10-01-2020, 02:09 PM
(10-01-2020, 12:15 PM)Isoko Wrote: You know, the polls right now still favour Biden and if I'm honest I don't think they are really going to budge anymore at this point. But it still interests me on how accurate they are. How many people are saying "I'll vote for Biden" when they secretly plan to vote for Trump. Or who are the people they are asking.
If I am to be honest, I think if we narrow it down, thus really could be on a knife edge and I do predict that is what the result will be - a knife edge. So no I don't take the polls seriously because I remember at the exit poll for Brexit, they predicted a comfortable win for the remain side at like 10%. Even the prime minister at the time seemed relieved and was ready to party when early warning signs started to hit at 12am that something weird was happening.
That 7% lead for Biden is nothing. Never, ever trust the polls.
Of course a 7% lead is not enough should there be egregious fraud in the election such as hacking the vote, intimidating voters, fraud in transmission of the results, or an attempt to change the rules after the election is over.
A 7% margin is about what Obama won by in 2008. I once posed a model in which Obama won all of the winner-take-all states that he did win and got to split the votes in proportion to votes received in the states that he lost, and such a model would have caused him to win about like LBJ in 1964. Doing it the other way? He loses.
I expect our lame-duck President to claim that he lost due to fraud.Bigots like him see themselves as the best thing that ever happened to the people that they despise and will be unable to understand why such people rejected him. I recognize the legitimacy of fear in view of a 2016 election that did not go as most of us expected (long -shots win at horse tracks all the time, but in a Presidential race they have only one chance to win every four years). If one goes to the horse-track and bets on horses, one has little time in which to rue one's loss and an opportunity to make another bet. The thrill will be back soon.
If one is an intense partisan, one has two years in which to feel the sting of defeat after a House race, four years four years to feel that sting after a Presidential election, and six years to rue the consequences of a Senate election. If you are a liberal and you live in Pennsylvania and despise Senator Pat Toomey or if you live in Wisconsin you have two more years to fume about Senator Ron Johnson, neither of which is even close to being a moderate.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.