Stacey Abrams is an elector in Georgia.
Democrats really need to be ready to go scorched earth the first time a totally reasonable cabinet nominee gets blocked.
“Constitution says advise and consent. We’ll consider ourselves advised and consented and you can GFY”
We need to make Obama the elector that pushes it to 270.
What is the best thinking in how to actually do that?
It was close enough, there is a decent shot that he would have won if he had just not contracted COVID himself.
I don’t disagree with any of this. I also don’t think it’s an either or. Our messaging should be encouraging people to engage with their communities on this level. The poor whites are super super pissed. I think they’d really enjoy demonstrating and mutual aid after they got into the swing of it. They have a long and rich history of it. It’s also very hard to hold racist beliefs when you’ve stood next to a black dude with a similar background to you and shouted fuck 12 at the top of your lungs as the pigs lob projectiles at you at various velocities. It really clarifies who the enemy is. The natural enemy of the workers are the cops not workers who happen to be a different skin tone from them.
Also Covid itself could have easily won him the election if he just took it seriously and hired competent people. Dude thought he could just wish it away. Incredible.
BLM mattered
if I’m a Dem, I run solely on M4A. I answer every question I am asked about any topic by saying I support M4A. If they ask me about socialism I say “I’m not running on socialism, I am running on M4A.” It’s not clear to me what the downside of this is.
this is what I’m worried about in Georgia. It’s also why valorizing Republicans to supposedly indicate how awful Trump is was a very questionable approach, and that’s putting it lightly.
Then you end up like Warren who says that net payments to the government won’t increase under $200k income or whatever it is, and they’re all like, but taxes will? And she wouldn’t answer it and thus her candidacy was lost
In 2008 you got 49/50 states. In 2012, 50.
Bragging about getting 48 now reminds me of OCR software claims of accuracy in the 1990s - a small % wrong can have a large impact.
Honestly not a ton Nate could have done IMO. This is a good example of garbage-in, garbage-out. Nearly all of the polls were horrible. We need to nuke the current method of polling and figure out a new methodology. The only thing he could have done was automatically assume a Trump-favored shift in the polling in 2020, same as it was in 2016; but in doing that he would have to assume that pollsters made zero corrections since 2016. I assumed (incorrectly) that the pollsters fixed their flaws from 2016.
I agree that this probably isn’t actually Nate’s fault, but it doesn’t really matter since he’s in the business of aggregating that garbage and claiming it means something. I think his career has peaked and will never get back to where it was on Monday.
If I was Nate I’d be in a conference room with my staff brainstorming about where we could get data about voter preferences that wasn’t garbage. The idea of taking a survey to figure out people’s political preferences in 2020 with all the gazillions of terrabytes of personal data for sale basically everywhere made little to no sense to me before they blew two presidential elections in a row.
Don’t adjust your methodology to reflect demographics and don’t guess at voter turnout numbers for those demographics. Pull everyone’s data, aggregate it, and get the smoke free picture. You don’t need to use demographics for figuring out who is likely to vote if you know how engaged each individual voter is because of social media.
37 were 100% locks prior to voting starting. They got 11/13
I really don’t understand the criticism of the models at all.
That is, I mean I guess I understand the argument that models are stupid and/or useless (though not a lot of people were making that claim during the golden era of Vince memes).
But I don’t understand the bitching about the “success/accuracy” models (plural, I think, if I’m remembering Nate Cohn’s correctly), since they squarely put this outcome well within their non-extreme range.
The polling was what it was, and the models used the polling. I mean, if the polling had turned out to be right and Nate was crowing about his model getting 50/50 people here would be saying “LOL, good job Nate, calling a blowout for the guy favored by double digits.”
That is the paradox/idiocy of voters, voters overwhelmingly favor D policies. But they just as strongly hate taxes. And either don’t believe you or think it’s a slippery slope or indirectly is going to cost them their jobs or some shit when Ds say they just want to tax the rich.