(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . NO, It's *not* a 'Dead Heat:' [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-08-26 God I get sick of hearing our MSM lie to us --which happens roughly every 1.4 seconds— and also of hearing people here mindlessly repeat dumb media tropes without a modicum of critical thought. So here’s one: This race will be decided by a handful of votes; it’s guaranteed to be a razor-thin margin. No. Actually it’s not. Kam and Tim have been kicking the crap out of Trump and his Nazis for a while now, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that clear fact. Poll-averages now show her with a significant lead of 3-4 points, and it’s almost certainly more than that, cuz the polls still aren't fully showing post-convention sentiment --and of course the averages always lag behind the latest by a couple of weeks as well. I’d guess she'll probably be up by 6 or so in another 10 days, and it could easily be bigger than that. (Which as it happens is exactly what I predicted here about 3 weeks ago, and had a bunch of people tell me that was stupidly optimistic --or words to that effect.) Trump (and Vance) continues to do everything wrong, and just seems to be digging himself deeper every time he opens his fucking mouth. And he's shown repeatedly that he tends to choke horribly under pressure, so I kind of expect that there will be a serious positive-feedback thing here. The bigger her lead gets, the stupider he'll behave, and that'll tend to just make it worse. At the same time, he and his Nazi thugs and billionaire Nazi backers will get more and more desperate with each passing week, and will continue trying increasingly insane stunts to turn it around. Buying Bobby K was one. That one looks like a flop so far. If it gains him anything, I think it's gonna be very small. What next? *I assume they're probably writing checks to Jill Stein and Cornel West and the Libertarian asshole as we speak. *They're desperately accelerating their plans to steal votes, suppress votes, and refuse to certify votes all around the country. *They're leaning on/bribing every Trump-Nazi judge around the country to help in those efforts (or be ready to help at a moment's notice when the moment comes). *They're undoubtedly planning all kinds of violence or threats of violence to intimidate people out of voting. *They're desperately begging/bribing/extorting all their Nazi-dictator friends around the world for any kind of help they can give in the last two months. (I'm quite sure the phones of Putin, Lukashenky, Orban, Li'l Kim, MBS, Bibi, and a bunch of others are lighting up with 'offers' from top Trumpers.) *'False flag attempts of various kinds? Acts of vandalism/violence/terrorism they can try to blame on Dems? *Acts of overt or threatened violence against Kamala, or those close to her? (Very serious concerted efforts to gin up 'stochastic' violence against them, without having to actually give the order themselves?) *Bribing/extorting/manipulating the worthless sleaze who make up most of our 'press' into hurting Harris or helping Trump in some substantial way. (This is probably the one that scares me the most.) Our media gives them SO much fucking help even without being pushed it's just comical. Anyone catch that Gary Tuchman/CNN 'focus group' after the convention? He pretended to have found 8 'undecided voters' and then asked them what they thought after Kamala's speech. Six said they were voting for her now, one said she still hates them both. One black guy said he'd decided to vote for Trump after hearing her speech. If you listened to this asshole for 10 seconds, it was SCREAMINGLY obvious he was a fraud; there's no fucking chance this dick was ever 'undecided.' So yesterday it was exposed (by Ben Meiselas of MT) that sure enough, he was completely fake, was a full-Nazi Trumpist from way way back, and was asked by Tuchman to pretend to be 'undecided' so he could fill out his fake 'focus group.' This should be a major scandal, and should demand the instant firing of Tuchman and a major investigation/apology/ reform effort from CNN. What will happen? Absolutely fucking nothing. Cuz we're America. All of our MSM are either overtly or effectively in the employ of Republicans --including those, like the WaPo and the Times, who we stupidly pretend are 'liberal.' Yeah, sure, there's one or two smaller outlets who actually do, ya know, journalism --like, say, ProPublica. They constitute maybe one percent of our total apparatus, and that's probably generous. If you added up all the ways the whole system biases things towards Republicans, I think it's probably safe to suggest that for a Dem (let's say Kamala) to beat them, they realistically have to win like 60-40. If you could fix like maybe half the shit that horribly biases all of it towards the Nazis, she'd get two thirds or three quarters of the vote. As it is, with all of it in the horribly biased state it's in, she has to effectively get like 60% of the pop behind her to actually come out on top. (It might be even worse than that, depending how successful their efforts to simply steal it end up being.) She'll probably get that, but there's a hell of a lot that can go wrong in the next two months, and a hell of a lot of truly horrific shit they're gonna try. Then of course there's the terrifying unkown 'x-factor' of how the actual vote will relate to the poll-averages. In both '16 and '20, it horrifyingly turned out that the Nazi vote was like ~2% stronger (in margin) than the polls predicted --and that was enough to hand it to Trump in '16 and very nearly do it again last time. So all the pollsters went way overboard to 'adjust' their models for that, and make them much more favorable to the Nazis. Then we've had all kinds of huge demographic and socio-political shifts since then, and as far as anyone can tell, it seems the pollsters have completely ignored all of that. The most glaring example, of course, is the criminal SC Dobbs decision, and the impact it's had on (especially female) voters. Every election since then (like about 19 in a row) has indicated a huge shift of the vote to the left, and also indicated that the pollsters have COMPLETELY missed it. You might think after the first twelve or so times this happened, they might have thought to make a tiny effort to 're-adjust' their models to account for this clearly-huge shift, but it doesn't seem they've done a fucking thing. All of this together makes any rational person lean towards the expectation that the pollsters probably still have it badly wrong, and will probably still have it badly wrong in November. IOW, it seems fair to expect that the 'Dobbs bounce' we've seen about 19 times in a row will probably hold up again, and the Dems are therefore likely to perform a lot better than the polls predict on Election Day. If the last couple years are a fair indication, that effect could easily be several percentage points. Even if it was just two (like the reverse of what happened in the last two prez elections), that'd be enough to have a huge impact. We'll have to see what comes out of the river, and like I said a hell of a lot can go wrong. But it's not at all unreasonable to surmise that the Dems could end up winning by a fucking landslide in two months. Consider a simple, rough hypothetical: Let's say I'm right, and the momentum that seems to be playing out right now goes ahead like it's going just for the next week or so. By the second week of September, she's ahead by 6 points in poll-averages. Republicans massively panic, and resort to stupid things that mostly do them more harm than good. Kamala and Walz continue to show that they're roughly a hundred times smarter than the Nazis, and continue to generally perform much better and campaign much better in every way. All of that acts to gain them just a little more progress in poll-numbers over the next 8 weeks. Let's say another two points in margin (which of course means changing the minds of just 1% of the population). Now they're up by 8. At that point, they'd not only comfortably win ALL SEVEN of the 'swing states.' but at least two of the other states, that everyone has long ago written off as solidly red, would also get really close, and fall 'in play,' as the politicos like to say. Those two, of course, just happen to be the second and third biggest states around, and just happen to comprise SEVENTY fucking electoral votes. That of course, would be Florida and Texas. Then Election Day comes, and guess what? It does in fact turn out the pollsters fucked up once again, does in fact turn out the 'Dobbs effect' is real, and gives us a modest (compared to what it's been in every one of the last 19 elections) bump of two points compared to pollster expectations. We win by 10 fucking points. That's enough to put Texas and Florida both into the blue. It's also enough to give us a big margin in the House, and to not only retain the Senate (which everyone's told us for two fucking years was impossible), but actually gain a seat or two. (One of those 'impossible' seats everyone had written off also goes blue along with TX and FL. Teddy Cruz, anyone?) I'm not saying any of this will happen, I'm just pointing out that the assholes in our media and 'talking-head' establishment, who've been telling us 12 time a day for the last four years that it's guaranteed this election will be decided by like 15 votes are, as usual, completely full of shit. It could turn out to be really close, if some of the Republican election-crimes turn out to be surprisingly successful, or if something goes terribly wrong in Kamala's campaign, etc. But it's every bit as plausible that we not only end up winning, but winning by a LOT. Of course our criminal media don’t wanna hear that at all, cuz that'll tend to reduce ratings. The best thing for ratings is that Trump is winning, or at least that it's desperately close. So they'll continue to tell us that's what's happening, regardless of real life, and they'll also work really hard to make that happen wherever possible. Ignore the hype, and fight like fucking hell against it. BTW, the scenario I laid out above --which I'd say statistically is just about as likely right now as a Trump win would be-- would yield an EC vote of 389 to 149 --and the White House, House, and Senate. I'd settle for a 6-point margin, 319-219 (all 7 swing sates), taking the House, and just barely holding the Senate. That'd be good enough. And we're very close to that right now. Maybe 2 points from it, by the polls, and closer in real life, I think --and that assumes zero 'Dobbs effect.' Yeah, we've obviously gotta work our asses off in every way between now and then. But instead of assuming (like most people insist on doing) that it's automatically gonna be a razor-thin margin no matter what we do, we should be aiming for a fucking landslide. Let's not just beat them, let's kick the living shit out of them. Let's beat them so fucking bad it empowers the Dems to actually DO some of the major stuff that desperately needs to be done if we want a fair chance to hold onto democracy going forward, and also deals Trump and the Nazis such a massive rebuke they'll be knocked on their asses, maybe --god willing-- never fully recover, and join Hitler and Himmler and their other great 'heroes' in the toilet of history. That is all. 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