Author Topic: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020  (Read 13354 times)

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #15 on: March 18, 2020, 03:58:13 PM »
Biden has it in the bag now. Decent wins for him in Arizona (which as a western state with a large hispanic pop was in the category of states Sanders has been stronger in), Illinois, and a really thumping win in Florida.

Regarding narrative and expectation: I think one should take platforms more seriously and literally than almost everyone does. If one analyses it, most politicians attempt most of their platform, most of the time: we just have a strong selectivity bias for remembering the calls they made which went against their platform. Conversely I think people's past makes slightly less difference than people expect, because politicians operate in the environment they're in, and are aware of who they're beholden to and who they need to keep on-side and what they can't get past their own party and so on. Of course that's not to say it makes zero difference, but I think it makes less than people expect.

I don't think for example that healthcare is a terribly hot-button issue for Joe Biden. But I suspect that a public option for medicare is something everyone will associate him with heavily by November, because he can't afford to not make that a key part of his plan - in the current situation, health topics will be paramount in people's minds, he's got to show some incremental progress at least in order to appease the Sanders wing of the party - and then in office, he's overwhelmingly likely to attempt to follow through on that, because the expectation has been set and that's the milleu we're in.

Looking ahead to the general, the 538 engine hasn't fired up yet, but the RCP poll averages give a rougher idea of where we stand - and they generally look OK but not stellar for Biden. He's a modest favourite in enough states to win, but Trump seems to be polling alright in Wisconsin and Florida in particular, which basically implies he's still competitive both in the midwest and the sunbelt. On the other hand, Biden seems to be a modest favourite in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona, which would see him comfortably over the line. Interestingly the few polls we've had out of Ohio have been really pretty bad for Trump too - it's very hard to see how Trump wins without keeping hold of OH. I think Trump's best case is that he holds on, just about, and Trump's worse case is a blowout loss, with the likelihood/midpoint guess being a narrow Biden win with some ground regained in the midwest (maybe MI and PA but not WI and OH), plus picking up North Carolina and Arizona or something in the south to get him over the line. We'll see.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #16 on: March 21, 2020, 06:03:42 PM »
Regarding narrative and expectation: I think one should take platforms more seriously and literally than almost everyone does. If one analyses it, most politicians attempt most of their platform, most of the time: we just have a strong selectivity bias for remembering the calls they made which went against their platform. Conversely I think people's past makes slightly less difference than people expect, because politicians operate in the environment they're in, and are aware of who they're beholden to and who they need to keep on-side and what they can't get past their own party and so on. Of course that's not to say it makes zero difference, but I think it makes less than people expect.

I don't think for example that healthcare is a terribly hot-button issue for Joe Biden. But I suspect that a public option for medicare is something everyone will associate him with heavily by November, because he can't afford to not make that a key part of his plan - in the current situation, health topics will be paramount in people's minds, he's got to show some incremental progress at least in order to appease the Sanders wing of the party - and then in office, he's overwhelmingly likely to attempt to follow through on that, because the expectation has been set and that's the milleu we're in.
The problem we have is that we come from systems where the Prime Minister has more or less free reign to implement an agenda.  That is not the American system this century at all, the Republicans will block anything a Democrat puts forward and don't have as much of a clear positive agenda other than tax cuts and deregulation and nastiness to poor people/brown people/LBTQ+ people (Mitch McConnell currently has 300 bills on his desk which he refuses to allow to be voted on).  So given that a president can do maybe one big thing every 12-24 months, guessing which big thing is important.

And Obama could have chosen a different policy on American war crimes, torture, massive political corruption, warrantless assassination of people of all nations by robot in countries he laughingly claimed to be at peace with, and whistleblowing.  For each of those things to move forward he had to say yes, and he listened to his daimon and he signed the papers.  I hope they bury him with a big honking Book of the Dead because he will need the section on "be still my heart, do not tell what you have seen, do not tell what you have heard ..."  Because there will be a quiet Canadian nurse saying "you kept me in a place beyond the law to be judged by a kangaroo court for acts I was supposed to have committed as a minor", and a one-eyed Afghan saying "you did not prosecute the woman who took my eye, and she was free to sin again."
« Last Edit: March 21, 2020, 06:09:58 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #17 on: March 21, 2020, 06:43:29 PM »
I don't think the US system is quite as simple as only a certain number of things-per-unit-time being doable - it's more categories of what can and can't be done over the heads of (in this case Republican) opposition, and continual constitutional border fights between the respective powers of different offices and in particular what can be done by executive order. I certainly don't disagree that Obama does bear heavy responsibility for his foreign policy - indeed, foreign policy is one of the areas presidents can move much more freely on, and I don't want "there's a heavy element of circumstance in explaining this" to be taken to mean "these people don't have individual moral responsibility", there's a big difference between producing workable explanatory models of people's actions and apportioning moral culpability and I'm very much trying to talk about the former not the latter. I don't think, though, that this negates my overall thesis that the big directional pushes in a presidential agenda are dictated by circumstance as much as personality, and that by and large presidents will attempt to implement as much of their platform as they can. The changes that matter in Trump's America aren't just the big-ticket fights over the wall/being horrific to migrants, or trade. There's an absolute mass of small-ticket executive level stuff, cutbacks to some agencies, funding for others, etc, that will for the most part have been in line with his platform and comprise much of the body of his reshaping of the USA. And those little changes can have big cumulative or unexpectedly reverberating effects (like, say, having your national security officials with responsibility for pandemics leave in 2018 and then not replacing them...)

I guess another way to put this is that I'm to some extent a sceptic of the "political capital" model that suggests that politicians can do a limited number of things and have to choose what to expend a limited stack of resource on. If given a clear run, politicians can do a huge amount very quickly, and if not, then the question is more about what the swing votes will let you get passed out of your platform than what you, personally, want to push for. Of course politicians can screw up the tactics of those situations and frequently do (as e.g. Trump failing to repeal the ACA), and I think at the edges there's a political capital concept in play when it comes to horse-trading over details, but I think if anything the US system makes a politician's agenda more shaped by expectation and circumstance and less by personal priority-setting than would be the case otherwise. If you want to know what a President Biden might get done on big domestic policy items that require legislation, it's the biography of Joe Manchin you're as likely to need as that of Joe Biden.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #18 on: March 21, 2020, 09:48:10 PM »
I wish I had time and energy to give that the response it deserves but my goal is to spend less time in front of and/or screaming helplessly at screens.  I have not done any sewing in months.

I am not necessarily thinking of the "capital/favours" model, but more that people only have time and emotional energy to force so many things through against opposition, both formal and informal.  Obama was obviously keen to implement healthcare reform and to "not do stupid ****" in foreign policy but not keen to take on the security services, and as it happened healthcare reform and cleaning up after the previous administration was about all he had time and energy for in his first term. 

Nobody has ever given a fart what i think about politics and damned few have even listened :(  I don't have answers to any of the worst problems we face, but I know how to say "you may not torture.  you may not murder.  you may not promote that corrupt official.  I don't care what my peers say."  Darius the Great or Hammurabi knew that much!

Also, its not just the uninterrupted US foreign policy 2005-2016.  It was all the shocking authoritarianism introduced under Bush Minor, plus Obama's own twist in the form of whistleblower policy.   These things are all against the best American political tradition, and the next president could have either rejected them or continued them.  He made his choice.

In other news, at least two US Senators walked into a closed briefing on coronavirus in February, walked out to give reassuring press releases, then sold millions of dollars worth of stocks.  (Very few Canadian MPs own millions of dollars of anything except possibly a house).
« Last Edit: March 21, 2020, 10:49:35 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #19 on: March 21, 2020, 11:32:11 PM »
Don't worry, responses are never obligatory, and I very much support the idea of taking some time out for crafts :) And I at least find your politic-thoughts interesting and worthwhile to listen to! (Also, in news of a much much smaller body politic, congrats and welcome to becoming a citizen of Exilian.)

And yes, the GOP insider trading scandal looks like it ought to be big, though many bigger things have blown over. Fox news reps have actually been calling for resignations despite the senators being in their party, though, which is a really unusual place for us to be.
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #20 on: April 06, 2020, 08:21:29 PM »
Trump's polling bump seems to be levelling out and faith in his crisis handling dropping according to polls. He's still polling better than before the crisis, but not by much and fewer surveys seem to be happening than usual. A Florida poll was released which showed Biden up by 6 in a head to head match - that's an outlier, but it's also worrying news for Trump, situations in which he loses Florida but wins the election are... improbable, I think it's fair to say.

Most primaries are being cancelled and pushed back, but Wisconsin is still holding one on Tuesday because of deadlock between the (Dem) Governor and the (GOP) legislature - the latter refused to postpone it.
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #21 on: April 10, 2020, 02:18:41 PM »
Sanders out, so Biden vs Trump will be the November matchup unless Covid or another disaster/scandal has anything to say about either of the candidates before then.

Trump's net approval is now at about -5.5, his Covid peak was -4. For reference, Obama's at this stage in his re-election year was +1.6, Bush's was +2.3, Clinton's +13.

In the minor primaries, Hawkins still leads with a large plurality but not majority of Green delegates, with Dario Hunter in a close second. Hornberger still leads a very split Libertarian field, having won 5 contests despite getting under 25% of total votes. Vermin Supreme, a man with (and this cannot be stated often enough) a boot on his head, is in second, having won Massachussetts as well as New Hampshire. "No Preference" is also getting very high vote shares in a lot of Libertarian contests.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #22 on: April 14, 2020, 11:48:46 PM »
Do you know of an overview of the allegations of inappropriate touching against Biden by someone sane?  Or where to find his platform?  Its just so hard to find factual information and level-headed analysis of US politics, especially from outside my urban, universitied, pale-skinned bubble.

One thing I have seen argued is that a lot of black voters are impressed that Biden spent eight years playing second fiddle to a black man without any sign of resentment, and people who are keen about the Democratic Party like that he has been a trusty part of it for a long time.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2020, 11:58:46 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #23 on: April 15, 2020, 11:10:33 AM »
Re the allegations: not really, everyone I've seen write on it has either been fairly transparently defending or gunning for Biden.

The formal Biden platform stuff is here: https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/
There's a fairly chunky amount of detail: it's very much overall a working administration-style document. Commentators I've seen I think correctly have analysed it as being to the left of Clinton's 2016 platform (which in turn was to the left of Obama) - but mostly on home/social policy, for example via major new education investment. I'd like to see a good analysis of what out of the platform has what roadblocks - aka what needs congressional approval, what needs state level approval - but good policy analysis is super hard to come by in any media at any time.

And yes: in many ways, the reason Biden won was that the thing he claimed about the electorate - that he had a solid bond with black voters who remembered his service under Obama - turned out to be true, whereas things the other candidates claimed - such Sanders claiming he could turn young voters out at a significantly increased rate and that he was able to win midwestern working-class white voters in ways a centrist candidate couldn't - turned out broadly speaking not to be.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #24 on: April 15, 2020, 03:21:34 PM »
Thanks!  I mostly see comments on specific issues, strongly partisan things, and clips of him talking where he does seem a bit less than coherent and energetic (but this is not 1850 any more, politicians don't get elected by delivering beautiful speeches full of logical twists and clever rhetoric).  I am very sad to see more intelligent Americans moving onto twitter and sharing nonsense or using their excellent minds to produce bitbursts (or forgetting that the whole world, not just people in their state/State, reads their feed and sees their calls to action).

One effect of the pandemic is that print advertising revenues are collapsing (I have heard of a drop of 1/3 or more since the start of the year), so what is left of the US local journalism will either die or become even more dependent on state subsidies.  There are already states in the USA where there is not one full-time reporter monitoring the state legislature.

dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #25 on: April 15, 2020, 06:10:38 PM »
Also, and I am sorry that I have serious logorhea again ...

the last month or two feel strange because its like living in a fighting army or classical Athens expanded to 7 billion people, right?  Observe, orient, decide, act; drop a round, observe the fall, correct and fire another until its close enough and you can order five rounds from every tube in the battery.  And the reason that has happened, even though there are almost no sure facts about the novel coronavirus, is that there have been trusted sources of information and people of good will making recommendations based on cited sources, and because most people understand that this could kill them or someone they love.  Seven billion people have come to a consensus about the general shape of an utterly uncertain situation, and acted in unison, moving around squawking morons in high office if they have to.  Its utterly unlike normal public life this decade which is all about screaming identity politics and established interests bogging down changes which everyone agrees need to happen but would hurt them in the short term. 

The media that existed in the 1990s had all sorts of problems, but they supported a little bit of real reporting about things which most people in a town or a neighbourhood or a region can agree affects them if they just knew that they were happening.  And that is dying along with the other aspects of the media, and without those tiny communities of experts who look at sources and interpret them and share their interpretations and how they could be wrong, and those people you trust to tell you about some part of your community that you don't see directly or hear about from the experience of people you know face-to-face, you can't get this kind of concerted action.  Everything falls back to "he said, she he said" (and most people my age and younger long ago turned out of the news, because they see a cruel and boring game that has no place for them to play).  Half a dozen companies and venture capital have cut the throat of the mechanism we have for getting facts into the public domain, building consensus about what those facts are, and having public debates about how to interpret them, and I think that we have only begun to see what that will cost us.

Local papers were never any good at analyzing what is happening in a national election campaign, but they can be pretty good at "the finance minister just gave a large contract to a company which her boyfriend has a major financial interest in" or other things where you have to know the people and the space and the personal relationships to show why the facts are significant.

And now I am just another crank ranting on the Internet.
« Last Edit: April 15, 2020, 09:45:20 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #26 on: April 22, 2020, 11:00:32 PM »
Logorhea is fine, this is a friendly place for such :)

Update on the "state of play":
  • Trump's Covid poll bounce for favourability continues to go down, and he's only a point or two above his pre-crisis level now.
  • Biden's lead over Trump remains stable. The Trump bounce didn't actually dent it significantly and it remains at about 5 to 6 points. Which is enough to win, but not by much, and pollsters aren't filtering for voting likelihood much yet, so we should still expect a tight election.
  • Not much state level stuff coming out - some Florida polling continues to show a tight race there. I think the present situation is that there's significantly enough states hanging as quite tight races to make it a genuinely close election across a wide board, though the Democrats have more "safe" electoral votes. That picture might change if we got better state-level data though, and the really good aggregator models haven't started up yet.
  • The generic congressional ballot polls now have Democrats eight points ahead. The 2018 midterms had them eight and a half points ahead, so an eight point lead if maintained would be enough to hold most of their gains (and probably thus hold the House of Representatives).
  • The fact that it takes an eight point lead in a two party system to feel you'll probably win really does show how utterly broken the US electoral system is.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #27 on: April 22, 2020, 11:43:01 PM »
And with a geriatric president with multiple major personality disorders, a geriatric opposition candidate, two very elderly but sane Supreme Court justices, and an ongoing pandemic which is most lethal to the elderly and which the government spent months denying, it is a very uncertain situation.  There are small regions in the United States with as many confirmed covid-19 cases as all of Canada, despite the fact that Canada has had more effective testing and more aggressive stay-at-home policies.

A good thing is that because the United States is a federal system, some state governments are limiting the damage.

Harpers' Magazine had a surreal "Weekly Review" for 9 April 2020 https://harpers.org/2020/04/sea-world-boris-johnson-american-airlines/  "The Crazy Years" go back to 1940 though, it could be that they are are product of industrialization + newswires with radio communication to put the most exciting news across the world in front of people every morning.

Quite a few people on the right in the United States seem to be screaming at China, that suits both Trumpists whose hero is a protectionist and anti-Trumpists who hate the CCP like T. Greer. 
« Last Edit: April 22, 2020, 11:48:07 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #28 on: April 23, 2020, 10:18:38 AM »
More new polling data: two polls out of Michigan and Pennsylvania, from Fox, showing Biden eight points up on Trump in both states, and with a +10 favourability rating compared to Trump's -8. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has become the focus of conservative attacks at a national level... but still shows up with 63% approval. Obviously just two data points, and other recent surveys of the states have shown the race statistically tied, but it's interesting the extent to which the Republicans going after Democrat governors is really not paying off for them. It also shows how relatively powerful US governors are - I'd need to look up who the equivalent person (mayor I guess) for the state of Vienna is. (Interestingly, despite Fox News' appallingly bad broadcast content, their polling (which is of course conducted by contractors) is a) usually pretty good and b) gives very slightly Democrat-leaning results on average.)

Something very worth knowing about for anyone who's going to be reading polls in the coming months is the 538 pollster ratings which give a lot of useful information on how good individual polls are likely to be - aggregators are usually better than looking at individual data points of course, but if you are looking at individual surveys (likely, as there's a lot of races out there and some just won't have enough polling to aggregate sensibly) being able to do comparisons to the mean etc is useful and the pollster ratings allow you to do that and check company quality fairly swiftly. Though of course companies can and do shift their methods at times and it can be hard for ratings to keep up with that.
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #29 on: April 30, 2020, 12:29:40 PM »
A new Republican narrative strategy seems to be emerging, or rather reemerging, which is Plan Blame It On China. The Conservative media are starting to talk about a "china election", and Trump has been working hard to support that narrative.

Meanwhile the polling continues to be pretty bad for him. Nationally it's still around Biden +6, but the swing state polls look worse than that would imply vis-a-vis 2016. Of course things may not continue that way. Attempts to publicly go after Biden on sexual assault allegations continue, which is a very difficult one potentially for Biden - it looks like his campaign is stonewalling it and hoping it goes away. It's unbelievably grim that we're going into an election with both major candidates having open allegations of this kind hanging over them.

We've had some polls of interest from non rust-belt states in recent days, all showing Biden up: by 8 in New Hampshire, 5 in North Carolina, and 1 in Texas. The Texas and NC averages do show Trump ahead - NC narrowly, Texas by some way - but it's fair to say that NC looks like being an actual battleground and Texas will be worth some Democrat attention. I don't expect this to be the year Democrats start winning statewide in Texas unless Trump really has a collapse in his numbers due to Covid, but it does seem to be edging a few points closer every cycle. That's potentially hugely significant for Republicans. In a world where Texas and Arizona are both blue, the Republicans could repeat Trump's run across the midwest, add Minnesota to it, and still lose. It also might mean elections in 2024 and 2028 with far wider maps (at least in the sense of there being more options for the tipping point state and more chance of landslide wins/losses by narrowly running the table across all of them) than we've seen in many years in the US.

Finally, independent and former Republican congressman Justin Amash of Michigan has decided to enter the Libertarian race, which throws that pretty wide open - he's vastly higher profile than Hornberger who's been winning most of the primaries, and he may well just walk in and take it, but we'll see.
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