A nice analysis of poll uncertainties

As we enter the final week of the election, a slew of last minute polls that will emerge. This is a good time to remind ourselves that we should not put too much stock in what they say. As I said in an earlier post, pollsters have to make adjustments to the raw data and this introduces systematic uncertainties so that the actual margin of error could be about double the statistical one.

Josh Clinton has done an interesting analysis to try and get a better idea of how much these adjustments can affect the results.

He says that pollsters have to address four questions.
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The fallout from the insult to Puerto Rico and Latinos

An obscure comedian has managed to hijack the campaign of creepy Donald Trump in the final week of the election by giving a disgusting speech at the Nazi-style rally in Madison Square Garden. In his speech, he managed to insult Latinos in general and Puerto Ricans in particular.

Latinos “love making babies. There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country,” Hinchcliffe said to laughter inside the arena. He added: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

This was a bridge too far for even some Republicans, who generally have no problems with insulting people of color and minorities, because they realized that this could have serious blowback by undercutting their courting of the Hispanic vote and because of the large numbers of Puerto Ricans who live in the swing states.
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The different ground game strategies

I have written before about how important the so-called ‘ground game’ is in US elections. This is the name given to the efforts by candidates to get voters to actually vote for them. By themselves, such ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) efforts may only contribute marginally to the final vote tallies but in close races, as the current one between Kamala Harris and creepy Donald Trump is, they can prove to be the decisive factor by boosting turnout.

Traditionally these efforts operate under the umbrella of the national parties that coordinate with state and local branches, since that provides an ongoing organizational structure and institutional memory that can be called upon in each election cycle. The national party organization provides funding to supplement whatever is raised by the candidates, and this money goes to hire staff members at all levels, down to the precincts. But the bulk of the actual work, consisting of making phone calls to voters, sending out mailers and postcards, distributing yard signs and flyers, and most importantly, going door-to-door and talking to people, is done by volunteers and these volunteers play a crucial role.
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Nazis return to Madison Square Garden

Back in 2017, I posted about a six-minute documentary A Night at the Garden that used archival footage about a rally that American Nazis held at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Billed as a ‘Pro American Rally’, it was attended by 20,000 people and is truly chilling to watch because it looked like it could have been made in Nazi Germany by famed Nazi propagandist film maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Donald Trump had a rally on Sunday evening at the same venue and the speakers are making the same kind of appeals to white Americans to ‘take back their country’. The speeches of the early speakers tell you that they have all got into the spirit of the 1939 event..
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Why won’t they stand behind their own words?

I have written before of the work done by the comedy duo known as The Good Liars who are attending creepy Trump events and recording their interactions with his supporters, like the way that Jordan Klepper does for The Daily Show.

In a recent one, they ask Michele Morrow, a candidate for the position of North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, for her autograph. She is of course gratified until she is shown the document to be signed which is a social media post by her calling for the killing of Barack Obama.

Here are the tweets.

I am puzzled by her reaction. Why would she be willing to proudly make a public post and then embarrassingly try to escape signing it? That looks worse than if she had nonchalantly done so.

The second return of Sherlock Holmes

From a very early age, I was enraptured by the mystery genre, devouring novels mostly by British writers whose style, less noir and more cerebral than their US counterparts, appealed to me. I particularly enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes canon by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read all of the stories at least twice, and have watched many adaptations of the stories for films and television.

One experiences a sense of sadness when the author of stories that you like dies and you know that there will be no new ones coming and I am certain many aficionados of Sherlock Holmes wish that there were more stories to enjoy. When Conan Doyle, tiring of being stuck in this series, killed off his much-loved character in one short story The Final Problem, the resulting outcry pressured him to bring him back three years later in another short story The Adventure of the Empty House, using a highly contrived plot device to explain how he hadn’t really died.

The Holmes canon is so well known and the character so iconic that many authors have written stories based on him as well as other characters that appear in the stories and copying the style of writing, a literary form known as pastiches, a high-brow version of fan fiction. I have resisted reading them, thinking that they would never be able to accurately recreate the atmosphere of the stories and thus would be a disappointment. Then I heard that the Conan Doyle estate had authorized Anthony Horowitz, a well known mystery writer in his own right, to write new Holmes novels. I just read the first one The House of Silk (published in 2011) and it was very satisfying. Horowitz not only portrays Holmes in a way that is consistent with my impressions of him, he also captures well the writing style of Holmes’s biographer Dr. John Watson.
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Tucker Carlson gives repellent parenting advice

Listen to what he said at a MAGA rally in Georgia

The audience at a Donald Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday erupted into bizarre chants of “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!” after an extraordinary and borderline creepy and sexist speech by far-right personality Tucker Carlson likening the Republican presidential candidate to an angry father spanking his daughter.

This man is sick. Someone who fantasizes along these lines and speaks of it with such relish reveals himself to be deeply sadistic and misogynistic.

Carlson has three daughters. I wonder what they make of such utterances

Why US elections are so complicated and take so long

US election campaigns, especially for national offices like the presidency and both houses of Congress, are interminably long and absurdly expensive. This is partly a consequence of the fact that the date of the election is fixed (for federal offices they are held every even year on the day after the first Monday in November), which means that planning can be done a long time ahead. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of restrictions on the money that can be raised and spent (whatever flimsy restrictions there are are easily worked around) means that vast sums, billions of dollars, are involved, giving an outsize influence to wealthy individuals and organizations.

People in other countries are incredulous that elections in the US are run by the states and that each state largely makes its own rules, and these rules are determined sometimes by highly partisan state legislatures that seek to give an advantage to their own party. They do this as far as the law and the constitution allows but in the age of creepy Trump, they are sometimes willing to go over the line. In many other countries, elections are run by a central, largely non-partisan, body. The reason for the state variability in the US goes way back to the origins of US that required the 13 colonies that had been separate entities to join together to form a single nation. Since each colony had been operating largely independently of the others, they jealously guarded their autonomy as much as possible and thus gave as little power to the central government as they could. Hence we have this patchwork of systems. One argument in its favor is that it allows for innovation in that each state can be a laboratory to try out different ways of doing things and, hopefully, the ones that works best may be copied by others.
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What to expect in this election

We are just two weeks away from election day on November 5th. I of course do not know who will win the presidency, although I am cautiously optimistic that Kamala Harris will. But that does not count for much since I am an optimistic person by nature, tending to look for hopeful signs that the future will be better than the past, even if the odds are against it.

The national polls have been showing a small but steady lead for Harris ever since the beginning of August. When Joe Biden dropped out on July 21 and the Democratic party quickly coalesced around Harris, there was a surge in enthusiasm for her, with massive numbers of volunteers signing up and huge campaign contributions that rapidly erased the lead that creepy Donald Trump had had up to that point. People tend to expect trends to continue indefinitely but they don’t, and when the support for Harris predictably plateaued, it felt to some observers that her campaign was losing steam when it wasn’t. What we were seeing is a new equilibrium state with Harris that is much better than the previous equilibrium state when Biden was the presumptive nominee.
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