He should be thrilled. He gets to spend his first two minutes of the debate saying literally anything he wants to, without interruption.
The rule I like is that further interruptions count against your time, so if Trump blabs constantly like last time, Biden will have about 5 minutes to himself to close out.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
Why are you wasting time here when you could be wasting it by listening to the latest episode of the DBR Podcast?
In my state of FL, Republicans have almost 150,000 more new registered voters than Democrats do. Still calling my state a coin flip. I’ll be shocked if Biden wins by some of the numbers I’ve been reading in recent polls (where he’s up by 4-7 points). But we shall see.
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
That’s a fascinating fact. What does “new” mean in this case — since the 2018 election? I don’t recall everything that happened in FL in the mid-terms, but I do recall the Dems falling short of nabbing the Governor’s office and the Reps flipping a Senate seat.
I agree that a 4-7 point Biden lead seems off. The 538 average is currently 3.7:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/florida/
Add some regular polling error and the possibility that Trump voters are still being undercounted, and you’re prediction of a coin toss seems right to me.
Cato's question is important. Upthread, we wondered about the same with all of the new GOP registrations. That's wonderful and all that they are getting voters out, but do the new folks outnumber the gullywasher of Dems that 2018 produced?
Also..."registered" does not equal "voter". Let's see how those folks do with a long line at the polls staring them in the face. (Under the Florida sun.)
I truly believe Trump has shot himself in the foot with his discouraging mail in voting. (Which Florida is really good at doing, I hear.)
Q "Why do you like Duke, you didn't even go there." A "Because my art school didn't have a basketball team."
Also something to consider...who said all of those Pub registrants are going to vote for Trump? Perhaps a large segment are over 65ers, transplants who may have been registered elsewhere but now see Trump's legal actions against Obamacare as a true treat to entitlements and the social safety net, motivating them to man the ramparts, get off the shuffleboard and into the voting booth? If Trump is truly the polarizing force he is credited to be there are a panoply of issues upon which he is apt to polarize the electorate that don't fall along traditional party lines.
Last edited by CameronBlue; 10-20-2020 at 07:12 AM. Reason: Trump's anti-democractic rhetoric is a threat to the idealism into which they were inculcated as students of democracy, OUAT.
More good stuff. There is also predilection among younger voters to register as independent but to not function as Independents, rather they skew very much liberal. We shall see who shows up but registrations are somewhat like demographics. They are suggestive but they are not destiny.
This is a good point about independent or as Florida calls them NPA (No Party Affiliated) voters. According to this article here are the total raw numbers for D, R, and NPA between 2016 and 2020
As others have stated, party registration doesn't automatically equal vote for that party especially for the newly registered NPAs. Who are they voting for?Code:D R NPA (Ind) 2020 5300166 5170189 3754886 2016 4875370 4553776 3087306 Diff 424796 616413 667580
Also, how many people went to the polls in 2016? If you those 3 groups together for 2016 you get 12.51 million. 9.42 million people voted for President in FL in 2016 (4.62 R, 4.50 D, 0.3 other). Who are the 3 million 2016 registered voters who didn't vote in 2016 voting for? R, D, or No one?
I agree with Southern Dukie that this will be a close race. Very likely within the +3.5% Biden that 538 is currently showing as average and +3.0% that they are projecting as outcome.
Last edited by tbyers11; 10-20-2020 at 08:34 AM.
Coach K on Kyle Singler - "What position does he play? ... He plays winner."
"Duke is never the underdog" - Quinn Cook
I will offer this, looking at trends can be helpful. Based on 538, in Florida, HRC was a slight favorite to win. Gillum was a 77% favorite to win and incumbent Bill Nelson was a 70.4% favorite. All lost. So while polling errors can go both directions, a small sample in FL says they appear to be trendingin one direction only. We have noted SouthernDukie's comments earlier in the summer about "reluctant" Trump voters. Recent poll to election results underlie their comments. Whether this is enough for Trump to overcome Biden's poll lead is the question. Scott ovecame a 2.2 pt deficit, DeSantis a 4.2 pt deficit and Trump a 0.6 pt deficit.
Ooooh fun! This presupposes that the polling misses were correlated between the 2 elections and that shy Trump voters are an explanation. My inclination is to say...maybe. I would argue there is no evidence that the correlation between the two polling misses In Florida is related to shy Trump voters. There is no evidence that this group exists. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but I think this connection is tenuous at best. I would assume the more likely answer is that polling in certain states and among certain demographics is spotty at best and that Florida is expensive and difficult to poll accurately. Maybe those polling misses were for different reasons and unrelated to each other. I would assume that is more likely.
This morning I heard that Trump's initial reaction to the new rules for the debate, after "It's not at all fair," was that allowing Biden to go without interruption for two minutes was a good thing for Trump, because (according to Trump) if Joe has to go for that long he will "lose his train of thought" because (and I'm not making this up!) he's "gonzo."
This is what we have come to in American politics. I think it is incredibly sad.
"We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world." --M. Proust
Just to be clear, looking at 3 data points from the same election does not equal looking at a trend. The polls in Florida clearly missed in 2016. That could have been a one-off, or it could be evidence of a trend. But looking only at the 2016 polls vs election results in Florida isn't examining trends.