The US Presidential Election 2016

[comrade_general]

Then there's this Churchill:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Attacking journalists eh? Have you never seen the way the journalists attack Trump and twist whatever he says to sound evil? He's unscripted. He speaks from his mind spur of the moment unlike most who read from delicately prepared scripts not even written by them. But you're a collegiate Brit and so naturally you've never had a slip of the tongue or spoken out of turn or rambled aimlessly. Unfortunately the media is loving it and they are very good at twisting words and nit-picking every syllable. But it's funny because there's Clinton with all her obvious lies and FBI investigation and the media can't seem to find any fault with her.

[comrade_general]

See how blatantly uncomfortable that reporter is when they accidentally show something real?! She quickly tries to be like "welllll that's not representative of his supporters... I don't know why we showed you that... Trump is actually racist..." She pretty much called him a "token black guy". Yay media.

There you have people coming together in understanding and friendship and the media just blows the whole thing off and tries to draw attention away from it. It's the liberal media's agenda to keep racism alive and promote controversy. Any time a black person starts thinking for themselves and getting educated they move as far from the left as they can. My uncle is a prime example.

[Clockwork]

The fact that so much of the media is left leaning just means that you have to sift through so much noise to actually hear anything. There's so many clickbait half truths because attacking the right is just so easy because it's the side that has to make the necessary but unpopular or less cutesy decisions. The left is just completely unwilling to step in on and instead just treats whatever is nasty like a non-issue.


Immigration is a problem in parts of every country and the options are to forcibly relocate people to spread them out or to limit the number of immigrants. The former is deemed (rightly in my view) to be harsher. The left merely states the benefits of immigration which everyone is aware of but never addresses any of the problems that come with it. So yeah when you have the majority leftist media just sniping with no actual substance or alternative argument it's so easy to just jump on the bandwagon due to a lack of perspective or free thinking. Not that I'm accusing anyone here of that, just in general.

[comrade_general]

Trudat. It's funny when people call Fox news "so biased" toward the right, which it is, when virtually every other news agency is so far up the lefts' ass that they are breathing out of the same nose.

And anyone who has a problem with illegal immigrants is a RACIST! There's obviously nothing wrong with immigration, there is something wrong when you don't do it legally - getting proper ID and permission, pay taxes, etc. The left doesn't seem to understand the difference.

Also funny when they say we're a nation of immigrants. Well yeah my ancestors moved here in the legal fashion, but hell I didn't I was born here. I'm a "native" American.

[Pentagathus]

Aye it's annoying how much opinion is polarised on these issues, as if they are completely black and white matters.

[Jubal]

Major update for today is that Clinton is not going to be indicted over her email server - FBI argue that what she did was careless but not illegal.

It's honestly a bit hard to see where Trump goes from here, beyond praying the economy collapses in the next few months or that the polls are wrong. Clinton will now have far fewer media stories about this, beyond a final flurry - I'm sure some will be manufactured, and Trump will keep trying to play this card in adverts, but there won't be any more actual events in the story, regardless of whether you think the FBI were right or not - and she's still sitting on a comfortable lead over Trump, narrowly ahead of him in pretty much all the battleground states according to polling. Both candidates seem to have hit rock bottom in terms of how disliked they are, and the answer is - thus far - that more people hate Trump than hate Clinton. And Trump still doesn't seem to have much of a ground game coming together - how much that will make  a difference is a big unknown (and for someone like me genuinely really interesting).

[Pentagathus]

When you talk about Trumps ground game I'm imagining him wrestling with Clinton. I'd enjoy watching that.

[comrade_general]

It comes as no surprise she wasn't indicted. The Clinton war machine is just too strong. Bill even had that closed-door meeting with the people in charge and probably told them "if you indict my disgusting wife you'll expose corruption that goes all the way to the president". Besides, the email thing doesn't even compare to how careless she was with the Benghazi situation and everything preceding that. In fact the only ad I've seen was about Benghazi, not mentioning emails, and sent a very powerful message about stopping her now.

And I imagine they get those poll numbers from online polls or places centered in liberal urban communities like LA or NY because no one in the rural areas would vote for Killary. I talked to people down in WV where there are a lot of Democrats and even they say anyone but her.

[Jubal]

I'm not honestly sure who I'd put my money on between the two of them. Neither is quite a prime physical specimen.

But yeah - the other issue Trump faces is that now he has multiple open lawsuits in which he's the defendant, so it's not out of the question that he could get indicted before November (though I think it's unlikely, he's every bit as much a wealthy member of the social establishment as Clinton and has a lot of experience at dodging lawsuits).

As to the poll numbers, ignore them if you wish, but in general ignoring the polls or assuming they can't be right is a pretty bad idea for a campaign. Sure, rural areas will mostly vote Trump bar maybe some bits of the west or northeast, but most Americans don't live in rural areas; 80.7% of the population of the USA was urban or suburban in the 2010 census, so a candidate could win literally every rural voter in the country and lose by a landslide. Polls tend to be a mix of online and phone, and then those numbers are rebalanced according to census data (so if you ended up interviewing say 45 urban and 5 rural voters in a sample of 50, you'd basically make the urban voters count for slightly less each and the rural voters count for more to make your data look more like the actual electorate). So there isn't really an argument to be made that the results are skewed by where or how they poll, and poll-based modelling has been very effective in the last few elections at predicting the result.

I guess the issue for Trump is that he's hit Hillary with the Benghazi and email things a lot, and it's still not broken through; it's hard to see where he gets the boost from to either really sink Clinton or boost popular support for his own campaign at this point. (This is, bluntly, speaking, not helped by the fact that he's running an unbelievably incompetent campaign and not exactly working hard to appeal to anyone who isn't already backing him).

[comrade_general]

What's your source for all that? www.cnnthirdpartypollswerenotbiasedweswear.com?


Also Libertarian Girl put it a little more eloquently;
 "Today the FBI Director basically said with his recommendation on the Clinton case:

yeah she did send classified information on a server that could definitely have been hacked which is definitely a violation but meh, oh well cuz Clinton. No consequences for you!

The rest of you plebs still have to obey laws tho or your lives are ruined. K thanks bye."

[Jubal]

My sources, apart from general knowledge of how polling works and the actual US census, tend to be RCP, which reports all pollsters regardless of political lean, and FiveThirtyEight, who have a pretty impressive record on calling states in presidential elections using more mathematical modelling and rankings of pollsters based on their past effectiveness at predicting actual results. 

Eh, she seems to have watched a different announcement on the matter to the one I just saw James Comey give.

I mean, I guess my view is that in an ideal world, this sort of foolishness would probably disqualify Clinton as an acceptable presidential candidate. But then, in an ideal world Trump would also be a total non-starter as a candidate, and I keep seeing precisely nothing to change my view that Clinton is entirely and absolutely the lesser evil here both for the US and for the rest of the world.

[Pentagathus]

Clinton seems like the giant lizard of preference to me but it's pretty damn dire that the choice is between two such lizardy lizards.

[comrade_general]

The government investigated the government and found that the government did nothing wrong. So we're all safe now.

Clinton's got her hands in too many corporate and foreign pockets, at least Trump earns his own money and only has himself to answer to in that regard. In other words Clinton owes quite a few dirty favors.

[comrade_general]

[Jubal]

Hillary doesn't need to remind people she has a vagina, she just needs to remind people she isn't Trump. Which is what she's doing, and it's basically working as far as anyone can tell.

I mean, between the man with probably the strongest reputation for probity in Washington, who doesn't have anything on the line here and who was originally a Republican appointee, and Trump (who may just have a tiny wee bit of bias/interest here), I'm inclined to go with believing Comey, I'll be quite honest. And any damage from the email scandal is now done; if Trump is still behind at this moment, he's never going to drag her down further by making the same attacks again. And if you don't believe Trump owes any dirty favours you'll believe anything, frankly, given aspects of his business past and some of the current lawsuits.