StrangeSox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum It was pretty close in the end and trending towards Leave. It was definitely still a shock, but was within the margin. Kinda like 2016.

What would your position be if the Democrats do manage to take the Presidency and Senate next year and decide to, say, add 3 four federal judicial circuits to better handle caseload and decide that the number of SCOTUS seats should match the number of federal circuits, allowing them to nominate 6 new justices? It'd be entirely within their legislative and executive power to do so. Is that the only criteria?

Brexit was within MoE. Australian polling missed badly in last year's elections because they were all herding the results. But at the same time, 2018 US polls were pretty good. So were 2012, though they overstated GOP votes.

Nobody really bothers with the vast majority of states today and instead focus on 10-15 at most. Aside from some fundraising trips here and there, the majority of the population gets ignored.

I don't think any politicians in the US are agitating for a fully nationally health care system like the UK's NHS. But today, those same decisions on care are made by your insurance company's actuarial department based on profitability. I won't claim to know the absolute best version of universal health care, but I'm very confident the current system isn't it.

This is actually a good point! We aren't seen a difference in support when comparing live phone versus online or automated phone polling. So if people are hesitant to reveal their true preferences to an actual person on the phone, it's not showing up in other sampling methods.

If you sample 10 democrats and 8 republicans but expect the actual electorate to be more like 8-8, you reweight the sample. Polling is far from an exact science, and there are a lot of assumptions that go into determining what that appropriate sample needs to look like, but the "they're oversampling democrats!" has been an unfounded criticism since at least 2012 and the Unskewed Polls guy. In 2016, they didn't weight by education and missed the big shift in non-college whites to Trump. Maybe something similar happens this year, missing some other demographic shift. IT's not a foregone conclusion, though.

Perhaps mid-18th century political ideology and formulations aren't actually the best, though? It was a system devised when the only people with a voice were propertied white men who were interested in keeping power to themselves. You can still have a federal system with lots of power devolved to the states while not having archaic structures like the Electoral College. Germany manages pretty well.

There's a fairly vocal minority that the electoral structures in this country favors despite often receiving millions fewer votes for the House, Senate and Presidency.

AOC is more likely to have her district drawn out of existence by establishment Democrats after the next census takes a seat from NY than to be backed for President by Pelosi et. al.

You are forgetting Nebraska! NE-2 (Omaha, mainly) is likely to go Biden, and in some scenarios, can be the difference between a 269-269 tie or a 270 EV Biden win. IF you take3 the 2016 map but give Biden AZ, WI, and MI, he'll have 269. If he can flip NE-2 (or the Maine one), that'd put him over the top.

This was not the original justification and the modern EC functions nothing like it originally did, fwiw.

Indeed.

Trump gives evangelical conservatives the policy and control of the judiciary that they want. Why wouldn't they support him?

The first time we took our then-14 month old and our 3yo to the playground since the start of the pandemic was in August I think. Two days after going he had a fever.

We'll be at 100-105M early votes by EOD

If you put Alaska to scale on that map, it sort of shifts things a bit: Here's its relative size: All that Alaskan Blue makes up for a lot of Great Plains red, if we want to argue that acres matter more than people.

As of 2013 or 2014, there was still a diner in downtown Ottawa, IL that had Freedom Fries on their menu.

He pretty much told the circuit court how he'd find on the merits if they quickly enjoined and remanded to him--the tents count as "structures" for all voting up until e-day, but the election regulations in Texas say that voting must be done in a "building" on e-day, and the tents wouldn't count for that. The drive-up voting will be in operation tomorrow, but he's ordered those votes kept separate and suggested that people find other options to make sure their vote will count.

A key part of the Bush 2004 strategy was running on state-level anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments and calling for a federal constitutional amendment.

We had been bringing our 3-1/2 year old daughter masked up on quick runs to the grocery or hardware store if we had to go so she could at least see people who weren't her immediate family or grandparents. Stopped doing that again a few weeks ago as cases really started to climb in Illinois. We're now back to more of an April mindset, do every possible thing curbside, don't go into a store unless you absolutely must. Specific daily cases in Will or Illinois in general though, yeah I couldn't tell you. "Very bad and getting worse"

What the various aggregator models are predicting as of today for the Presidential race, from 270towin.com Sabatos Crystal Ball Cook Political Report Inside Elections Politico Economist 538 And this is the current "2020 Consensus" map that lumps all the aggregator's aggregations together: Most aggregators are putting Dems are pretty safely 49 seat floor in the Senate. Will they pick up enough seats to offset their almost guaranteed loss in Alabama to get to 50 or 51?