2017: Whither Democrats?

Yes. Only the goofiest cultists on DailyKos expected otherwise.

If only I’d thought to include some context on this that might explain why it should be a very pleasing result for Democrats. Perhaps next time I’ll think to do so.

Is that an actual quotation?

If not, I have one for you:

Ha, not an actual quote. But I’m just imagining him looking at the results in a district where the Republican party has a +13 registration advantage and seeing Lesko win by 6 when there was heavy turnout and a decent GOP candidate running…and I’m imagining Flake thinking “Whew.”

Choose your own takeaway from the AZ-08 special election, in a VERY safe, red congressional district:

First, Whiz Kid Harry Enten:
https://twitter.com/ForecasterEnten/status/989002574392119301

or maybe Nate Silver:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/989003058255421440

or third choice,
https://i.imgur.com/7fL44jD.jpg

Know hope?

It’s cute how Trigger has faith in the American public to vote for decent humans. Meanwhile, Nazis are back and enjoy the support of 40% of the population.

Cite please.

How dare you bring data into this.

I just fear that you’re setting yourself up for more losses. Getting closer doesn’t matter. If it’s indicative of some future outcome… ok? Honestly, does it even matter?

I am afraid of seeing similar stuff happen like we did in 2016, where everyone “knew” Hillary was going to win, and yet here we are. Or the special election in Georgia, where you got all mad at me when I said, “Even if he makes it to the general runoff, he’s gonna lose.” which is exactly what happened. And yet you gave me shit for pointing it out.

I’m not saying this stuff to rub the Democrats’ noses in it. I don’t WANT them to lose. I’m just afraid that folks are feeding some unrealistic expectations… I fear that the Dems are going to start believing their own hype, and end up wasting money on all these longshot races, and then blow it like Clinton did. If she had actually invested time in places like Wisconsin, instead of wasting effort trying to compete in Texas because the polls were all saying how she was gonna crush it, maybe we wouldn’t have Trump ruining the fucking world now.

Sorry for being the downer, but after the absolute clusterfuck of 2016, I am quite pessimistic.

Sigh. To recap:

Yeah, so she needed to work harder in PA or Florida too. This is not a meaningful argument to justify her campaign’s appallingly poor strategy.

And really, the other part of the equation is that a ton of folks just fucking stayed home, because they assumed Clinton was gonna win, because that’s what they were being told was gonna happen. That’s what I’m afraid of happening again.

Here we go again.
The Clinton campaign poured a lot resources into both those states. While this does not absolve the Clinton campaign of all errors, the answers on what they “should” have done is easy if we already know the answers to the test. In other words, “single factor analysis” isn’t going to arrive at “what happened” in any meaningful way.

Another read: Both times the swing was in Democrats’ favor, they underperformed – one of those being the largest variance on the board (and the other was arguably a toss-up at D+1).

And, two of the people I just cited were the guys shrieking into the hurricane: “Donald Trump has a better chance of winning than the media narrative is letting on.”

But yeah, when I read this garbage:

I wonder if some of you are intellectually equipped to distinguish between polling numbers (which have built-in margins of error all over them, from question methodology to sample method to sample size to weighting) and vote totals (which for this comparison are more “pure” data points.)

For starters, in the two weeks before the election, 538 was saying “Donald Trump has a 1 in 4 – and then 1 in 3 – chance of winning”, which was not an insignificant chance at all. And they were taken to task for it.

But here, we have some historical trends to compare with numerical vote – not poll – data. And that historical trend data compared with current actual vote totals doesn’t say that the GOP is going to lose control of the House. It does not say the GOP is going to lose control of the senate.

What it does say is that the GOP should be very worried about the possibility of that happening, and the statistical probability that it could happen. Because that statistical probability forecast did indeed increase based upon last night’s results in the Arizona special election. Will it happen? I do not know. But I do think it is obvious that from a statistical perspective it is now possible to say with a degree of confidence that it is more likely to happen than not likely to happen at this point in time. Which means that if I’m rolling a 10-sided die, it is more likely than not like that I will throw a number larger than 4 than it is I throw a number smaller than four. That probability does not preclude the throwing of a number 4.

Here’s my prediction, which no one asked for and even fewer care about: We’re gonna see a small pickup in seats for Democrats in the midterms. The raw numbers will be fairly large, but gerrymandering will keep the swing from being big in terms of seats. Nonetheless, this will be trumpeted as a huge turning point in federal politics. Then for 2 years we’ll have absolutely nothing happen at the federal level because divided government. By 2020, much of this anti-Trump passion will have been snuffed out by lack of improvement in anyone’s daily lives. Turnout will be low, and Republicans will be back in control of the legislature. Probably a Democrat will beat Trump for the White House after whatever insanity he does in the next few years backfires, but at that point we’re back to divided government and no improvements.

Well then. More bad news for the Democrats for you:

That’s a B+ polling outfit with a +1 Republican lean in 538 tabulations saying that a Democrat is leading in Tennessee. That sucks.

The ( R )next to the candidate’s name means Really Likes Nazis. The (D) means Doesn’t Like Nazis.

My evidence is that time the Leader of the R party called Nazis “Very Fine People” and everyone was like “This is fine” because the motherfucker is still President.

I know a lot has happened since then but please remember Nazis are killing people in this country and demonstrating and the R party does nothing about it. That means they’re cool with it.

Time to pack it in, all over but the crying.
(/s, just in case)

So…not a cite. Just lowest-common-denominator polemical shitposting. OK.

According to that tweet a couple posts up, 43% of Tennessee voters are voting for the candidate that’s ok with Nazis. 11% can’t decide if they will vote for the candidate that’s ok with Nazis.

So, in the case of Tennessee I was under representing the number of people who are ok with Nazis.