Stephan: Again, I note that we need to be clear that the disparity between the presidential outcome and the down ballot outcomes is telling us something very important. The Democratic Party did not win. As a party they lost, and that holds many implications. For instance, almost immediately when the census comes in redistricting will begin, and the Republicans will dominate this in many states. This article explains what I mean.
Here’s something else Republicans can be happy about after Tuesday.
Protestors march in front of the Capitol in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday to demand all votes in the general election be counted. Texas Republicans will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Credit: Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP
An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.
The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.
By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key […]
Stephan: As I said yesterday, my big takeaway from this election is the support that a man who is an irrefutable racist, criminally corrupt, and incompetent businessman and president continues to command. Trumpism is clearly going to continue no matter how the election turns out. In fact, it is likely to get worse because the Trumpers are going to be angry and resentful if Biden wins. I think we can also say that the Democratic Party grievously miscalculated. They may get the presidency, but it seems unlikely they will flip the Senate, and they lost seats in the House. I spent much of the afternoon thinking about what would have happened, for instance, if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate?
I think the Democrats need to sit down and rethink what their party is about. They clearly did not convert many Republicans nor, as much as I liked their ads, did the Lincoln Project. The hard and uncomfortable truth is that a large percentage of the American population is virulently racist against non-Whites, and indifferent to both corruption and incompetence because they don't like or trust democracy. I think we are a country on a knife-edge.
President Donald Trump’s last rally before the 2020 Election on November 3, 2020. Grand Rapids was also the site of his final rally in the 2016 election.Credit: Peter van Agtmael—Magnum/TIME
The car horns blared as Joe Biden took the stage just before 1 a.m.—not to proclaim victory, but to urge his supporters not to lose hope, no matter what President Donald Trump might say. “We believe we are on track to win this election,” the former Vice President told the crowd in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 4. “It ain’t over until every vote is counted. Keep the faith, guys.”
As the new day dawned and dragged on, it increasingly looked as though Biden was right. Having flipped Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, Biden appeared to be inching toward victory. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina remained too close to call as of the evening of Nov. 4. Independent forecasters believed Biden was likely to eke out the requisite 270 electoral votes when all the votes were counted, over the President’s noisy objections.
Even with the White House nearing their grasp, Biden’s […]
W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication - The Conversation
Stephan: It is perfectly obvious to everyone, I should think, that once again the pollster community got hosed by the American population. The big question, of course, is how did this happen? I think the answer is that most people do not tell the truth when polled. It's a spectrum from hedging to outright lying. The reason is that what is really driving people is a taboo subject. The United States is going to become a majority-minority nation, according to the Census Bureau, by 2045. Very few people define themselves as racists, although that is their real position.
You can not support a man like Trump unless something overrides any concerns you have regarding his criminality, the corruption, the recurring sexually aggressive incidents. What is that? I think it is three things that align to create this trend: White supremacy, male dominance, and christofascism, and although someone will tell you their religious beliefs, only a minority will tell you they are racists. On top of that, one must add that the Trump population live in a non-fact basis reality. One has to watch and read a lot of this parallel university to understand, how thoroughly different that world is. Fox is the on the edge of that world; it gets much weirder.
The technology of polling must be transformed until it gives accurate answers. It is clearly not reliable.
CNN posted national polls on the presidential race, taken between 10/16/20 and 11/1/20. Screenshot, CNN, CC BY
Election polling is facing yet another reckoning following its uneven-at-best performance in this year’s voting.
Although the outcome in the 2020 presidential race remained uncertain the next day, it was evident that polls collectively faltered, overall, in providing Americans with clear indications as to how the election would turn out.
And that misstep promises to resonate through the field of survey research, which was battered four years ago when Donald Trump carried states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where polls indicated he had almost no chance of winning. Prominent, poll-based statistical forecasts also went off-target in 2016.
Those failings deepened the embarrassment for a field that has suffered through – but has survived – a variety of lapses and surprises since the mid-1930s. Many of those flubs and failings are described in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”
Criticism was intense in some quarters Wednesday. Politico’s widely followed “Playbook” newsletter was notably scathing. “The polling industry is a wreck,” […]
Stephan: Here is another take on the psychophysiology of the Trumper world. We need to understand this. This is a group who by their voting pattern have shown they will not abandon their worldview. In my opinion, trying that is a waste of time. But understanding it is essential.
A Trump campaign rally
The orange spray-tan was barely wiped off Donald Trump’s inauguration Bible before the mainstream media went on Trump Voter Remorse Watch. Working off a common but incorrect understanding of human psychology — that, given evidence and time, people come to regret their worst decisions — journalists kept interviewing Trump voters over and over, in “heartland” diners and farm fields and gargantuan exurban malls, in search of evidence that doubts were starting to creep in.
I found the whole thing exhausting fairly quickly. In June 2017, I published an article in which I concluded, after interviewing psychological experts, that “the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never.’”ON THE PODCAST: Election Day 2000… all over again?
Here we are, three and a half years later, and things have gone even more poorly than we could have imagined. Trump was impeached for trying to extort a foreign leader into smearing a political opponent, the economy is in the toilet and getting worse, and 231,000 […]
Stephan: We are so diminished. Everything Trump does makes us appear thoughtless, vulgar, and incompetent.
President Donald J. Trump joins G7 Leaders for dinner Saturday evening Aug. 24, 2019, at the Biarritz Lighthouse in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo. Credit: Shealah Craighead)
All over the world, President Donald Trump drew widespread criticism on Wednesday, November 4 for demanding the vote-count cease in the 2020 presidential election even though thousands of votes had yet to be counted in key battleground states. Some of the criticism of Trump’s behavior has come from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
For almost two decades, the 57-member organization has been monitoring U.S. elections at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State. But in 2020, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been troubled by what it observed in the United States.
The Week’s Catherine Garcia reports this year, participants accused Trump of making “deliberate attempts” to “weaken confidence in the election process.”
German politician Michael Georg Link, according to Garcia, complained, “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president — including on Election Night — harm public trust in democratic […]
