The election of Donald Trump impacts America and the world to such an extent that Pragmatically Distributed will not be lacking in material anytime soon. However the election was such an ordeal that this blog will take a week long break and return, with style, to normal operations next Thursday. In the meantime I will be considering various blog topics to convert into articles.
I suspect I know why Trump is confident about Florida and Hillary is in a panic about Michigan: Democrat turnout figures are unimpressive in early voting states such as North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. Meanwhile IBD suggests Republican turnout will equal Democrat turnout nationwide. If so, Hillary has good reason to be nervous:
A quick repost of a comment I just made on Lion’s blog:
November 7, 2016 at 5:31 pm
The surprise announcement that the Clinton case is back on inevitably raised speculation over why Comey is reopening it.
We see three possible explanations:
If Comey were inclined to help Trump he would have sought an indictment sometime after Hillary was nominated and after state ballot deadlines had expired. Timing her indictment in such a way would have left Democrats in a very difficult legal position removing her name from 50 state ballots. Since Comey didn’t, we discard this explanation.
Does his announcement help Hillary?
It is hard to see what benefit is in it for. Some have wondered if this is a strategy to neutralize any pending revelations from Wikileaks by moving them off the front pages ahead of time.
To us this maneuver seems like a double edged sword: It could just as easily amplify whatever ammunition Wikileaks has saved for the remainder of the campaign by reminding voters of her email scandals with the FBI just before Wikileaks releases their final surprises.
Bringing back the case also neutralizes her character attacks against Wikileaks for supposedly coordinating with Russia: If Clinton was so grossly incompetent at securing top secret information that even Anthony Weiner managed to download her missing 30,000 emails onto his iPhone then not only do the Russians have them but so do North Korea, ISIS, China, Guccifer, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Yemen, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
If everyone, except until recently the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has her deleted emails then Wikileaks (if they also have them) could have potentially received them from anyone, not just Russia.
If the investigation helps Hillary we fail to see how it helps except as some sort of Hail Mary strategy that her political position wasn’t desperate enough to justify.
By process of elimination we lean towards the third explanation.
The debate benefits Trump because the entire event centered around Hillary’s failings and witnessed no distractions luring Trump drastically off course.
To win the election Trump must make every day like tonight’s debate with a combination of ads and public speeches relentlessly attacking the record, character, and corruption of Clinton.
Electoral politics will not end in 2016.
2020 is coming and if Trump does not win this year, he will likely try again because, as mentioned in a previous post, Deutsche Bank will collapse soon after the election (unless its collapse can’t be delayed before then, which is very possible) and destroy the eurozone as its demise sets off a chain reaction of derivative exposure with other banks.
The structural failings of the euro have been delayed for the sake of preserving the electoral survival of Obama, Hillary, and the EU establishment. The bill for living on borrowed time is almost due and the consequences will be grave when Brussels admits it cannot pay either the principal or substantial interest.
The end of European Monetary Union (EMU) will take down the rest of the global economy, perhaps before Clinton is sworn in. When the next crisis forms Hillary and the Democrats may well wish Trump had won so they could blame the crisis on him. Trump, meanwhile, will not be able to resist the urge to remind everyone for the next four years that he was right about the failings of the world economy.
Trump’s numbers have held up well considering the barrage of attacks he has faced. He is only behind by a few points in the swing states. Furthermore, there is reason to believe the current lead of Hillary is volatile and can be closed with a good counter-offensive by Trump.
I suspect her lead is fragile for two reasons.
One is the LA Times poll. Although I would not interpret their results to mean Trump can take victory, or anything, for granted, the LA Times poll is worth keeping in mind as a measure of turnout enthusiasm on account of its unique methodology. The poll is designed so that its results are highly sensitive to changes in which group of voters are likely to turnout on election day. Other polls usually fix their demographic profiles based on best guess calculations derived from previous electoral trends. The LA Times poll, on the other hand, has no fixed profile but instead estimates what the real-time voting profile would be if the election were today. In a volatile four-way race that remains close, with undecideds still between 5 to 10 percent of poll respondents, and where unusual factors and candidates are being processed by the electorate, a “free floating” system of demographic weighting may be the correct statistical approach to take.
Continue reading “The State of the Campaign – Trump Down but Within Striking Distance”
She is evil. But she is also cute and telegenic.
And in this era, more so than any other, cuteness is sufficient reason for why she will get away with murder.
When the subject of whether Israel should attack Iran’s nuclear program is raised, the ensuing discussion inevitably veers into what consequences to expect following an Israeli strike.
While the question of what will be the aftermath to war is always legitimate, the dire scenarios painted by opponents of an Israeli attack are all hobbled with implausibility. The usual leftist and far-right predictions in the “against” camp center around, and are limited to, a vague threat that Iran will pursue a “wider war” against Israel.
What a “wider war” would consist of is never detailed satisfactorily; these important details are absent simply because Iran lacks the ability to conventionally or “asymmetrically” retaliate against Israel. Without sufficient ability (or at least good arguments to the contrary) there is no reason for Zionists to interpret the warnings of Islam apologists as anything but feeble bluffs because all answers for “How” Iran would hit are unconvincing.
If Iran is denied a nuclear arsenal by Israel, the responsibility to answer “How” to conventionally punish Israel would fall to the Iranian navy, airforce and army. All three of these branches are in no condition to carry out a campaign directly against Israel. In no small way this is due to their equipment consisting of outdated Soviet-era technology and, in some cases, legacy systems from the days of America’s Cold War alliance with the Shah.
Continue reading “Warnings Against an Israeli Airstrike on Iran are Hollow”
What a mistake for Clinton to assume Trump could ever be embarrassed in any way by anything he has said or done. Her latest October surprise only served to infuriate him coming into the debate where he then took his anger out on her in classic form. Another dire consequence for her is that by playing the abuser card she has handed Trump license to continually raise the issue of her enabling of Bill Clinton’s sexual abuse and harassment until election day.
Trump’s superior megalomania moves the race back to a 50-50 contest.
What else? My sidebar image of Lincoln has strong objections to Hillary’s description of Lincoln’s honesty. But the integrity of Lincoln was avenged nicely by Trump. I have nothing else to complain about except to regret Trump didn’t perform like this in the first debate.
And if it is should secular conservatives accept that the vast majority of Westerners are better off under governments that actively encourage religiosity?
Jefferson remarked as follows on a post about Rushton’s theory of r/K selection:
TFR correlates almost perfectly with religion. Chassidim in upstate NY have 12 kids on zero income, SWPLs with 7 figure incomes maybe adopt an African kid in their 40s.
To which I responded:
Well, not perfectly, but very, very strongly.
Stalin eased up on restrictions against Orthodox Christianity after Hitler invaded, both to motivate soldiers and increase the birth rate. It seems soldiers were not ready to die for the philosophical intricacies of dialectical materialism and women were not willing to replace the losses of the Red Army only for the sake of the mighty dictatorship of the proletariat.
So are we secular conservatives left with having no hope of raising Western birth rates short of sponsoring Christianity – with the exception of Israel which sponsors Judaism and has the only elevated birth rate among its desirable populations in the West?
Pragmatically Distributed 
IBD’s number today suggest R-D turnout levels will be even.
Early voting totals suggest IBD is right, but that state pollsters haven’t adjusted their turnout models correctly.
For example, in the CBS/Yougov poll of Florida, which had the state tied 45-45, their weighted sample had whites being only 61.7% of all voters, Hispanics 19.8 and blacks 13.7.
But according to early Florida vote results whites are 66% of the electorate, Hispanics 15% and blacks 13%. If the CBS turnout model is adjusted with these actual figures then Trump is ahead by over 1 point in Florida, and this before election day voting which will break strongly for him.
I’m now confident Trump will take Florida tomorrow.
For another example, most state polls of North Carolina have that state even despite early voting being disastrous for Democrats.
If state polls are generally built around 2012 turnout models and if IBD is right that Republican and Democrat turnout will be even, the state polls, which are very tight, are overestimating Hillary’s actual position.