Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Cat state:

Quantum superpositions are typically fragile and fleeting, but one such state has now been maintained for a record-breaking 23 minutes. Keeping quantum states stable for this long could help make more robust quantum devices, or lead to discoveries of strange new effects in quantum physics.

This long-lived phenomenon is known as a cat state, named for Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment where a cat is placed in a box under such peculiar circumstances that it becomes impossible to tell whether it is living or dead. Cat states are superpositions where a quantum object can be in several mutually exclusive states, but it is impossible to tell which one it actually occupies – it effectively simultaneously occupies them all. [“Quantum ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ survives for a stunning 23 minutes,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, NewScientist (9 November 2024, paywall)]

It’s been a week since my last update on the price of DJT, the public stock of Mr Trump’s social media company, when the price/share was $27.69, and it had just dropped 30% in the wake of his victory in the 2024 Presidential Election. Have investors recovered their enthusiasm for the once and future President?

Hardly. While I’m sure the zealous base are convinced it’ll return to dizzying heights soon enough, and it may, the more experienced amateur and professional investors are staying away, as illustrated in the above one month chart.

I can’t help but wonder if Mr Trump’s choices for important government positions are dismaying for them. While the choice of former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) as ambassador to Israel might be simply a way to get a fellow grifter out of Mr Trump’s hair, such choices as Waltz, Gaetz, Gabbard, Rubio, and others may be big red flags that Mr Trump’s judgment is deeply suspect, if only for how he puts control of the House at risk by satisfying the ambitions of House members. There is more than just that here, but that’ll be revealed in the near future, I’m sure, and I don’t care to speculate here.

All this may tempt the ambitious investor to gamble. Between investors from MAGA-world risking all, the more sober investor risking a nickel, perhaps on the downside, and the unknown maneuvering of world leaders eager to buy the favor of a world power about to replace a strong leader with a weak leader, it’s very hard to say where this stock will go. I certainly think the fundamentals are terrible.

I’ll repeat from earlier posts on this thread: I’m not putting any skin into this game.

I will be having surgery on my shoulder in the next few days, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to resume posting.

Perimenopause:

Perimenopause means “around menopause” and refers to the time during which your body makes the natural transition to menopause, marking the end of the reproductive years. Perimenopause is also called the menopausal transition. …

The level of estrogen — the main female hormone — in your body rises and falls unevenly during perimenopause. Your menstrual cycles may lengthen or shorten, and you may begin having menstrual cycles in which your ovaries don’t release an egg (ovulate). You may also experience menopause-like symptoms, such as hot flashes, sleep problems and vaginal dryness. Treatments are available to help ease these symptoms. [Mayo Clinic]

Noted in “Perimenopausal women are ‘enraged’ — and no longer keeping quiet,” Rachelle Bergstein, WaPo:

[Comedian Samantha Bee] had been suffering for over a year, she admitted. Bee, who debuted her limited-run off-Broadway show “How to Survive Menopause” in New York City this October, said she’d been scared she “was losing [her] mind … I was like, ‘something terrible is happening to me.’”

But the doctor offered another explanation. “She was like, ‘Hold the phone!’” Bee said. “‘How old are you? Oh honey, you’re in perimenopause.’”

Rep Seth Moulton (D-MA), age 46, speaks out on transgender sports, which may require a spot of searching on the reader’s part of this article:

Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton from Massachusetts said on Sunday that he stood by his opinion on transgender athletes, saying that Democrats are out of touch with majority of Americans.

Moulton, who recently won his reelection bid unopposed, told New York Times that the Democratic party should shift its approach to transgender issues, and that as a parent, he does not want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” [CNN/Politics]

Look for a few people to start shrieking bigot, as the Pavlovian training kicks in – but I’m not sure how many.

Rep Moulton is certainly young enough to be a long-time leader of the Democrats. This part is encouraging, too:

During the interview with CNN, Moulton said that he’s not an expert on this issue but is willing to engage in thoughtful debate.

My bold, and kudos.

Right-wing pundit and radio host Erick Erickson has an important message for Democrats and the left, and it’s Honesty Is The Best Policy.

You lost, in part, because your side of the aisle engaged in a cover-up of the sitting President’s cognitive decline. His staff, Cabinet Secretaries, members of Congress, and senior members of the press with access to Biden told everyone he was fine. They lied, and Biden got exposed on a debate stage.

If you are not willing to hold your own side accountable for engaging in a coverup of the President’s decline, don’t expect Republicans to take you seriously about holding Donald Trump accountable.

In 2008, I launched an effort to find, identify, and drive from politics those people who were leaking damaging information about Sarah Palin to the press from inside the McCain campaign. Nichole Wallace herself told me my effort pushed her out of Republican politics.

If you’re still feeling bewildered by the loss of the Democrats in the recent elections – I’m not so much bewildered as frustrated with myself for underestimating the effects of the immigration problems^[1], the utter botch the Democrats made of the management of the transgender issue under President Obama^[2], and the misjudgment of simply making Harris the nominee when Biden dropped out, although exactly what they were supposed to do is not clear to me – then give this Erickson column a read^[3]. It seems mostly spot on, outside of the religious bit, which I consider so irrelevant that I skipped it after reading a couple of sentences.

The American public needs honesty and adherence to the tenets of liberal democracy, otherwise you look like a pack of autocrat-wannabes. Funny, this message applies to both major political Parties.

¹Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) should have abolished the filibuster then and there in order to pass the immigration bill written under the direction of Senator Lankford (R-OK). While Andrew Sullivan continues to claim that the bill is best understood as a way to expedite illegal immigration (Dissents of the week, paywall), the fact is that it was written under Senator Lankford’s direction, and he approved it. The scrapping of the filibuster in order to get this bill passed would have created a pivot for stealing the immigration issue from Mr Trump.

² Yes, I knew about it, but now I suspect it was one of the pillars on which many voters chose learned to mistrust the Democrats, and that I could only suspect and not really believe. Truly, neither Party is a Party of honor these days, a remark that would no doubt outrage some in each Party, but cause most just to shrug. If the Democrats want to know honor again, a good first step would be to identify all those who pushed to bypass a public transgenderism debate, and expel them.

³ If all you can think is to shriek, But Erickson’s a right-winger!, try holding your breath until you turn blue in the face and pass out. Remember, he’s a fellow American, and he’s convinced that a better Democratic Party will improve the Republicans as well – and that’s something we all need. The arrogance of thinking your opinions are perfect and all those bad Trump supporters are wrong needs to be left behind; what are needed are people who actually have a connection to A) reality and B) logic. Or can you tell I’ve been reading Daily Kos of late and am running short on patience? Too much CYA riles the ol’ liver, you know.

George Will never liked Kamala Harris, I think, but in the process of condemning her, he’s made the sort of prediction that leaves toothmarks in the wannabe prophet, so deep it’s worth quoting:

The Democratic Party reformers had best be in love with good, hard evidence, and not the wild-eyed finger pointing (“America hates black women!”) that I’ve seen in places. I consider it little more than CYA (Cover Your Ass) if it lacks any kind of backing.

So I think that this report from a WaPo reporter on the ground is an important testimony:

… A lot of voters I [Yvonne Wingett Sanchez] talk to – from Democrats to independents to moderate Republicans who supported Joe Biden in 2020 – feel like it was super unfair and hypocritical for the party that has spent so much time talking about democratic norms to simply up and replace Biden with Harris. It turned off a lot of independent and GOP voters who had been open to voting for the Democratic ticket up until then because it felt like their party was being hypocritical. It just didn’t feel fair to them.

Sure, it’s informal evidence, and should be vetted and confirmed.

But it’s sensible and, more importantly, has no CYA value. Clearly, a competitive, foreshortened primary should have taken place. And I did see, in print, complaints of this nature prior to the election. I didn’t consider them all that important – and I suspect that I was wrong.

But, and more importantly, Joe shouldn’t have run at all. The media didn’t seem to be reporting that he has in a state of decline, as a friend of mine reported, so that’s a ding on them. I think a properly run primary at the start of the primary season would have produced a viable candidate.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for other evidence that isn’t just CYA fingerpointing.

Telegenic:

(especially of a person) appearing attractive on television:
The producers of the show decided they needed a more telegenic host. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Don’t lose sight of why Trump won,” Megan McArdle, WaPo:

In the end, that’s probably good news for America. While some voters were undoubtedly voting on democracy, or immigration, or race, or gender, most of them seem to have been participating in a pretty normal anti-incumbent election in which a telegenic candidate beat a weak opponent who was tied to an unpopular administration and following a suboptimal playbook. Obviously, that’s disappointing if you supported Harris and think Trump’s character is unworthy of the office. But it also means that in four years, you’ve got the normal chance of taking that office back.

In case you guessed it, the only reason for this post is to gag over Mz McArdle’s assertion that Mr Trump is, somehow, telegenic. Is she kidding?

If you’re feeling down after the election, or even if you’re feeling up, I wish I could deliver a real live introduction to this dude Stanford referenced in this Daily Kos post. This hits it on the head:

“I’m afraid of living in world that’s gotten crueler!” I burst out. “I don’t want to live in a world in which daily cruelty is normal. I don’t want to live in a world that hurts vulnerable people. I don’t want to live in a world that is mean.”

“Then be kind,” he said.

He reminded me that he and [his late husband] Mac had lived through a world much meaner than this. Those who are kind will continue being kind, and we will carry on fighting. Assholes may be emboldened for a while, which will suck, but that is the way of the world. You win, you lose, you win again, and you do your best.

Sometimes you take backwards steps. The only thing is, taking backward steps with nuclear weapons on hand is unsettling.

I’m not sure the author of the post, SeattleProgressive, fully understands:

Today, I think I was hoping my hatred and fury for the world’s mean people would have some kind of magical power to make other people see how horrible this is and feel bad about it. But mostly, I realized, I am grieving and raging at a world that was always mean getting a bit meaner despite our efforts. We’ve been rejected. The beauty and empathy of our way have not won people over. We’ve been rebuffed. It hurts, and it hurts badly. It is humiliating and frightening. But that’s the way it is, and we don’t stop. We’ve been through this before, and far, far worse. Consider what was normal in 1924. Our work is the work of centuries. This is a battle lost, but we’re still here, and there are still a freaking lot of us, and we’ve got a long string of wins behind us.

It doesn’t appear that he’s begun the self-examination to see why what he believes to be beautiful may seem, oh, autocratic to others.

But, taking a page from his friend Stanford, he’ll probably get there.

For me, I think some of the grief comes from the realization that I do not understand the country as well as I might. 300+ million people can be hard to grasp, but some of the reasons given for Mr Trump’s victory, such as legal Latinos’ anger at the illegal immigrants being permitted to enter, I’ve been hearing for years, and it seems I didn’t give it proper weighting in my analysis. No where close.

Well. Live and learn, eh?

Since the last update on DJT, former President Trump is now future President Trump, and his company’s shares must have surely skyrocketed.

Right?

Here’s a monthly chart.

Yeah. Yesterday, which was Wednesday after the Democrats met reality in an alley and never got their knife out of its sheath, it had a mediocre gain, which I’ll admit surprised me.

So I figured that, surely, today we’d see skyrockets after Mr Trump’s surprise victory. The market gained some more, the Fed dropped interest rates, all was good.

Instead, DJT is down somewhere in the range of 30% in a single day.

It makes you wonder if the investment world is looking at the future, at the quality of the people who may be influencing their investing lives soon – and not liking it. Not liking it at all.

As I’ve said many times before, the Republicans are made up of fourth-raters, and now they’re about to get another grip on the levers of power. Sane people should be very worried, now.

Oh, and now I’d say at least half the membership of the Democratic Party are fourth-rate campaigners and strategists. No, no, accept your laurel wreaths, grit at your teeth at the poison ivy I’ve substituted for the laurel – you’ve earned it.

Which may turn out to be its own punishment. We’ll just have to see if this clematis survives until Spring.

Guarding its root system is this lungwort.

Looking healthy for November, a testament to our historically mild weather.

Funny old phrase, historically mild.

Your mirror after you clean it with CYA-brand vaseline.

Yep, let me say I’m surprised. Either the women of America are not as outraged at losing their rights to abortion as I thought, or other facets of the Democratic platform were sufficiently repellent to make them take their chances with the Republicans, or they were overwhelmed by the male vote.

I must say, when famed vote counter Rep Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets something like this wrong, you know the shared model of reality to which the Democrats subscribe needs to be reformulated. What should they do?

1. Gather data. Fingerpointing is, of course, the natural first reaction. But that’s more of a strategy for climbing the social prestige ladder over the bodies of your fellows than it is problem-solving. Don’t get me wrong, some current Party leaders and theorists are best dealt with by expelling them, but picking and dumping scapegoats before analysis is complete is ineffective, and looks more like revenge than a considered judgment.
2. Gather that data by surveys of the disaffected. While exit polls may point the way, sit down and talk to people. Don’t lead them to your preferred conclusion – if you’re not being surprised during the interview, you’re probably doing something wrong.
3. During analysis, pay attention to CYA (Cover Your Ass) maneuvering. Long-time readers may remember when Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) won the Virginia governor’s seat, I wrote that the Democratic analysis of their failure in that election seemed to consist of CYA, and that made me uneasy. This is the category of result I’d expect from CYA that no one closely examined. CYA means less important sources of error are examined, leaving the big source as a festering wound in the flank. I, in fact, would recommend that those employing CYA strategies, at the end of error analysis, simply be expelled from the Party, if not outright, then if they dig in their heels in proclaiming their defense. If they run about in a frenzy claiming The voters are bigots!, so much the better. Blaming someone else for your mistake is the mark of an incompetent.

Of course, fingerpointing has already begun. This fellow, on Daily Kos, is a little hard to follow:

I guess at this point I have already lost my audience; I must be a Bernie Bro (I am not. I am French, remember?), a Progressive (that, yes), a crazy leftist (yes too). But as a purely professional issue, should not you at least wonder about, and try to measure, the possible electoral cost among at least some low-income groups when the candidate does no attack corporate dominance and wealth and income inequality? And while we are at it, did you know that Harris got her best numbers, according to exit polls, from people making at least $100,000 a year, while she lost up to 40% of the low-income groups making less than $30,000 a year? Your answer will probably be that high-income people are educated, low-income people are not, and it’s a matter of education. But then why would 45% of the rich and educated still vote for Trump?

Like any good leftist, he blames the problem on income inequalities. Harris didn’t promise to remedy those, thus she loses. Is that the real problem? Or is this everything-is-a-nail solution?

Erick Erickson’s already in on the fun, although strictly speaking, he’s not a Democrat. He has a number of Democratic foibles he’s going to point at, and while they’re all worth considering, I’ll pull out just one, as it seems to be connected to the aforementioned Youngkin incident:

Eighth, the progressive left has embraced intersectional politics and it is killing them. They cannot align with most voters on transgenderism. They have divided themselves over Israel and antisemitism due to their “colonizer” talking points. Harris could not pick Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania because of the anti-semitism in her party. He might have saved her. These intersectionally woke white Democrats cannot fathom that black voters might not relate to Kamala Harris because, to these white progressives, they share a skin color. Identity politics and intersectionalism will keep tripping up the Democrats. White Progressive Democrats openly fantasized about a Kamala Harris – Pete Buttigieg ticket. If Democrats conclude America isn’t ready for a black female president, good luck with your first gay presidential nominee.

I’ve been running across references to identitarian politics, on both the race and culture fronts, and how intersectionality plays into it for years, and I think that all ties into the analysis of the loss to Youngkin, with an analysis that leads to brushing the white voters with the BIGOT brush. A popular example is the dislike harbored by legal Latino immigrants for illegal Latino immigrants. In Erickson’s world, the Democrats of a certain stripe, upon identifying someone as Latino, would assign them a politics, whether they’re oppressed or not, and that’s about it. In the given example, that would be a mischaracterization of the Latino part of the United States – a misunderstanding of reality, and a causeway to mistakes and disaster.

Is Erickson right? I suspect he is.

He also echoes a point I’ve made a couple of times:

Finally, if you lose the presidency to a multiply indicted and once convicted felon as well as losing the popular vote, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, maybe stop accusing everyone else of being bigotted [sic], racist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, or whatever else and accept that you are out of touch, unable to relate, and lost to Donald Trump.

Actually, I believe he has 32 convictions to his name, although they’re on appeal. Does 32 make things worse for the Democrats? Don’t forget he’s demented and a few other terms of denigration.

Erickson has a very good point.

There’s a more subtle point here as well, having to do with how to play a game. All games are played through the mental model we construct of the game, whether we’re playing at the kitchen table or engaging with the real world. The good players connect evaluation methodologies to the game itself, meaning selecting the next tactic is based on how the tactic will affect the game.

Bad players mistake the mental model of the game for the game itself. Why they do this will be as varied as all the games themselves, from the sometimes insoluble nature of some games to, as I believe in this case, a combination of sloth, a desire to retain social prestige/position by acceding to dubious political models, and the bullying ways of transgender advocates who either do not understand the essence of liberal democracy, or have deliberately chosen to ignore it in service of their haste to embed transgenderism and its associated medical surgeries in American culture, even in the face of European withdrawal from same.

The result? The Daily Kos stream of popular posts was instructive, progressing from wild-eyed confidence to assertions that victory was still viable to the beginning of a post-mortem. Will they get to Erickson’s thoughts on the matter, or will they remain self-absorbed and disconnected from real people?

I’ve had a lot more thoughts, but I think I’ll stop this rant here. Maybe more later.

Continuing a thread: Well, well, well. Secretary of State Raffensperger (R-GA) continues to impress:

Bomb threats that caused disruptions at polling places at the Etris Community Center and Gullatt Elementary in Union City, Georgia have been deemed non-credible, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

“We’ve heard some threats that were of Russian origin. I don’t know how to describe that that’s viable—we don’t think they are, but in the interest of public safety, we always check that out, and we’ll just continue to be very responsible when we hear about stuff like that,” Raffensperger told reporters Tuesday. “We identified the source, and it was from Russia.” [Time]

I wonder if we’d dare to toss a missile at Russia. Say, a dud. With pre-launch notification.

Just to make a point.

Did you scoff at the reports, multiple, that the Russians are interfering with our elections, trying to tilt it to the right? Here’s Erick Erickson with a short update:

The Haitians Voting in Georgia. Remember the video from a week or so ago about the Haitians voting in Georgia? It showed illegal aliens with drivers licenses. They claimed they’d been in Georgia for six months, were registered to vote, and had photo identification to do so? Turns out a man in Massachusetts now admits Russian agents paid him to post the fake video.

Paid $100 to stir up trouble. It’s insulting, and it speaks to the poor moral upbringing of the “influencer” – and lack of discernment by the person’s followers.

Necropolitics:

Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article, and later, his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people’s lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Why I’m choosing to fight Harris,” Karen Attiah, WaPo:

Yet I could not stop thinking of an idea expressed by the Cameroonian historian and theorist Achille Mbembe. “Necropolitics,” he observed, is the terrible reckoning that “the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.” I had hoped the administration would enact arms restrictions to force right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the needless death of the Palestinian “Other.” I had hoped it would not toss aside the concerns of Arab, Muslim, Palestinian and Lebanese communities.

A way of looking at society from a post-colonial perspective? Or just another way to express everyday life? I’m not sure.

One more time? No. As I mentioned a few installments ago, my shoulder is sometimes giving me problems, and tonight is one of those. Tonight’s dump on FiveThirtyEight includes pollsters such as Emerson College (2.9) as well as unknown pollsters, such as Research Co, who could be simply looking to improve their ratings, or to influence voters in races still thought to be undecided. Some may be adding a final result as influenced by Selzer & Co’s (2.8) shock-result of Harris leading Trump in Iowa, which I discussed at the above link.

Have a good night, folks, and don’t stress over your favored candidates. We’re Americans and our shared goal should be finding our way beyond the arrogance with which we struggle, not doomscrolling until your hair falls out.

Erick Erickson is, for a voter shepherd, analyzing a bit too deeply:

The reality is pretty simple. Based on the fundamentals, Donald Trump should win. But based on emotions, Harris should win.

The fundamentals are that this election comes as the incumbent White House party has wrecked the American economy. The press claims we’re doing better than every other country, which is true, but the reality is voters vote on microeconomic issues and not macroeconomic issues. At the microeconomic level, prices are still too high and not offset enough by growth in wages. Gas is higher than when Trump left office. The border is less secure and American communities are overflowing with illegal aliens. International gang activity in the heartland is on the rise. Abroad, we are less stable and less secure. The Chinese have hacked into our internet service providers and have access to our data. The Biden Administration does not know how to stop them from that access. Iran is on the verge of more strikes against Israel. Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas.

Notice how he admits that, world-wide, America is doing quite well, which indicates Democratic economic plans have been successful, as I have bolded. But as a right wing radio host who, from his blog posts, has been tasked with holding his conservative audience together and have them vote for Republicans, Erickson’s admission is foolishness.

I’ve noticed the right wingers have been quietly backfilling behind Mr Trump, which is to say, they’ve been trying to build a degree of separation between Mr Trump and right-wing ideology. For example, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pronounced thusly not long ago:

“President Trump can win this election. His policies are good for America, and if you have a policy debate for president, he wins. Donald Trump the provocateur, the showman, may not win this election,” Graham told Welker.

“I’m looking for President Trump to show up in the last 80 days to define what he will do for our country, to fix broken borders, to lower inflation,” Graham added. [NBC News]

Republicans continue to stomp their feet on economics, noisily proclaiming the excellence of their policies, while, as we’ve already noted with Mr Erickson, they assert the economy, as managed by the Democrats, is a flaming wreck – ignoring a superb unemployed rate, return of manufacturing, etc etc, along with the concrete evidence of poor economic performance under Republican administrations – the arch-example being, I think, the Great Recession under President Bush. Under President Biden, yes, inflation was a problem, but, first, cleaning up after the Trump Administration is an expensive business, and, second, it’s come back down to normal.

There are certainly some truths in portions of his message. The social policies of the Democrats have exhibited an arrogance that nearly approaches the Republicans’ arrogance on the same matters, which is to say their shared certainty of the rightness of their solutions in a complex, difficult world exacerbates already difficult problems, and irritates people who feel they should be participating in debating and solving them. There are evident problems on the left and the right.

In the end, though, the real problem with Erickson’s analysis is his complete omission of Dobbs, i.e., abortion. Without Dobbs, we’d be facing a tight race and even a second term for Mr. Trump. But the fourth-raters that make up most all of the Republican Party these days more or less guaranteed Dobbs – and the disaster that appears to have followed them home.

A week ago DJT, the stock of the company of Mr Trump, was selling for $40 a share. Give or take. How about now?

Bad news for share owners:

That’s a 25% drop in a week. I’ve also chosen to show the monthly chart, rather than the usual daily chart. This view illustrates the frantic lifting of DJT to the heights, and the equally catastrophic fall. While unrealized losses aren’t really losses unless the company actually goes under, I think there’s a lot of Trump supporters who are crying into their beer on this fall, and I doubt it’ll recover. Mr Trump may be one of them, as I’m not seeing any news items saying he sold out. One site claims his net worth declined $1.3 billion. My oh my.

Again, I could be wrong, but as an old colleague, Stu, once said concerning the stock of Silicon Graphics, That was a dead cat bounce. The stock may go up, but that doesn’t mean much.

And I will not be trying to take advantage of DJT. I do not expect this company to survive, but dying companies can rip the avaricious investor into little pieces.

Here Again?

Yeah, I thought yesterday was it for pre-election Senate Campaign Updates, and I was wrong. No apologies. There’s been both poll results and news.

What’s this about Iowa?

One of the better pollsters in the business, who mostly confines themselves to Iowa, is Selzer & Co. (2.8 out of 3 stars from FiveThirtyEight), who publish the Iowa Poll, usually via the Des Moines Register. Iowa was won by Mr Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and was considered a lock for 2024 by just about everyone.

Then came the release of Selzer’s poll results for October: Harris 47%, Trump 44%. Here’s Selzer herself:

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Sure, the margin of error is ±3.4 points, but in a sense it’s irrelevant. The fact that Harris is this competitive, as measured by a widely respected pollster, in what was supposed to be a bastion of Trump support, really puts a spin on reality for pundits, foretellers, clairvoyants, psychics, and other cousins to woodland ticks: Trump may have reached the end of the line, politically speaking, and, as the flag carrier and inventor of MAGA, that may carry over to his endorsees, his allies, and his base.

Over the next few days, we may finally see the end point of a number of toxic cultural trends. First, there’s the meta-trend of unlimited competition, as leaders of these trends fight for dominance, to be #1. Not that this is unusual, but when this happens between the unlimited self-interested, meaning those who don’t understand the nature of the role of governance, then the collapse of supposed alliances occur, whether it’s politicians breaking alliances, or countries invading each other. Total victory is pursued with little regard for the well-being of those even on your side.

Then, among the cultural trends, we may see the MAGA-heads, libertarianism and their “rational” defense of being self-centered brats, evangelicalism, the militant groups such as Oath Keepers, and others that I forget, all of these shrinking, even collapsing, as intra-group leaders begin fighting with each other to replace failed leaders, and the disillusioned leave in droves.

And that may take down far-right Republicans who’ve allied with these groups. Oh, not all of them. A few will survive, especially those not up for election. That’ll give them time to disavow alliances that might prove fatal to them.

But how about that list of close races or open seats in my last post? Is it possible that every single Republican will lose their race? Oh, I expect Justice will win in West Virginia, so, no. But is it even possible that there are other Republicans that I think are secure that aren’t? Could Senator Cramer (R-ND) lose to Katrina Christiansen (D-ND), for example?

You’d think I’d stop here, but I’m reminded of something Professor Richardson wrote recently about an election about a century back. I very much regret to say I can’t find the entry, but its basics was about an election in which the Republicans, controlled and populated by businessmen, were convinced they would win an election in both branches, and their loss was so brutal that the party went through a reset. They hadn’t seen it coming because they were disconnected from society, only talking to themselves.

I see the same thing here: A Republican Party, notorious for living and talking in an epistemic bubble, meaning no outside ideas or thoughts ingested, analyzed, and respected, thinks it is going to win, ignoring polls (“Every cycle, there’s one idiotic survey“) and opposing arguments while clinging to their quasi-religious tenets of Taxes are bad! and Regulations are bad! and, critically, Abortion is bad!

That last one is the biggest blunder.

The funny thing is that they’ve had plenty of warning, and don’t seem to have picked up on it. I wrote about this here. Americans have had enough, and it may be shaping up into a blue tsunami that sweeps Republicans out of power and discredits all those groups I mentioned above. Trump and his minions may have, en masse, so sickened the voters, that even those that are normally willing to vote Republican so long as they don’t have to do research, have had enough of the negative, even nightmarish, messages.

We may be at a historical inflection point.

Or I could be wrong. But I’m expecting a very interesting Tuesday night and Wednesday.

Oh, You Do Natter On!

Thanks. On to the red meat.

I’m not planning to quote a bunch of polls here. Sure, The New York Times/Siena College (3.0) dropped another collection of polls, as did AtlasIntel (2.7). Tell ya what, I’ll list the surprises, and then move on to the news.

• Morning Consult (1.9) gives Ohio challenger Bernie Moreno (R-OH) a one point lead over Senator Brown (D-OH), 47%-46%. This is a surprise because I take Morning Consult to be more liberal than the general run of pollsters.

Yeah, that’s it. There are plenty of polls, but no real surprises, so why burden you with numbers this late in the game? Here’s the news I’ve run across.

• Montana challenger Tim Sheehy (R-MT) had an interview:
  

  Tim Sheehy, the Montana Republican nominee for Senate, said in an interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly that there are no medical records that would prove he did not accidentally shoot himself in the arm in Glacier National Park in 2015. [WaPo]

  Kelly pronounced herself confused, and so might be Montana voters. Why did he do this interview, though?

I turned this post into a rant. No apologies.

Hypnagogia:

Hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Its opposite state is described as hypnopompia – the transitional state from sleep into wakefulness. Mental phenomena that may occur during this “threshold consciousness” phase include hypnagogic hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Fresh insights into how we doze off may help tackle sleep conditions,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (26 October 2024, paywall):

Researchers – and most people – have long been aware that there is more to the transition into sleep than a simple on-off switch, says [cognitive neuroscientist Delphine Oudiette at Sorbonne University], in part because of a bizarre, semi-lucid state at the onset of sleep called hypnagogia, featuring hallucinatory, dream-like experiences.

Your brain shutting down is an inefficient and bio-soggy process.

NewScientist (26 October 2024, paywall) has an interesting article on how mathematical languages mimic English word frequencies under the title of “The laws of physics appear to follow a mysterious mathematical pattern,” by Alex Wilkins:

A strange pattern running through the equations of physics may reveal something fundamental about the universe or could be a sign that human brains are biased to ignore more complex explanations of reality – or both.

This insight comes from a physicist’s version of Zipf’s law, an observation by linguists that the most common word in a language appears twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third, and so on. In English, for example, the word “the” tends to make up around 7 per cent of any large text, with the next most frequent word, “of”, occurring around 3.5 per cent of the time. What’s more, it turns out that Zipf’s law appears to hold in other situations, such as income distribution or the population of cities.

Now, Andrei Constantin at the University of Oxford and his colleagues have found that a similar law applies to the symbols used to construct the laws of physics. They looked at three sources of equations: those used in The Feynman Lectures on Physics; a list of equations named after people found on Wikipedia; and a set of proposed equations describing the inflation of the early universe. By treating each symbol and mathematical operator in the equations as a word and ranking their frequency, they could analyse the equations in a similar way to Zipf’s law.

Although the article is a little short on details, and I don’t really have time to track it down and try to make sense of it. What interests me is the categorization of the symbols. “The,” according to Merriam-Webster, belongs in the categories of definite articles, adverb, and preposition (there’s also an entry called combining form, but that appears to be inappropriate to the subject at hand). “Of” is classified into preposition and auxiliary verb.

Do the mathematical language symbols sort into similar categories? This, too, is interesting:

“You might expect that this [distribution] would differ quite significantly between the three different sets of equations because they come from different places,” says team member Deaglan Bartlett at Sorbonne University in France, but to their surprise, that wasn’t the case. Instead, all three sets seemed to fit the same pattern. That wasn’t true when applying the same analysis to randomly generated mathematical expressions.

Mathematical languages are used for specialized communications concerning both theoretical and natural constructs, so from that perspective, and Zipf’s Law, this is actually unsurprising. But as a reasoning, or logic manipulation and application tool, it may be more surprising.

Whether there’s some mystical or mysterious aspect to it seems doubtful to me, but I’m always interested in being wrong about such things.

Here we are on the Saturday before Election Day, 2024, and it appears the pollsters’ produce is near exhaustion. Yesterday was quite a cloudburst, but today it’s a poll from Cygnal (2.1), and three other pollsters of which I have no recent memory, and FiveThiryEight has no knowledge. Their results soothing to the conservatives’ turn of mind; whether they are also accurate will be discovered in a matter of days.

Evaluation of polls is the question paramount for folks like me and you, my reader, a reader who, if representative of the contemporary American electorate, is not knowledgeable of the dark undercurrents of the game of politics these days. I have no great or intimate knowledge myself, but I am taking the time to analyze polls and pollsters, based off the hard work of FiveThirtyEight and a few others, principally based on Daily Kos, constructing, as is my habit, stories based on my impression of the patterns associated with each pollster, flavored by the human motivations inevitable in human-driven enterprises: desires for prosperity, excellence, the quick buck. A pollster’s role will depend on the humans implementing it, and interpretation of their results, based in a domain where baselines are unknown but may possibly be inferred from more than one result, or not, makes the analysis a challenge.

For some, these results are for idle knowledge, such as the general, interested citizen curious as to the state of the race; for others, responsible for facets of a candidate’s race, interpretation becomes a key element in discovering a winning strategy.

It’s been a lot of work. Some nights, my gorge rose, as old-timers might say, not only from sheer volume, but the mendacity and deceit that seemed implicit in certain results. Other nights, it was a fascinating exercise.

Now, to the nitty-gritty.

Progressives are excited and confident, almost overly so. Still, the blunder of the Republicans implicit in Dobbs justifies the progressives’ confidence in my view; the special elections’ results since Dobbs, and the Republican candidates’ continual stumbles over the issue clarifies and confirms this conclusion.

Republicans and other conservative pundits have found themselves splitting their time between attacking Democrats (see here and here) and reproaching their fellows (see here and here). It’s not a good look, especially as it’s on topics that are not subtle conundrums, but are rather obvious. The fact that folks such as Erick Erickson have to spend time reproaching his allies is a pointer to how much trouble conservatives are in, even as Erickson crows that Harris has given up, and then six days later blithely says either candidate can win.

Me? I’m an independent whose political experience consists of watching how political campaigns play out. Never ran nor been involved. Just so’s we understand each other.

The Presidency

I expect VP Harris to win, and, while Mr Trump and his allies may bellow in outrage and claim they’ve been cheated, it won’t be close. Along with Dobbs, for which Trump has alternately plausibly claimed credit and implausibly sought to disassociate himself, Trump has revealed misogyny and patronization, mendacity and arrogance, and poor choices in associates, from employees to billionaires trying to protect their fortunes at the expense of environment and justice. Simultaneously, former associates, both private employees and public principal officers of the Trump Administration, have entreated the public to not vote for Mr. Trump: Chiefs of Staff, military leaders of various positions, and Cabinet ministers of various responsibilities.

I terminate the above lists not for want of material, but because my fingers tire.

The House of Representatives

I’ve been saying it since Dobbs was handed down, and there’s little reason to change now: I expect a forty seat pickup by Democrats. Some of it is the outrage over Dobbs, with some of it being redistricting added in. For example, Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymandered districts for House are going away with this election, and I expect the Republican advantage of 6-2 in representation to the House at the beginning of the current Congress (one Republican has since resigned and not been replaced) to become a 5-3 Democratic advantage, based on Dobbs distress and demographics.

Similar changes will hit other States as well.

The Senate

This is the subject of this thread. 34 seats in contention, including a special election Nebraska in which appointed Senator Ricketts (R-NE) defends against Prescott Love, Jr (D-NE). Which seats are likely to change hands or are being emptied due to death or retirement?

1. Senator Manchin’s (D, then I-WV) seat is open by retirement. While polling in West Virginia seems non-existent, it is widely agreed among the punditry that Governor Jim Justice (R, then D, then R -WV) will be the victor over former Mayor Glenn Elliott (D-WV).
2. Ohio’s Senator Brown (D-OH) has been in a close race with Bernie Moreno (R-OH). I think Brown will win, but this will be a close one.
3. In Nebraska, Senator Fischer’s (R-NE) travails in the polls have been the surprise story of the season. Fischer is a far-right extremist, while challenger Dan Osborn (I-NE) is a centrist. Nebraskans reportedly pride themselves on their independence, and the polls have been close, with the two candidates alternating in the lead position. The Dobbs issue clearly favors Osborn, so if there’s going to be a big upset this season, Nebraska is my candidate for that.
4. Montana’s Senator Tester (D-MT) may be the most vulnerable Democrat seeking reelection in the Senate this cycle, not because of weakness on his part, but because of the nature of Montana. Will Dobbs apply here? His opponent is Tim Sheehy (R-MT); will Sheehy’s peccadilloes appeal to Montanans, or will they repel them? Polling has suggested both lead, but the quality pollsters tend to favor Tester.
5. Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) never wins big, principally because people don’t like him. He was last seen denying that Dobbs is an important issue, which will only convince undecided voters that the Senator is out of touch, and that is not a successful campaign tactic. His opponent, Rep Allred (D-TX), is pushing hard for a promotion to the Senate.
6. The Senate seat in Michigan is open due to the imminent retirement of Democrat Senator Stabenow (D-MI). So far, it appears Rep Slotkin (D-MI) leads former Rep Rogers (R-MI) in the race for that seat. I expect Slotkin to secure the seat again for the Democrats, but it may be close.
7. Florida Senator Scott (R-FL) continues to battle former Rep Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL), but polls never get them closer than two points apart, with Scott in the lead. I think there’s a chance that the Democrat can pull the upset, but it’s not as likely as I’d like to see, given the Senator’s grasping, grating personality.
8. Wisconsin’s Senator Baldwin (D-WI) has been battling challenger Eric Hovde (R-WI?) all season long, and not fallen behind. Recently, her lead seems increasing. That lead remains small, but I think it’s insurmountable.
9. Ditto with Nevada’s Senator Rosen (D-NV) and challenger Sam Brown (R-NV).
10. Ditto with Pennsylvania’s Senator Casey (D-PA) and challenger David McCormick (R-PA?).
11. Can Missouri’s Senator Hawley (R-MO) be upset? I hadn’t thought so, but then he stepped into a debate and reportedly was flattened. Maybe there’s a slight chance? That’d be the dark horse victory of the season.
12. Senator Sinema’s (D, then I -AZ) Arizona seat is open by retirement, but I expect Rep Gallego (D-AZ) to easily win it, as Lake is deeply unpopular in Arizona.
13. Senator Menendez’s (D, then I -NJ) New Jersey seat is open by retirement, forced by scandal, but I expect Rep Kim (D-NJ) to easily win it, because this is New Jersey.
14. Senator Cardin’s (D-MD) Maryland seat is open by retirement, but I expect Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) to easily beat former Governor Hogan (R-MD), because this is Maryland.
15. Senator Feinstein’s (D-CA) California seat is open due to her death, but Rep Schiff, who won the jungle primary, is poised to crush Republican and MLB great Steve Garvey (R-CA). Because this is California.
16. Senator Braun’s (R-IN) Indiana seat is open due to him seeking the Indiana governor’s position, and I expect Rep Banks (R-IN) to easily win it. And, yet, there have been virtually no polls; Banks, as an extremist in the era of Dobbs backlash, may sport unexpected weaknesses; and Braun himself, another extremist, has reportedly seen his lead shrink drastically in private polls. There’s just no information to work off of, so I don’t have any expectations of an upset. But might there be? That’d be another dark horse victory.

And that’s about it. Am I wrong? Right? If you don’t care to write and tell me, you can wait for Election night and see how the counts turn out.

Bloody mice, chewing up everything. And just because our cat thinks she needs to bring in live prey.

/disgruntled

ActiVote? What The Hell?

I’ve been excluding ActiVote results because of a perceived erratic rightward tilt, and because it’s not rated nor known to FiveThirtyEight. But today, I glanced at their first three new results, and, much to my shock, two of them were reasonable. Since I’ve been writing this series not only to keep readers up to date on the Senate campaign, but also as a learning experience, I thought I’d put them up as a lesson in … the power of money.

In our hypotheses, we’ll take a potential high rating on FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Rating Page as a proxy for future earnings potential; the better the rating, the higher the earnings.

We can put together these hypotheses, and expected behaviors.

1. ActiVote is a prolific, honest pollster. They are non-proficient, so results are erratic compared to other pollsters, and often diverge from top pollsters. Codename: Honest.
2. ActiVote is a prolific, honest pollster, and is excellent. Their divergence from top pollsters is simply the result of other pollster’s poorer results. Codename: Excellent.
3. ActiVote is a prostitute pollster, meaning it issues results favoring its sponsors at their request. The goal is to influence voters’ behavior at the polling booth or moral equivalent; accuracy is not a priority. Thus, their results may be much like item 1 results, only more so. While their goal is both dubious and probably impractical, being caught is of low probability, and punishment may be negligible. Codename: Prostitute.
4. ActiVote is a grifter of sponsors, meaning it issues results that pleases sponsors without a request to do so, nor without revealing their activities, and with no regard to accuracy. Their goal is to increase repeat sales through pleasing results, often via confirmation bias. Codename: Grifter.

Naturally, for the Prostitute and Grifter there is a tension between immediate profit and high ratings from 3rd parties such as FiveThirtyEight. Thus, for those who qualify in either category and are good pollsters, their last polls should converge with other known excellent pollsters. We may have seen that in today’s batch of polls, but I don’t know if this was the last for our prolific example.

As a practical matter, hypothesis Honest will be considered the most likely if ActiVote’s results prove to be a pseudo-random scatter. Prostitute and Grifter will be indistinguishable, since there is currently no access to ActiVote’s internal communications, and considered most likely if ActiVote’s results change from previous results, converging with Election results in most cases. Finally, Excellence will be the most likely if ActiVote does well in its final results for each region it polls without a shocking change compared to previous results.

I’ll try to remember to return to this topic once Election results are released.

How Is The Abortion Issue Playing Into The Election?

Thanks for asking, I just wrote a post on that.

Examine And Classify The Nitty-Grit … Grit … Grit …

• In Arizona, unknown ActiVote has thrown in the towel and claimed Rep Gallego (D-AZ) has a substantial lead over election-denier Kari Lake (R-AZ) of 54%-46%, or nine points after rounding and maybe a few other dance routines. Not only is it large, but it has Gallego well over 50%.
  

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  Data for Progress (2.6) gives Rep Gallego a 50%-45% edge, with a margin of error of ±3 points.

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  Finally, YouGov (3.0) has the smallest lead for Rep Gallego at 49%-45%, which seems a bit of a puzzle.

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  The only question in my mind for this contest is why are so many Arizonans voting for Lake?

• Nevada has generated a flood of polls from higher quality pollsters for the contest between Senator Rosen (D-NV) and challenger Sam Brown (R-NV), most of which give the lead to Senator Rosen: Emerson College (2.9) 49%-45%, YouGov (3.0) 51%-44%, Noble Predictive Insights (2.4) a close 48%-46%, and Data for Progress (2.6) with a more substantial 49%-42% lead. Only Susquehanna Polling & Research (2.3) gives Brown the advantage at 47%-46% on a smallish sample size of 400, the smallest of all the Nevada polls this time around, although not by a great deal, and a large margin of error of ±4.9 points.
  

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  I’ve been expecting a high single digit to a low double digit victory margin for the Senator; perhaps I’m a bit optimistic?

• There’s an even larger flood of polls in Pennsylvania, all showing Senator Casey (D-PA) ahead of challenger David McCormick (R-PA?): YouGov (3.0) has a very reasonable 50%-44%, Data for Progress (2.6) gives the Senator a reasonable 49%-45%, Suffolk University (2.9) takes 49%-46% and rounds it to a four point lead, Marist College (2.9) a very small lead of 50%-48%, WaPo (unrated) suggests a 49%-46% lead, and finally the problematic ActiVote (unrated) has the Senator leading 51%-50%, presumably through a surfeit of fingers used for counting. Or rounding, or rounding, yes, yes. Stop yelling. ActiVote’s summary? “McCormick Closing in on Casey in Pennsylvania.” Maybe. I kinda doubt it, though.
• Michigan is only getting a rain shower of polls, all finding Rep Slotkin (D-MI) leading hard-right extremist former Rep Rogers (R-MI) for the open Michigan Senate seat: YouGov (3.0) gives Rep Slotkin a big lead of 51%-42%, Marist College (2.9) has the Rep ahead by a smaller gap of 52%-46%, EPIC-MRA (1.9, which is a bit low but I have nothing else against them) is at 47%-42%, and finally the ever doubtful ActiVote, now functioning as a cautionary example, giving Rep Slotkin a minuscule lead of 51%-49%. I think an eight point victory is not out of reach, but we shall see.
• Wisconsin’s up here, where we finally received snow, and next to Lake Michigan, so they’re getting a lake-effect snow squall of polls, all showing Senator Baldwin (D-WI) leading Republican Eric Hovde (R-WI?): YouGov (3.0) shows a lead of 50%-45%, Marist College (2.9) has a measurement of 51%-48%, and ActiVote, oh ActiVote, measures a respectable lead of 54%-46%, which sounds right even if their sample size is a mere 400 voters, with a margin of error of ±4.9 points.
  

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  It appears Senator Baldwin is pulling away, if the polling is accurate, which many progressives will dispute. And this Daily Kos article is interesting: The pollsters say Wisconsin is a toss-up. But the polls aren’t matching 2024’s reality.

• But do debates matter for Senate races? I’ve never seen that question asked, much less answered. But Steve Benen claims that the debate between Missouri Senator Hawley (R-MO) and his challenger, Lucas Kunce (D-MO), was a disaster for the Senator, as does some dude named Brian Tyler Cohen. The latter link is to a short clip from the debate, and I hear Kunce saying, Josh Hawley is a selfish swamp creature… I kid you not.
  

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  It’s noteworthy that a debate has occurred at all. It may mean that the Senator’s private polls showed that he is in trouble, and perhaps he thought that he needed to win a debate to show he’s the dominant political personality in Missouri. It seems that this idea swirled down the toilet, if Cohen and Benen are to be believed. I haven’t the time to hunt down a recording of the event and watch.

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  But will it matter? Do Missourians watch debates, or is the state too polarized? There is very little public polling, and I’ve just assumed the Senator will win. But Missourians certainly have good reasons to kick the bum Senator out, from being just a showboating mouth to encouraging Jan 6th insurrectionists to supporting Christian Nationalists. I guess we’ll have to wait for results from Missouri on Tuesday.

Oh, Stop That!

Polls from the following pollsters, entirely or in part, have been shoveled into the bin, taken to the Pit, and placed on the Spike, who has been tied down and smothered in mushrooms: Torchlight Strategies (no rating, appears to be a lapdog for Senator Fischer) and OnMessage (1.1, which is awful).

Enjoy that visual. And, yes, I meant Spike from Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. Thanks for asking.