Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
For readers who remember William Dembski for his role in the ID wars, I ran across this in a New York Times article about proving the validity of medical miracles:
He’s one Pringle away from a revelation.
Hey everybody! Hope you’re all doing great.
dazz,
Will a Florida jury convict?
Apparently the case against him is so damning that even some commentators in FOX News are saying he’s in deep shit. Time will tell if the judicial system is corrupt enough to let him walk free.
And there’s also the Jan 6th case still pending.
London Times joins the Dark Side.
https://archive.ph/V4pwW
From what I’ve seen, polls indicate that the Republican voters are flocking to Trump’s support in nearly unanimous lockstep. And of course, Republican politicians realize that they have two choices: support Trump, or lose to someone who will. Presidential candidates understand fully well that they have no chance unless they can take a big bite out of Trump’s worshipers, so they mostly don’t dare criticize him directly unless they are out of office anyway. The lawyers on Fox are saying, well, an indictment is not evidence of anything except the weaponization of the judicial system against their listeners.
I think a great many Trump worshipers are simply not aware of what’s been going on, but have been trained to disregard inconvenient details. One legal pundit has predicted that a single Trumpy on a jury will mean no possible conviction, because evidence is not relevant to them. My speculation is that it’s not a corrupt judicial system that will fail us, it’s a corrupt echo chamber. We have met the enemy and they are us.
I think one or some of the proceedings will be timed strategically so as to take Trump off the race. It looks like his popular support is still there and the Republicans cannot muster any counterweight, but the establishment has decided that this guy will not become the President again.
Formerly I did not think that allegations such as the stashing of secret documents, election rigging (“I need 11,000 votes, give me a break!”) and insurrection would be brought up against Trump. I thought that threats against Trump would remain at the level of hush money and tax fraud cases. I thought this way because the secret documents, election rigging and insurrection are things to do with the accountability of the President, and naturally the establishment does not want the President to have accountability. (Think about it: If the office of the President were to involve accountability, then nobody would want to be the President!) But no, they are rolling out the secret documents and obstruction of justice charges now, so they are so serious that they don’t even care that these charges imply that the office of the President has accountability.
If Trump does not get the message and step aside from the race, there is more to bring him down. In a normal country, charges of tax fraud would be enough to get a candidate off politics for good, but USA is not a normal country. In USA you can do things like collusion with Russia, rig elections, steal secret documents, orchestrate a coup attempt and then run for President again. It was perceptible during Trump’s time in office how the established public servants had to rein Trump in and work around his administration. This was understandably very difficult and will not be allowed to repeat.
Meanwhile I learned that the judge on the documents case is Aileen Cannon, the same who appointed a “special master” earlier and was nearly sanctioned for this silliness. Expect more judicial silliness with the documents case.
I have no inside info, but based on pissgate, Mueller, et al, I expect this to backfire.
Depending on their actual motives.
At the moment, the democrats are looking for some face saving way to convince Biden not to run. Biden needs to run to avoid his own troubles.
Besides age and health, what troubles does Biden have?
Family.
I would make a small bet that neither Biden nor Trump will be elected. I don’t think Biden will run.
But it will be the most interesting campaign season since 1968.
Here’s the real reason I think Biden won’t be the candidate. Or, if nominated, will drop out. Or lose.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
Compare to past presidents.
This is not among Biden’s problems whatsoever.
But Biden is already running. You know this, right? You are following current events, right?
Biden would lose, if the competition were viable. Unfortunately there is no competition. Additionally, the establishment is this time prepared to use active measures to take Trump down before he gets into office. If Republicans do not find anyone better than DeSantis, they are a party without a candidate.
Biden’s main obstacle is his age. But then it’s Kamala Harris, I suppose. Not that she is any good, just that Trump is unelectable.
When you say Biden is running, you assume he is the candidate, although the nominating convention is a year away.
I am comfortable not knowing what will happen.
I think people who know what is going to happen know a lot less than I do.
Here are some things that need to be considered in predicting the next election:
1. Elections can be decided by third party candidates. Bill Clinton’s elections, for example. Or Trump in 2016.
2. Elections can be decided by voter enthusiasm.
3. Juries in criminal cases have to be unanimous. (Have you ever looked at the makeup of South Florida?)
I am only certain of one thing: it’s going to be interesting.
One either knows or not. American elections are not that hard https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/the-americas/what-is-allan-lichtman-s-prediction-for-the-2024-us-presidential-election-1.1109868
I’ll still make a small bet that Biden will not be re-elected. What happens to republicans, I have no idea.
Biden has multiple factors working against him. First of course is his age. (But Trump turns 77 today). Second is his inability to appeal to peoples’ natural bigotry. Third is that his record of accomplishment (which is substantial) is simply unknown to the vast bulk of the right wing bubble, since Fox never mentions any of it.
Seeking to improve national living standards is never going to be as persuasive as finding an enemy to blame. Xenophobia is rampant, and facts aren’t even in the same ballpark.
Fox News reaches a few million people. Very few people get their news from television. Besides, most people are seeking confirmation rather than information.
Biden’s accomplishments would be better known if he could speak in public, but but he is remarkably disfluent. Has been most of his life, but such things get worse as you get older. Ask me how I know.
As for Trump, I harbor a suspicion he set this arrest up. I doubt he can be convicted by a South Florida jury, and there’s points to be scored as a martyr.
As I said, interesting. Not good, but interesting.
Americans should know that it’s not the people who elect the president. How people vote is irrelevant. Read your constitution.
The president is (s)elected/appointed by the two parties. It will be either a Republican or a Democrat. And it’s been decided it will not be Trump.
The system is not hard to figure out.
Erik,
I am by no means convinced that Trump is toast. There are lots of senators and statespersons who would like to see him gone, but they are very mindful of the polls. The elites lost control of the primary process in 2016, and that could happen again (unless they’ve changed the rules to prevent it from happening).
Trump’s fate is interesting, but anyone who think he’s out of the picture might recall Ross Perot. I think it’s quite likely if the case against Trump goes to trial, it will result in a hung jury.
Juries in this country are the sole deciders of fact. Jurors are not bound by any legal obligation to follow the law, even though they are instructed to do so. Jurors can nullify the law.
It’s true that Americans don’t vote for the president. They vote for electors,
The more I read the more convinced I become that Trump invited this prosecution as a constitutional test.
The game is rigged in his favor. There are constitutional issues regarding executive authority. I’m not even a hobbyist authority on law, so I treat that aspect as entertainment. But some people think it’s a real, unresolved issue.
TLDR: it’s not a matter of being above the law. It’s a matter of the constitution granting executive authority to the person of the president, not to the agencies supervised by the executive. I’ll pass on trying to predict the outcome. But it looks like a deliberate provocation to me.
If that fails, there’s jury nullification.
The elites can let things play out according to the rules or they can simply make a decision. And in my assessment they have. They may have lost control over the primary process, but they have control over everything after the primary process to rig things as they want.
If the votes are close, then somebody in the dark, maybe a court, will select electors as needed. This is in fact how Trump tried to win last time, but he did not have wider acceptance (such as Pence’s) for doing so. If the wider acceptance is there (which it is this time), electors will go as needed and nobody can do anything about it after the fact.
My prediction is that Biden will win, unless he dies of old age.
Law and order are completely out of the window at this point. How can a party who after all this nominates Trump claim to be caring about law and order? Same for law enforcement, the judiciary and the system of the so-called checks and balances in general – the system that for so long has not managed to put a guy like Trump behind bars can hardly be called a system.
If Republicans nominate Trump, the voting will not be the decisive factor in the elections. It will be certain that the Democrat candidate wins (or is handed victory). If Republicans don’t nominate Trump, they will have no chances, because MAGA crowd only wants Trump, so again the Democrat nominee is the more likely winner.
The elections will only be interesting if they are between not Trump and not Biden. If Trump is on, the outcome is a given and not interesting at all.
While I don’t share your cynicism about corruption, I also think we have a problem here. I hold Trump at least somewhat responsible for the widespread public disgust with the democratic process, though Fox News is probably just as responsible. But right now, it seems that there are two groups of voters – those who worship Trump but have no real idea what he’s done or would probably do if re-elected, and those who are unhappy with every potential candidate for either party.
Biden has been painted by the far right echo chamber as doddering, senile, and out of touch. But that is a very big echo chamber, which we can confidently predict will never tell those inside it what Biden has accomplished, only misrepresent, fabricate, and belittle.
Nonetheless, the Democrats lack any strong candidates. Kamala Harris appeals to almost nobody, Buttigieg seems to be regarded as intelligent, knowledgeable, sensible, and unelectably gay. Nobody else is on the radar. Nobody will challenge Biden if he wants to run again. If he chooses not to, the Democratic candidate will likely end up being what’s-his-name, you know, that senator or congressman or mayor or whatever from I forget where.
Meanwhile, Trump currently has the nomination as his to lose, and polls tell us that his worshipers would vote for him even if he were in jail (for reasons Fox has never told them, except it’s the nasty Democrats or deep state or corrupt legal system full of judges Trump appointed, etc.) Trump is a lifelong performer and con man, an accomplished (and nonstop) liar, so he has an irresistible appeal to the ignorati. DeSantis may have exceeded Trump in flat-out cruelty and bigotry, but he’s a terrible showman. The rest of the Republican field is there trying to raise money, or get some policy adopted, or develop national name recognition.
Right now, the political trajectory has us looking at another Biden-Trump election, with each of them boasting terrible ratings, but still ratings much better than the competition for either of them. Fox has successfully convinced too many people that elections are a waste of time, albeit with the assistance of SCOTUS, and those people dislike everyone and don’t trust the process (for good reason).
I think there are good reasons for nor trusting the process. For example, Michigan never completed the 2016 recount, because the number of ballots exceeded the number of people who voted.
Detroit News on unrecountable recount
That you seem unaware of this is scary.
Trick question: who really won the 2000 election?
Well, that’s not true, so its hardly “scary” if people are unaware of it.
Ballot discrepancies occurred in both directions, were typically between one and five votes, and the recount was stopped by a Federal judge at the Republican’s request, because there was never any evidence of hacking or fraud — their argument, not mine.
You find it okay that a state could not complete a recount?
You would feel that way about Florida 2000?
I guess there’s a rule that trust in the results depends on whether your guy won or lost. Millions of people never accepted the 2000 results. Something was wrong with the process.
I’d point out one rather obvious feature of the Michigan law. If the ballot count can’t be reconciled, the original vote stands.
Kind of makes it easy to block a recount.
But it only affected 60 percent of the precincts in Detroit. Why do you suppose the problem was isolated to Detroit?
It is true, because when the ballot count can’t be reconciled, the original count stands. Hence, no recount.
The need for bulletproof voting procedures has been obvious since 2000, but only 20 states have good, auditable procedures and can finish counting on Election Day.
I’m ok with stopping a recount once it’s determined that the results of the recount can’t change the election outcome.
In that case, the results could change depending on the recount. It seemed to me that every recount resulted in changing the winner. So the question is, how many recounts is enough when the actual vote is too close to call given the number of genuinely ambiguous ballots? If the “who might the voter have intended to vote for?” ballots exceeds the margin by which either candidate could win, what process should be used to decide? Flip a coin? (That has been done).
Which process do you mean? Historically, according to polls, there has always been a small percentage of voters who distrust the results because they voted for the loser. What happened in 2020 was that the right-wing propaganda machine joined with Trump in repeating ad nauseum that the election was stolen.
Please note that the voting process itself turned out to be entirely trustworthy. I think this is one of the most important things to come out of the 2020 election, because of the sheer number of recounts and audits, and the care (under the glare of publicity) that was applied. Turns out the voting process as a whole did a damn fine job. This is comforting to know.
What’s not so comforting is that with a really lasting and pervasive propaganda effort, such a large number of voters is willing to simply ignore the effort that went into validating the election. In a nutshell, it was the PR PROCESS that failed us. Focus groups and the like have let us know unambiguously that Trumpies actually shown the recounts AND the process of counting AND the ballots themselves, simply shut their eyes and declare it all fake because Fox News told them to.
No, sorry, but the voting procedures worked just fine, or at least well enough to certify winners with complete accuracy in important races.
But if you want all votes counted by the end of election day, you would have to eliminate voting by mail, eliminate servicemen voting from overseas, eliminate the common requirement that early ballots be ignored until election day, eliminate all hand counting, etc. And you think this would be good?
Bullshit. Florida not only has voting by mail, it has had for many election cycles, early voting and completely open absentee voting. No reason required.
There are no technical excuses for widespread incompetence. An isolated precinct here and there, but not statewide or city wide.
And it has all withstood challenges in federal court.
Look again.
On a precinct by precinct basis, according to state law that could be challenged on at least two grounds.
But you wrote
Nope, Republicans got a judge to stop the (imperfect) process, silly.
Well, I tried to be clear. Some states have a rule that no votes shall be counted until the polls close. But early ballots must be hand counted and signatures verified, which simply can’t be completed on voting day. Other states allow counting of mailed ballots as soon as they are received BUT the results can’t be revealed because it might influence in-person voting day results. This seems to work. In general, you need to identify every reason why counting isn’t complete at midnight on voting day, and address each one.
It’s certainly not clear to me what problem you are trying to solve. I will repeat, there is nothing wrong with the voting process with rare and local exceptions. There is something wrong with a system that seems unable to discourage well funded and well publicized lying about valid results. No voting process is immune to this. If you can think of a legal way to muzzle Trump and Fox and the whole right wing ecosystem, that would be good. If you can think of a way to continuously provide voters with the facts and nothing but the facts when this is NOT what they want to hear or what they are willing to accept, great.
Republicans may have made the request, but a Michigan judge would hardly intervene if it mattered. Neither Michigan nor Pennsylvania, together or separately, could change the election.
When Florida was recounting, there were at least two physical kinds of ballots. The infamous punch cards, and paper ballots of the kind widely used today.
The three counties using paper ballots had zero anomalies in the recount, which might be why all but three counties adopted them.
Other reforms adopted in the aftermath include universal access to absentee ballots. And easy early voting. All those things that were controversial in 2020. And Florida still completes counting on election night.
It’s a matter of having a simple bulletproof, auditable physical ballot and tabulator, and competent people running the system. There’s no excuse for the level of incompetence shown in 2020.
But don’t try to tell me 2020 was the first time an election wasn’t accepted by the loser.
Addendum: after the multiple recounts failed to change the outcome, there was a hissy fit about the confusing ballot.
There were good reasons for doing away with the punch card ballots, and confusion is one of them. But the primary reason for the voting errors was erroneous instruction sheets provided by the local Democratic Party.
petrushka, are you just complaining or do you have a solution? Have you ever tried to count votes yourself?
Counting votes is a necessarily messy process. The counting needs to be completed by a certain time and somebody needs to decide that, yeah, the result is such and such (just decide, regardless of the actual counting). This is absolutely needed – at one point it is decided and everybody shut up and move on.
In a normal country it should not matter much that your preferred candidate lost, because in a normal country all candidates are pretty much normal human beings. I remember when voting machines were introduced in 2004, Democrat propaganda took issue with the machines in a way that has been blown out of all proportions now in Republican propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq79wG3DqvI
The point is that on the Democrat side it remained at the rhetorical level, did not become an insurrection, a coup attempt and eternal court battle.
What do you want? What’s your solution? When your preferred candidate loses, battle the issue in court forever to “reinstate” your preferred candidate?
The makers of the process knew from the start that counting of votes is a vulnerable process and the best that can be achieved is that there is some oversight and that the announcers of the results are more or less reliable. Those who demand a recount would obviously be happy only when they personally get to do the recount and declare the results.
Read my posts. The majority of states have good to excellent systems, so it’s not only possible, but inexcusable not to.
I disagree somewhat about most politicians being normal people.
Normal people could not do and say the things necessary to get nominated and elected by either of the major parties. There are lots of seemingly normal people running on fringe party tickets, but they don’t get elected.
My best answer would be term limits. If I were rewriting the constitution I would eliminate politics as a career. No lifetime elected positions, no lobbying career after serving.
States as in constituent states of USA? This equals that you are just whining and you do not have a solution. Namely, we are talking about a solution for the process of presidential elections in USA.
I did not assert that most politicians are normal people. It’s definitely so that it takes a special type of personality to make a professional career politician, a set of character traits not found in an average joe. I said that in a normal country politicians can be expected to be pretty much normal human beings.
But USA is not a normal country. E.g. first-past-the-post elections along with two-party system creates a terrible schizophrenic dynamic in the psychology of the masses, a strong polarising illusion of choice where there really is just high pressure to pick one of two sides. Under such a system, the candidates artificially blow their illusory differences out of proportion for a circus effect without any real corresponding policy platform.
This does nothing to the system of parties and to the system of elections. It would have an effect on how the election cycle gets funded, but overall it’s clear that you have no solution.
No problem. I understand that it’s neither your job or inclination to have a solution.
The biggest systemic problems of American presidential elections according to me are as follows:
– There are just two relevant parties. This also means there are just two relevant candidates, no real choice.
– These two candidates are picked by the parties, not by the people. Everybody is under the mass delusion that the people vote for the President. In the primaries, the parties select their candidates. In the actual elections, the electoral college determines the result. The outcome where the popular vote goes to one candidate but the electoral college picks another is a feature of the system, not a bug. The people really go to voting booths as a smokescreen.
– Gerrymandering. In USA select demographics of citizens are either explicitly excluded from being counted – suppression by (non-)registration – or silently by redrawing voting districts every single time. In the political discussion, this is framed as a debate about (illegal) immigrants, but it is really about registering citizens, including those whose ancestors were citizens throughout the Jim Crow era.
The 2-party system is a direct result of the US system of single-member districts. Third parties have almost no chance, because with more than 2 candidates it’s hard for one to get an absolute majority. Contrast with many European countries, where many candidates run “at large”. If a state has, say, 18 seats in the House, you’d get dozens of people running state-wide and the top 18 vote getters would get the seats. The result is representation by many parties.
Uh, no. Anyone can run in the primaries, not just those endorsed by either major party. In the general election, we often have more than two candidates. Murkowski was elected Senator with write-in votes, and wasn’t even on the ballot.
Yes, but others can run. Party selection is not required (but money usually is).
This is an exaggeration. Yes, votes for President are actually votes for electors, and it’s the electors who pick the President. There is no requirement that the candidate who gets a majority of votes gets all the electors in a state, and in fact two states (Maine and Nebraska) have split electors.
It’s quite true (and quite common) that Presidents are elected with a majority of electoral votes but a minority of popular votes. And quite true that the founders set things up this way deliberately, to get a Constitution approved by enough states. Small states demanded this.
But this is not a smokescreen. One vote in Wyoming is worth 47 votes in California, but this is not a secret. The playing field is deliberately slanted.
Yeah, gerrymandering is a serious problem, because the winning party gets to draw lines guaranteeing their majorities essentially in perpetuity. This is a separate issue from voter suppression, though. Speaking generally, voter suppression is aimed at making registration hard for “undesirables”, while gerrymandering is aimed at one-party domination. These are different things — in blue states, the path for minorities to register is made as simple as possible, while district lines are drawn to disenfranchise Republican voters.
Really? What I have read about primaries, the voters there are delegates, i.e. the voters represent a given party, which means straightforwardly that party members select (as opposed to voters at large elect). Naturally party members select from their own party. Maybe there are more types of primaries, which simply means there are more types of primaries, including the type I have heard about – and I assume I have heard about it because it is the prevalent type.
Lisa Murkowski the Republican? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to get some third or fourth-party candidate elected this way?
Sure, anybody can run – but has no chances. The point about money, i.e. campaign funding, is another interesting hurdle that probably is impossible to mitigate. Under any and all election systems people would get elected due to connections, which usually directly correlates with money. Under a party system, the party is the club where one does one’s political networking.
Trump presented himself as an alternative to the political establishment. He actually genuinely is outside the political establishment, having no sense of protocol or diplomacy. However, he is – always was – a rather stereotypical representative of the crony business elite, so ultimately he is not a true alternative, certainly not someone to drain the swamp or such. And not any sort of conservative values messiah either. He successfully duped his voter base.
I don’t think we’re on the same page somehow. I have voted in many dozens of primaries, not always for candidates of the same party. I am certainly not a delegate of any kind. I have voted in primary elections to select the eventual candidates for every office from President to dog catcher. Nominally, a primary is run by a party, and every candidate in a primary is running to become that party’s representative in the general election. It’s fairly unusual that I vote for the candidate (out of many) who eventually wins the nomination. I’ve never voted for anyone who won the general election in November, not in primaries or in the general.
Perhaps more to the point, I have never in my life heard of a party primary where any delegates vote (except in their role as ordinary citizens).
Really? Where are you? In the US, the only election where delegates vote is the electoral college. Used to be that delegates voted for Senators, but that’s long gone.
Murkowski was NOT the Republican on the Alaska Senate ballot. She wasn’t even ON the ballot. The party-nominated Republican LOST. Sheesh.
You seem to be conflating protocols with de facto real-world practicalities. It is uncommon for anyone not endorsed by a major party to be elected to many offices, especially higher offices. On my ballot, many candidates for lower offices (like school board members, city councilmen, etc.) don’t even identify with a party. For more important offices, it’s necessary to be regarded as electable, and someone doesn’t become electable by being endorsed by a party, but just the reverse – the party endorses someone they regard as electable.
Who is that? Usually it’s someone who has either a ton of money (and can self-fund a competitive race) or someone with a LOT of name recognition. Trump was a reality TV star, Reagan was a Hollywood actor, so was Schwarzenegger. My state Senator was head football coach at Auburn, and has no clue how government works but hey, he won a lot of football games. Priorities, you know. Politically, Trump was a fairly generic New York liberal before he decided to run for office. He violated nearly every Republican principle while in office.
Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. Trump is a con artist, a cheat, a grifter, a showman, and has a gift for appealing to the bigot vote, which turns out to have been much larger than anyone else suspected. Note that the more indictments he gets, the more dedicated his voting base! Telling the people the lies they want to hear while doing the opposite seems to work really well.
Good to know. I’m in continental Europe, so I have to look these things up https://www.usa.gov/primaries-caucuses
You apparently only have experience with “open primaries”, whereas I regularly hear about “Democratic primaries” and “Republican primaries” which indicates procedures internal to the respective parties, not elections where everyone regardless of party affiliation can have an input.
Another pertinent point is that there is a difference in voting for a candidate to become president compared to voting for a nominee to become a presidential candidate. Whichever way you slice it, Americans at best vote for a nominee to become a candidate (though I’d argue it’s not even that, definitely not if we go by the constitution). The choice between presidential candidates is made by the electoral college.
Well, this explains nothing. Which Murkowski are we talking about? The senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Republican, I suppose. She was not on the ballot, but got elected? Elected by the people? How does this work? In the news it says that she was picked by something called “a ranked-choice runoff” which sounds like some committee decided this time to do it this way, not the regular way. (Not interested, really. Senate elections are not presidential elections.)
Can I recommend folks try TinyUrl to avoid the distortion caused by long Urls on small screens? Or is it just me?
Probably just you. I look at this site using a cramped text-mode environment (Linux tty character length 100) without any issues. Try different browsers or something.