Posts Tagged ‘Nate Silver’

BidenWatch for September 7, 2020

Monday, September 7th, 2020

Dueling Kenosha visits, Biden’s polls fall, 2016 all over again, and more Chinese shenanigans. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • The difference between Trump and Biden’s trips to Kenosha:

    Trump spoke to the family’s minister to see if he should meet with the family of Jacob Blake. His father, Jacob Blake Sr. insisted on having a lawyer present if Trump were to visit with the family. The President wasn’t interested in playing any of those games. Instead, he met with the people in Kenosha that were devastated by the rioting and damage, and law enforcement who calmed down the riot. His trip was not focused on politics but on getting the community what it needed.

    Two days later, Biden visited Kenosha as well. But his was a trip to please his radical handlers. It was made only because the President’s trip was successful.

    Unlike Trump, he met with Jacob’s anti-Semitic father. But that makes sense for Joe, after all, the Democratic Party’s far-left base is filled with anti-Semites. The media made a big deal about Jacob’s father speaking to Biden, but not talking to Trump. They ignored the fact that Blake Sr. is a Jew-hating Bigot.

    Jacob’s father is a Farrakhan-supporting, raging bigot. And he’s Joe Biden’s new BFF. If he was a Trump supporter, his hate-mongering would be fodder for the news. But he’s part of the Democrats and their BLM offensive so there’s silence.

    (Hat tip: The Daily Gator.)

  • “Nate Silver’s Latest Shows Biden Is Headed for a Very Bad November“:

    Nate Silver, the popular statistician and data geek who publishes his predictions for political outcomes throughout the country has released some new findings for the November Presidential Election and the news for Team Biden isn’t great. In fact, they are downright bad.

    In 2016, Clinton won the national popular vote by just over 2.8 million votes or 2.1%. Her enthusiasm rating was just 12 points behind Trump at this same time in the election (early September) in 2016. Polls found that of Trump’s base, 58% were enthusiastic about voting for the now-current-President versus just 46% of the same voters for the now-defeated Clinton. In other words, despite the majority of her voters being less-than-enthusiastic about showing up to vote for her, she still won the national popular vote by 2.1%.

    This is where the bad news for Biden comes in. Currently, Biden’s enthusiasm score trails that of the President by 17 points. Of the President’s supporters, 65% are enthusiastic about voting for him, a seven-point increase from his 58% at the same time in the race in 2016. Biden, on the other hand, enjoys a 48% enthusiasm rate, up just 2% from his 2016 predecessor.

    This simply means that Trump enjoys a much stronger support from his base than does Biden his. If history is any indicator, Trump will likely do better against Biden in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016, at a 2.1% margin of national vote victory. If we apply that to Nate Silver’s data, Biden would only have about a 22% chance of victory against Trump come election day.

  • “Why Biden could still lose the suburbs to Trump.”

    Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic Party officials and strategists in the suburbs reflect confidence in Biden’s ability to compete with Trump on issues surrounding this summer’s civil unrest, but also widespread concerns about the political volatility — and potential allure — of the president’s law-and-order message.

    In Pinal County, Ariz., where “Thin Blue Line” flags have proliferated outside Phoenix and Tucson, Holly Lyon, chair of the local Democratic Party, said, “There is that little sort of unsettled feeling in people because we can tell that [Trump’s messaging] is grabbing hold, and it’s working.”

    Snip.

    Two Democratic strategists who recently viewed focus groups of suburban voters described high-propensity voters increasingly concerned about unrest in urban centers, though both strategists said it was unclear whether that concern would push them to Biden or to Trump.

    One of the strategists described a focus group in which white, college-educated women reacted to the protests by discussing their own property values and, in one woman’s case, her family’s mortgage.

    “White women who have college degrees are starting to really get sick of this,” the strategist said.

    Some state polls are showing signs of it. In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, a Monmouth University poll released last week found that Biden’s lead over Trump had narrowed statewide, and that Trump was leading Biden by 2 percentage points in 10 swing counties, including some Philadelphia suburbs, erasing a large advantage Biden had built there earlier this year.

    If civil unrest persists, said Robert Tatterson, secretary of the Democratic Party in Ozaukee County, outside Milwaukee, Trump “will be able to be the strong man, only-I-can-save-you leader, and that’s playing out just like I had feared.”

    Note that the word “antifa” is completely missing from the article. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who notes “People always say Trump is ‘talking the wrong way.’ He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump’s super power.”)

  • President Trump’s approval hits 52%…and 45% among black Americans.
  • All that might explain the panic in Bidenland:

    Why did Joe Biden leave his Delaware basement and fly all the way to Pittsburgh to give a speech Monday with no crowd — no supporters in attendance — and not even answer press questions? He could have given the same speech from Delaware, but he flew to Pittsburgh. Why? Paul Kengor’s article today in The American Spectator explains that support for Trump has surged in Pennsylvania over the last month, in large part because of Biden’s “highly ill-advised pick of Kamala Harris, who folk in this area see as a West Coast leftist whose ‘progressive’ bona fides include an unwavering opposition to fracking.”

    Kengor explains that, in Pennsylvania, fracking means jobs — lots of good-paying blue-collar jobs — and by choosing Harris as his running mate, Biden is effectively threatening to kill those jobs.

    The Real Clear Politics average in top battleground states confirms the momentum shift. During July, Biden’s lead was about 6 points, but since the conventions, Trump has cut that lead in half — and that’s just the public polls. Everybody knows there is a “shy Trump voter” factor, where people are afraid tell pollsters who they support, but are likely to choose Trump on Election Day. That factor may be as large as 5% and Biden’s slippage in Pennsylvania, where the latest Monmouth poll shows him with just a 3-point lead, obviously set the alarm bells ringing at Biden campaign HQ.

  • “Biden-Harris ClusterFrack – First They Were For Fracking Ban, Then Polls Shifted, Now They Are Against Ban.”
  • For those who followed the 2016 election, it’s deja vu all over again:

    Memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now.

    First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten. Biden has enjoyed a comfortable lead throughout both the primary polling against Trump, and post nomination. But there are concerning trends for Biden that mirror those of Hillary Clinton’s position in August 2016. In fact, Biden is doing worse in the polls than Hillary was at this time — but you wouldn’t know this based on media coverage of course.

    Pollster Frank Luntz breaks it down. On August 25, 2016, Hillary held a +9.2 advantage over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average for Pennsylvania, a state she lost. Currently Joe Biden holds a +5.7 average lead. In Michigan, Hillary held a +9 advantage in polling, a state she also lost. Biden is at +6.7. In Wisconsin, the state Hillary lost and infamously did not visit once for the duration of the general election, Hillary held a lead of +11.5. Biden sits at +6.5. The only state of the crucial swing stats where Biden’s polling outperforms Hillary’s is Florida, where Biden holds a +4.8 average lead. Hillary’s lead was +2.9. She of course lost Florida as well, all but sealing the presidency for Trump and the unthinkable for the media. Biden still holds about an +8.5 lead nationally, but for a candidate who is perceived to have less professional baggage and considered more likable than Hillary, these numbers should be putting the Biden campaign on alert.

    Biden also received no post-convention bump, as most candidates do when more voters start paying attention to the election. Biden was of course at a historical disadvantage with COVID-19 canceling out the possibility of a large-scale convention, but the trappings were all there: video presentations, major endorsements, candidate speeches. Yet still nothing.

    Then consider the fact that Trump’s base support has not eroded. Trump’s popularity with voters, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, shows his support has more or less remained between 40-44 percent throughout his presidency. While he currently trails Biden in the crucial swing states, Trump enjoys a rock of support, even after three years of Russiagate, Robert Mueller, sustained negative media and entertainment coverage, sports team boycotts, impeachment and of course the pandemic. Roughly 40 percent of the country, we can assume, has simply tuned out the media.

    Plus Biden’s wimpy response to the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting,

  • Trump gets the edge over Biden for criminal justice reform.
  • The weirdness of Slow Joe’s Speech. “The speech itself was a mind-numbing collection of platitudes, cliches, and lies. To that extent it was a conventional political speech. Listening to it, however, is painful. Biden has become a deeply contrived figure. Thus the artificiality of the staging.”
  • More on that subject:

    Including the blatant question scripting:

  • More on Biden press conferences:

  • Ann Althouse watches a Biden-Harris chat so you don’t have to. Actually, that’s not true: she only makes it 20 seconds in, then switches to reading the transcript. Also dings Harris for lying about her imaginary hard-scrabble background. “Her mother was a medical researcher at prestigious institutions, and her father was an economics professor at Stanford. They didn’t have any financial struggles, did they?”
  • Chris Wallace is set to host the first debate between President Trump and Biden on September 29. Assuming Biden doesn’t chicken out like everyone thinks he will…
  • Delusional Biden asks Trump to denounce “right wing” rioters. I’m sure he’ll get on that right after asking why so many NBA players are midgets.
  • “Democrats are now in serious danger of losing Minnesota for the first time since 1972.” (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • That always-fake Biden lead in Texas blows away like the fog it always was. “Trump is now leading Biden among likely voters, 48 to 46 percent, according to the poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Poll has Trump up by ten points in Missouri. If so, Trump should be worried, since he clobbered Hillary by about 18 points in 2016.
  • Bernie Sanders says he’s going to make sure Biden governs on the hard left.
  • “Biden claims black man invented light bulb during campaign event.”
  • The people driving the Democratic Party’s agenda today:

    

  • Biden confuses basic facts about murder of Trump supporter in incoherent press conference.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • See if you can count how many ways this New York Times piece on competing Biden and Trump ads talking about the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots tries to spin the issue for Biden.
  • “Secret Service Inadvertently Confirms Gateway Pundit Story About Biden Sexually Assaulting Agent’s Girlfriend.” The 2009 file on the incident was destroyed due to “retention standards.” More: “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.”
  • Slow Joe gonna Slow Joe:

  • The Democratic Party keeps signaling that it has no intention of accepting a second Trump term:

    [T]he Democrats have no intention of accepting defeat at the ballot box. If you think that they were sore losers in 2016, you ain’t seen anything yet.

    And what they’re doing is effectively threatening violence if Biden does not win, and it’s just a variation on the theme that Biden talked to [in] Pittsburgh, during the week, when he said if you don’t vote for him, ‘ya ain’t safe.’

    (Hat tip: @txpoliticjunkie.)

  • “Meet The Rioting Criminals Kamala Harris Helped Bail Out Of Jail.”

    ox 9 News in Minneapolis did the research for us. Here are a few of the criminals they found Harris did a solid for.

    Among those bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) is a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice convicted sex offender, according to court records reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators.

    According to attempted murder charges, Jaleel Stallings shot at members of a SWAT Team during the riots in May. Police recovered a modified pistol that looks like an AK-47. MFF paid $75,000 in cash to get Stallings out of jail.

    Darnika Floyd is charged with second degree murder, for stabbing a friend to death. MFF paid $100,000 cash for her release.

    Christopher Boswell, a twice convicted rapist, is currently charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in two separate cases. MFF paid $350,00 [sic] in cash for his release.

    Kamala Harris and her friends in the corporate media, otherwise known as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, will pretend this never happened and they are counting on voters to be too ignorant to know that it did. Harris was so eager to be on the rioters’ team that she literally raised money for them in the hopes that they could be released and foster further mayhem.

  • How Harris put ideology over justice:

    You might have forgotten the first time you heard the name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats, along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.

    At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.

    On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most impact as a cop there.”

    As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his service weapon.

    Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial, “Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community: ‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”

    That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community, a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old daughter, cut down in cold blood.

    Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a deliberative review of the circumstances.”

  • How Hunter Biden was involved in a $1.5 million investment fund using Chinese money while his father was still Vice President.
  • More on the same subject: “Hunter Biden’s deals ‘served’ China and Chinese military, new film claims.”
  • Even the New York Times has noticed how Biden’s story on China has shifted:

    “The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Jiang, recalled Frank Jannuzi, the Senate aide who organized the trip and took notes at Mr. Biden’s side.

    Snip.

    Two decades later, China has emerged as a great power — and, in the eyes of many Americans, a dangerous rival. Republicans and Democrats say it has exploited the global integration that Mr. Biden and many other officials supported.

    The 2020 election has been partly defined by what much of Washington sees as a kind of new Cold War. And as Mr. Biden faces fierce campaign attacks from President Trump, his language on China points to a drastic shift in thinking.

    Mr. Biden calls Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, a “thug.” He has threatened, if elected, to impose “swift economic sanctions” if China tries to silence American citizens and companies. “The United States does need to get tough on China,” he wrote this winter in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Biden now sees the country as a top strategic challenge, according to interviews with more than a dozen of his advisers and foreign policy associates, and his own words.

    Completely missing from this article: any mention of Hunter Biden.

  • Heh:

  • Heh, but with more drinking:

  • Heh III:

  • “Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That 2+2=5 As ‘Mostly True.'” 
  • “Cutting Out The Middleman: Dems Will Just Have Trump Debate Biden’s Teleprompter Directly.”
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    Clinton Corruption/DNC/Election Update

    Wednesday, July 27th, 2016

    Yeah, I’m in a rush, so it’s going to be one big list tar-ball. (Or if you prefer, tarball. Call it clintoncorruption.tar.gz.)

  • Nate Silver at 538 now gives Donald Trump a 55% chance of winning the presidency over Hillary Clinton. This is a big, big reversal, given he had Clinton up by over 87% chance of winning at one point.
  • The Wikileaks drop of DNC emails is starting to yield some very interesting information, especially about just how far in the tank the MSM was for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.
  • “The e-mails confirm the party establishment was in the tank for Clinton long before the primaries were decided.” To which I can only reply: Duh. Also this: “In one oddball e-mail chain, a DNC deputy communications director plotted to create a fake Craigslist ad that portrayed Donald Trump as sex crazed.”
  • Here are some quick and dirty highlights. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Washington Post and DNC hold joint fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Despite that being, you know, illegal.
  • Did CBS News actually change poll wording to be more favorable to Hillary and less favorable to Sanders?
  • Indeed, the emails reveal a pattern of the DNC not hesitating to bully news organizations for daring to mention Sanders favorably. “DNC communications director Luis Miranda, expressing his displeasure with “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough in a note to DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach, wrote: “(Expletive) Joe claiming the system is rigged, party against (Sanders), we need to complain to their producer.”
  • DNC confiscates the signs of Bernie Sanders supporters.
  • “Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States.”
  • Is the Clinton Foundation next up on the FBI investigation list. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Man admits to helping funnel illegal foreign contributions to Obama campaign.
  • Sanders supporters file suit over DNC and DNC law firm Perkins Coie LLP illegally favoring the Clinton campaign before Sanders dropped out. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Now it’s time for Hillary’s Thought Police to begin the hard work of grinding those kids down.”

    The idea is to turn those kids into useful political beings by using their own slogans and reference points against them. First, though, they must be softened up by shaming. And the pro-Hillary media (and most of the media is decidedly pro-Hillary) has been relentless at shaming them to keep them in line since that DNC leaks story broke.

    Shaming has been going on relentlessly on social media since these kids first touched a keyboard. They know how it works, they understand its conventions, if not its real purpose, which is to herd stubborn political ideas.

    They’ve been described by some pundits as spoiled children, as whiny babies too witless to understand simple arithmetic, even though the party arithmetic was rigged from the onset. The DNC supplied Superdelegates for Hillary, all but guaranteeing her victory, something first explained months ago by columnist Paul Jacob.

    And now many in my business who consider themselves progressives — even as they cleave to the Establishment Queen — are telling those Sanders kids two things:

    Shut up and behave.

    The goal is to take these scraggly revolutionaries, break them down and deliver zealots in November.

    And so now what you’ll see over the next few days from Philadelphia is the Democratic National Convention transformed into Operation Trust Hillary.

    Also this:

    Those leaked emails tell a story of supreme cynicism: The email asking that Sanders’ religious status be attacked in southern states; the emails outlining collusion between top officials and the Hillary camp. There are more to come.

    The most fantastic part of this moving story is that Hillary decided to blame it all on a singular villain: Russian strong man Vladimir Putin. Team Hillary said Putin was doing it to help Trump.

    (Full disclosure: Putin rode over and insisted on writing my column but my editor just said no.)

    Hackers targeted the DNC emails. And if hackers got Hillary’s vanished emails from her time as secretary of state, let’s hope they have the decency to release them before the presidential election.

    I must admit, there may be a Putin connection with the DNC leaks.

    But here’s the thing:

    Putin didn’t write the emails from the Democratic National Committee. Putin didn’t make fun of a black woman’s name; Putin didn’t scold American journalists and expect them to jump and help shape the news or offer government jobs to donors.

    The DNC officials did all that.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Disruption at the Texas Democratic delegation breakfast.
  • Yes, Hillary does want to ban guns.
  • Lifelong Democrat explains why he’s voting for Trump:

    Clinton Global (and its related entities) is a department store of political, multinational, corruption. The charity is under investigation, it was the middle man in weapons deals to foreign nations, it brokered a treasonous uranium deal to Russia, it stole money from Haiti and small contributors after the earthquake, it was deeply involved in a larcenous private college, Laureate University, it has allied with some of the worst dictators in the world and it may unravel slowly as the greatest charity fraud in history.

  • Hillary’s VP pick Tim Kaine is all over helping big banks dodge regulations.
  • So Paul Simon sang at the DNC. I love Simon’s work, but he’s not exactly the performer I’d pick to connect with today’s voters. However, Ann Althouse’s Meade came up with this inspired rewriting of Bernie’s theme music “America”:

    Let’s not be suckers, we’ll marry extortions together
    I’ve got some emails right here in my bag”
    So you’ll pay all of my campaign debts and I’ll buy your Wall Street lies
    And we’ll walk off and sell out America

  • DNC Day One: Soviet flags and Palestinian flags, but no American flags. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • A wall around the conevntion center wasn’t enough: Democrats actually built a makeshift wall around their own stage.
  • Clinton Cash dominates Facebook trends.
  • Linkswarm for December 22, 2010

    Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

    A few bite-sized links of interest for the holiday season:

    • Michael Barone digs deeper into the census data. Among the tidbits: Five of the seven states with no state income tax gained the most population, and the other two each gained the most within their region, and immigration seems to have slowed in the last decade.
    • More on redistricting from lefty election wonk Nate Silver.
    • China’s housing bubble is worse on a percentage of GNP basis than the U.S. or Japan.
    • California’s Treasurer claims that the state economy is not in trouble, but is merely resting. He also asserted it has beautiful plummage.
    • We’ve got spirit, yes we do!/I killed a buck, how about you?

    (Hat tips: Instapundit, mostly.)