Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:26]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, October 19th, 2024. It is just before 23 UTC as I'm starting to record this. I'm Sam Minter. Yvonne Bowe is not here. So we had, you know, lately we've been doing Friday night U.S. time or Saturday during the day. So like Saturday UTC almost always recently because I now have something on Thursday evenings U.S. time. I've got to do. And so Yvonne asked me if we could do Saturday this time because he had something going on Friday. And so when we do it Saturday, it's daytime US time. And we were going to do it at 16 UTC. But just a couple hours before that, Yvonne texts me and lets me know he's not feeling well.
|
Sam:
[1:15]
| And I don't know if he's going to want to give any more details about what's up with that next week or not. I don't know. Probably not. Long past by then. But the bottom line is he wasn't feeling up to or able to do anything. So he's like, I'm sorry, last minute cancel. I'm out. And it was close enough to the time we were scheduled to record and that I didn't attempt to get any substitute hosts in on two hours notice or whatever. But also, to be honest, I'd been up all night with some other stuff going on. I was tired. I was going to be staying up. Just, I was getting, you know, I'm like, oh, I'm not doing the podcast. That means I can sleep a couple hours. So I went back to bed and it's hours later. Now I did, you know, and agenda wise, this first segment is the rambly personal slash non-current events-y, well, non-serious news. Sometimes we can do current events that's not serious in this segment.
|
Sam:
[2:22]
| That kind of segment. And then we will have two segments of sort of actual newsy stuff. And, you know, I guess this time they're going to both be picked by me. You can, of course, guess that, you know, hey, look, we've got so little time left before the election at this point. You know, as I am recording this, it is down to 17 days, 17 days until polls start to close. And so, of course, I'm going to be talking about the election. It is.
|
Sam:
[2:58]
| If it's not like, I don't know, like I'm struggling to come up with anything non-election even to talk about in this initial segment. The whole damn rest of the show is probably going to be election stuff in one way, shape, or another. You know, 17 days left. What the hell do you expect, people? You know, what? I'm going to spend like the whole time talking about the Europa Clipper or something. I mean, it's on our list. Or the WordPress thing. Honestly, I don't have enough to say about those things. The WordPress thing seems like it's like an idiotic turf war thing. And, you know, people need to get a hold of themselves and, you know, just get over it and be civil and work things out and blah, blah, blah. And it seems like the automatic guy is the guy who's like nutso on this one, not the other people. But whatever, whatever. ever. And Europa Clipper, cool. They launched it. It won't actually get there for six years. And, and, and by the way, six years is 2030, 2030.
|
Sam:
[4:13]
| For those of us who remember when the year 2000 was still like way in the future, like 2030 coming up on us very rapidly it's just it's just wrong it's just wrong anyway so what do i want to talk about on this this initial slice of show you know i actually contemplated just being like hey yvonne's not here i'll be back after this break and talk about politics but what i will mention and it it's it's relating to the politics vaguely but like because it's election graphs related like i i mentioned on a show that i am taking.
|
Sam:
[4:55]
| The basically the rest of the time between now and the election off and a little bit of time after the election basically i'm taking the i'm not going to be back at the day job until november 11th okay so i'm taking three weeks off the first two in a little bit are pre-election and then is like a few days after the election as well. And the reason for this is because in previous years, the volume of polls by this point was already absolutely overwhelming. And I've mentioned before, I hand enter these polls. I manually, like the way election graphs is set up, like, yes, I know they're like 538 provides an API. I could do, And every four years, I consider it because there have been, whether it was 538 or other people before that, there have been ways to automatically ingest polling data.
|
Sam:
[6:00]
| But I always say to myself, you know, first of all, I may make different decisions. Like I'm including some things that 538 doesn't. Now, most of the things that I include that 538 doesn't are included by DDHQ slash the Hills database. And they also have an automated way to get their stuff so I can combine them or something. But like I, I make different decisions about what to include the, some of the things I include aren't included by either of them. Because I'm like, when people do all kinds of variants of like, oh, okay, not just here's the registered voter, here's the likely voter, but here's the number before we press people for.
|
Sam:
[6:48]
| First we just ask people, and then we push the undecided people to make a decision. And so that's what's called the with leans. It adds in the people who say they're not really decided, but they're kind of leaning towards one candidate or the other. And I include some of those different ways of looking at it. I just include all the variants I can find.
|
Sam:
[7:10]
| And so not all of that information is available. And I also feel like there's, there's a value in the, having hands-on and looking at each and every data point I put in and what's its effect. I also, the way election graphs is structured right now, like it really is set to like process one new data point at a time. So like I add a data point and then I trigger updating of the site and the mechanisms I have to update right now sort of assume there's only one new data point. So like if i added five data points and then told it go it would get confused like mainly in terms of like automatic posts on mastodon and stuff like that i think the web website for the most part would eventually figure it out but it wouldn't be ideal it's not set up to do that it's not set up to sort of detect and handle a bunch of stuff at it at once. It really expects one at a time. And like, I know that's bad design and I could fix that at some point, but it hasn't been a priority for me. And I kind of, you know, enjoy doing it data point by data point. But the point of all this is I'm doing it manually and I'm not only typing in the line of data manually, but after I type in the data and I trigger the processing, it takes It takes a couple minutes for it to do everything it's going to do with the new data point.
|
Sam:
[8:39]
| It can be, and then if it's something that triggers a tipping point change or a state crosses from one of my categories to another, it takes even longer because it waits on, like some things are processed like immediately and other things are on like a time thing where it only gets looked at every five minutes or whatever. So if it's one of those, I have to wait for it and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the point is, it takes me on average... Maybe three or four minutes per data point. Like some of them are less and some of them are more. And so like when there are lots and lots of polls, it ends up taking me lots and lots of time. And in previous cycles, like four years ago, by the time you got to two weeks out, I mean, I was, you know, taking six plus hours a day. Like it was getting close to being a full-time job, just putting all the stuff in. there were a couple of outlets that were doing, you know, 50 state tracking polls where every day they were putting out new numbers for every state. And there were, you know, and all the swing states were getting like a whole bunch every day, practically, etc. And so for the last couple of cycles, I've taken time off before election day. I think last time I also like four years ago, I think I also took three weeks. The time before that, I think I only took two weeks.
|
Sam:
[10:06]
| But it feels slower this time like there are a bunch of polls right now like as i am recording right now there are a bunch of polls that came out friday afternoon slash evening and it's saturday afternoon right now and i haven't put them in yet because i was otherwise occupied and i'll do it after I finish this segment, probably. And it's, it's, it's probably going to be, I don't know, an hour or two of stuff to catch up, but an hour or two is not six hours. You know, it does seem slower than it was. And, and maybe it's just like, I'm not remembering properly. And it was like this, but you know, I'm, I'm hoping that I actually not only get to do all the election graph stuff, but I have time to do some other stuff. Like I want to catch up around the house. I want to, you know, I want to do some cleaning. I want to do some laundry. I want to do a little bit on some projects other than election graphs. I want to spend some time watching TV with Alex, you know, all this kind of stuff and a few other things, you know, um.
|
Sam:
[11:27]
| But I don't know, we got two weeks left, maybe it'll like radically ramp up just for the last two weeks. And I shouldn't be saying, oh, it looks better than the other cycles.
|
Sam:
[11:41]
| Because I'm going to end up back absolutely hammered for the next two weeks. We'll see. Hammered, not in the sense of like drinking and being drunk, but hammered in the sense of just having lots of stuff to do, you know. Anyway but i'm hoping to do other stuff and frankly like look it's it's different than a real vacation i haven't taken like a real vacation where like myself and the family or myself and my wife or whatever like go somewhere and just freaking relax by a pool or something in like, I cannot remember us doing that ever, honestly.
|
Sam:
[12:23]
| And we really fucking should at some point, like all of my vacations are like, I'm going to take off a week to do something. The last time I took a week off was to add the, the, the with time left probabilistic models to election graph and now i'm taking time off to do election graph stuff and then one week after the election ostensibly to sort of recover and also to pick up my wife's campaign yard signs but like the yard signs aren't that much this because she was unopposed this year so like i only put out like between 20 and 30 signs whereas two years ago when she had an opponent it was between 200 and 300 signs, I think. Maybe it was about 200 signs. It might be slightly under 200. I don't know. In that ballpark, I could look it up, but it feels like it was 200 to 300 signs.
|
Sam:
[13:19]
| A week wasn't even time to pick up all the signs and to check all the locations. I shouldn't say pick them all up because the reality is a significant fraction of them will be gone. People will have stolen them, thrown them into the woods where you can't get to them. Although we tried really hard. If we could see it in the woods, we, we would get it. Like I even bought like one of these like long 25 foot apple picker things so that I could reach one that somebody had thrown into like a thicket and try to pull it back out. And I successfully got it, but I had to like buy equipment.
|
Sam:
[13:59]
| To get that thing out. But anyway, so what, what I'm hoping like is I actually am, don't end up completely slammed by election graphs and signs and all this kind of stuff and actually can relax a little bit too, you know? And yeah, I mentioned like filling some of that time with housework and okay. Yeah. There's all kinds of housework and chores and things that just need to get done and it's nice to have time to do that too and to some degree that's like relaxing to me too depending on what the task is some of them i have like dread but others i'm like yeah i actually find doing laundry like like a sort of relaxing zen thing you know i have a specific method of course you know i have all my autistic tendencies i have like.
|
Sam:
[14:52]
| A 30 step algorithm that I use that probably no one else does it anywhere near the way I do. And there are certain things that are important to me about the process that no one else would care about. And there are certain things that other people would care about that I don't even bother with at all. But the point is, you know, I can spend an hour or whatever, like sorting laundry, putting away laundry, moving laundry from place to place and putting it in a machine and blah, blah, blah, and taking it upstairs, downstairs, whatever. And, you know, while I'm doing that, I'm listening to something cool on the headphones and I'm, you know, just relaxing a little bit, but you know, it'll be nice if these three weeks actually end up with a decent amount of time for me to just be sitting on the couch, watching TV with Alex or other stuff, you know, I could deal with that. You know, relaxing is fun. And, you know, I...
|
Sam:
[15:49]
| One of these days I should really do another, you know, the thing I should do is another one of those random vacations. Like I've the, the next on the list one has been go to go to the Yucatan in Mexico for like two decades. It's time to actually freaking do that thing. Maybe next year we can organize that. I don't know. At one point Yvonne was like, I'll go with you. So that'd be fun. Curmudgeons corner live from the Yucatan. You know, we could do that. Anybody else want to join me there? Like a random trip, Southern Yucatan, like, like right near the border of Belize is where we're talking, not like Cancun or the major tourist spots. Although I guess it's, it's the, the, the Mayan Riviera or whatever. Like, so there's, there is tourism nearby anyway. Like, so I'm on vacation on sort of a personal work project sort of vacation, which, you know, I understand I need to do the other type someday, but this is as close as I get. And I get to do things that are sort of my priorities that I figure out what I want to do and how I want to spend my time. And it's not governed by like work needs this or work needs that.
|
Sam:
[17:09]
| And even that alone is refreshing. You know, even if it's not like you're, I'm not going somewhere on a trip and doing typical tourist stuff, but it's like actually having time that's mine. And that's, that's important. Like, I mean, yes, I have time that's mine every weekend and in the evenings, but it's not the same.
|
Sam:
[17:34]
| Like honestly i am just like by the time i get to the end of the weekend i'm just feeling like i've started to recover and i'm ready to like you know because of course i fill the weekends with stuff like this podcast and with election graph stuff anyway and with with other things like that So, you know, I sort of complete all of that stuff, usually sometimes Sunday, and then it's already time to start thinking about Monday, you know. So anyway, I'm looking forward to the next three weeks. Well, I'm nervous about the election, and we'll talk about that soon enough. But, but just from a personal point of view, like not worrying about going into work, not worrying about what's going on there and like, you know, all of the, the, the chaos that's associated with any workplace and with my workplace in specific at the moment is nice.
|
Sam:
[18:39]
| Do I have any more, but first stuff to do? Have I rambled long enough about how I'm enjoying like the fact that I'm on now on vacation? This is like, I'm like less than 24 hours in to not having to deal with work stuff. But, and so I, I'm not like fully into it yet. I haven't actually started any of the things I intended to do during these three weeks yet. I haven't even entered in a single data point for election graphs yet. I'll, I'll do that after. I'm just doing this normal weekend thing of recording the podcast. And I haven't done any household chores yet, you know, but I will. I will do all these things. So I'm just at the beginning. I'm still excited about it. We'll see how I feel in another week or whatever.
|
Sam:
[19:28]
| Only other but first. Let's see. Let's, let's, let's click off the things that are not like news politics related. SpaceX catch, catched SpaceX caught their booster thing. Cool. It's still too bad. Elon is, has his name associated with that, but SpaceX does do some cool stuff and it's not cause of Elon. It's cause of all of the other good engineers who work at that company. And good management, et cetera. Like from everything I can tell, that place is doing well in part because Elon isn't fucking with it on an everyday basis.
|
Sam:
[20:11]
| I still worry about like the amount of dependency our space program is getting on SpaceX right now because Boeing's doing so badly right now and the government itself is doing less on its own and contracting out almost everything. I mean, even when they did like Saturn V and the space shuttle and stuff, Obviously, contractors built the actual machines, but the government was much more in the driver's seat, whereas now they're sort of in a, we want private contractors to do like everything. And, you know, that's a little worrying, but it's still cool. They, the new heavy, I mean, they've been landing their rockets for a long time now, but this is the biggest one yet that they've actually managed to catch. And it's a key element in the future plan. So awesome. Good job. The WordPress press stuff. I mentioned briefly the Europa stuff. I already mentioned briefly, uh.
|
Sam:
[21:07]
| Is that it? I think that's it. So here you go. I am going to take a thingy. Yeah, I'm going to take a break.
|
Sam:
[21:24]
| And I'm probably going to come back and record the next segment tomorrow. Since I don't have a co-host, I'm splitting this up over probably three different sessions, And then I'll put out the actual audio version. If you were on YouTube, you can see the parts as they get done, if not live. So nobody's been watching live this time around, but that's okay. That's okay. I feel okay by that. I'm not feeling neglected. Yeah. Okay. First break. What did I say? First break. First break. It's this one. It's this one right here. And we'll be back after this. And look, the rest of the show, one way or another, is going to be related to the presidential election. Like, I mean, we maybe talk about, you know, tangentially related politics as well, but it's basically all politics and basically all election. Because, like I said, the days are ticking down. There's not much left. But first, this break.
|
Break:
[22:31]
| Do, do, do. This podcast is sponsored by alexemzilla.com. Alex Emzilla is great. It's on YouTube. And it has lots of fun videos. Alex Emsola is awesome and great. I love his videos, and they are obviously better than Curmudgeon's Corner. While they're funnier, they're more interesting. And frankly, he seems at least a little smarter than either of the hosts of Curmudgeon's Corner. Honestly, it's ridiculous how endlessly talented and phenomenal Alex Emsola is. That's how great his YouTube channel is A-L-E-X-M-X-E-L-A dot com Yes Do, do, do!
|
Sam:
[23:35]
| And so we are back It is now Sunday, October 20th At just before 17 UTC As I'm starting to record this second segment So the plan here I'm going to do the election graphs update for this segment and talk about polls and polling and where things look and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Although to be honest, we're kind of in the same situation we have been, but I'll talk about it in more detail. And then in the next segment, I'll talk about everything else in terms of how things are going and what's going on in the race and all this kind of stuff. So poll wise, first of all, right after I published last week's show, I did an election graphs update. I ended up like I put in a place what I do, like I'll start the blog post and I'll put in a tentative title and then I'll actually do the blog post when I pull. And as part of that, I'm pulling all the data. I'm looking at which states moved which way since the last blog post, all of this kind of stuff.
|
Sam:
[24:39]
| And then, and then I put it, I write sort of TLDR summary at the very top. And then, you know, which I, I, I don't write that summary until I have, after I've done the analysis in case the analysis gives me something different than my impression. And then I should go back in and change the title of the post too. But I forgot that.
|
Sam:
[25:06]
| You know so i had put in the tentative title bad week for harris because my overall impression prior to pulling all the data is it had been kind of a bad week but in reality when i pulled the data it was very very mixed the tipping point moved by 0.1 percent and it actually moved towards harris the the things that made me think it was a bad week which were bad factors were that last week, there were a number of just barely Harris states that moved to just barely Trump. And so, yeah, that was movement away from Harris. And it left a situation with no, there were no weak Harris states left at all. There were no states, when I did that last update, that were between a tie and Harris up by 5%. Those had all been emptied out. Those had all gone to Trump. That seemed bad but when i did all of the analysis it looked well like i said the tipping point moved by 0.1 and that 0.1 was towards harris and the the the win odds were all roughly the same it ended up being kind of a flat week so i i realized i hadn't changed the title after i hit publish and at that point the permalink is set the url is set i mean there are ways to change it but you break those permalinks.
|
Sam:
[26:32]
| And so I just added a question mark to the title of it. Bad week for Harris question mark without changing the text of the post itself, which is kind of lame because really it should have been, you know, a flat week and with everything still in the where we are right now. And I'll get to the changes in the last week momentarily, but for a long time now, it's been, hey, it's too close to call.
|
Sam:
[27:04]
| We are within the zone where polling can't tell you the winner. It is reasonably possible that Harris will win by a decent margin. It is also reasonably possible that Trump will win by a decent margin. At the very moment, last week and also this week, if you just give every state to whoever's ahead by even the tiniest amount in my averages, it gives a slight narrow advantage to Trump. And in my probabilities it gives an even bigger advantage to trump just simply because my probabilities are based on looking at the last four election cycles and how have the polls been off in the last four election cycles and more often than not they have underestimated republicans so my odds are essentially based on okay we're probably going to underestimate the republicans again. There's a chance that we won't, but we're probably going to underestimate the Republicans again, which gives a little bit more of an advantage to Trump than, you know, other folks who give odds, give it much closer to 50-50 than I do at the moment, because I'm assuming we're going to underestimate Republicans again.
|
Sam:
[28:19]
| If we don't underestimate Republicans again, and you know, it's more likely, like, I think a lot of the others are assuming that there's no correlation between past performance and past polling errors with current polling errors. So they assume there can be polling error, but they assume that we have absolutely no idea which way that polling error will go. Whereas I assume that it'll be like previous years and on average previous years have underestimated the Republican. We won't know who's right on that until we count things. And honestly, you know, as I've said on this show before, I personally think there are a lot of signs that the polling is actually going to underestimate Harris this time. There are a lot of reasons to think that. But I'm not going to put my thumb, on what my models are doing. I'm basing it off the data, basing it off previous elections. I'm not going to be like, oh, my gut says that this time they're going to underestimate Harris and therefore change something. Or even just assume flat, you know, so we'll see. But I actually feel like election graphs is, I don't know. I don't know. I feel like I personally am more optimistic than what election graph says.
|
Sam:
[29:46]
| But as I keep saying over and over again, you know, I don't want to like, my gut is not something I'm necessarily going to trust here. I'm going to be like, look, if things are like previous years, to really feel confident about being ahead, Harris has to have a decent lead in all the swing states, not just be tied in all the swing states. And essentially, that's where we are. So now, since last week, we've had a bunch of polls.
|
Sam:
[30:18]
| And as I am, let's see, what were we down to? As I'm recording now, we're down to 16.3 days between polls, days before polls start to close. And by the way, the 16.3, I also checked, like double-checked the polling close times, you know, and I'm regretting a little bit my choice of where I set this, like when I set the site up a while ago. And I've debated changing it. I have it set to, the end date is 23 UTC on election day. And the thing is, polls do start to close at 23 UTC, but no full states close until zero UTC, an hour later. So I've been like, you know, stressing over the fact that, hey, I should have had the end date set all this time to zero UTC rather than 23 UTC, because that's when full states start to close as opposed to just partial states. And really if you're talking about partial states you have like a whole day earlier with like well not quite a whole day but like 18 hours earlier or something when dicksville notch and all of those little towns start to close but anyway i'm keeping it how it is like my my site again is set up stupidly like if i wanted to change that date i have to change it in like 20 or 30 different places, and it would be easy to miss one.
|
Sam:
[31:46]
| And I don't. I don't. This is stupid. Like, it should be one place and then everything else picks it up from that place. But no, no, I had to be stupid. It's in, like, 23 different places because it's all, like, historical. It was put there when it was and I never standardized it and blah, blah, whatever.
|
Sam:
[32:04]
| And it is when the first, like, major sections of states close. You know, it's what, what, what could I say? It is what it is.
|
Sam:
[32:16]
| Do I still have the map? Yeah, I have the map. So here it's 23 UTC, by the way, is going to be. Oh, and also there was effective, like they changed when savings time would be, but savings time is still before election night. So it didn't actually affect this. The first things to close at 6 p.m. Eastern, which is 23 UTC, are part, well, most of Indiana, but not all of Indiana, and the eastern half of Kentucky. Those are going to be the first two things to close, but they won't give results for either of those states until the entire state closes an hour later at 7 p.m., which is zero UTC.
|
Sam:
[32:57]
| And then at seven we've got like vermont virginia indiana kentucky south carolina georgia and florida so we'll start to get an indication for real then anyway how did i get a tangent tangent i was talking about like stuff for this week hold on yeah here we go here we go blah blah blah okay Okay, stuff for changes in the polls this week. Basically, the bottom line of what happened is some of those states that had gone over from just barely Harris to just barely Trump have now gone back. We now have Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania back on the just barely Harris, weak Harris side of things. We still have Trump favored in my averages.
|
Sam:
[33:52]
| Just the straight averages, forget the probabilities for the moment, because Wisconsin, Trump still has a lead in Wisconsin by 0.1%. So, you know, and I, and I would suspect that it probably will go back soon, but again, like the theme that we've had all along is so many close States right now under 2% margin in the poll averages. We have Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and then we have Georgia at exactly 2% and Arizona at 2.1%. So you can generally throw those in again. So we have the same seven states, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, who are all razor thin in terms of polling averages.
|
Sam:
[34:44]
| So, like... If polling averages are just randomly wrong, then, you know, it could go either way. If polling averages are systematically underestimating Trump again, then Trump will win by a decent margin. If polls are systematically underestimating Harris this time, then she will win by a decent margin. And everything in between there is still possible at any point in time. Now one people one thing that people had asked a number of times is well what about this whole thing with the zone being flooded by conservative pollsters are they intentionally trying to manipulate these kinds of averages to make things look more republican than they would otherwise to help Trump out? And honestly, I think the answer is yes. I think they are. I did an analysis the other day. Let me see if I can find it. I should have had it. I should have had it ready. I should have had it ready. But let me get that up for you.
|
Sam:
[35:54]
| Somebody on Mastodon asked the election graphs account, well, what about this? Specifically, they were like, what happens when you take out the red wave polls this was let's see somebody titled themselves trump chaos fatigue with handle di di x is nine on mastodon.social anyway what happens when you take the red wave polls out and so what i did as just an example and probably when i do the next blog post for election graphs i'll do this again on whatever is now of the tipping point state but But I did it on Pennsylvania, and this was like three days ago now, so the numbers would have changed. But just as an example...
|
Sam:
[36:43]
| I looked at my polling average and the election graphs philosophy is to include fucking everything.
|
Sam:
[36:51]
| Include everything we can find, including folks like Rasmussen, who have a known partisan agenda, including folks like Trafalgar, same thing. And then there are others that are less clear, like, you know, maybe, maybe there are Republican aligned pollsters or maybe they're not. And they just like, but they seem to historically bias towards the Republicans, whatever. So what I did is, because one of the reasons I don't take that into account is I don't want to get into the game of making judgment calls of like who to include or who not to include. Or even more complicated like try to rate them and weight them differently depending on their accuracy or do like 538 does and apply correction factors that say like this pollster usually overestimates the democrats so we're going to apply a correction factor blah blah blah i just don't want to get into that game that's like it's so much putting your you know to use the phrase Again, putting your thumb on things that, you know, you end up having so much room for judgment on what do you include? What do you not include? How do you weigh it? How do you do this? How do you do that? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can get completely different fucking answers depending on what you do.
|
Sam:
[38:17]
| And I don't want to do that on election graphs. So I just include everything.
|
Sam:
[38:22]
| But 538 does have pollster ratings. They go from a zero to three scale where they basically look at all kinds of things about the pollster, including their accuracy in terms of how the polls have done compared to the actual results. But that's not the only thing that goes into the rating. They also take into account things like how transparent are they about their methodology and a variety of other factors. But they end up giving that zero to three score on pollsters. And basically, like, if you're close to a three, you're a really good, high quality pollster that, you know, everyone should trust and pay attention to. And if you're getting down close to zero, you're kind of trash and people should mostly ignore you. And then they've got they've actually got a fourth category pollsters. They've entirely banned that don't even have a rating because they exclude them from their from their averages entirely. And so I recalculated the Pennsylvania average at that time, which right now is.
|
Sam:
[39:30]
| Three days later, I have Pennsylvania. It rounds to 0.0. It's, it's like, I have it listed as a 0.0% Harris lead, but my system, the way my averages work, it actually can't be exactly 0.0. Like if it's, if it really is an exact high, it'll pull in older polls until it's not. So I know it's not exactly 0.00, it rounds to 0.0.
|
Sam:
[39:59]
| Anyway, three days later, I have it at zero. But when I did this analysis, it had Harris up by 0.1%.
|
Sam:
[40:08]
| But then if you restrict it to only pollsters who rated 1.5 or above on 538 scale, it jumps to Harris by 0.4%. If you restricted it to only 2.0 and above, it's up to 0.8. And if you restrict it to 2.5 and above, it's Harris by 1.5. So for Pennsylvania at that moment in time, ignoring lower quality pollsters without trying to identify are they specifically like red wave polls or pollsters? Are clearly like trying to i shouldn't say clearly i don't want to imply you know impugn people's motives although i think there's plenty of evidence um you know if you take out the low quality pollsters harris's numbers went up by 1.4 percent in pennsylvania on that example but i think that like that's going to vary by state that's going to vary over time so like like if i do this again, you know, right now the tipping point state is Wisconsin, where Trump is up by 0.1%. If I do that same thing, do I get the same result? I don't know.
|
Sam:
[41:32]
| Eyeballing right now the latest polls in the mix for that state are bullfinch rmg research redfield and wilton patriot polling and rasmussen those are the ones that are in my average right now which ones do i know and like that's i think rmg research patriot polling and rasmussen are probably all ones that you would potentially consider as at least in the zone of suspicion, for the effect we're talking about.
|
Sam:
[42:06]
| And guess what? First of all, those are three out of five polls in my average. So they definitely dominate the average. Those are the three that have Trump ahead. RMG has Trump up by one. Patriot polling has Trump up by one. Rasmussen has Trump up by two. The other two in the average, Bullfinch, if you average their two results, have Harris up by 2.5. Redfield and Wilton have Harris up by one. Now, if I was actually going to do like the analysis I did before, I wouldn't just average those two. I'd find two other older ones to include in the average that were more trustworthy. Just glancing through, I think that would be morning consult, which has Trump up by one and probably insider advantage, which has Trump tied. So you would pull in a couple of Trump things, but they would be Trump things that aren't quite as strong as the ones you just excluded. But even when you put all that into place, it's a relatively small difference.
|
Sam:
[43:08]
| It's like that Pennsylvania example where I actually did all the math. It was a 1.4% difference. 1.4% is very small. However, when you've got seven fucking states that are all at a 2.1% or less margin right now, 1.4% doesn't look that small anymore. It's pretty big. But the thing, and so you have to keep in mind though, that the actual, all of this is still just coming out to say it's close enough. The polls can't tell you the difference.
|
Sam:
[43:47]
| Even, even with this. Now, could you like, if I did all my averages with only pollsters that had 2.5 or above on 538 scale, would it be different? Yes. Would it be more towards Harris? I think right now it would be. I haven't done the analysis on more than that one thing on, on Harris, on Pennsylvania, because that took me a while to do. You know, I was like going through the list of polls on my site and looking up the pollster rating on each one and then deciding whether to include it or not, and then doing the average by hand and blah, blah, blah. You know, so it took me a little while to do that. I might do, hell, for my post, I might do it on all seven swing states just to see. That will be very interesting. I think I now determined I need to do that.
|
Sam:
[44:42]
| But yeah it's yes I think they are doing that I think they are, putting their thumbs again the thumbs and what are you supposed to put your thumb on the are you putting your thumb on the needle, as the scales you're putting your thumb on the scales that's where that comes from it's like you're you're you're weighing stuff and you're you're making it look like you have a you're selling a little bit more than you actually are whatever I've got it that that's thumb on the scales not thumb on the needle not thumb on the thing thumb on the thing sounds like a good title for the show though anyway the tipping point in the last week oh i, one more thing on the these pollsters and that may be intentionally well more than one thing that may be intentionally trying to skew averages because people have been saying they've been flooding the area. Like they've been putting out lots of results from all kinds of different right-wing pollsters all over the place in all the swing states. And so it's like, well, what's their motivation exactly?
|
Sam:
[45:52]
| Like, because if you're trying to actually figure out what's going to happen in a state, you want to do your damn best to not be biased. You want to do your best to make assumptions that reflect reality so that you can get the best estimate you possibly can of what's going on. But there are other possible motivations. Well, and before I go to other possible motivations, it is very possible that the Republican leaning pollsters actually just honestly believe their models, honestly believe all the other pollsters are missing Trump voters. And they are doing things with their modeling to make it more likely to catch those voters.
|
Sam:
[46:45]
| And in both 2016 and 2020 including these right-wing pollsters at the very end of the election made i can't speak for the other folks anybody else doing averages but including them i am convinced made my averages closer to the actual results than they would have been otherwise because the other pollsters were missing Republicans. There were Republicans who weren't answering polls, the famed Trump shyness or whatever.
|
Sam:
[47:23]
| And so they were, whatever their motivations, whatever their methodologies, which may or may not be valid by, you know, what pollsters say you should be doing, gave better answers. Now, maybe they were just lucky. They essentially skewed their polls to be more Republican, more Trumpy, and just happened to be right. It doesn't mean their methodology was correct. They just happened to be right.
|
Sam:
[47:59]
| So like, this is another reason I'm reluctant to like manually make decisions to remove certain pollsters from my averages is because frankly, I don't know who's right. Even if, even if they are motivated by things other than accuracy, I don't know who's right. And and my my methodology of doing probabilities and all that takes into account the fact that the last few weeks before the 2016 and 2020 elections there were lots of pollsters in the field who were redder than the others and my averages reflected that so like if i change that this time around it changes the ability to compare to those previous years anyway it does look like that's happening. So when you look at polls and polling averages, interpret accordingly. If you want to look at the election graphs ones and say, well, how would that look if you only do pollsters that aren't known to be affiliated in some way with right-wing causes?
|
Sam:
[49:11]
| The state detail pages have the exact list of polls I include and the exact list of historical polls pull out of whichever ones you think you trust and make your own average. See where that is.
|
Sam:
[49:25]
| Okay, having said all that, back to the national summary and where we are right now. The tipping point since last week has moved from Trump leading by 0.8% to Trump only leading by 0.1% with all of the caveats about interpreting that than I just said. If you plug that into my time left before election models, you end up with Harris's chances at between 17.8 and 34.2%, which I would be much happier if it was over 50, but it's not right now. And the main reason is what I mentioned before. I'm kind of assuming, based on the historical averages, that polls are underestimating Harris. And right now, well, first of all, right now, just with the straight poll averages, Trump wins anyway, even without putting that into effect. He's ahead by 0.1% in the tipping point state. If he actually wins Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona, he wins. He wins by six electoral votes. It ends up being super close in terms of the electoral college, and he wins.
|
Sam:
[50:44]
| But even if you give Wisconsin, let's say Wisconsin moves from 0.1% Trump to 0.1% Harris. She's still got nevada pennsylvania and wisconsin less than half a point ahead and michigan not at only 1.7 and if you and that's about how far i'm gonna have to like pull it hold on what's the exact number i think it's like 1.3 1.4 something like that, Okay, I'm going to look up the post where I said, I always forget this number.
|
Sam:
[51:23]
| My actual, here we go, 1.3%.
|
Sam:
[51:27]
| If you look at the curves I use for looking at an individual state and what are the odds of the Republicans or Democrats winning, the break-even point where there's a 50-50 chance is Democrats ahead by 1.3%. So basically my models say that in order for Harris to have a better than even chance in a state, you need to have her poll averages, not just on her side, but more than 1.3% on her side. And right now, you know, that means that Nevada and Pennsylvania are still more likely to go to Trump than to Harris with my model and Michigan just barely like, I lie. Even Michigan, like that I, at the moment, oh yeah, here we go. And this is where it differs from with the time left before the election versus now. In Michigan, if the election was held today, I give Harris a 57.1% with her 1.7% lead. But with 16.4 days left, I actually only give her a 49% chance because there's time for that to change. And historically things have changed in that time. so anyway.
|
Sam:
[52:54]
| Look, all of this round and round and round on this just really in the end comes down to, we can't fucking tell. There's too many closed states. We can't tell. I'm like, you know, going from, you know, does Trump have a slight advantage to this? Harris have a slight advantage. Either way, it could go either way.
|
Sam:
[53:19]
| Like if you look at my of i said between 17.8 and 34.2 percent according to my accounting for time left models i think the my and here's my gut that i don't put on the website directly but like i feel like between those two models reality is probably like 70 of the way towards the uniform swing model. So the two models, the independent states model, that's the one that gives 17, 8% assumes that the polling error is completely unrelated in all the states. Like you could have one state underestimating Harris by 3% and another state underestimating Trump by 3% and then it can all be doing like that. Uniform swing assumes the same polling error everywhere. And so if the polls are underestimating Harris by 3%, they're underestimating Harris by 3% everywhere. Now, obviously, neither one of those two extremes is going to be correct. It's going to be somewhere in between. I think it's going to be closer to uniform swing, simply because you got the same pollsters that are producing polls in all the swing states. So if they've got some sort of methodological assumptions that produce a polling error, it's likely to be the same in all the swing states. So I think it's going to be closer to uniform swing. Anyway, so let's call it 30%. Let's say Harris has a 30% chance.
|
Sam:
[54:49]
| 30-70 does not mean Harris can't win. 30-70 means that, yeah, maybe Trump would be slightly favored. But it's not – I always bring back the average odds that people gave Trump in 2016 were about 14%. So Harris has much better ads now than Trump had eight years ago.
|
Sam:
[55:20]
| And so you should not be like 30%. Oh no, that's like nothing. And again, that's assuming that poll errors this time will be somewhat like poll errors in the last couple of years, which I think is a reasonable way to do assumptions. If you did not have that assumption though, like, you know, most of the like 538 and the economist both have it really close to 50, 50. And that's where we are still. And honestly, I'd say like 70-30, 30-70 is still effectively a coin toss. It's a weighted coin, but it's nowhere near like, it's still too close to call. You still would not be surprised by a Harris victory. A Harris landslide is even still within the realm of possibility. But i'd still much rather actually be ahead.
|
Sam:
[56:23]
| I'd much rather actually be ahead but as as folks have said, if it's in within the margin of error it's when it's within, if it let me say that again without like if it's within the margin of error it's within the margin of effort and i think that's very true and that's why people are trying hard and we're going to wrap up this segment about polls and then we'll start talking about the the non-polling parts of what's going on with the election and and there we'll get into some of the reasons why you know i keep saying my gut is that polls are underestimating harris related to how the campaign is actually going right now and so yeah we'll talk about that in a minute well a minute for you for me i'm gonna go off do some household chores do some other stuff maybe get some food, i'm gonna do stuff and come back to do another segment later a few hours later later in the day tonight. I don't know. When I feel like it, I'll get back to you. But for you, for you, it is only this lovely short break.
|
Break:
[57:45]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! It was just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. The baby build a little bit more than you do Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. You, you, you, it's, it's amazing. To get the show on the road. There's a road? There's a road? Oh my god, there's a road!
|
Sam:
[58:50]
| And here I am again. So, let's see, now it is Monday, October 21st, just before 2 UTC. So that's still Sunday night, West Coast time, where I am, U.S. West Coast time. So we'll finish this sucker up, and then we'll edit it up, and then we'll send it out. And my editing at this point is very light. Like I try to do like absolute minimal, like just basically you see what you get. You see, you know, well, on the audio podcast, you see nothing on YouTube. You get to see a little bit more getting ready and stuff. And I don't know, like if, if there's lots of coughing and stuff, I'll get rid of that. If my son interrupts me, I'll get rid of that. But otherwise it's just straight on through. Like, I don't care. Like, I mean, I do care, but it takes too much time to care. So I don't care if you know what I mean. So let me start out. My voice did a little start, start thing like there.
|
Sam:
[59:50]
| Since I did that last segment, there have been, of course, new polls. There are new polls all the time now. And so just to highlight the things that changed, basically Pennsylvania went for, I mean, there were, there were polls in a bunch of states, but these are ones that matter. Pennsylvania moved from just barely Harris back to just barely Trump. Meanwhile, Wisconsin went from just barely Trump to just barely Harris. And some others moved around a little bit. The tipping point moved from Trump by 0.1 back up to Trump by 0.9.
|
Sam:
[1:00:25]
| So back sort of in Trump's direction overall is the general sense of this. And my counting for time left odds got a little bit worse for Harris now at between 17.9% and 28.3%. with all the caveats I gave before. The one thing that I forgot, I think I started down this road, but forgot was on the polling, like why would the red state pollster, or red state pollsters, why would the Trump leaning pollsters care about flooding the zone? And I sort of went off to, well, maybe they actually believe it and maybe they do. But I forgot to get back to the other reasons. Like if you think they're doing it, If you think they know that they're pushing things in the direction of their candidate beyond real life, then why would they do that?
|
Sam:
[1:01:21]
| One reason is just like, hey, it'll make Trump happy. He likes to see good numbers, maybe. Another reason would be like, hey, you want to discourage the Democrats. You want to make them think that Trump is winning and it's hopeless and why bother voting just stay home?
|
Sam:
[1:01:40]
| I don't know if I buy that one that much because like for that to like be an effect, you, you want to see like, I mean, yes, people will stay home because it's hopeless. If it's hopeless, like if, oh my God, Trump is winning by 18,000 points in every swing state. But even if you take these Trumpy pollsters at face value and don't even include them in an average it still shows a close race it still shows like yeah maybe Trump's ahead by a little bit but certainly within shooting distance for the Democrats most of them are showing margin of error even even the like most optimistic Trump ones are showing like within margin of error still So I don't know if I buy that. Like, if anything, that will encourage turnout. Like, oh my God, it's close. I got to vote.
|
Sam:
[1:02:34]
| Or, you know, we're just barely losing. And maybe if I vote, we won't be. I don't know. Like, I don't buy that. The other thing that people are saying is they're trying to set up the narrative for contesting the votes. Like if it turns out that Donald Trump does lose these states, but narrowly, they can point to a whole bunch of posts, a whole bunch of polls showing Trump was actually ahead in those states. How could he possibly have lost? He was ahead. and just to make it more plausible for whatever things they end up deciding to contest. I don't know. I honestly, like...
|
Sam:
[1:03:20]
| I feel like the most likely motivation is actually these right-leaning pollsters actually believe their polls. Are they flooding the zone to make the narrative match their own views? Sure. They're putting out a lot of polls, and I can certainly see that. And those other motivations, maybe there's some of that there. I don't know. But I feel like these pollsters are, are they constructing their models in a way such that the results match what they want to see? Probably. But I'm guessing most of them actually feel like that's the truth. Like they do a turnout model that represents what they think is going to happen which involves more Republicans turning out I don't know anyway, enough of that I said I was done with polls and it was time to talk about other stuff, this is basically all election 2024 stuff and almost all of it is going to be at the presidential level.
|
Sam:
[1:04:39]
| So that's what you're getting. I guess I'll go through some of these things roughly in the order that we noted them down in our potential topics list. So over the course of the week, one is just the Trump campaign. And this is comes from both Harris and Vance is really double and tripling down on the racism. Like, and there should be no surprise to this. I mean, it's been a continuous theme of Donald Trump's presidential races since the moment he came down the escalator in 2015. And so there's no surprise here, but it's getting, it's more and more and more overt, less hiding. I mean, there hasn't been much hiding in a while, but it's like, it's getting to be so blatant.
|
Sam:
[1:05:40]
| And you know all the Haitian stuff was part of it but I mean like the comments on they don't care if they're legal I you know Vance was said something along the lines the other day of like yeah well I'm still gonna call them illegal and I don't have a list of examples in front of me because I'm stupid and unprepared, but it just seems like it's been ramping up and ramping up and ramping up. And I guess this has happened the other elections too. It's like, I'm surprised there haven't been like live video covering a caravan of migrants coming up from Central America. Cause that, that seemed to happen every election for several elections in a row. Cause the reality is that's happening all the time. They just chose to highlight it during election season.
|
Sam:
[1:06:32]
| But it's, it's so discouraging every time you see something new and you know, to expect it and you know, it's their thing. You know, it's, it's, it's the key. It's, it's the core of, of Trumpism, like racism and grift, basically. I mean, it's, it's like the fundamental theme is, I mean, make America great again. It's all about, let's go back to some previous America where, you know, the white male Christian ruling class was in charge and didn't have to think about anybody else so it's not surprising when there's a new comment or whatever i mean there have been ai generated images that they're sharing all over social media that are just scary looking foreigners being violent it's so annoying so discouraging and the fact that it resonates with so many people in this country is even scarier. I mean, I've said this before, but yes, Trump is scary.
|
Sam:
[1:07:56]
| But the thing that's really depressing is not Trump himself. It's not even how the Republican party has capitulated to him. It's that enough of the American population likes what he's putting out that this race is within the margin of error. And we can't, like, it could go either way. Like the fact that this isn't an absolute freaking blowout on the with the democrats winning like if the republicans put up something like this is just depressing at to every level of my existence it is just and again i it's an entirely different thing like i i know some people did but i don't feel that way, you know, or I didn't feel that way about Romney or McCain or even W or, or the older Bush or Reagan, you know, like I had problems with each and every one of those Republicans I listed still do.
|
Sam:
[1:09:08]
| And God knows like Clinton and Obama and Biden aren't perfect and neither is terrorists. But those other older style Republicans, I didn't automatically think, okay, if you support them, there's a problem with you too. You know, it's like, it's the difference between, you know, arguing on the margins of about policy stuff or even like yeah they sort of are really bad in certain areas to certain populations i care about but they at least i don't know trump is a whole different world i feel like i had no problems being friends with somebody who was like a Romney supporter.
|
Sam:
[1:10:03]
| You know, agree to disagree kind of things. You know? You know? But given what Trump is, I can't, you know, like, I don't feel like if I know somebody's a Trump supporter, I can't have, I mean, I'm going to be civil to them in the grocery store or something, but they're certainly not somebody I'm going to like do something socially with. I'm sorry. It's beyond the pale morally. And and they're doubling down on it they're doubling tripling quadrupling down on it as we get to the end i'm gonna be a little scattered with these that's okay whatever you care next up there's been a lot of talk depending who you talk to you'll you'll hear people either.
|
Sam:
[1:10:59]
| Praising Kamala Harris's strategy at this point, or the complete opposite, saying that this is guaranteeing she's going to lose, etc. And that's that she has been really spending most of her time at this point trying to nail down the center.
|
Sam:
[1:11:20]
| She's been campaigning with the former Republicans that support her, Liz Cheney and all of those folks. They had some events specifically related to that, like Republicans for Harris in Pennsylvania and some other stuff. She's also been going on a variety of shows that appeal towards less political folks. And that that's not not so much a go after the center as a go after the the apathetic or the people who aren't following politics too much but also like policy wise she's been saying things like oh i'm gonna have a bipartisan council of advisors i'm gonna put a republican in my cabinet i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that and the interpretation of that is of course that she is putting there, she is trying to set up something where disaffected Republicans who don't like Trump can feel comfortable potentially voting for her. And so she's going after that sort of audience of, you know, can I get some people who voted for Trump in 2020 or 2016 to vote for me instead?
|
Sam:
[1:12:45]
| Or at least keep them from voting for Donald Trump again. Give them enough context to be like, you know, I never really thought that I would vote Democrat, but she doesn't seem that bad. Maybe I can vote for her.
|
Sam:
[1:13:04]
| And there are a lot of folks who think that is absolutely 100% the right strategy and that is the audience she should be going after. But there's a vocal minority out there that I see posts from on Mastodon all the time who are basically your, I mean, it's, it's the, the successors of the Bernie or busters who are basically like, she's not saying what I want her to say on the Gaza situation. She's not liberal enough on this situation. I don't like the fact that she's talking to Republicans and therefore she hasn't turned my vote. I'm not going to vote for her, whatever. And what she should be doing is courting us leftists and, you know, going after us and coming in our direction. And look, I have said here with Yvonne a couple of weeks ago that I'm not sure there's much room to do much on the persuasion side to like actually convert Trump voters to Harris voters. And I think it should really be about get out the vote and all this kind of thing.
|
Sam:
[1:14:25]
| But I think the people to go after are sort of those people who aren't paying attention or who are more apathetic or just not tuned into politics and get more of those people to vote. I don't think it's about courting the far left. You know, the far left is going to do whatever they're going to do. I have seen a number of posts by people who did withhold their votes in 2016, who either didn't vote or voted for Jill Stein or whatever. I've seen a number of posts from those kinds of people saying, I made a, I made a mistake. I made a fucking mistake. Those of you who are talking like this again in 2024.
|
Sam:
[1:15:10]
| Like I know a lot of you are too young to remember 2016. And that's one of the things too, as like someone like me, who's, you know, 50 plus, I remember 2020. I remember 2016. I remember 2000 and freaking Ralph Nader. You know, I remember all these things. It's been eight years since 2016 there are a lot of people who are now potential voters who tend to say things like that and and be like you know i i couldn't possibly vote for harris because she's got the wrong position on issue x even though they're on the left hand side of things and you presume don't like Donald Trump and say things like, it's the lesser of two evils and I'm not going to vote for any evil and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are a lot of people out there who it's their first time through that rodeo and they don't remember the others. And so some of these videos of the people who did that in 2016, I think are instructive. I hope.
|
Sam:
[1:16:25]
| It changes the minds of some of those people who are talking that way this time, but it probably won't. I mean, you know, at a certain point, those folks are stuck. Yeah. The bottom line is, I'm sorry, a vote is not an endorsement. A vote is, it is not a, I want to be careful with words because you can endorse somebody and say, yes, you should vote for them without actually, a vote is not saying that you agree with all that person's positions a vote for them is not saying you think that person should be a saint you know it is saying that of the available choices that it's it's a chess move and look i'll i'll admit like i remember saying that crap myself when i was in my 20s like i voted for fucking Ross Perot. I've voted for libertarians at various points in time. And I'm like, you know, you don't get bonus points for picking the winner. You should pick the person who most agrees with you.
|
Sam:
[1:17:37]
| And with the wisdom of age, that is bullshit in the American system. If we had a parliament with proportional representation, okay, maybe go, go for it. Makes sense. You vote for the person who's closest to you, and then they will work in coalition with other groups to do whatever. Maybe, yeah. But we don't. We live in a system that is winner-take-all, first-past-the-post. And that means that, realistically, you got two choices. Even if they both suck, you pick the one that's better.
|
Sam:
[1:18:18]
| And anyway i i think i think the right some of those folks are hopeless you're not going to convince them but i think there's very little juice left to squeeze from the people who voted for trump before and you want them not to this time maybe there's some juice there but i don't think there's a lot. I think the place where they would get the most impact is getting the center left-ish but the.
|
Sam:
[1:18:53]
| Less likely to vote people, getting them out the door or getting some of the people who just haven't been paying attention and don't think politics is useful. The people who are sort of completely disaffected and believe that, you know, nothing's, their vote doesn't matter. Those are the people to get out and and speaking of that briefly i want to highlight my stepmother stepmom kathy sunshine on october 19th posted to her substack an article that i would recommend to people it's titled welcome to the hotel pennsylvania and you'll find it on thirdage.substack.com, And basically she's spending like most of the month of October doorbelling in Pennsylvania near Harrisburg. And it's a post about her experiences there. I'll give a couple quotes here.
|
Sam:
[1:20:02]
| One, well, I'll give this one example. Read the whole article. It's a really good article. Plug to her. Here's one paragraph. In the poorest neighborhoods, disinformation is rife. Many people believe that the pandemic stimulus checks bearing Trump's signature came from him personally. The exact deception he intended. And hope that if he is reelected, another check will arrive. That money was approved by Congress, I told one young woman, who stared at me blankly and asked, What's Congress? And that's the kind of thing that is out there. I mean, something like 40% of eligible voters don't vote. I think getting them is hard, but that's where the biggest pool of people you could potentially get comes from.
|
Sam:
[1:21:07]
| But going after some of those disaffected Republicans, okay, fine. Do some of that. But I think Harris is also doing what I was saying. She's going on shows where they usually talk about sports. She's going on shows where they usually talk about entertainment or relationship. She's going on non-political. She's going and doing interviews at non-political places. We talked about Howard Stern the other day. We talked about the She's Your Daddy. Whatever it is. I, I, her, her daddy, who's her daddy. I don't know. I forget what the name of the damn thing is, but she's been on a bunch of that and she's continuing to have been on a bunch of those kinds of shows. And I think that's the right place. And I think that people fixating on, oh, she's going after like Republicans and she's leaning to the center. I think that's the right place to lean. I mean, sorry, that's how American politics works. You run towards the center in general elections and you try to get the middle. I know people on the left want somebody to run to the left, but that ends up, there are a lot of folks that, what's the right way to put this? I think you lose more people than you gain that way. Leftists may want to think that they're a silent majority, but they're no more a silent majority than the conservatives used to be.
|
Sam:
[1:22:35]
| The center has the most people. And if you go too far to the left, you lose them and you lose the election. You sort of, you, the best way to get to a lot of the results that sort of the far leftists say they want is to move incrementally in that direction more slowly. Sorry, you know, I know they want rapid change and revolution and, you know, get rid of the neoliberal capitalists and blah, blah, blah, you know, fast change. Some things need fast change. Look, I'll, of course, but more generally fast change is like more generally, hold on. I have to write, make a note. More generally, though, like, you know, you move things too fast, you get a huge backlash, you get violence, you get all kinds of bad things, you want to move more slowly.
|
Sam:
[1:23:45]
| But electorally, the main thing is, even where I agree that we should go faster and the far left position is better, you end up losing. You know, there's a real politic thing here of like, figure out how to win the freaking election. Then once you're in charge, maybe you can do some stuff. But you got to win the election first. And you don't win the election by alienating people. You want to build your coalition and get it as wide as possible. And I mean, we've got the, the Harris coalition right now goes from freaking Bernie Sanders to Dick fucking Cheney. They have both endorsed him.
|
Sam:
[1:24:31]
| Could you imagine anything that would get Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders on the same page a few years back? Come on. That's a massively wide coalition. It's, will it win?
|
Sam:
[1:24:49]
| We'll find out. But I think, like, concentrate on, I have no problem with her trying to convert to Republicans. And I think she's doing the right thing by going after these places where people pay less attention, congregate like there's no and she is doing some of the more mainstream media. But I mean, come on, she doesn't need to go on fucking MSNBC. Those people are already voting for her, you know, go after the other places. OK, next up, I guess I touched on this with the people like Stein.
|
Sam:
[1:25:26]
| Stein specifically in the last two weeks, her campaign people, like there've been a number of them caught or people who are her supporters at Stein events have been recorded specifically saying things like, we know we can't win Michigan, but maybe we can keep Harris from winning. And you can't get more overt than that in terms of saying that the Stein campaign's objective is essentially to elect Donald Trump. That's what they're saying. If you keep Harris from winning a state like Michigan, then you're making sure Trump wins. They know that's the effect they're having, and they seem to be fine with that and be running with that. And this is the same damn thing with West.
|
Sam:
[1:26:25]
| And, you know, I don't know what's up with Oliver Like, most of these folks, like At this point, the positions in the polls of all of these folks Are extremely small And Kennedy's essentially gone to zero since he dropped out He had already gotten close to there As soon as Harris took over from Biden And so the third party support right now is pretty damn small in comparison to where it sometimes is. But the problem is you've got these seven states that are super close. So in order to make a difference here, these third parties don't need to get a lot. They just need to convince a few people who might have voted for Harris to vote for the third party instead. And they can flip the election so and stein specific i mean stein specifically is such a damn grifter you know it's it's all about the scam and you know i'm sure she's making some money off it she gets some attention every once in a while you know.
|
Sam:
[1:27:39]
| And, you know, I don't know that there's a direct connection, but that whole, like, I'm going to sit with Putin a few years back, that picture still keeps coming up. You know, it's just there.
|
Sam:
[1:27:53]
| I've I know the argument that these sort of esoteric third parties. Well, even the big ones, like, OK, fine. You know, Stein's with the Greens. They've always been like fourth or fifth level party in the US. But even like with the libertarians, like the whole notion that this somehow gives visibility to their agenda and they're not going to win, but they're going to influence the conversation and blah, blah, blah. No, nobody, nobody's paying attention to any of that in terms of what they're actually saying. The at you know it's just at most right now a protest vote it's like it's like the place people go when they don't want to vote for either of the two main parties but it's there it's not serving sort of the the view of you know hey we'll vote for the greens or we'll campaign for the Greens, and it'll give more prominence to their positions on a whole bunch of issues. Ditto with the Libertarians. It's just, it's not working. If that's your strategy, it's a failure, because that's not what's happening with those votes. Okay. I'm going to keep going through a few more of these. We'll be done soon. I'm getting tired. I mentioned Harris.
|
Sam:
[1:29:20]
| Bypassing traditional media. Trump obviously has been too. He's been going on the right-wing podcasts and a few other places. The closest thing to major media, I mean, he was on Fox the other day on their morning, Fox and Friends, their morning program. He went on that Univision thing, which was a disaster for him. He got actual real questions from real human beings and he completely failed to answer them. That audience looks so skeptical of everything he said. Because for once it wasn't like an audience full of people who were already fawning all over him. But Trump has been.
|
Sam:
[1:30:05]
| People criticized Harris for avoiding traditional media, and she eventually did a few traditional media interviews and then was all over the place with non-traditional media. Trump, over the last week or two, has canceled something like three or four interviews he had scheduled with real places. Like he, he, he dropped out of one that he was going to do on CNBC. He dropped out of one that he was going to do on regular MSNBC. He dropped out of some podcast he was going to be doing that was sort of aimed at black men, but there may have been another, I don't know. Those are the three I can remember. And obviously I didn't even, I don't remember the name of that third one. And one of his staff members, and this is the kind of thing a staff member should be fired for, honestly, but one of his staff members apparently told the venue they were backing out of that the reason they were backing out was he was exhausted. And he has looked exhausted at a variety of his venues lately.
|
Sam:
[1:31:19]
| But that's not the kind of thing even if it's true you don't say it I mean it looks like he's hiding it looks like his campaign is keeping him from anywhere else, where he might be exposed to a real question from somebody who is not already in the tank for him, I can't believe they let him do that Univision one I mean it was a disaster but I.
|
Sam:
[1:31:44]
| It would make sense that they're trying to keep him out of these things because some of his rallies that are in front of diehard supporters are going really badly lately.
|
Sam:
[1:31:57]
| I don't remember exactly when the whole like he's going to play music for 40 minutes thing happened. Like, did we talk about it last week? I don't remember. But like he also had a situation where his mic stopped working and he just stood around on stage for 20 minutes until they fixed it, you know, and look.
|
Sam:
[1:32:21]
| Tech issues happen. Although I'm honestly really surprised that for something like, oh, the microphone's not working. There wasn't a pretty damn quick fix. Like, why would that take 20 minutes to deal with? I mean, I don't know what was happening behind the scenes, but 20 minutes seems like a long time to like, can we get him another mic? I mean, obviously, it had to have been something more substantial wrong with that than that, right? I don't know. But like, even assuming something real technical went down and they had to deal with it, don't just stand there. Like have him go back into the green room play some music then and say he'll be back once we fix the tech problems or whatever you know the they just having him stand out there looking lost for 20 minutes is is it the right thing and all of this you know combines to the what what's up with trump's decline like i can't remember how many times yvonne and i talked over the years.
|
Sam:
[1:33:32]
| About you know is trump losing it and we always agreed something along these lines of he's clearly not what he was in the 80s but he's still fine i mean the same kind of thing we said about biden honestly you know it's like he's is he much is he much different than he was in 2015 we always said no it's about the same he was he he was always rambly he was always a little bit stupid he was always like not quite understanding what he was really talking about and and he was always a little off the wall and couldn't keep a coherent train of thought those things are always true, And they were to a degree, but they do seem to have gotten significantly worse just in the last few months. I mean, the latest thing is...
|
Sam:
[1:34:27]
| Just within the last couple of days, he gave, at some sort of rally, he spent like the first, what, I don't know, 10, 20 minutes or whatever. I don't know how long. Even if it was one minute. He spent the beginning talking about, let me get the stupid name right. Let me make sure I want to quote the AP on this so that I don't like, here's the AP headline, AP. Like, and we've been complaining about how like the major media, like with sane washing a lot of this kind of stuff. And the New York Times kind of did that even with this event, but AP, Trump kicks off a Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer's genitalia. Really? Really?
|
Sam:
[1:35:24]
| He has seemed to be less coherent. People pointed out that at the Fox and Friends thing, the people there, the hosts, seemed to be guiding him around like a child, just to get to his seat and stuff. And then once they were talking to him, sort of coaching and trying to lead the conversation as he rambled. It's will it it seems kind of obvious that it's getting worse and getting worse quickly, will it make any difference that that's what we always ask right like you know will.
|
Sam:
[1:36:06]
| And i think the answer always comes down to do the right people see it and i think the answer for the most part is no i mean maybe some people actually at these rallies i saw one clip of someone who was videoed leaving a Trump rally. I think I saw a clip. Maybe I read a quote, whatever, but the person was like, I think he's passed his expiration date. But if you go to the places where the most Trump voters are, like conservative podcasts, conservative blogs, Fox News, especially Fox News, for the most part, you don't see the craziest stuff. They're not taking his rallies live. If they show clips from it, they're going to show clips where it isn't the crazy stuff. They're not going to be having conversations about maybe Trump's past as expiration date, what's wrong with Trump, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, does it get to some of those people that I was talking about before that just aren't paying attention very much? So not the like diehard Trump partisans, but just people who aren't paying attention and blah, blah, blah. Maybe some, you know, Saturday Night Live is making fun of it. There are clips all over TikTok.
|
Sam:
[1:37:28]
| The mocking kind of stuff does seem to have the power of breaking through a little bit, and people will understand the mocking. And so if people are making fun of him for him being incoherent and such, maybe that part of the narrative gets out. But there's still, honestly, I don't know how much of this stuff is going to change anything. You know, I had that whole segment on the polls and moving a little bit this way, a little bit that way. But the bottom line is things have been pretty static for months. Like, it's.
|
Sam:
[1:38:07]
| The vast majority of people in this country know where they stand on this, and nothing's going to change their mind. And even with this kind of thing, I mean, kind of, look, it's the same. When we were talking about Biden and his potential limitations after the first debate, one of the things that Yvonne and I said all the time was, so what? If Biden can't make it through the four years, whatever, we got Harris. And Harris is fine. Is the same thought process going on in terms of Vance? Like if you look at Trump over the next, next. If you look at what we've seen of Trump in the last few weeks, it's getting harder and harder to imagine him actually making it through four years. Do we really end up with a scenario that, you know, he gets sworn in, assuming he wins, he gets sworn in on January 20th and on January 21st, he makes a deal with Vance to resign and be pardoned or something. Now, I don't think Trump's ego could actually handle that because he doesn't quit anything, and that's a core part of his personality.
|
Sam:
[1:39:30]
| But could you see something where he doesn't want to be president? He's never wanted to be president. He wants the grift that he can get out of it, and he wants to be looked at as a winner. He hoped that that would finally get him the respect and recognition from the elites that he always craved. It didn't.
|
Sam:
[1:39:56]
| He doesn't actually like the job of being president. He just wants everything that goes with it. So would he be perfectly happy just turning over all of the policy parts to people that actually care?
|
Sam:
[1:40:15]
| And then, you know, sign on the dotted line every once in a while. And then look from everything we've heard like his biggest backers right now are are the people who like set up vance as the vp choice so do they really want vance like is that is that what they're really looking for or or do they not care as long as it's someone easily controllable that's probably more like it but you know i think the argument that a trump vote is really a vote for vance is not out of the question if it like at the rate trump is deteriorating like is he actually going to be able to do the job i don't know but it's certainly something to be thinking about and and i don't know like said a long time that what happens to the republican party after trump And there are a variety of possibilities, but the worst one is essentially someone like Trump, but smarter.
|
Sam:
[1:41:26]
| And is that what we get with somebody like Vance? I mean, so far, he may be smarter in some sort of academic sense, but his political instinct seems pretty bad. He's been kind of disastrous on the campaign trail. So I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:41:44]
| But, and on the curmudgeon score of Slack, I think it was Bob who asked, if we get Vance, do we really get Thiel? Maybe it was Pete. I don't know. Whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:41:54]
| And yeah, maybe. Maybe that's what we get anyway. I mean, we got like Musk and Thiel and other folks like this clearly with a major influence on what's going on here. Their super PACs are going crazy, spending all kinds of money. One of the other things in the news this week was Musk apparently offering monetary rewards for people to register and stuff that, depending on what you read, is either on the verge of being illegal or definitely being illegal, depending on the exact details of how he did it. Like he's trying to exploit some sort of loophole to, to get around the requirement, but it's, yes, these billionaires are playing in this game and trying to exert their influence through choosing this person. Now, the thing with Trump in the past, and you'd think people would learn, right? Like the mainstream Republicans in 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to be the nominee, many of them moved from fairly overtly saying that Trump would be a disaster, Trump was horrible, Trump was a racist, Trump was this, Trump was that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Lindsey Graham doing his if we elect Trump it will destroy us comment, all this kind of thing to getting all in behind him.
|
Sam:
[1:43:24]
| Because they felt that they could still manipulate him and get what they want. And look.
|
Sam:
[1:43:32]
| They did, to a large extent. I mean, what are the things that a lot of these people cared about the most? Tax cuts and Roe versus Wade. They got their tax cuts for rich people, and they got the judges in place to overrule Roe versus Wade and to push conservative viewpoints on lots of other subjects. Like we still have all the fallout, you know, on the changes to the, what can be done with regulations and stuff like that, that's gone through the Supreme court. That's going to take a while to play out, but that's going to be very significant as well. So yeah, they got most of what they want, but at the same time, they got a loose cannon that did all kinds of stuff they would rather not happen. And so do we have these folks, are folks like Musk and Thiel assuming that they can control whatever comes out of this? And I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:44:35]
| They probably can't control the whole thing, but maybe they don't need to. As long as they get a couple of key things they want, they want, you know, they want to like make sure you've got an administration that won't mess with their businesses, won't raise taxes, won't try to impose rules, et cetera, et cetera. Then, yeah, they'll get what they want out of Trump or Vance.
|
Sam:
[1:45:04]
| Musk seems to be all in on the racism. He'll certainly get that from Trump. Probably from Vance, too. Like, Vance, you know... I wonder with Vance, like how much of what he says is because that's what he truly believes and how much is him positioning himself in a certain way. I think he believes most of it. Okay. It's time to wrap this sucker up. One more news thing that came out this week that I just had to laugh at.
|
Sam:
[1:45:41]
| Stormy daniels and stormy daniels lawyers apparently reached out to rachel maddow from msnbc this week because they just wanted to tell an additional story like they were there was there you know not to get it all into the stormy daniels history but there was a point where Stormy Daniels sued Donald Trump for him disparaging her. She lost that lawsuit. Even though Donald Trump lost the other big lawsuit with New York, not lawsuit, the criminal trial in New York about, you know, the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and stuff. Stormy Daniels lost the lawsuit that she filed against Donald Trump and was ordered to pay all kinds of legal fees. So she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Donald Trump. And she had set up a GoFundMe and blah, blah, blah, and raised a whole bunch of money and was ready to pay Donald Trump. And so her lawyers and Trump's lawyers were negotiating on the amount. And they disagreed on the amount. Of course, Donald Trump's lawyers felt that she owed more. Stormy Daniels felt that she owed less. but Donald Trump's lawyers basically came back with, you know what? We'll let it go with the lower number.
|
Sam:
[1:47:07]
| If you sign another NDA that you won't talk about Donald Trump anymore. And this was not years ago. This was like this summer. This summer that just ended. And they are once again trying to pay off Stormy Daniels to make her shut up.
|
Sam:
[1:47:26]
| Does she have anything new to say? No, it doesn't look like she has anything new to say. Everything she has to say, she's said already. She's described everything about their encounter in multiple venues at this point. So it wasn't about not letting something new come out. At least it certainly doesn't seem that way because Stormy Daniels, by the way, laughed at this and they did not sign any new NDA or anything like that. So if there was something more, she could certainly come out and say it. No, it's just he doesn't want her saying it again. he just doesn't want her talking he just like hates what she had to say and so it's just like he just got convicted for doing this crap, for trying to get her to sign an NDA in the lead up to an election because.
|
Sam:
[1:48:25]
| Of the potential influence on the election and he just did it again, the exact same thing it's just like for what's her name the the woman he raped in the department store where every time he gets a legal judgment it seemed like he went out and just defamed her again eugene carroll that's her name because he's like yeah i don't care i'm gonna do what i want to do they say i'm guilty they say i owe money for whatever i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do i mean he has seemed to be a little bit more quiet about eugene carroll lately but you know she hasn't been in the news as much lately anyway stormy again uh and with that let us say goodbye i i will say like let's let's look at the what is the time left now as i'm finishing up this recording.
|
Sam:
[1:49:25]
| 15.8 days until polls start to close on election night. And I talked about the beginning. That's partial states. It's one hour later for full states. Anyway, Two weeks, basically. Two weeks. We're almost done here. Well, we're almost at the election.
|
Sam:
[1:49:45]
| We may or may not know the result on election night. And there may or may not be chaos like four years ago, after the election.
|
Sam:
[1:49:55]
| I would assume that if it's even remotely close, we're once again going to see like 60 lawsuits from the Trump people on every single possible thing. And they certainly seem to be setting up to try to do some January 6th, this thing again, if they could, I feel like anything that like assuming they lose, like again, he could win legitimately, but assuming they lose, I feel like any attempts to try to do something like that will be less successful than they were last time. Just because you know well and this is one of the things that makes me think like harris's polls are are underestimated that they're underestimating harris like the enthusiasm gap really does seem real there's it's i don't know it's not quantified it's not whatever but there's so many anecdotes of like less enthusiasm on the Republican side. You've got his small rallies. You've got less yard signs. You've got less people, their big trunk Trump flags on their trucks. All of this stuff seems to be less than it was four years ago or eight years ago, but we'll see. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:51:22]
| Go to curmudgeons hyphen corner.com. You can find all the ways to reach us. You can find our transcripts. You can find...
|
Sam:
[1:51:31]
| Our archive of shows going back to before we had, we only have transcripts for like the last year, year and a half. I forget exactly what. But before that, you can find all our archives going all the way back to 2007. And of course, you can find our Patreon if you would like to give us cash money. At various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. But at $2 a month or more, or, or if you just ask, we will invite you to the Cummudgeons Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and a bunch of other folks are, chatting throughout the week, sharing links, all of that kind of stuff. It's a lot of fun. You should be there. If you were there right now, you could, you, you could have gotten all kinds of information on exactly what Yvonne's illness was that kept him from doing the show this week. I'm sure you all want to get into that detail and really understand exactly what is going wrong in Yvonne's body.
|
Sam:
[1:52:38]
| Or maybe not. Let's see. What's a good highlight other than that from the from the curmudgeon's quarter slack. We've talked about return to office stuff. I don't even want to talk about it on the show. Yvonne posted something about neck restraints and motor sports. A few examples were posted about AI doing stupid things again. What else? Yeah, you know, good enough. People were talking about the DJT stock and potential manipulation were not there and also manipulation of the election betting markets. Oh, I posted a really cool article from The New Yorker on how scientists are starting to decode bird songs. Cool stuff. All kinds of stuff. Okay, we are done. Time to end this show. Hopefully, Yvonne will be feeling a lot better and be able to join us next week and the week after, and as we rush headlong into this election. But for everybody else, and for Yvonne, if you're listening, have a great week. Feel better, Yvonne. And stay safe. And we'll talk to you next time. Goodbye. Now, why isn't the song going?
|
Sam:
[1:54:05]
| There we go. Thank you.
| |
|
