I went back to see what you two were talking about and I saw this, and I don't know if it's even necessarily the case. The GOP primary was pretty unconventional (largely because of who won it) but there wasn't really anything about the Democratic primary that was. The strongest candidate keeping A-list challengers out, then back-loading her resources, and then accepting a "demographics as destiny" long slog created a really predictable contest. So one primary ends up looking pretty conventional while the other one looked really chaotic and unconventional (yet still predictable in its own right).



I also found this, which naturally caused me to crack up.

Clinical language sounds harsh to people who don't know it.

We only refer to people as 'keepalives' and stuff like that behind closed doors, where the death panels are.

But they were edited and set up to upset low information people who don't know what is really going on in the video.

After the ACORN thing you should really be more skeptical. You might have bought that one too...

It is like the truth doesn't matter anymore, just passion with you people.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 27 2016 02:50pm

Yeah. I agree. It's been pretty conventional on the Democratic side. I was just trying to be a little less mean about congratulating one's self on successfully predicting what was supposed to happen and the person who was the heavy odds-on favorite to win.



We already know that's pretty much the case. When people vote to place restrictions on abortion, they aren't voting to end abortion. They are voting to reduce safe abortions.

Before Roe v. Wade in 1973, an estimated 200,000 to 1.2 million abortions were performed a year (it's hard to get exact figures since it was illegal in so many areas), and approximately 5,000 woman a year died due to do-it-yourself abortions or botched abortions.

An abortion is actually a very safe safe and low-risk medical procedure....when it's performed by doctors and/or professional medical teams. You could show many pro-life advocates the facts about abortions, how many certain laws are likely going to prevent, how many women might die due to botched abortions or medical complications, and they wouldn't care.

It's not about that. This is an emotional battle that's being waged by them, often with a basis in faith or scripture, which furthers compounds things and makes even the most rational people not think straight.

Thankfully, abortion rates in this country are going down, but it's not because of abortion restrictions (though, that might account for a little bit of it). What drives the reduction in abortions is improved sexual education, increased access to birth control, addressing poverty, and many other key factors. But the pro-life movement doesn't really care about these things because their #1 goal actually isn't to reduce abortions.

So it's definitely a case where truth and facts matter less and passion, faith, and emotion matter more.

Not to say that it's at work here in this example, but this can give you a little insight into how big of an issue recency bias can be in election prognostication when it comes time build models that call for assuming what's going to happen in the next election, based on how the last couple were decided. A lot of money goes into that and you need to be accurate within a certain degree, and that means there's a demand on getting the previous elections "right."

It would be easy for some at this point to say "oh Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary, big deal, that was always going to happen." Was it? It was "supposed" to happen because Clinton's campaign made a series of decisions that spanned 3-4 years to form a strategy that they rigidly stuck to. If they don't make those decisions, or if they decide differently, or if they don't stick to the strategy then maybe she doesn't win.

So that must mean when the last House election results came in outside your given range of possibilities, it illustrates you're just not that good at your job, eh?

hahaha

I may be in error though. Now that I think about it, I think it was how badly he missed the Senate outcome.

If we see it what do you think his co-workers see. He probably has a family member that got him that job and "the firm" is required to keep his sorry ass on

ruh roh you're dun for in the rebuttal

Well I'm obviously not a model builder, so amusingly you just sort of humiliated yourself with what you highlighted there. Exactly as I said, such models require multiple previous elections' worth of data. 2014 is a great example why: you'd never want to allow an outlier, like that cycle's historically-low turnout, to negatively-effect your model.

I'd say the fact that I identified the exact seats that would change hands (and in almost the exact order of the eventual flip-line) in both the House and Governor races months before Election Day speaks to the obvious high level of political acumen that I have, not that it matters. Either way, I rarely build models.



I don't know if I should be thanking you or Santara for this hilarity. The idea that someone who has such frequent trouble understanding what's written in half of the posts written here is capable of even evaluating my job performance is so laughable that it could provide laughs for days. Fucking amazing.