Posted this in the Take the Pledge thread but more may see it here.
The Democracy Labs have created a crowdsourced realtime nationwide map of voting issues. It sort of works like Waze, see a problem and report it and a coalition of voter protection groups will be notified.
Feel free to share this link.
http://bit.ly/seesay2018map
Vote Together is trying an interesting experiment to see whether making voting more celebratory and social will result in measurable increase in voter turnout. In NC for instance they plan to have events at 175 polling places and will compare turnout at those polling places with a control group of polling places that do not have similar events.
What kind of events? " From backyard BBQs and block parties to picnics and parades." I’d be curious to hear whether folks on the forum encounter one of these events when you vote.
I think that it is interesting because recent best practice for GOTV involves use of “social pressure” messaging to motivate voters. Typically it involves sending a voter a letter in the mail that details their voting history, their neighbor’s voting history, and the history of other people who live on their block. The idea being that people are social creatures and social pressure encourages people to fit in and take part in something that their friends and neighbors are doing. Field testing indicates that it works, but you have to be very careful in messaging this or you cross the creep out line and it can backfire.
Parties at the polls takes a different approach and while more labor intensive it is a hell of a lot more fun. I’ll circle back once the results of the experiment is made known.
Now if we were to combine that with Voting Day being a national holiday, that could be a lot of fun!
Matt Taibbi wrote this in 2006:
The thing that people should be concerned about isn’t that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It’s the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is. If you work backward from that premise, and start thinking about what the consequences of that phenomenon might actually be, your head can easily explode.
Final Sabato Crystal Ball forecast is in:
http://crystalball.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/final-picks-for-2018/
If their chart is even in the “pretty much accurate” range, gonna be a big night for Democrats in every spot but the Senate.
Eh, I dunno.
I think YOU understand this, because you’re so engrossed in it. But I think for most folks (perhaps not those here), I get the impression that they are looking at polls as some kind of running scoreboard. Some indication that their “team” is winning. I think this is also why folks freaked out after the 2016 election, because for tons of folks they went from thinking that they were winning, to suddenly having lost.
Also, this is somewhat separate from the game-day thread that we’re in, since I’m eager to see the runtime coverage of what’s happening.
But I get the feeling that people in general, and even us in particular, view polls incorrectly.
But then again, whatever.
just your standard billionaire-funded “populism”
GOP, the best government money can buy. For the people doing the buying, that is.
Anyone posted about this gem yet? (BTW, why aren’t the links showing up all fancy like they were before?) n/m just takes a while.
Racist ‘magical Negro’ robo-call from ‘Oprah’ targets Stacey Abrams in Georgia governor’s race
If I may insert a bit of levity at this juncture, I think this may be how many of us Dems feel right now:
Definitely! Also what I thought was the best segment in an otherwise meh show.
That’s pretty good news. The governorships and state legislatures are massively undercovered and probably more important than taking the House or Senate in future elections (and not ending up with a Constitutional Convention being shoved up our collective ass).
Ah, I should have realized someone would already have posted it. I love when Beck Bennett raises his arms to cheer, only to show the massive sweat stains.
Well, it’s up to 19% now. Whee. And the Dem’s chance at the house is now at an all-time high of 87.6%.
I gotta stop reloading that page.
13% is still a pretty good chance of holding.
13.4% is a weird percentage to get your head around. More than an eighth, less than a seventh. About the same odds as rolling a total of 8 on two six-sided dice (that’s actually 13.9%).