Trump: Now officially a huge loser. Open thread.

I’ve seen a suggestion Stacy Abrams should head the DNC after her work in Georgia registering black voters

I know Biden isn’t great, but just knowing that Trump lost feels like a huge relief. It’s like we’ve been in darkness for the past four years and finally there is some chance we’ll see light. Still work to do, but I’m a lot more optimistic than I would be if Trump had won. It’s a morale booster if nothing else, and I desperately needed that.

@Naglfar – Yeah for sure, I’m not a fan of Biden but I do feel so very very relieved that Trump is out now. I feel I can begin to relax, at least today!

My partner and I are heading out to the hills today to have some quiet quality time and be away from computers.

And @Naglfar, I also wholeheartedly agree with your comments on the real on the ground people that need thanked – absolutely!

> Lainy
I hope that you and your relatives can recover quickly ! If you can, provide us a feedback of how you feel from time to time.

> Usanian mammothers
Well, congratulations ! Let just hope Biden is not too mild in his progressive stance.

Apparently Four Seasons Landscaping is located between an adult bookstore and a crematorium.

Not surprised at the pick then. Rudy’s not known if he’s coming or going for a long time now.

@BQS

Now that Trump is a loser and in debt, many of his enablers and hangers-on might slink away, further reducing his ability to insulate himself from consequences.

Of course, and this is what he deserves. I will note that that doesn’t mean his former enablers should be forgiven or a viewed as good. As I mentioned in the other thread, all that’s changed is that they don’t want Trump to take them down with him.

I’d be surprised if Melania stays.

She’s probably going to divorce him, but I’m sure he can find some other cult member whom he can convince to marry him.

My worry is that Trump, seething from narcissistic injury and angry at them for failing to deliver the Presidency, will continue holding maskless super-spreader rallies in an attempt to punish them by killing them off, like some sort of Johnny Appleseed from hell.

I think he will keep holding rallies, but I don’t think he’s smart enough to plan that specifically. He’s already hinted that he may try to run again in 2024, which makes it all the more important to prosecute him and his administration so he can’t run. Just putting him in jail for a few years would keep him from holding any more rallies.

Search “loser” on Twitter right now under “People.” Someone is at the top of the results.

After all the shit that’s been happening, this is a huge relief!

I will, however, reiterate that the real people responsible for this are not the establishment, but are grassroots activists who worked to register voters, fix ballot issues, and get people to vote. These are the people we must thank.

@Naglfar – Agreed! I listened to Harris’ and Biden’s speeches on the radio last night, and I liked how Harris thanked people like this early on. Her speech seemed more down-to-earth and less grandiose/symbolic than Biden’s (though I got to feel smart for catching the Langston Hughes reference in the “dream deferred” quote, yay English Lit).

Good news is the Dems plan to rejoin the Paris Agreement, so hopefully that happens soon. I didn’t hear anything particular about ICE or borders, though.

@Lainy – That sucks! Hope you feel better soon.

https://youtu.be/3GwjfUFyY6M

@occasional reader
She’s the libertarian party’s candidate. I’m afraid I don’t know anything about her.

@occasional reader
As others have mentioned, she’s the candidate for the Libertarian Party, which is far right libertarian. All I know about her are that she was bitten by a bat during the campaign and that she may have been a net benefit for Biden because she took away votes that otherwise would have gone to Trump.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but I think the election was manipulated. Along with the 2016 one.

Consider this: What would have been the best possible outcome from the 2020 election from the viewpoint of the extremely rich?

After four years of Trump, they had their supreme court majority to obstruct regulation and uphold the flooding of elections with oceans of dark money. They had their massive tax cuts and assorted deregulations. Trump had pretty much done everything beneficial for them that he could. All Trump could do after that point was stoke civil unrest, generate more ruinous trade wars, and generally be a loose cannon on deck. So, the superrich would logically have wanted to limit Trump to one term, given they had the power to do so.

They also would not want any of their gains reversed by the Dems: no court packing, no reregulation, no tax hikes. To prevent hostile executive action they would need at least one of the White House and Senate. To prevent hostile legislative action they would need at least one of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate. The White House was out of the question: once it was clear they couldn’t manipulate the Republican primaries to jettison Trump, getting rid of Trump necessarily meant a Democrat in the White House. They could shut out the left-center Sanders types in the Dem primaries and lock in a neoliberal like Biden, but would fear Biden might still cave to pressure from the left on some issues. So they’d want a firewall in the other intersection of those sets, the Senate. They’d want to keep it in Republican hands. As for the House of Representatives, it would be irrelevant if they held the Senate.

Now, as the post-election dust is settling, it’s looking like the above is exactly, precisely, what has happened. Trump is gone, and by just large enough a margin to avoid widespread enough questioning of the election results as might spark feared civil unrest. The Senate looks likely to remain red, a potent check on any progressive moves by Biden, from cabinet appointments to court nominations, or from the still-blue House of Representatives.

The superrich got exactly the outcome from the election that is optimum for them, and they are celebrating. Just look at the fucking Dow if you don’t believe me.

So, why do I think they put a thumb on the scale, beyond just their usual firehoses of dark money?

The polling errors.

The polls used to be fairly accurate. They had some level of random error, some noise, but not much systematic error. Poll aggregations typically accounted for known (small) D or R biases of the aggregated poll sources and had virtually no systematic error at all. Until 2016. Then suddenly there was a huge pro-Democrat bias, which seems to have been even larger in 2020, though no sign of it in 2018’s midterms.

Why would this be? The theory you’ll find in the mainstream media (all billionaire-owned, natch) is that the polls were distorted by the “shy Trump voter”. This would explain the poll biases in 2016, and the lack of same in 2018. The problem is that this theory doesn’t explain 2020 very well at all, for two reasons. First, a Trump voter who was embarrassed about their preference in 2016 had much less reason to be embarrassed in 2020. After everything Trump did? you say. Kids in cages, forced sterilizations, a quarter-million COVID dead? But their own social peer group was something of an unknown in 2016. In 2020, they knew that that peer group consisted of enthusiastic Trumpites, and that there was large scale support across the nation for their fascistic politics. And really, have you ever known a Trump supporter to be shy about it in any other context?

Second, there would have to have been a ton of shy Salazar voters, shy Gimenez voters, and so on in all of the mispredicted House and Senate races. But those were “normal” Republican candidates, not frothing QAnon true-believers or Trump himself. Voters in those districts have never been particularly shy about supporting Republican Congressional candidates in the past. Why would they start in 2020?

I propose an alternative hypothesis: the polls were as accurate as normal, both in 2016 and in 2020 (and in 2018). The errors weren’t a D bias in the polls but an R bias in the counted votes, aided by Republican-associated voting and tabulating machine companies and Republican county and state governments. The errors seem to have been largest in states with Republican control of at least one branch of government (which you’d think might also be states where voters would be less likely to be embarrassed to be supporting a Republican candidate for office, notably).

Someone put their thumb on the scale, to put Trump in in 2016, and in 2020 to bump him out again while shutting Dems out of the Senate and keeping a House supermajority out of their reach as well. The polling discrepancies tell you where and by how much Dem candidates were cheated.

Who did this? Follow the money. Go take a look at today’s Dow numbers.

(I’m actually not totally sure why they messed with House races. Holding the Senate seems like it would be sufficient. But perhaps they want to influence the composition of key committees? The House has one thing it can do without Senate support: issue subpoenas and carry out investigations. I think there’s something they don’t want the House investigating. Likely related to their electioneering in 2016 and 2020, and perhaps other things, shenanigans done during the Trump years. The Agricultural Committee chair is one of the surprise reelection losses among the Dems, so some of those shenanigans probably involve agribusiness — factory farms, climate change, pollution runoff, or some such matter.)

> Tovius and Naglfar
Thank you for the information ! I was used to rich people candidating for fun, seems it was different this time.