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Vader

The Next President

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so it looks like about a week after the debate clinton has gained back a lot of the ground she's lost over the last month or so, fivethirtyeight at the time of this writing projects her chance of winning at 67%, up from a low of about 55% the week prior.  It's not enough to say she's gained back all of the ground, or she'll keep the lead she has, but it does bode well I think.  it was clear from watching the debate that trump was simply outclassed, and his insistence on litigating his old scandals over and over again continues to hurt him.  It'll be interesting to see how things develop over the next few weeks now that Clinton and Trump are liable to get the same amount of coverage, if for no other reason than she'll become a staple in the non stop coverage of trump.  As weird as it is to someone who pays attention to politics, this seems to be a quite significant period to what are generously called low information voters.  I'm constantly surprised by just how many people haven't decided who they are voting for at this point in the race.

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I wish I could find the tweet, I think it was a YouGov twitter, but they released poll results showing Clinton in the mid 40% polling and Trump in the high 30% for like the 12th straight poll with the comment "The most stable election tracking in history continues", basically subtweeting directly at Nate Silver.

 

This presidential election has a much different shape than the previous ones in my adulthood, but I'll admit that 538's poll tracking histrionics have started to wear on my a little. I'm not saying there hasn't been volatility, but most of the betting odds websites have been very consistently set around Clinton 65% chance to win all spring and summer.

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I wish I could find the tweet, I think it was a YouGov twitter, but they released poll results showing Clinton in the mid 40% polling and Trump in the high 30% for like the 12th straight poll with the comment "The most stable election tracking in history continues", basically subtweeting directly at Nate Silver.

 

This presidential election has a much different shape than the previous ones in my adulthood, but I'll admit that 538's poll tracking histrionics have started to wear on my a little. I'm not saying there hasn't been volatility, but most of the betting odds websites have been very consistently set around Clinton 65% chance to win all spring and summer.

 

I actually got in a fight with my girlfriend this weekend because of Nate Silver's over-the-top anxiety about the election. For perfectly understandable reasons, she's bought into the idea that anything could tip this election towards Trump (while, of course, nothing can secure it for Clinton) and that's definitely the message that FiveThirtyEight is pushing. Linking to, say, the Princeton Election Consortium doesn't really assuage her fears, because the data overload at FiveThirtyEight makes it seem authoritative.

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I didn't feel this way in 2008-2014 about their tracking. Their words say the economy is trending up, President Obama is relatively popular (those things are linked), Trump is historically disliked, all of which tip towards Clinton, and they MOSTLY have had her at a 2/3 chance to be president, but there were those wild outliers where she was like 90% in June and low 50s in September and they were driving the 538 narrative. You can take number that are legitimate and true and crunch them into your algorithm so it reacts in a dramatic way without putting your thumb on the scales even a little bit. Most of the other known/reputable trend lines also have those spikes and dips, they're just way less severe.

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I can't believe that no one has filled that 9th slot in the supreme court yet.

There's no way Republican congress would let it happen.

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Dont be surprised if its vacant even after hillary wins. They will fight on this long and hard. Also very likely ginsberg resigns in the next 4 years, she is quite old so the longer the GOP can delay that the better for them

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There's no way Republican congress would let it happen.

 

I guess I'm more saying that I can't believe that it's allowed. 

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There's no way Republican congress would let it happen.

 

The Supreme Court vacancy length is already wildly unprecedented. I know senators were blustering about "not doing their job" if the SITTING US PRESIDENT nominated a supreme court justice and they accepted, but they're not doing their jobs by not filling the seat.

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I guess the interesting thing with regard to the Supreme Court is the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices that are supposed to make it up. So if the Senate doesn't want to appoint more Justices they are well within their right to do that since there's nothing special about having nine Justices. Kinda weird how permissive the Constitution is of allowing behavior that would generate a constitutional crisis though.

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I guess the interesting thing with regard to the Supreme Court is the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices that are supposed to make it up. So if the Senate doesn't want to appoint more Justices they are well within their right to do that since there's nothing special about having nine Justices. Kinda weird how permissive the Constitution is of allowing behavior that would generate a constitutional crisis though.

Many parts were deliberately vague, I think there is a lot of overestimation of how smart the founders were or how much foresight they put into the constitution.

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I guess the interesting thing with regard to the Supreme Court is the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices that are supposed to make it up. So if the Senate doesn't want to appoint more Justices they are well within their right to do that since there's nothing special about having nine Justices. Kinda weird how permissive the Constitution is of allowing behavior that would generate a constitutional crisis though.

 

Fun fact, Congress sets, through law, how many justices are.  And there's one precedent for Congress shrinking the Court to prevent a president from even having the opportunity to add a member to it. 

 

Which, given the Court's role in government for the last century, it's terrifying to imagine a Congress who decided to try and cripple it.

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FDR's fights with Congress over the Supreme Court are also pretty interesting to read about!

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The VP debate has been enormously frustrating for me, particularly with the media's response to it.  The mere fact that Pence is getting praised for his performance, which consisted of just straight up lying for the entirety of it, has completely dashed my hopes of this election being a one time thing or even just a low point in american politics.  It's not so much the ignorance of the voters or their endless justification of Trump's actions, it's the media's desire to simply revel in the chaos that absolutely drives me nuts.

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Yeah, I don't think Trump is going to win but I'm not very excited about having to go through this every 4 years for the rest of my life. Especially since each presidential election is now apparently a year to two years long apparently.

 

In some ways I think the 2020 election will be worse because it will probably be someone equally awful running but more competent, like Ted Cruz or Mike Pence. I don't think it's possible for a moderate to win the Republican nomination anymore.

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So uh.....this election suddenly got really weird in the last day.

 

I guess Trump probably won't step down because it's more profitable to promote himself and spend campaign funds on traveling on his plane and using his hotels?

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I won't until it's done but I definitely feel better than I did two weeks ago when they were basically tied in polls. It's sad that this is what it took for people to start abandoning ship and I think 40% of the country is still going to vote for Trump because "anyone but Hillary" but at least it seems a lot less likely now. 

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That's without any poll data from the weekend. The RNC is redirecting funding from the presidential race to down ballot races to try and save some semblance of power in government. Trump was already relying mostly on the RNC to organize the GOTV effort for them. I saw quotes that they'll now target voters who are split ticket in an effort to save every seat they can (eg - now targeting Floridian voters who are voting for Clinton but ALSO Marco Rubio for senate, which they were avoiding previously). This is effectively over. Wrap it up trumpailures, etc.

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I've been a registered voter in Pennsylvania since 1999, but between college and military service this is the first time as an adult that I've lived in the state, or in Philadelphia, during a presidential campaign, and I've been struck by the gulf between how the two campaigns are operating. Pennsylvania tends to vote a lot like America votes on the national level: in years there's a presidential election and turnout is relatively high, Democrats win by a narrow margin, and in years there's no presidential election and turnout is lower, Republicans win by a narrow margin. That makes us a swing state of sorts, so presidential campaigns spend a lot of their resources here.

 

Since the party conventions, the pattern in PA has been: Trump or Pence himself swings through the state a couple times a month and holds a couple of rallies or photo ops on each trip, while the Clinton campaign keeps a similar schedule for the candidates, but augments that with basically weekly stops in Philadelphia alone by campaign surrogates like Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

 

A lot of Republican office-holders seem to be officially defecting from Trump right now, but the fact that basically none of them have been out on the stump in battleground states for him over the past few months tells me that Trump's never had more than grudging support among Republican office-holders. Heck, John McCain even came out to PA to campaign for our Republican candidate for the Senate, but Trump has had none of that sort of support from the party. I wonder how much that would have mattered on election day, had this tape of Trump joking about sexual assault not surfaced.

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I can't help but feel some sort of relief that a part of this circus is now over and didn't drag on until the very last days. But hey, Trump is still at the center of news today and I imagine that will continue for a while despite the fact that it's over. And I wish it had ended a long long time ago.

 

Now everyone can move on to the creepy clown epidemic.

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Now everyone can move on to the creepy clown epidemic.

 

Don't worry. They're just a joke, no-one could ever vote for them.

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On 10/4/2016 at 10:07 PM, Cordeos said:

Many parts were deliberately vague, I think there is a lot of overestimation of how smart the founders were or how much foresight they put into the constitution.

 

I have always been taught and read that it is intentionally vague because the Constitution was meant to be a living document hat could be changed with time as society and the people under it changed. The founders were smart and if anything got overestimated, it was the people of the future. The Constitution was also written at a time when the US was supposed to be weaker federally and executive-ally (?) and the states were supposed to have more - at least as I understand it but its been a while - which changed after the Civil War. 

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