We are living through, and participating in, one of the most remarkable periods in all of American history. Let's close strong and win this thing, together.
I don’t live in her District here in NJ, but I’m doing postcards for her as well. It’s an under appreciated swing district and important to win back this year.
Seconding this! I'm so excited about Sue's campaign? My mom is a Dem organizer in a pretty red part of NJ and she said folks have just been coming out of the woodwork to help support Sue.
What a fantastic week! I can’t wait to “Do something”! And I am working on that right now!
Simon, how long should we expect to wait for polling that reflects the effect of the convention? What do you make of the VP’s superpac team publicly saying their polling is not as rosy as public polling? Is this real or more motivation for the troops?
Everyone, keep up all the good work! We sleep when we are dead!
As a whole - it was an amazing convention! Harris hit it out of the park with her speech! So genuine, so human. She is more than ready to lead! It's about goddamn time we took patriotism back from the Republicans! Probably the best convention I've ever seen. I feel fired up. There is one little nagging feeling I have though....I just wish they had included a Palestinian speaker. I worry what the consequences of this might be. I know Michael Moore will probably make ugly noises about this. Anyone else have thoughts about this? Still I'm thrilled as a whole & ready to win! Let's do this !
I think we have to be ok with the fact that getting a ceasefire might be the only real way to fully engage with Palestinian voters again. I was a bit disheartened that they were given no room to speak, but we just need to keep working hard to get her elected.
A lot is going on around the issue of Palestine and more will come out as we go along. I think people need hope, optimism, and joyous unity right now. Four days of celebration is warranted after all the insanity of the past decade. Maybe, just maybe an America in jubilation with the distinct possibility of seriously defeating Donald might give creeps like Netanyahu and Putin pause. I certainly hope so.
True. I know the situation is ongoing. Plus I think it really matters that Ilhan Omar endorsed her. One of the articles I read did quote/stare how Ilhan made clear to the protesters at whom she spoke that we must defeat Trump (I'm paraphrasing). Just got Murphy's law on my brain lol
It would have been very good to have a speaker, but on the other hand the tokenism implicit in the move would have limited its impact on healing the underlying divisions in the party on this issue imo
Republicans are eager to use Gaza as a wedge issue and they’ve actually been pretty successful at it so far, which makes it all the harder to make any moves toward solutions or reconciliation.
So perhaps it had a minimal impact ? Perhaps it was for the better ? Also I wasn't aware that the GOP was being so successful at using it. I've heard the opinion that it is baggage she can weather. Here's hoping. Deep breath.
I may be looking at this through a too-local lens because I’m in New York, where politicians grandstand on all sides of this issue, and I’m around some of the universities that have been most affected by the House GOP caucus’s investigations. So in the spaces I know, the GOP has definitely used the issue successfully to drive splits in our coalition. My read may be off on where things stand nationally.
That being said, I think overall the speaker issue is a minor blip in a serious policy disagreement. The Uncommitted coalition has a lot of activists in it with various agendas, but there are certainly many who want the US to effectively switch sides in the conflict between the Israeli side and the Palestinian side, to the point that we’d be backing Palestinian demands for sovereignty over Israeli territory. Those activists are influential, are driving many of the visible campus protests, and are never going to be satisfied with anything Dems could realistically promise imo. The war crimes, genocide, or whatever you want to call the death toll of the Israeli bombing campaign are a motivating factor, but the agenda for these activists long predates October 7 and is bigger than the current war. So I think overall it’s the sort of thing where a speaker would have calmed nerves for a few days until the next perceived offense against them.
And I perceive that there’s a strategy behind this: keep being the squeaky wheel, which some call moving the goalposts. It may or may not be smart strategy, but it’s certainly strategy and one can argue it’s been successful to an extent. After they disrupted campaign events and engaged in negotiations with the campaign, they were granted a panel at the DNC. But by Thursday they were saying they’d been denied a voice at the convention because they couldn’t give a two-minute speech on the floor. If they’d gotten the speech, the next demand would have been something else.
Makes sense. Everyday I learn more about these activists/groups and I see your point. I guess the October 7th war if anything brought these groups further into mainstream attention. Basically you're saying even if Harris/DNC had given into their demands, these groups would've essentially been like Lucy continuously moving the football before Charlie Brown could actually kick it, and there never would've been any action satisfactory for them. Talk about a tightrope to walk!
Yeah and to put it in very blunt terms, this is ethnic politics and the two ethnic groups involved are at odds. Of course there’s hardly unanimity within each group, but the loudest influencer voices on each side are the most dogmatic.
It’s hard to keep them both within the party. But the saddest thing I think is that it’s so challenging to disentangle the simple need to end the horrors of this war from the desire of each side to win or to prevent the other from getting an advantage in any settlement
And this is also so much harder than undoing South African apartheid or, in a way, even getting the US out of Vietnam imo. Those conflicts were more ideological than ethno-religious in character
Only today did I learn that there were negotiations even during the convention. I wish I knew what went wrong. It sounded as if something had been worked out but for some reason didn't happen. I am deeply saddened by that.
I'm a Quaker, and I'm against unnecessary violence. I am also saddened by the inability of people to let go of petty stances that only get in the way of finding a solution. That includes the convention organizers as well as Palestinian-Americans who together should have worked out some way for an American Palestinian to have given a brief sharing. It would have been appropriate at the very least if one of the people giving benedictions to have been a Palestinian, even one who wasn't muslim.
But Kamala's speech making a strong statement about the rights of palestinians to have the same rights and sense of freedom as Israel hit hard, and coming near the end was pretty damn powerful. I hope that makes some people think.
This convention had to present Kamala Harris to the country as a leader ready to take us into the future. I don't know how tying her to the ongoing and contentious dialogue on Gaza and calling attention to the fact that a ceasefire still remains elusive would have helped that. Let's just get the ceasefire in place and the humanitarian relief going over there and keep the campaign moving forward over here.
I agree and just want to remind everyone that until Jan 20th, Joe Biden is STILL the President and Kamala Harris is STILL the Vice President. She isn't and Shouldn't do anything that would reflect on his position and his own way of working with this. She isn't going to put him on the spot... She'll have time to bring her own agenda.
Today, 6-8 ET/3-5 PT, texting Montanans and registering more Dems!
Last night on FT 6 textbanking, sent 67,000 texts to NV, FL, and AZ! Next Thursday text MI, NY, and WI- to buy a token for a future Text Arcade, https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ft6arcade24
At the same time we BYOP. I sent mine to FL and WI yesterday. Meanwhile FT 6 phone banking calls the same population of unregistered folk who trend Democratic. About 1 MM in FL alone. Those folks are waiting to hear from us.
As a centrist, I was absolutely elated to hear the Democratic Party, and the Veep herself, welcome me without reservation into the fold. The party is maturing and enlivening magnificently, and I am thrilled!
Welcome to the party, in both senses of the word. And, can I just say, as a progressive I'm glad to see more and more people coming around to the facts that a) the free market won't increase wages or decrease prices as long as megacorporations can buy their competition to avoid having to compete, b) that, as long as stock buybacks are more profitable than making better products and services, the free market won't drive innovation in the absence of governmental investment, and c) that paying the highest prices for healthcare of any nation on earth is literally killing us.
There was a reason Elizabeth Warren received an extended standing ovation so great that it moved her to tears. She is unlikely to ever be president now, but she gets this “well-regulated capitalism” stuff so well, and so do we.
That’s where I have it from: Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, she was the presidential candidate that I supported. That said, President Joe Biden has far exceeded my expectations – in part because he implemented many of the policies and appointed numerous highly capable people suggested by Senator Warren.
Ha ha! I love a man who is not afraid to use a bazillion exclamation marks to express enthusiasm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I get it. Everything you said. I am a generation older than you, Simon, was there in the sixties, etc. but this is joy in the morning, joy in the afternoon and joy in the evening! It has a momentum that is nurturing everything, EVERYTHING, good about being American, and calling on all of us to manifest it all. Yes, we can!
538 has just relaunched its Electoral College predictor. They currently give Harris a 58-percent chance of winning the election, with 287 Electoral Votes for Harris vs 251 for Trump as the most likely outcome.
I agree! Polls are still catching up, especially the state-level polling that is essential to gauge the all-important Electoral College. 538’s polling average(s) are far preferable to single-poll analysis.
But I believe our voter registration and GOTV efforts are going to blow them out of the water. That said, we need to work really hard the next two-and-a-half months for a Pink Tsunami and Blue Wave that overcomes all the GOP’s shenanigans.
Agree 10,000%, let's all be pedal to the metal w donating/postcarding/phonebanking/canvassing, and reaching out to all the people in our various circles (work/book clubs/neighbors/friends/families) and tell them: we MUST vote blue and vote early. Let's seize this!!!
I’d rather have a 58% chance of winning than a 42% chance of winning, but those numbers mean we have a better than four in 10 chance of losing. And as I recall, 538, then had Hillary’s chances better than 58%.
In my opinion, the best use of our polls and polling averages is as a tool to guide our actions. Seeing the forecasts as "fate", and then just leaning back and waiting for predictions to come true, is seriously misguided.
Even if Kamala reaches 83.3% probability of victory, I won’t feel complacent. That’s still the equivalent of Russian roulette for democracy – with a 16.66% chance of a fatal outcome!
Polls only tell you what people say, not what they will do. Sentiment may be leaning our way, but that can change, for better or worse. I still think we have to overcome a lot of sexism and racism, but I hope at some point people are just sick of trump and will reject him soundly,
Just want to clarify that polling is not equivalent to random odds. A good poll identifies specific variables and attempts to quantify them in relation to one another. They can, if well-designed and analyzed, provide information we can use to strategize. Odds are entirely random and unpredictable. Margin of error is not related to odds. Not the same thing at all.
In addition to MOE, we must also be concerned with what I call MOC: the "margin of cheating". That may be rather difficult to quantify...
On a related note, I have tried to find a state-by-state overview (at least for swing states) of how many voters have been purged from the voter rolls. And likewise an overview of new voter registrations, broken down by party (for the states that have party registration). So far I have had little success hunting down such data.
If anyone has that info or know where I can get it, I would be most grateful.
As Democracy Docket states, it’s hard to grasp the scale of the effort You may find more comprehensive info on these sites.I support them both because they’re fighting back as we all work to GOTV !
Thanks! I subscribe to Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket. He frequently touches on these themes in his newsletters, but I have yet to see a systematic overview.
I found it telling and encouraging that the Harris-Walz Campaign just hired Elias, and that they have ten times as many lawyers on their team as Biden’s 2020 campaign did.
Just remember - It's still relatively early ( at least in the re-set timeline). Also no two elections are alike. 2016 was... well 2016. It was a perfect storm of cynicism and complacency. Plus 538's 2022 midterm's forecast vastly underestimated the our chances of keeping the Senate. Check it out https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/. I know it's a midterm election, but let's add probability sites to list (alongside smug editorial boards and polls) of things that don't vote. People do !
The polls were not wrong. FBI Director Comey’s announcement changed the race. Meta-analyses by Prof. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, and others, actually show a shift of approx. 5% in the final days before the election.
Remember 1) we don’t worry here, we do 2) there is never anything wrong about being ahead or leading 3) yes we have to keep working 4) this is not 2016 it’s 2024
Thanks, you have given me hope since before 2020 election. I’ve been a do somethings person since my first presidential election in 1972. We fight, we win.
My heart and my gut tell me that yeah, we got this bagged. But I am not letting up on getting the vote out, and helping people understand what the issues are. Some of the pundits I listened to this morning (for as long as I could stand It) kept talking about policies being short on details. I wanted to tell them that's because the details are worked out in concert with the cabinet and Congress. Dumb asses. The Convention is for coming together and seeing ourselves as a community with common goals. The election season is when we work to convince people that their votes count. The polls are useful (when they are done right and used right) as a tool to let us know where we are. But we can't rely on them. The only thing we can rely on is ourselves and each other, and the joy and enthusiam we bring to working together.
Seems to me pundits want policy details only so they can point to "daylight" between Kamala and Joe, and "discrepancies" between Kamala’s policy positions now compared to the ones she espoused during the 2020 election. In other words, they are frustrated because they don’t have the "gotchas" and controversies that generate their clicks and views.
How ironic that the news media showed very little interest in writing about Hillary’s strong policies in 2016 (it was all "but her emails"). Nor did the news media give much coverage of the excellent, policy papers of Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Nobody came close to her level of detail!
We are here, Simon - yes to fired up and getting some things done!!! Postcards getting addressed as we speak. SOOOOO grateful to be part of this/your community! Small question tho - your reference to English Lessons for the (paraphrasing here: ....) "folks" in the back? I missed this... can someone help inform me? was there ugliness? I didn't see the entire convention and got a lot of the speeches not live but later from podcast/video..... hopefully this is a small note barely worth bringing up - but it confused me. the big message is all the energy and... well... "Hopium!" that we have going now! thank you as ever to you, Simon, Dems, and this community!!!!!! cc, Santa Rosa
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. This is my first convention since I retired and I have been watching gavel-to-gavel coverage on the DNC2024 channel on my TV. SO much better than cable news coverage. It's not as great as being there - lucky Simon! - but it's close. Anyway, I haven't seen or heard any nonsense from "those in the back" so not sure what Simon is referring to.
Thank you Simon for creating this magnificent space to "do more worry less" and leading us to be agents of change! Let's get this done! As for me, I'm writing postcards to GA DEMS encouraging them to VOTE BLUE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BALLOT!
I'd planned to be writing postcards, but my local post office is *completely* out of postcard stamps! At first I was disappointed, but then I realized that that probably means there are a lot more New Mexicans writing postcards than I dared hope. Forever grateful that I stumbled into this community of hopeful doers!
And I salute you with a mug of fresh-brewed, early-afternoon coffee!
Hi Simon, thanks to you and all of Hopium! When will you interview Sue Altman, NJ-07?
Yes - we NJ Hopium members who know and love Sue would like to hear from her here! (I've been doing postcards for her.)
I don’t live in her District here in NJ, but I’m doing postcards for her as well. It’s an under appreciated swing district and important to win back this year.
Seconding this! I'm so excited about Sue's campaign? My mom is a Dem organizer in a pretty red part of NJ and she said folks have just been coming out of the woodwork to help support Sue.
That is great to hear!
What a fantastic week! I can’t wait to “Do something”! And I am working on that right now!
Simon, how long should we expect to wait for polling that reflects the effect of the convention? What do you make of the VP’s superpac team publicly saying their polling is not as rosy as public polling? Is this real or more motivation for the troops?
Everyone, keep up all the good work! We sleep when we are dead!
I’ll be right with you, as soon as I stop crying…land of the free, home of the brave!
I'm right with you crying tears of joy. Fascists want us to be depressed and immobilized, but we're not taking the bait and we're NOT GOING BACK!
Can’t define it any better than that.
Reminds me of the scene in the movie Casablanca when everyone sings the French national anthem in the presence of the Nazis occupiers
Well that is some serious Hopium being sprinkled across the Substack world and in our inboxes! Nice!
As a whole - it was an amazing convention! Harris hit it out of the park with her speech! So genuine, so human. She is more than ready to lead! It's about goddamn time we took patriotism back from the Republicans! Probably the best convention I've ever seen. I feel fired up. There is one little nagging feeling I have though....I just wish they had included a Palestinian speaker. I worry what the consequences of this might be. I know Michael Moore will probably make ugly noises about this. Anyone else have thoughts about this? Still I'm thrilled as a whole & ready to win! Let's do this !
I'll add that I'm glad she acknowledged Gaza !
I think we have to be ok with the fact that getting a ceasefire might be the only real way to fully engage with Palestinian voters again. I was a bit disheartened that they were given no room to speak, but we just need to keep working hard to get her elected.
A lot is going on around the issue of Palestine and more will come out as we go along. I think people need hope, optimism, and joyous unity right now. Four days of celebration is warranted after all the insanity of the past decade. Maybe, just maybe an America in jubilation with the distinct possibility of seriously defeating Donald might give creeps like Netanyahu and Putin pause. I certainly hope so.
True. I know the situation is ongoing. Plus I think it really matters that Ilhan Omar endorsed her. One of the articles I read did quote/stare how Ilhan made clear to the protesters at whom she spoke that we must defeat Trump (I'm paraphrasing). Just got Murphy's law on my brain lol
It would have been very good to have a speaker, but on the other hand the tokenism implicit in the move would have limited its impact on healing the underlying divisions in the party on this issue imo
Republicans are eager to use Gaza as a wedge issue and they’ve actually been pretty successful at it so far, which makes it all the harder to make any moves toward solutions or reconciliation.
So perhaps it had a minimal impact ? Perhaps it was for the better ? Also I wasn't aware that the GOP was being so successful at using it. I've heard the opinion that it is baggage she can weather. Here's hoping. Deep breath.
I may be looking at this through a too-local lens because I’m in New York, where politicians grandstand on all sides of this issue, and I’m around some of the universities that have been most affected by the House GOP caucus’s investigations. So in the spaces I know, the GOP has definitely used the issue successfully to drive splits in our coalition. My read may be off on where things stand nationally.
That being said, I think overall the speaker issue is a minor blip in a serious policy disagreement. The Uncommitted coalition has a lot of activists in it with various agendas, but there are certainly many who want the US to effectively switch sides in the conflict between the Israeli side and the Palestinian side, to the point that we’d be backing Palestinian demands for sovereignty over Israeli territory. Those activists are influential, are driving many of the visible campus protests, and are never going to be satisfied with anything Dems could realistically promise imo. The war crimes, genocide, or whatever you want to call the death toll of the Israeli bombing campaign are a motivating factor, but the agenda for these activists long predates October 7 and is bigger than the current war. So I think overall it’s the sort of thing where a speaker would have calmed nerves for a few days until the next perceived offense against them.
And I perceive that there’s a strategy behind this: keep being the squeaky wheel, which some call moving the goalposts. It may or may not be smart strategy, but it’s certainly strategy and one can argue it’s been successful to an extent. After they disrupted campaign events and engaged in negotiations with the campaign, they were granted a panel at the DNC. But by Thursday they were saying they’d been denied a voice at the convention because they couldn’t give a two-minute speech on the floor. If they’d gotten the speech, the next demand would have been something else.
Makes sense. Everyday I learn more about these activists/groups and I see your point. I guess the October 7th war if anything brought these groups further into mainstream attention. Basically you're saying even if Harris/DNC had given into their demands, these groups would've essentially been like Lucy continuously moving the football before Charlie Brown could actually kick it, and there never would've been any action satisfactory for them. Talk about a tightrope to walk!
Yeah and to put it in very blunt terms, this is ethnic politics and the two ethnic groups involved are at odds. Of course there’s hardly unanimity within each group, but the loudest influencer voices on each side are the most dogmatic.
It’s hard to keep them both within the party. But the saddest thing I think is that it’s so challenging to disentangle the simple need to end the horrors of this war from the desire of each side to win or to prevent the other from getting an advantage in any settlement
And this is also so much harder than undoing South African apartheid or, in a way, even getting the US out of Vietnam imo. Those conflicts were more ideological than ethno-religious in character
Gotta trust that Harris can walk this tightrope.
So far it seems she can
Only today did I learn that there were negotiations even during the convention. I wish I knew what went wrong. It sounded as if something had been worked out but for some reason didn't happen. I am deeply saddened by that.
I'm a Quaker, and I'm against unnecessary violence. I am also saddened by the inability of people to let go of petty stances that only get in the way of finding a solution. That includes the convention organizers as well as Palestinian-Americans who together should have worked out some way for an American Palestinian to have given a brief sharing. It would have been appropriate at the very least if one of the people giving benedictions to have been a Palestinian, even one who wasn't muslim.
But Kamala's speech making a strong statement about the rights of palestinians to have the same rights and sense of freedom as Israel hit hard, and coming near the end was pretty damn powerful. I hope that makes some people think.
This convention had to present Kamala Harris to the country as a leader ready to take us into the future. I don't know how tying her to the ongoing and contentious dialogue on Gaza and calling attention to the fact that a ceasefire still remains elusive would have helped that. Let's just get the ceasefire in place and the humanitarian relief going over there and keep the campaign moving forward over here.
I agree and just want to remind everyone that until Jan 20th, Joe Biden is STILL the President and Kamala Harris is STILL the Vice President. She isn't and Shouldn't do anything that would reflect on his position and his own way of working with this. She isn't going to put him on the spot... She'll have time to bring her own agenda.
Yes she can!
What did you say??? I can't hear you 😌
And it was the same outside the hall. Fired up! Ready to go here in St. Louis!
Jon Tester news - Pearl Jam is doing its part to help Tester get the W in Montana. Their bass player is from Tester's hometown.
https://x.com/TrumpsTaxes/status/1826994624205836569
As a long time PJ fan, I love to see it. I also think Tester may get a boost from abortion being on the ballot this time around, which is crucial.
For half a second, I forgot the context and thought you were referring to PJ Harvey.
Today, 6-8 ET/3-5 PT, texting Montanans and registering more Dems!
Last night on FT 6 textbanking, sent 67,000 texts to NV, FL, and AZ! Next Thursday text MI, NY, and WI- to buy a token for a future Text Arcade, https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ft6arcade24
At the same time we BYOP. I sent mine to FL and WI yesterday. Meanwhile FT 6 phone banking calls the same population of unregistered folk who trend Democratic. About 1 MM in FL alone. Those folks are waiting to hear from us.
https://www.mobilize.us/ft6/?q=phone%20banks&tag_ids=20038
Good for you!
Thanks Daniel for alerting us to this GOTV resource! I just donated; what a great idea!
Especially for the youth votes
Love this!
I feel a strength of conviction I didn’t dare hope for before the convention! Really lifted me up - utterly committed to the Harris-Walz ticket!
As a centrist, I was absolutely elated to hear the Democratic Party, and the Veep herself, welcome me without reservation into the fold. The party is maturing and enlivening magnificently, and I am thrilled!
Welcome to the party, in both senses of the word. And, can I just say, as a progressive I'm glad to see more and more people coming around to the facts that a) the free market won't increase wages or decrease prices as long as megacorporations can buy their competition to avoid having to compete, b) that, as long as stock buybacks are more profitable than making better products and services, the free market won't drive innovation in the absence of governmental investment, and c) that paying the highest prices for healthcare of any nation on earth is literally killing us.
Maybe not the best slogan, but let’s hear it for ... well-regulated capitalism!
LOL. Yeah, a little clumsy, but what the heck. I'm with you.
Ditto. Let's ask whoever came up with "We're not going back!" to jazz this one up a touch and we're in biz!
I'm all in on "Democratic Capitalism ... where Democracy guides a safe and healthy economy"
There was a reason Elizabeth Warren received an extended standing ovation so great that it moved her to tears. She is unlikely to ever be president now, but she gets this “well-regulated capitalism” stuff so well, and so do we.
That’s where I have it from: Elizabeth Warren. In 2020, she was the presidential candidate that I supported. That said, President Joe Biden has far exceeded my expectations – in part because he implemented many of the policies and appointed numerous highly capable people suggested by Senator Warren.
Same, friend. Exactly where I was and am! 💙
We have WORK to DO to ELECT a CONGRESS to WORK for ALL of US …
Vote Early. Join a party and postcard together… talk on the elevator, walk across your street & engage your neighbors.. talk, laugh , VOTE!!
Ha ha! I love a man who is not afraid to use a bazillion exclamation marks to express enthusiasm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I get it. Everything you said. I am a generation older than you, Simon, was there in the sixties, etc. but this is joy in the morning, joy in the afternoon and joy in the evening! It has a momentum that is nurturing everything, EVERYTHING, good about being American, and calling on all of us to manifest it all. Yes, we can!
💃🏻💃🏻💃🏻❤️❤️❤️🇺🇸!!!!!!!!
538 has just relaunched its Electoral College predictor. They currently give Harris a 58-percent chance of winning the election, with 287 Electoral Votes for Harris vs 251 for Trump as the most likely outcome.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
Lots of info if you scroll down, including win percentages for each state if you hover your cursor on the map.
We love this!!! And though polls are notoriously…just polls…I believe she will win by MORE.
I agree! Polls are still catching up, especially the state-level polling that is essential to gauge the all-important Electoral College. 538’s polling average(s) are far preferable to single-poll analysis.
But I believe our voter registration and GOTV efforts are going to blow them out of the water. That said, we need to work really hard the next two-and-a-half months for a Pink Tsunami and Blue Wave that overcomes all the GOP’s shenanigans.
Agree 10,000%, let's all be pedal to the metal w donating/postcarding/phonebanking/canvassing, and reaching out to all the people in our various circles (work/book clubs/neighbors/friends/families) and tell them: we MUST vote blue and vote early. Let's seize this!!!
Too close for comfort, no let up no getting complacent. It’s ours for the taking, let’s put our heads down and win this thing!!!!
I’d rather have a 58% chance of winning than a 42% chance of winning, but those numbers mean we have a better than four in 10 chance of losing. And as I recall, 538, then had Hillary’s chances better than 58%.
In my opinion, the best use of our polls and polling averages is as a tool to guide our actions. Seeing the forecasts as "fate", and then just leaning back and waiting for predictions to come true, is seriously misguided.
Even if Kamala reaches 83.3% probability of victory, I won’t feel complacent. That’s still the equivalent of Russian roulette for democracy – with a 16.66% chance of a fatal outcome!
We must do the work!
Absolutely.
Polls only tell you what people say, not what they will do. Sentiment may be leaning our way, but that can change, for better or worse. I still think we have to overcome a lot of sexism and racism, but I hope at some point people are just sick of trump and will reject him soundly,
Just want to clarify that polling is not equivalent to random odds. A good poll identifies specific variables and attempts to quantify them in relation to one another. They can, if well-designed and analyzed, provide information we can use to strategize. Odds are entirely random and unpredictable. Margin of error is not related to odds. Not the same thing at all.
In addition to MOE, we must also be concerned with what I call MOC: the "margin of cheating". That may be rather difficult to quantify...
On a related note, I have tried to find a state-by-state overview (at least for swing states) of how many voters have been purged from the voter rolls. And likewise an overview of new voter registrations, broken down by party (for the states that have party registration). So far I have had little success hunting down such data.
If anyone has that info or know where I can get it, I would be most grateful.
As Democracy Docket states, it’s hard to grasp the scale of the effort You may find more comprehensive info on these sites.I support them both because they’re fighting back as we all work to GOTV !
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/these-right-wing-groups-are-trying-to-remove-millions-of-voters-around-the-country/
https://www.citizensforethics.org/
Thanks! I subscribe to Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket. He frequently touches on these themes in his newsletters, but I have yet to see a systematic overview.
I found it telling and encouraging that the Harris-Walz Campaign just hired Elias, and that they have ten times as many lawyers on their team as Biden’s 2020 campaign did.
Just remember - It's still relatively early ( at least in the re-set timeline). Also no two elections are alike. 2016 was... well 2016. It was a perfect storm of cynicism and complacency. Plus 538's 2022 midterm's forecast vastly underestimated the our chances of keeping the Senate. Check it out https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/. I know it's a midterm election, but let's add probability sites to list (alongside smug editorial boards and polls) of things that don't vote. People do !
The 2016 storm was called Comey.
Thank you so much for posting the link. I'm in Arizona -- hanging in there for Ruben Gallego!
Your future Senator, Ruben Gallego, was great on stage! A powerful moment when he brought out all his fellow veterans who now serve in Congress.
Pedal to the metal, everybody, no letting up!!!
I just worry as I think Hillary was at 85-15 odds right before Election Day.
The polls were not wrong. FBI Director Comey’s announcement changed the race. Meta-analyses by Prof. Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, and others, actually show a shift of approx. 5% in the final days before the election.
True.
Remember 1) we don’t worry here, we do 2) there is never anything wrong about being ahead or leading 3) yes we have to keep working 4) this is not 2016 it’s 2024
Thanks, you have given me hope since before 2020 election. I’ve been a do somethings person since my first presidential election in 1972. We fight, we win.
Thank you
My heart and my gut tell me that yeah, we got this bagged. But I am not letting up on getting the vote out, and helping people understand what the issues are. Some of the pundits I listened to this morning (for as long as I could stand It) kept talking about policies being short on details. I wanted to tell them that's because the details are worked out in concert with the cabinet and Congress. Dumb asses. The Convention is for coming together and seeing ourselves as a community with common goals. The election season is when we work to convince people that their votes count. The polls are useful (when they are done right and used right) as a tool to let us know where we are. But we can't rely on them. The only thing we can rely on is ourselves and each other, and the joy and enthusiam we bring to working together.
I wish I could give your comment many upvotes.
Seems to me pundits want policy details only so they can point to "daylight" between Kamala and Joe, and "discrepancies" between Kamala’s policy positions now compared to the ones she espoused during the 2020 election. In other words, they are frustrated because they don’t have the "gotchas" and controversies that generate their clicks and views.
How ironic that the news media showed very little interest in writing about Hillary’s strong policies in 2016 (it was all "but her emails"). Nor did the news media give much coverage of the excellent, policy papers of Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Nobody came close to her level of detail!
“ I wanted to tell them that's because the details are worked out in concert with the cabinet and Congress. Dumb asses”
My sentiments exactly! Glad someone else recognizes this!
We are here, Simon - yes to fired up and getting some things done!!! Postcards getting addressed as we speak. SOOOOO grateful to be part of this/your community! Small question tho - your reference to English Lessons for the (paraphrasing here: ....) "folks" in the back? I missed this... can someone help inform me? was there ugliness? I didn't see the entire convention and got a lot of the speeches not live but later from podcast/video..... hopefully this is a small note barely worth bringing up - but it confused me. the big message is all the energy and... well... "Hopium!" that we have going now! thank you as ever to you, Simon, Dems, and this community!!!!!! cc, Santa Rosa
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. This is my first convention since I retired and I have been watching gavel-to-gavel coverage on the DNC2024 channel on my TV. SO much better than cable news coverage. It's not as great as being there - lucky Simon! - but it's close. Anyway, I haven't seen or heard any nonsense from "those in the back" so not sure what Simon is referring to.
And I also would like to know about this. I watched about 80% of the convention live and I never got a hint of this.
Yep. Wondering about that too.
Thank you Simon for creating this magnificent space to "do more worry less" and leading us to be agents of change! Let's get this done! As for me, I'm writing postcards to GA DEMS encouraging them to VOTE BLUE ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BALLOT!
Postcard Party in Chicago for Michigan and Wisconsin Tuesday!! I’m DOING SOMETHING!
That’s what I’m talking about!!!! 😉😉😉😎😎😎
You go go go!!!
I'd planned to be writing postcards, but my local post office is *completely* out of postcard stamps! At first I was disappointed, but then I realized that that probably means there are a lot more New Mexicans writing postcards than I dared hope. Forever grateful that I stumbled into this community of hopeful doers!