StrangeSox

I'm really hoping that Trump's buying all of the "Trump Wins!" garbage internet polls, thinks they're legit, and does not change a thing in his plan for the next debate. (he did not cite any of the real polls)

The #trumpwon hashtag seems to be originating from St. Petersburg. No, not the one in Florida.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans blocked the stop-gap funding bill in the Senate today over funding for Flint's water crisis. Government will shut down on Friday if no bill is passed.

Local politics can be hilarious, one of my relatives holds a full time local office.

Hillary quickly out with an ad this morning featuring the former Miss Universe Trump insulted as "fat" in the 90's and doubled down on again this morning: https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/7...src=twsrc%5Etfw He also called her "Miss Housekeeping" because she's latina ha ha so it's a diversity double -whammy.

Why do you think black voters overwhelmingly reject Republican candidates and policies across the country?

rabbit please put me on ignore if you can't help whining about me regularly.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 12:38 PM) That all said, none of this matters much. What matters is where the polls are in a week, in those few key battleground states. Everything else is noise. First polls with entirely post-debate samples will start coming out Friday with most coming out early next week.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 01:38 PM) I trust souces like 538, who actually understand statistical modeling. They found only 2 polls that were actual samplings - meaning, not some website with a click poll (which are hilariously useless). The CNN one, where Clinton won by a huge margin, and a PPP one where Clinton won but by a slim margin. The PPP one was also better at representative sampling across parties. Those were the only debate "winner" polls that even came out. So I have zero idea where you are getting some other idea of Trump "winning" from. That all said, none of this matters much. What matters is where the polls are in a week, in those few key battleground states. Everything else is noise. 538 is decent, but Nate Silver's been tweaking his model an awful lot this year. I've linked to it in the Republican thread, but I like the NYT's The Upshot "Who Will Be President" page because they summarize the current national and state-level polling not just for their own models but for several of the main aggregators including 538.

Ford is not taking kindly to Trump's claims about them in the debate yesterday. http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/15/news/compa...jobs/index.html

I am sorry you never took a basic stats class, but that is actually how statistical sampling works. I don't like seeing people fooled by flim-flam nonsense so please take that lesson to heart.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 12:47 PM) Not if a third party candidate can steal a state or two...if you can somehow get to that, then you don't get anyone with enough delegates potentially and it could be none of them that get elected. I often wonder what would happen if a high profile person ran independent. It probably wouldn't work because if it was a high profile dem or republican, they'd canabilize their base and the other candidate would win enough, but if that candidate could steal a few dem and a few repub states, it would work out brilliantly. And no, if I think both candidates are crap, I won't vote for either candidate. If that happened (peeling off enough states to keep anyone from hitting 270), the vote gets thrown to the House so whichever party controls the House will just choose their candidate anyway. This year would mean we get President Trump. You're right that it wouldn't work because there just isn't a natural constiuency to build around a spoiler candidate that would fall between the current Democratic and Republican parties. Maine's last two governor races which resulted in a proto-Trump winning are a case study of how third party cannibalization ends up working. California's new-ish "jungle primary" system where the top two vote-getters regardless of party in the primaries make it to the general has had some similar results--you have say five Democrats running in a pretty blue district in their primary and all split the votes pretty evenly while there's only two Republicans. Because the Democrats split their vote so many ways, only Republicans would be on the ballot despite Democrats collectively making up a much larger percentage of the vote.

CNN and the multiple other legit polls aren't online self-selected response polls that can be rushed by internet mobs and are meaningless. Those sorts of polls are how Stephen Colbert got bridges in eastern europe and part of the space station named after himself, but they aren't statistically valid polls of a sample of the population that you can extrapolate to the population at large.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 11:32 AM) So here's an irony. It is state-level Republicans, in heavily blue Illinois, who have a really clear path to how some of their policies may in fact be best for poor communities. They are the ones trying to get the state budget under control, in a state which needs exactly that moreso than possibly any other. There's a path to relevance in a dead-blue state available to them, if they focused their budgeting cutting scissors on the right areas to get the state to where they can afford everything it needs. Instead, for reasons inexplicable to me, their favorite target seems to be schools of all things. Shooting themselves in the foot. Opposition to public unions which are still a strong if fading backbone of Democratic political organizing is at least part of the reason. Another part is likely general anti-public/pro-private ideology.

Voting is a tool to affect policies and leadership, not a tool to make yourself feel good in my opinion. Soxbadger made a good post several weeks ago laying it out in game theory language.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 12:27 PM) This is infuriating. What policies on a national level is the Republican party offering to help African American communities? There are none. They want less funding for public schools, less funding for public transportation, less social safety nets, to keep the status quo on healthcare and college, and they refuse to acknowledge the systematic racism that exists in this country that is still impacting poor inner city communities. The, welp, why don't they give the Republicans a try argument has no basis in fact because they have no policies at a national level geared toward helping African American communities. It also assumes some sort of weird force field where Democrats are able to actively keep black people from hearing Republicans. They can hear Republicans, and they hear their message loud and clear. They reject it in almost total unity.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 12:17 PM) And every time you draw your own moral red lines instead of approaching the facts presenting your argument gets weaker. But hey keep talking about how black communities don't listen to Republicans in areas where Republicans don't even exist. If you keep repeating yourself and your argument will get stronger. It's not my argument to make as to why the "free stuff" argument is, at best, incredibly tone-deaf and explains why the black community hears what conservatives are saying and runs from them. Go find black and minority sources aka listen to what they have to say.

QUOTE (Ezio Auditore @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 12:12 PM) There are different groups of Democrats within Chicago who live in different parts of the city who want different things and vote for different Democratic candidates. They don't all come from some generic Democrat factory. Take Rhode Island, for example. The state is dominated top to bottom by the Democratic Party, but what that really means is that everyone, even very conservative candidates, runs as a Democrat. Same thing in the South until the political realignment of the 60's-70's: being a Republican was absolutely toxic, so we had plenty of conservatives running as Democrats (and liberals as Republicans in the north like George Romney and Rockefeller).

Like I'm pretty sure that if black people want to listen to Republicans and even vote for them, nothing is stopping them* *except Republicans lol

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 11:05 AM) Its incredibly racist. 50 million people get government assistance. You'd think they were all democrats and black the way its portrayed. Yeah, that's a huge component of it. The whole "welfare queen" myth and everything. Those people get all that free goody stuff, us people are just trying to scrape by and get hardly anything from the government at all.

You know every time you guys keep doubling down on the "free stuff" thing you're just proving the point that conservatives do not ever listen to black communities or minority communities in general.

Rand Paul is opposed to the public accomodations provision of the Civil Rights Act. His outreach to the black community hasn't exactly gone well in the past either. Going on about black people voting for Democrats because of "free stuff" is insulting. Not recognizing that is exactly what's meant by conservatives not listening. Decriminalization in this state was in the works before Rauner was elected, and he forced it to be weaker than it otherwise would have been. The Obama administration has recently made multiple moves at the federal level regarding imprisonment policies and has deprioritized federal enforcement of low-level drug crimes.

QUOTE (Ezio Auditore @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 10:46 AM) They don't. I mean... occasionally you'll see something like Newt Gingrich, totally out of the blue, acknowledge systemic racism is real, or Glenn Beck agree with black people (probably because of his libertarian streak) but by and large that's the exception and not the norm. The rest of them are the people who comment on Fox News posts after police shootings - Republicans do this awkward tap-dance aware these people exist and they're a large part of their constituency but trying not to offend them. Trump's pretty much blown the door off that in this election and turned on the light to show all the cochroaches. But anyway as a black person, best to just pretend those people don't even exist and work around them. TL;DR one party is at least semi-responsive to the priorities of black people, if imperfect and frustrating, the other either ignores them or actively resists them, with a handful of exceptions. That's still a relatively easy choice. Republicans haven't done anything since maybe the early 70s to even try to make inroads. This Lee Atwater quote is basically the origin of the liberal "economic anxiety" jokes about the more deplorable parts of Trump's base. What's unfortunate about Trump's white nationalism is that his campaign is polarizing legitimate economic issues facing lower-income white people in this country. The concerns about small towns and rural areas being decimated and emptied out leaving those stuck behind in awful positions is eclipses by the angry shouting racist orange.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 10:45 AM) I suspect this is par for the course for basically everyone in Congress, is it not? No. There's issues with the revolving door of congressmen becoming lobbyists and some of the insider trading knowledge stuff they can do, but that doesn't mean they're all two-bit grifters scamming desperate people out of thousands of dollars. He runs his scam charity as a personal slush fund. David Fahrenthold's reporting over at WaPo on this has been fantastic.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 27, 2016 -> 10:38 AM) I don't really know what you mean you say conservatives aren't really listening. As you said, big cities and Democratic. On a nationwide level, Republicans don't have a lot of policy concerned with the black vote. I think the new wing of the Republican party will change that. The problem is Democrats offer free stuff and Republicans are nonexistent. I'd take the free stuff too. I think the blacks know that they are being policed in a way that's unfair compared to the rest of the country. I am not talking about police shootings. I am talking about the pay to play legal system, the microscope on their communities and the rules on drugs and felonies. The less people there are with felonies, the less people there are in jail and then there's less kids with no fathers. This is a Libertarian policy that should be bipartisan as it's so obvious the imprisonment and destruction of the family is the root of the problem. See, the first part is the "free stuff" narrative is inherently deeply insulting to the black community, and white conservatives who preach it are completely tone-deaf to anything that various minority communities actually say and think about race and racial politics/policies in this country. The second is that, at least for the past decade plus since the "tough on crime" era phased out, Democrats have also been pushing decriminalization particularly when it comes to drugs and for ending the awful mass incarceration in this country. This is one of the very few areas I overlap with some libertarians on, and I've linked Radley Balko's excellent work on this subject before, but pretending it's just a Libertarian solution and not what the Democrats are also offering and actually putting into place because they have actual political power is just silly.