Belize

What if: the Democrats saying Biden needs to go are the same Democrats who have no idea what electability is or how to achieve it.

One other surprising thing about the anti-Biden stuff among Democrats: people like Bernie Sanders are *supporting Biden*. The Congressional Black Caucus supports Biden. Relatively centrist Democrats like Jon Tester and Mark Warner are the ones pushing strongly for Biden to go. I worry that the anti-Biden panic is actually coming from people who thought "electable" candidates such as Kerry and Clinton would win.

I think the campaign messaging on Project 2025 is surprisingly getting through all of the "Democrats in panic" news. That's the second thing I read about on social media after the Biden frenzy. There's also been one or two stories about legislative activity in Congress and the ongoing NATO summit, but that is overwhelmed by the first two.

It also raises the possibility that people who *slightly disapprove* of Biden are largely voters who voted for Biden in 2020. And can be won back, especially if the alternative is Trump.

A potential answer: There are degrees of approval and disapproval of presidents. Biden does well in horserace polling against his opponent *among those who only slightly approve and slightly disapprove of him*. That's illustrated by the 90 and 3 in his row. So there's a lot of people who tell pollsters they disapprove of Biden, but will vote for him anyway. And that's unusual when compared to the previous three presidents. The idea of disapprovers voting for the president anyway is novel. I'm still trying to figure out what all that means, but it leads me to believe that job approval/disapproval as a measure for reelection outcome is different now than it was in previous presidential reelections.

Giving up the incumbency advantage, fighting over a new nominee and trying to start a new campaign: That's one way to solve your problem of Biden being down 3 points in the polls.

In all honesty, my position on the Biden controversy is: Incumbent presidents win reelection. The only time they lose is when there is economic recession. Pushing Biden out of the race would take that advantage away in favor of an inner party fight four months before the election and certain defeat in November. Pushing Biden out would be a bunch of panicked Democrats orchestrating their own defeat.

There's a lot of interesting information one can test and consider in that CNN segment, but one that made me go "huh?" was this one. In what way was the 2022 midterm elections "the Trump era"? The guy who was out of power in 2022.

Election polls conducted one week before the election reflect the actual results within the poll's stated statistical margin of error only 60% of the time. For ten weeks prior to the election, it drops to 50% of the time. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/election-polls-are-95-confident-but-only-60-accurate-berkeley-haas-study-finds/ I love election polls. They're fun in a way. But I only read them with the level of seriousness they deserve. (Not much. They have about an even chance of actually resembling the election.)

The Parkinson's disease speculation about Biden is amusing because of course I would vote for someone who has Parkinson's. I guess I'm progressive like that. Oh no! The president has a movement disorder. The horror.

I see you have discovered the annual physical that the president of the United States undergoes. The results of the physical were released by the White House in February. Biden had tests for Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis and cervical myelopathy, which were all negative. Health-Summary-2.28.pdf (whitehouse.gov)

People should forget the election forecasts of people like Nate Silver, The Economist and 538. (Silver doesn't work at 538 anymore despite having founded it; he's moved on and created a new model). I'm talking about the model where they say, "Clinton has a 71% chance of winning" based on an algorithm. (This was Silver's actual final forecast before the 2016 election.) By Silver's own admission, his forecast and the ones like it, are non-falsifiable. After 2016, Silver said his model wasn't wrong because he did give Trump a 29% of winning. The logic follows that he can never be wrong. Non-falsifiablity is what academics guard against, and it's the hallmark of chicanery. Without knowing that beforehand, intelligent people should be tipped off by the specificity. Who the hell can ever say that a candidate has 71.675% of winning?

From 2012.

NY Times stupidity, international edition

Aw c'mon. It was sourced to a scholarly journal and everything.

Anonymous source discovers what a White House Chief of Staff does.

The paper linked above is very fascinating. It explains several things that many may not know: 1. The national polls in the final 13 days before the 2016 election were *not* far off from the popular vote. Forecasters like Silver just used them to come to the wrong conclusion that Clinton was going to win the electoral college. 2. Battleground state polls in the same time period *were* wrong. 3. The main reason the battleground state polls were wrong was late voting for Trump. The undecideds breaking for Trump, in other words. This "voters deciding in the final week" phenomenon doesn't favor one party more than the other. It can benefit either. Also, there is *no way* pollsters can guard against it. There just has to be a caveat that polls can swing quickly. 4. Logically following, the battleground state polls were probably right *on the days they were conducted* but not a week later. 5. The second reason the battleground states were wrong was oversampling of college educated voters, which has always been an issue for pollsters because they are more willing to take polls. It wasn't a problem in the past because the partisan preference of the education demographic was U-shaped but now has become linear. (Democrats used to do well with *both* college educated and those with no college education but that's not the case anymore.)

Maybe you would consider this good news. There's no evidence that this is a real phenomenon. "[T]here is little evidence that socially desirable (Shy Trump) responding was an important contributor to poll error." Evaluation of the 2016 Election Polls in the United States | Public Opinion Quarterly | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

One argument I have heard from pankicky Democratic voters as justification for their panic is that Biden has seen a long stretch of polling where he is behind Trump. Nate Silver made this argument. Putting aside the issue of whether polls are predictive, the 2024 margins are much smaller than those of 2020 and 2016. Early polls in those years had Clinton and Biden with leading margins of 6-15 points. The RCP average back in 2015 even had Clinton up 20 points. By contrast, the Trump 2024 averages of his leading margin has been at most 3.5 points. More often, it's been less than a point. *That's* the poll results Silver is so concerned about. (Yes, Silver admitted he is a Biden voter in this same forecast, and said he can now say who he supports because he no longer works for an establishment media outlet.)

Broadly speaking, horserace polls aren't predictive in June-July. Also broadly speaking, reading crosstabs of polls is very misleading if you are trying to judge how subgroups have answered the questions. But some of the most famous polls are underestimating how many African-American voters there are going to be in November. The latest NY Times/Siena College and Data For Progress polls have African-Americans as 10% of their likely voter samples, when it's going to be closer to 13% (what it was in 2020). Only 10% of the electorate being African-American would be disastrously low. That percentage almost always rises every four years, so it *falling* by 3 points isn't credible.

Remember 2020? Remember when Trump said people should inject bleach to cure Covid in front of reporters? In the week after that, Trump trailed Biden by 6.8 points in the 538 average. Now, do you remember Republicans panicking and thinking they were going to lose the election? How about Democrats? Do you remember them crowing with glee because they knew they were going to win the election? If anything, Republicans never doubted Trump would win and Democrats remained in fear that they would never defeat Trump. It's fascinating watching the ups and downs of the 2020 election and how Republicans remained delusionally confident while Democrats remained delusionally pessimistic, despite Trump being in a much biggerpolling hole than the one Biden is currently in for 2024.

I'm all for attacking Biden, Trump or any politician, but "he's old as hell; he looks like the Crypt Keeper and will be dead soon" is problematic. I don't think I would take that any more seriously than when someone says "f*ggot" and mocks a lisp. Putting politics aside, that's how I always hear such comments and I just tune it out.

So, name-calling someone based on them being in a particular group that they can't change. Sounds enlightened.

Sure thing, doctor.