politics is becoming more controlling and concerned with taking away personal freedoms under the auspices of outdated religious diktats and that to me is weird.
I have no problem with any of the candidates for VP. It’s really only us politico tragics that care so much. As long as they do no harm and can campaign well, then they’re all good.
I’d love to see Mayor Pete debate Vance. He is just so good at getting a point across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0HRnp3IY5Q&ab_channel=TheView
“Kamalanomenon” steams ahead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBDlJUHx2uU&t=304s
Mavis @ #573 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 3:45 pm
Thanks Mavis. Of course I suffer from a large dollop of confirmation bias, but Harris roars. Confidence is infectious.
And being on a first name basis with her nation is not nothing. Biden needed “uncle Joe”. Harris is plain “Kamala”. When you can drop your last name and still be known by an entire country, and maybe even a sizeable fraction of the world, then you’re very well known. And nonsense words like Kamalamentum and Kamalanomenon reinforce it. It’s clever. It works.
I was worried she would take too long to ramp up. She hasn’t.
EDIT: Corrected my misspelling of Mavis.
Late Riser @ #576 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 4:52 pm
I’m a hope
lessfull optimist, but I think that the Dems set this elephant trap (including deliberately picking & downplaying Harris as VP to Biden in 2019) and the MAGAts blundered into it. The bait & switch was too well choreographed (& funded) to be anything else. The Obscene Orange Loser & his bully babies have been out-conned.Comment I read today on a blog from someone who was previously backing Biden to stay as the nominee.
I don’t think hiding Harris was meant to be a trap for Republicans. I think Biden hid her because he didn’t want what has just happened to happen, ie that she was much younger contrast to him and would raise those uncomfortable age questions.
In many ways Biden should’ve been the Democrat candidate in 2016. If he was we’d likely not have had Trump, and Biden would be coming to the end of his second term. But for some reason Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton instead of his VP. And here we are.
Trump can’t even be happy for the Olympics! I’m not an Olympics person myself, but that doesn’t mean I begrudge our athletes their effort and achievements.
I know she’s a Black woman and therefore Trump hates her, but you’d think his campaign team would at least be telling him to express congratulations or be happy about her amazing Olympics achievements. The woman is an absolute machine. But he can’t even do that. Such a grumpy old man.
That would be Simone Biles.
Of course Harris will say yes.
C@t:
How’s the new place going?
Why would Harris say yes? Debate time, format, location, moderator, network are negotiated and agreed upon – not dictated to by a wannabe dictator.
Talk about conflict of interest; appealing to MAGA is Fox’s business model.
@Confessions at 5:49pm
I presume someone on his team convinced him to drop the request that Kamala must be dressed like Princess Leia was as Jabba the Hutt’s slave in Return of the Jedi, complete with chains, since that might not go over well with the black voters in Georgia that he’s trying to win over.
Confessions @ #583 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 5:51 pm
Fantastic! We really lucked out. It’s one of those gentrifying suburbs with old cottages being renovated by young families, young couples and escapees from Sydney. Our place has already been renovated, so that’s good too. There’s some petrol head bogans over the road but they’re harmless, and an Indigenous family who own a dingo! We’re loving it. 🙂
Confessions @ #582 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 5:49 pm
The showman wants a slavering audience. I wouldn’t agree if I were the Harris campaign.
How convenient that Litigious Don has a case against American ABC on foot. 😐
Great to hear that you’ve got a good new home, C@t.
C@t:
So pleased you’ve landed in a good place.
Kirsdarke @ #587 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 5:59 pm
Thank you, Kirsdarke. 🙂
The more people see Trump, the lower his ratings go. The less people see of Trump, the higher his ratings go.
I’d be nixing the Biden rules that silenced mics, and Trump’s love in audience, and just go for it. Yes it’s Fox but we saw the other day how an unleashed Trump behaves around Black women. It ain’t good 😆
On the subject of Republicans being weird, can we go back a few years when there was this whole meme of “Let’s Go Brandon” sprang up?
Basically a crowd of MAGA’s were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” and it was misinterpreted as “Let’s Go Brandon” by the media commentators, which resulted in MAGA’s chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” at every opportunity.
That’s something I’d define as “weird”.
Did you read this from JVL, ‘fess?
C@tmomma @ #530 Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 – 9:40 am
Trump is crazy like a fox.
Absolutely Biden should have been a candidate in 2016. Because the Democratic Primaries lack his presence, Hillary looked to be the unbeatable candidate which kept almost all other democrats out. Only Sanders and Martin O’Malley really contested it (and O’Malley was basically forgotten by everyone). Sanders got so much support partly because the anti-establishment measure resonated so much more when the Establishment candidate was quiet disliked, even by her own side.
Biden basically became the establishment candidate in 2020 only when it looked like Sanders was going to be hard to beat and then he just steam rolled everybody.
The Trump ‘model’ cannot deal with his dementia.
Nothing can.
C@t:
Yes, I’ve read the ‘planned set piece’ theory but don’t buy it. If Trump was intending to use blatantly racist language to reset the focus away from Harris and onto him, he couldn’t have stuffed it up more. Instead of people querying Harris’s authenticity, they are instead talking about how old and racist Trump is and how presidential she looks in comparison.
If this was a deliberate act, why did his people drag him off stage so suddenly? More competent candidates might have been able to pull it off, but Trump just opened his mouth in response to fair questioning from a Black woman and exposed his true self. And Harris responded beautifully. She isn’t going to be gaslit into talking about her gender and race, she’s just going to point to the Trump shitshow and ask Americans if they really want more of that same old weird sideshow.
…they are instead talking about how old and racist Trump is
That’s it, they are talking about Trump. It’s pretty much along the lines of, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The Reality TV person is doing what we all watch Reality TV for.
I think it’s up to the media to see it for what it is and not give Trump the oxygen he craves. Just report it like, ‘Trump said another totally outrageous thing’ and move on.
‘Confessions says:
Saturday, August 3, 2024 at 6:41 pm
C@t:
Yes, I’ve read the ‘planned set piece’ theory but don’t buy it. If Trump was intending to use blatantly racist language to reset the focus away from Harris and onto him, he couldn’t have stuffed it up more. Instead of people querying Harris’s authenticity, they are instead talking about how old and racist Trump is and how presidential she looks in comparison.
If this was a deliberate act, why did his people drag him off stage so suddenly?’
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Trump was off the leash for 34 minutes and then they dragged him off. His hole was getting deeper and deeper and deeper. His only hope with the black vote is to get as many black voters off the rolls as possible.
One of the elements of dementia is that it is a disinhibitor. Trump has always had poor impulse control. His dementia is accelerating his lack of ability to manage his impulses.
One outcome is that some of his lies have just become a joke. Schumer is a paid up member of Hamas…. riiiiiiiiiiiiight!
Using lots of words to MAGAsplain that anything and everything that Trump does is politically brilliant is past its use by date.
Trump is losing his marbles. He would be on medication. He has his toe pads. He is timing his rallies for the middle of the day to avoid the Sundowner Syndrome. And so on and so forth.
But dementia is as dementia does.
Late Riser:
Saturday, August 3, 2024 at 4:52 pm
[‘Thanks Mavis. Of course I suffer from a large dollop of confirmation bias, but Harris roars. Confidence is infectious.’]
It sure is, LR. Based on how polling is trending and my gut instincts, I’m picking Harris to easily win. She’s unstoppable & is too smart to make blunders before the election. Trump should start selecting the curtains for his cell at Rikers and/or FDC SeaTac.
C@t:
In a tight election campaign there’s plenty of bad publicity and Trump is about to reap it with his and JD Vance’s comments about women and women of colour.
Team Harris is so far knocking this out the park. She’s focused, not falling for the usual Republican culture war gaslighting, and her messaging is on song. She isn’t talking about gender or her cultural background, something Team Trump is desperate for her to do.
Trump is scared and flailing and it shows in his demeanour and his public statements.
Interesting piece from the Bulwark there. I don’t know if it was intentional execution of strategy or not but it still can benefit him for the reasons outlined. Trump is the king of happy accidents.
While I think that Trump’s comments to the NABJ didn’t help him, I think the longer we linger on it the more it helps him. For several reasons:
1) The aforementioned point from that article.
2) The more liberals push back on it, the more some of them end up coming across as unlikeable ‘wokescolds.’
3) The whole idea that Harris changes her racial identity as she sees fit does feed into a narrative that she’s an opportunist who has never earned her success and lacks any real skill. Just like the “DEI” thing and the “She slept her way to her early career success” stuff. The whole “turn their biggest strength into their biggest weakness” strategy. Right now, its execution is a bit weak but that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for the attack to sharpen and become effective.
As for the VP race, considering how close we are, I’m going to just let it come, and then play the ball as it lies. As Trump, of all people, correctly said (paraphrased): voters are not voting for the VP, they’re voting for the President.
I’d prefer someone like Walz or Beshear but if it’s one of the others that have been mentioned, then so be it. It doesn’t change who Harris is.
While I do appreciate the lively discussion online about it, I fear some people (elsewhere, not here) are becoming too Manichaean in the whole thing and are forming “camps” demanding particularly VP candidates – even to the point of elected officials (or those adjacent) campaigning for particular candidates. And that’s the last thing Harris and the Democrats need: People being disappointed or butthurt because their “guy” didn’t get picked.
Finally, I see mentions of Minnesota as a swing state. Despite its historic record as a blue state (since FDR became the Democratic candidate in 1932, the state has only gone Republican in a Presidential election three times: twice for Eisenhower and once for Nixon in his 1972 landslide), it’s not that solidly blue and has become tantalisingly close to flipping red in the past. Notably, it almost fell alongside the other 49 states in Reagan’s 1984 landslide – only (barely) remaining blue because the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, was a native son. More recently and more pertinently, it almost fell to Trump in 2016 and it was looking shaky for Biden just before he dropped out.
However, I wouldn’t call Minnesota a “tipping point” state. I feel Minnesota is one of those states that can fall to Trump but, if that’s happening, Trump most definitely has 270+ votes elsewhere and therefore they are superfluous (except to give him a bigger margin to gloat about and maybe give some coattails to Republicans in that state to help with lower ticket races.) I think the current Republican equivalent of Minnesota is probably Florida. In theory, it’s gettable and has been close recently but, if Harris is winning Florida, she already has the 270+ elsewhere.
Re Kirsdarke 5:57.
Will Trump be made up for the part as Jabba the Hutt?
Family values. If this is how he parents, he has no business dictating to people who don’t have children.
Except that this isn’t true, and she has a lifetime that proves it. Plus she isn’t buying into the culture war thing.