There is a lot of stress, anxiety, and worry out there — despite all the positive signs.
I get it — the stakes couldn’t be higher and we’ve been burnt before.
I’d like to help you relieve a little of your stress and anxiety.
Because if we work hard in the next few days and GOTV in every way we can WE WILL WIN.
Here are the top twelve election worries I am hearing from people and why I don’t think you should lose sleep over them.
Worry Number 1: republicans are trying to suppress the vote!
The blatant voter suppression efforts from Republicans should outrage you; but they should bring you more hope than fear.
They would not be trying to steal your vote if your vote did not matter.
They would not be trying to steal your vote if they really thought that the polls were wrong.
They would not be trying to steal your vote if this really was 2016.
Yes, it is awful that they are doing this. It is outrageous and cowardly and undemocratic. But is is also pathetic — it is pathetic that one of our two major parties can only win by cheating and lying and that they are just fine with that path. It is even more pathetic that they won’t even be able to win WITH all their cheating. We are still going to kick their asses.
Rather than panic, I want you to remember what happened when they tried this shit in Wisconsin. I want you to remember what happened when the Supreme Court helped them by making people in Wisconsin show up in person to vote during a pandemic.
People in Wisconsin showed up to vote in droves. We won in Wisconsin. A liberal challenger upset a Trump-backed incumbent to win a State Supreme Court seat.
The Republicans are making a huge mistake right now. People don’t like it when their freedoms are taken from them. There will be a backlash.
Republicans in Texas have done all they can to make early voting difficult. And what is happening? More people have voted in early voting in Texas ALREADY than voted in all of the 2016 election. North Carolina is over 86% and Florida is over 83%. Hawaii also has more votes than in all of 2016. Boom.
Worry Number 2: What about the polls showing a tightening race in PA?
The polls showing a tightening race in PA are not high quality polls
and PA is a weird state, polling wise because there are tons of DINOs there (ie people who are registered Democrats but ONLY vote Republican and have since Reagan).
Worry Number 3: But a guy I went to high school with says that the race between Biden and Trump is tightening. Should I be worried?
that guys sucks and his info comes from infowars bullshit. Check out the actual scientific polls
There’s Little Sign Of The Presidential Race Tightening
After a surprisingly sluggish weekend for polling, the floodgates have opened, with a mix of high-quality polls, low-quality polls and pretty much everything in between. And although there are some outliers in both directions, they tell a fairly consistent story, overall: A steady race nationally, perhaps with some gains for Joe Biden in the Midwest.
Worry Number 4: But the polls were wrong in 2016
This is not 2016.
Trump's chances hinge on a polling screw-up way worse than 2016
President Donald Trump still has a path to a second term. But it would take a polling debacle that would make 2016 look like a banner year.
According to a series of battleground state polls conducted and released in the week following the last Trump-Biden debate, the president’s chances of winning a second term now require winning states where he still trails with only days to go until voting concludes.
It’s not impossible, but you have to squint to see how Biden’s lead won’t hold up on Election Day. Even signs that were more apparent four years ago — whether in real-time or in retrospect — are more ambiguous this year.
There are generally fewer undecideds in the polls. Biden is viewed favorably by a narrow majority of voters in the country. And surveys conducted since the debate last week have not showed as large of an uptick for Trump.
AND The polls could be wrong. But that may help Biden, not just Trump.
In truth, public opinion polls are imperfect instruments, and there's always bound to be some degree of error, especially given the widely varying quality of the nation's pollsters. But Trump would probably need a larger polling miss than in 2016 to win re-election, and there's no guarantee a systemic polling error this year would run in his favor.
Fundamentally, the current polling in the 2020 race is different from 2016 in three important ways.
First, Biden's lead is larger and much more stable than Clinton's was at this point. Second, there are far fewer undecided and third-party voters left to woo — reducing the chances of a late break toward one side.
And third, the scores of district and state-level polls conducted by the parties to make spending decisions in down-ballot races generally align with national polls showing Trump running behind his 2016 pace, including in key states. In 2016, these same polls had shown flashing red warning signs for Clinton, particularly in districts with lots of white working-class voters.
Worry Number 5: But I heard that the Republicans have registered more voters than we have!
Why A Surge In Republican Voter Registration Might Not Mean A Surge In Trump Support
In the past couple of weeks, key battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have received a lot of attention because Republicans have seen a spike in voter registration numbers. This is often cited as a counterpoint to Joe Biden’s sizable lead over President Trump in the polls, as all these Republican registrations must be a sign of support for Trump that the polls are missing, right?
Well, it’s hard to say what’s happening exactly.
Party registration is often a lagging indicator
Registration surges follow the campaign calendar — Consider the 2020 presidential primary. Democrats had a competitive race, which drove interest in voting in 2019 and early in 2020 among Democrats and voters who wanted to have a say in the party’s nomination contest. Meanwhile, Trump was practically unopposed in the GOP nomination contest, so there wasn’t the same motivation among Republican-leaning voters to register ahead of the primaries in the spring until we got closer to the general election.
Independent voters complicate things — the share of Americans who identify as politically independent has now reached or even topped 40 percent in recent years, younger voters are more likely to identify as independent than older voters. And importantly, younger voters of color are also more likely to register as independents, as Florida’s registration figures have shown. Both of these groups tend to lean Democratic which means that even if many of these voters don’t openly identify as Democrats, they’re more likely to vote for Democrats than not. More broadly, polls show Biden ahead of Trump among voters who identify as independent.
For example:
Worry Number 6: But isn’t Joe Biden hiding in his basement?
Biden is fighting for every vote
Worry Number 7:But there is no way we can win in in those red states!
First, we don’t need to win all of them or even most of them but we are on track to possibly win some. Which would be amazing.
Georgia would just be icing on the cake. Ossoff is like a young Obama
and numbers are looking great in Florida
and in NC
and we are tied in Texas!
Worry Number 8: But Republicans have all those big money donors!
Democrats are raising tons of money (just ask my checking account)
‘It’s daunting’: Democrats crushing House Republicans on the airwaves
Democratic congressional candidates are swamping Republicans on the airwaves in another sign they’re poised to pad their House majority in November.
In the most competitive 94 districts, Democrats have booked over $177 million in ads since Sept. 1, while their GOP opponents have booked $93 million, according to a POLITICO analysis of advertising data.
“At this point, it’s pretty clear there’s going to be losses. The question is just how many, and if Republicans can keep it in the mid to high single digits,” said Ken Spain, a GOP strategist and former communications director for House Republicans' campaign arm. “The money and the momentum is so significantly one-sided.”
2 Democratic senators sick of doom-scrolling are using Twitter to raise millions
two middle-aged senators with a combined 1.3 million Twitter followers are raising boatloads of cash for Democratic Senate candidates simply by taking their personal texting conversations onto the social media platform for the whole world to see.
Worry Number 9: But Covid left us without a good enough ground game!
Just some of the great organizations working to help people vote:
Worry Number 9: what about those shy trump voters?
First of all, that is the last word I would use for trump voters. Second, There are shy Biden voters too
The election of President Trump, which shocked many pollsters and reputed experts, gave rise to a much-discussed species: the shy Trump voter, a citizen so cowed by critics and the media they won’t dare express their feelings out loud. Trump calls them “a silent majority,” and his backers believe that untold millions who lie to political pollsters, or refuse to take part in opinion surveys, will again stun the world, defying predictions and delivering the president a second term next week.
Less noted are the shy Biden voters, who may quietly help the Democrat chip away at Trump’s base in small-town and rural America.
Muha believes Biden will do considerably better than Clinton, based on some of the conversations he’s had with constituents — in private.
“I’ve talked to many of them who’ve said, ‘I’m going to vote for Joe Biden, but I’m not putting a sign in my frontyard,’” Muha said. They don’t want to provoke their neighbors.
Julie Slomski, 43, a Democrat running for state Senate in Erie, said she, too, meets plenty of Democratic voters who express their support in hushed tones and hurried conversations.
Worry Number 10: But I read about some guy who predicted the last 20 elections all correctly using this formula and he says Trump is going to win.
That guys science is garbage.
Let’s hear from the experts who use actual science and do this for a living:
Nate Silver on why 2020 isn’t 2016
In 2016, our final forecast said Trump had a 29 percent chance, and that came through; right now we give him a 12 percent chance to win in November {this is down to 10% since this article went live}. That’s not trivial, but it is a different landscape.
One difference is that there are fewer undecided voters this year. In 2016, there were about 13 or 14 percent undecided plus third party; it’s around 6 percent this year. That’s a pretty big difference. So that first mechanism that I described that helped Trump is probably not going to be a factor. Trump could win every undecided voter in these polls and he would still narrowly lose the Electoral College.
Biden’s lead is also a little bit larger. After the [FBI Director James] Comey letter, Clinton’s lead went down to 3 or 4 points in national polls and 2 or 3 points in the average tipping point state. Biden is ahead by more like 5 points in the average tipping point state.
We can definitely find cases in the past where there was a 5-point polling error in key states — that’s why Trump can win. But a 2016 error would not be quite enough: If the polls missed by exactly the same margin, exactly the same states, then instead of losing those three key Rust Belt states by 1 point, Biden would win them by 1 or 2 points. He might also hold on in Arizona, where the polls were fine in 2016. So it would be a close call, but one that wound up electing Biden in the end, pending court disputes, etc.
so why are so many predictions still making this seem so competitive?
It’s also worth thinking about incentives here. Imagine you’re a pollster and you have a choice between two turnout models. One is a newfangled turnout model that accounts for early voting. The other is a more traditional, conservative model.
One of them has Biden up 6 points in Wisconsin. And one has him up 10 points. There’s not much incentive to publish the 10-point lead. If Biden wins by 10 when you had him up by 6, people will say it was a pretty good poll nevertheless. But if Trump wins, you’re going to look that much worse. So I think there are a lot of incentives to be sure that you’re not missing the white working-class voters that may not apply to Hispanic voters in Arizona or to younger voters who have not been reliable voters in the past but are evidently turning out this year.
Dave Wasserman on why 2020 isn’t 2016
and this:
From Charlie Cook → Don't expect a contested election
Every day that Trump remains behind in the polls, outspent badly and with the early vote gushing in, the cone of uncertainty narrows, and the odds of such an upset goes down.
I believe his actual lead is more like 9 or 10 points, based on the higher-quality, live-telephone-interview national polls conducted since the first debate, as well as the gold standard of online polling, the Pew Research Center’s mammoth poll of 11,929 voters released two weeks ago.
Any way you slice it, these are pretty good leads, considerably higher than the 3.2-point national margin that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in the RCP average on Oct. 29, 2016. When all the votes were counted, the margin ended up being 2.1 percent.
The Senate is increasingly less a case of whether Democrats will take a majority, but how large will it be. The chances of the GOP keeping its losses down to a seat or two are dropping; I am thinking that a five- or six-seat gain is becoming highly possible
Worry Number 11: rejected ballots will be the hanging chads of this election.
A lot of panic porn articles about that yesterday.
First, as of Tuesday, roughly 30,000 mail ballots had been flagged for possible rejection or cure in eight battleground states, accounting for a tiny fraction of the roughly 11.5 million mail ballots returned, an analysis by The Post found.
and this
The total rate of pending rejections was 0.35 percent, a rate he predicted will rise to the 2016 election-year level of about 1 percent after late-arriving ballots are factored in.
Deficient ballots were slightly more likely to come from Democratic mail voters, at 0.33 percent, than Republican voters, at 0.29 percent — and both were lower than unaffiliated voters, whose ballots were flagged at a rate of 0.47 percent.
So given the ratios that Cook is talking about, the low rate of rejections, and the fact that even though our ballots are more likely to be rejected, it is not by that much, this is very unlikely to be an issue to lose sleep over.
Worry Number 12: Black and Latino voters are not turning out
Giant panic porn article in Bloomberg yesterday (no I won’t link to it) about how Black and Latino voters are not turning up and what a disaster that is for the Biden people.
First, everyone expected a large percentage of Black and Latino voting to occur on election day. This is not a surprise.
Second, articles that only have anonymous sources of campaign “advisers” are not that compelling.
Third, Biden’s support from white suburbanites (who are voting early) and older voters (also: early) is more than making up for this early discrepancy.
Fourth, Black voters have supported Biden since day one. They got him the nomination and that was BEFORE Kamala joined the ticket.
Fifth, there are enormous efforts with lots of money and volunteers behind them to get all Democrats to the polls.
Sixth, the data is actually much more ambiguous than that panic porn article makes it sound. For example, there’s been a surge in the older African-American vote. Black voters 65 and older have already surpassed their 2016 numbers in six key battlegrounds — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas. And young voters are also smashing 2016 numbers.
and as this article points out —
In North Carolina, where African Americans make up a fifth of the voting population, more than 690,000 Black voters had cast ballots by mail or through early in-person voting as of Oct. 26, according to data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project, an information center based at the University of Florida.
and
Early tallies in Georgia, another Southern state with a history of racial barriers to voting, also show Black voter turnout on pace to exceed levels recorded four years ago, according to data from the Secretary of State.
and this article points out that Biden is actually working really hard in Florida to increase Black voter turnout
the Biden campaign is using multiple ways to reach Black voters:
Many Biden and Harris stops in South Florida have been in cities with large African American and Caribbean American populations.
The campaign has tailored advertising messages in in print, digital, radio and television advertising, including ads in Black community newspapers and radio stations and Creole language broadcast media.
The candidates and a range of political and entertainment surrogates have made themselves available to Black media outlets and along the campaign trail.
On Thursday, the Miami Heat’s Udonis Haslem was among the NBA stars who delivered warm up remarks at Biden’s drive-in rally in Coconut Creek, appeared with him at the Sistrunk Boulevard shop, and visited early voting sites in Miami-Dade County.
Independent groups that support Biden have also worked in African American and Caribbean American communities in Florida. Former state Sen. Chris Smith and and state Sen. Perry Thurston have organized an effort that has had about 50 people going out every evening in teams to knock on doors of non-voters in Black neighborhoods.
So don’t let a panic porn article lead you to panic. Yes, we need to get more Hispanic and Black voters to the polls, but we always knew that would occur more on election day than on early voting and we are ready.
OK, so those twelve areas aren’t as bad as we might have thought. Does all this mean we shouldn’t worry at all?
Of course not. If you thought there was only a 5% chance that your house would blow up and kill everyone in it on Tuesday you would still be worried. Some worry is hard to avoid.
But when you feel that worry, remind yourself about the 95% chance that everything will get so, so much better after Tuesday. That should be making you feel hopeful. You should be balancing that worry with buckets full of hope. Because being hopeful doesn’t mean blinding yourself to the possibility of failure, it means acknowledging that, with hard work, we are on track to win.
and this:
keep faith. keep working. keep hope alive.
We deserve a little laughter:
this one is for me:
Remember when we almost had taco trucks on every corner?
Let’s give the final word to Elizabeth Warren. Our next treasury secretary:
This is it y’all. We are just feet from the finish line. Now is the moment to dig deep and do all we can for this last push.
Want to help Biden win? Want to give him a Democratic Senate to work with? Want to be a part of this incredible moment?
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