Quote (ofthevoid @ Nov 3 2020 10:51am)

Nothing wrong with being optimistic.

People have friends or family die in car accidents and still drive, people die of heart disease and their family members still pound bacon burgers and milkshakes as so on.

That doesn't mean live carelessly and irresponsibly but simultaneously don't be paralyzed by every thing that comes up every few years.

Quote (IceMage @ Nov 3 2020 11:33am)

Virus is fake news, they have nothing to worry about.

Quote

One thing to look at is the number of early ballots cast. Over 100 million ballots were cast early, which is 72.8% of the total number of ballots cast in 2016. Trump got 46% of the votes cast in 2016. Based on states that report party registration as part of their voting data, registered Democrats have cast 45% of all early votes.
If you extrapolate that to include states that don't report party registration, evenly distribute votes from voters that don't list a party affiliation (23.8% of early votes, and information that I've seen skews the NPA vote towards Biden, but we'll divide that evenly for sake of discussion), and assume that crossover votes (registered R voting for D and vice versa) cancel each other out, then Biden has an estimated 57% of early votes, or a little over 57 million votes.

Based on 2016 turnout (which this is expected to exceed by a significant margin), Biden theoretically has 86.5% of Clinton's vote total, not including votes cast today. I've seen estimates of total turnout this year in the 155-160 million range. This would have 55-60 million votes cast today. If we go with 60 million, Trump would have to capture over 61% of votes cast today to make up that gap.

Now, this only addresses popular vote, and doesn't account for other subtleties in the data (for simplicity's sake). So Trump certainly has a path to victory, but it's certainly going to be an uphill battle for him.

Quote (Surfpunk @ Nov 3 2020 07:29pm)

I posted this elsewhere, but it lays out in a very general fashion the uphill battle Trump has today.

Quote (EA7 @ Nov 3 2020 09:37am)

All of this makes sense on paper, but many of the so-called experts in this field are using very outdated models and making incorrect assumptions. Trump essentially revolutionized politics, the old systems and statistics used to make accurate predictions no longer work.

Looking it from a simple point of view: one candidate is campaigning 5 times a day and drawing crowds of up to 57,000 people with massive enthusiasm, and even has hundreds of supporters waiting to greet him at 3 AM when he finally finishes his day and returns home.

The other can barely draw a couple hundred people on a good day and spent most of his campaign being MIA.

With this kind of enthusiasm gap, the numbers really don't add up.

Quote (thesnipa @ Nov 3 2020 11:55am)

you mean like volunteering at a polling station at age 95 in the middle of a global pandemic?

i dont think people should be paralyzed by fear, in fact ive been venturing out and hanging in safe situations with friends a lot more. but that's not similar to a 95 year old pollster.

Quote (EA7 @ Nov 3 2020 11:37am)

All of this makes sense on paper, but many of the so-called experts in this field are using very outdated models and making incorrect assumptions. Trump essentially revolutionized politics, the old systems and statistics used to make accurate predictions no longer work.

Looking it from a simple point of view: one candidate is campaigning 5 times a day and drawing crowds of up to 57,000 people with massive enthusiasm, and even has hundreds of supporters waiting to greet him at 3 AM when he finally finishes his day and returns home.

The other can barely draw a couple hundred people on a good day and spent most of his campaign being MIA.

With this kind of enthusiasm gap, the numbers really don't add up.

Quote (ofthevoid @ Nov 3 2020 12:40pm)

They are probably the only ones that care enough about civics to actually put their time where their mouth is. Meanwhile the other generations are either busy working, making lame videos on tic-toc or dorks like us arguing politics on a video game website.