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PoliGAF 2017 |OT6| Made this thread during Harvey because the ratings would be higher

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I mean, are you going to believe HER word over the President of the United States?!



(I am being sarcastic)

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It would be great if Virginia gov was a reverse-2014 in the sense that most polls greatly underestimate Northam’s winning margin.

He wins by double digits and Democrats sweep every competitive House of Delegates race for a solid gain or maybe even outright majority.
 

Holmes

Member
Well if +1 is the best Republicans can do, and +14 Is the best Democrats can do, I'd rather be a Democrat.

I think a lot of uncertainty is that we don't know what the electorate will look like in an off year Trump election.
 
Well if +1 is the best Republicans can do, and +14 Is the best Democrats can do, I'd rather be a Democrat.

I think a lot of uncertainty is that we don't know what the electorate will look like in an off year Trump election.
I’d like to think Northam would be on the winning end of that equation - Virginia has a long history of electing a governor from the opposite party that just won the White House, a trend only recently broken by Terry McAuliffe.

Remember that Northam won the primary easily in spite of public polling having it pretty close right up to Election Day. Also that primary turnout was extremely high, well over half a million votes. Just in terms of raw votes, if Northam got every primary voter to turn out again for the general and vote D, he’s already halfway there.
 

JP_

Banned
Didn't we already have a Russian memo that's proved that? I recall that being a scandal for a short period.
I thought sessions said he didn’t remember or think much of meeting like they were just introduced because they were in the same room
 

pigeon

Banned
Dave Weigel @daveweigel

Q-poll assumes a D+10 electorate, Monmouth assumes R+2. In 2016, electorate was D+7; in 2014, tied.

Keep in mind that there’s a reason they don’t weight these polls by party ID — it shifts too much. So Weigel is a little wrong here — these polls didn’t assume different electorates, they found different electorates.
 

studyguy

Member
Do you think Cruz would melt after coming in contact with a lightly carbonated beverage.
Maybe one of Dr. Pepper's 23 flavors would hurt him.
 
Franken is good but his questions need to be more focused. Just ask him one question at a time so Sessions does not get to feign umbrage.

For example,

"Did you meet Kisliyak?"
"What issues did you talk about"
"Do you always fail to recall your meetings with foreign diplomats?"
 
Franken is good but his questions need to be more focused. Just ask him one question at a time so Sessions does not get to feign umbrage.

For example,

"Did you meet Kisliyak?"
"What issues did you talk about"
"Do you always fail to recall your meetings with foreign diplomats?"
I recall him saying he tries not to come off as too much of a dick during hearings, so he probably restrains himself a bit.
 

The actual Tennessee Republican Party tried unsuccessfully for months to get Twitter to shut @TEN_GOP down.

”It was in no way affiliated with our office," Candice Dawkins, the real Tennessee Republican Party's communications director, told BuzzFeed News. ”It was very misleading."

On three separate occasions — Sept. 17, 2016, March 1, 2017, and Aug 14, 2017 — the Tennessee GOP reported the fake account to Twitter for impersonating it, according to email correspondence that Dawkins shared with BuzzFeed News.

Twitter is a problem.

Mike Montero had a post on Medium that does a great job of summing up my feelings:

I remember walking around the city on those days. Lotta hope. Feeling a bit cocky to be honest. But we thought we were gonna change the world.

Here's the bad news: we did.

Twitter was built at the tail end of that era. Their goal was giving everyone a voice. They were so obsessed with giving everyone a voice that they never stopped to wonder what would happen when everyone got one. And they never asked themselves what everyone meant. That's Twitter's original sin. Like Oppenheimer, Twitter was so obsessed with splitting the atom they never stopped to think what we'd do with it.

Twitter, which was conceived and built by a room of privileged white boys (some of them my friends!), never considered the possibility that they were building a bomb. To this day, Jack Dorsey doesn't realize the size of the bomb he's sitting on. Or if he does, he believes it's metaphorical. It's not. He is utterly unprepared for the burden he's found himself responsible for.

The power of Oppenheimer-wide destruction is in the hands of entitled men-children, cuddled runts, who aim not to enhance human communication, but to build themselves a digital substitute for physical contact with members of the species who were unlike them. And it should scare you.

...And at some point, and I don't know exactly when or how or who — even scarier I don't know if the people involved know when or how or who — Twitter made the decision to ride the hate wave. With their investors demanding growth, and their leadership blind to the bomb they were sitting on, Twitter decided that the audience Trump was bringing them was more important than upholding their core principles, their ethics, and their own terms of service.

And that, whenever that day might have been, is the day Twitter died.


Twitter would have you believe that it's a beacon of free speech. Biz Stone would have you believe that inaction is principle. I would ask you to consider the voices that have been silenced. The voices that have disappeared from Twitter because of the hatred and the abuse. Those voices aren't free. Those voices have been caged. Twitter has become an engine for further marginalizing the marginalized. A pretty hate machine.

Biz Stone would also believe that Twitter is being objective in its principled stance. To which I'd ask how objective it is that it constantly moves the goal posts of permissibility for its cash cow of hate. Trump's tweets are the methane that powers the pretty hate machine. But they're also the fuel for the bomb Twitter doesn't yet, even now, realize it is sitting on. There's a hell of a difference between giving Robert Pattinson dating advice and threatening a nuclear power with war.

...Twitter today is a cesspool of hate. A plague of frogs. Ten years ago, a group of white dudes baked the DNA of the platform without thought to harassment or abuse. They built the platform with the best of intentions. I still believe this. But they were ignorant to their own blind spots. As we all are. This is the value of diverse teams by the way. When you're building a tool with a global reach (and who isn't these days) your team needs to look like the world it's trying to reach. And ten years later, the abuse has proven too much to fix.

... I've known plenty of people who've worked at Twitter over the years. Most have left by now. Usually out of frustration. And their stories aren't mine to tell, so I won't. But I'll tell you this: a lot of those people have tried, honestly tried to deal with the abuse on the platform. But when leadership doesn't want something fixed it's close to impossible to fix it. And when leadership doesn't see something as a problem, it's not getting fixed at all.

And I'm sure that in the next few days Jack Dorsey will come out and make a pledge about how Twitter needs to be more transparent. He's very good at that. But when companies tell you they need to be more transparent it's generally because they've been caught being transparent. You accidentally saw behind the curtain. Twitter is behaving exactly as it's been designed to behave. Twitter, at this moment, is the sum of the choices it has made.

Even when the coop is covered in chickenshit, the chickens will come home to roost.

Twitter never saw Donald Trump as a problem, because they saw him as the solution.
 

Blader

Member
Reporter on CNN said that according to her sources, if Trump issues preemptive pardons in the Russia investigation, Congress would likely move forward with impeachment, even with Republicans in control.

As long as Paul Ryan is the Speaker of the House, impeachment will never happen. There is no one more cowardly or spineless on the whole goddamn hill than Ryan, and I'd sooner expect Mitch McConnell to publicly calling Trump a traitor and a Russian stooge than I would expect Ryan to meekly suggest the remote possibility of maybe doing impeachment.
 
I guess I should be glad I never encounted that account on my feed.

Even if you didn't directly come into contact with it, you certainly indirectly did. That account was the generation point of tons of talking points that quickly spread to Reddit, Breitbart, and Fox News. (Gennerally in that order.)
 

Wilsongt

Member
Russians definitely realize America is full if idiots given how easy they were able to infiltrate and be believable. All they had to do was be caricatures of the most extreme poles and they fit right in.
 
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/17/politics/alabama-poll-roy-moore-doug-jones-tied/index.html

Has this been discussed? I'm not completely in the loop but I found it surprising. Not that I put much weight into it.
Yeah we talked about it a bit yesterday when the poll dropped.

Undecideds are too high to draw any worthwhile conclusions. However, it’s a good sign that the race is significantly closer than it has any right to be.

whyamihere posted a tweet sourcing some Dem operatives that they don’t believe the tie, but don’t think they’re any worse than 5 points down. And the real goal is to get the establishment GOP to have to spend money shoring up Roy Moore - Jones has had the airwaves entirely to himself thus far.

I said yesterday I don’t believe Jones will win, but all the ingredients for an upset are there.
 
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/17/politics/alabama-poll-roy-moore-doug-jones-tied/index.html

Has this been discussed? I'm not completely in the loop but I found it surprising. Not that I put much weight into it.


It's a poll saying the Alabama Senate race is tied atm

Not terribly surprising. Moore is a particularly repugnant candidate, and Jones has played this election almost letter-perfect. We have the right environment and circumstances for an upset. If Jones loses, it won't be for lack of trying.

I have the same opinion about McCaskill. She's done the town halls, attempted to engage with the rural voters, preemptively pounced on her likely opponent. I have little doubt her campaign will be vicious when the fun really begins next year. If she loses, we can't blame a lack of effort or poor strategy.
 

DTC

Member
I wouldn't put any stock into it. It said Trump had net +1 approval. (Most polls show Trump at +15 to +20 approval in Alabama). Also, 42% is probably expected from Jones anyways, because Alabama has a somewhat high floor -- just not much more than that.

Moore is also fairly well liked in Alabama (slightly less than Trump, but still pretty favorable).
 
I wouldn't put any stock into it. It said Trump had net +1 approval. (Most polls show Trump at +15 to +20 approval in Alabama). Also, 42% is probably expected from Jones anyways, because Alabama has a somewhat high floor -- just not much more than that.

Moore is also fairly well liked in Alabama (slightly less than Trump, but still pretty favorable).

Alabama loves Moore so much that he nearly lost to a Democrat in 2012.
 

DTC

Member
Alabama loves Moore so much that he nearly lost to a Democrat in 2012.

He had 53 / 39 favorable in a few recent polls.

He nearly lost in 2012 because chief justice and attorney general races tend to be less political than statewide races, and his opponent was very well liked. I doubt the GOP leaning Alabamans are going to suddenly be "wow, I really want a liberal democrat to represent us in the senate!". And I doubt there'll be enough democrats to turnout.

I live 10 minutes away from Alabama. A lot of dudes throw a fit when their property taxes go up by 0.01% to support the local schools (which tend to be not great). They're also very socially conservative. Doug Jones saying he's vehemently pro-choice was a big, big mistake.
 

kirblar

Member
Are his supporters picking up his speaking style or something? Just reading that, it sounds like something Trump would say.
Trump has done shit like this before, which is why we need audio.
He had 53 / 39 favorable in a few recent polls.

He nearly lost in 2012 because chief justice and attorney general races tend to be less political than statewide races, and his opponent was very well liked. I doubt the GOP leaning Alabamans are going to suddenly be "wow, I really want a liberal democrat to represent us in the senate!". And I doubt there'll be enough democrats to turnout.

I live 10 minutes away from Alabama. A lot of dudes throw a fit when their property taxes go up by 0.01% to support the local schools (which tend to be not great). They're also very socially conservative. Doug Jones saying he's vehemently pro-choice was a big, big mistake.
And they're not great because the middle class+ white residents have their kids in private school and deliberately starve the public schools of funding.
 

DTC

Member
And they're not great because the middle class+ white residents have their kids in private school and deliberately starve the public schools of funding.

Honestly, it's not even that in Alabama. A lot of them just don't want their taxes to be raised, even if their kids go to these public schools.

The private school problem is a lot worse up north (where I used to live) in New Jersey / New York.
 
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