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Why does anybody think Donald Trump will win?

anyone listen to this ?


i just did. yikes. summary : a number of intellectuals and former officials conducted a war-game type activity to look at various potential outcomes of the election and how those might play out. this episode covers the results of one of the more plausible scenarios. it was a nice "oh, shit. i didn't know that" sort of experience for my commute home. definitely worth a listen.
I tried. Had trouble with it. Is there a YouTube version?
 
Can you elaborate?

People need to stop trying to compare 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump is running against Joe Biden, not Hillary Clinton. It is ridiculous to pretend this is a repeat of the worst election in my lifetime.

What is ridiculous is thinking that the polling industry can accurately foretell the electoral college result.
 
Look at these maps exactly one week before Election Day:
Using a calculator on my browser to add up electoral votes for red, blue, and swing states, I figured out the most Donald Trump could get if today was Election Day is 248. That is 22 EC votes short. That means he would have to steal two states from Joe Biden with no chance of winning New York or California even if he wins Texas and Florida. Realistically, no scenario will award the rattlesnake 270 EC votes.

Trump is going to win in the 272-274 elector range.
 
What is ridiculous is thinking that the polling industry can accurately foretell the electoral college result.
They are usually accurate within the margin of error.

They aren't always right, but because the entire point of science is accepting your mistakes and learning from them, they get better as time passes.
 
:rolleyes: Every time people talk about the EC all they talk about is comparing Wyoming to CA because that comparison is the only one you can really do to make the EC look bad. If you compare any of the rest the numbers really aren’t that far out of line especially not to get more than a shoulder shrug

If you're fine with different voters having differently valued votes, then whether I go with WT/CA or VT/TX as a basis of comparison, your point is moot because you simply don't believe in the axiom of "one man, one vote" anyway.
 
They are usually accurate within the margin of error.

They aren't always right, but because the entire point of science is accepting your mistakes and learning from them, they get better as time passes.

That is of little value in a winner take all situation.
 
Every time people talk about the EC all they talk about is comparing Wyoming to CA because that comparison is the only one you can really do to make the EC look bad. If you compare any of the rest the numbers really aren’t that far out of line especially not to get more than a shoulder shrug.

Anyone who did not think the EC was bad during the 20th century should have learned it is when Secretary of State Katherine Harris botched one county's vote recount. If only the popular vote decided who wins the presidency, everybody would have known who won it on November 7.
 
That is of little value in a winner take all situation.
I mean it depends how large the margin of error is, compared to the lead the poll says a given candidate has.

If the polls says Biden is up 36 points in California, it doesn't ****in matter whether the margin of error is 3 or 5 percent, Trump isn't going to win that one.
 
I tried. Had trouble with it. Is there a YouTube version?

i don't think so. i think that you just click listen or download. i listen to it on my phone using the TuneInRadio app. that's how i listen to pretty much every podcast. some people like other apps, but that's the one that i have been using for years. i also use it to stream news audio.
 
He certainly has a non-zero probability of winning, and I think people are less likely to trust polls this election given 2016. That being said, the polls aren't looking good for Trump either. However, I wouldn't go and write him off in the least. Never underestimate the Democrats ability to **** it all up.
 
Every election there are hundreds of threads started declaring certainty of the outcome relying on polls. In fact, statistically polls have been proven so wrong the odds are vastly better by figuring out the opposite outcome and that is most likely what is accurate.
There is only 1 poll that is reliable and Trump is leading it.
More halloween masks have been sold of Trump than Biden.
 
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The electoral college rewards the geographic location of voters and not the sizes of the populations. That's how a Republican President was elected twice in this century alone in spite of losing the popular vote.

So let's say a couple moves from Wyoming (3 EC votes) to California (55 EC votes). The EC votes don't change, pretty much no matter what. A result of the forty-year migration from Southern and Midwestern states for coastal states means that previously purple states are now red, and a small handful of purple/blue states are just really, really blue. And that migration has resulted in a large handful of states with very, very few people who have almost equal power to a handful of states with much larger populations.

This seems counter-intuitive when you remember that 55 is a whole lot bigger than 3, but that fact doesn't save the country from a minority of the population selecting its President.

Here's an interactive map showing the relative value of your vote if you lived in one state or another. If you're too busy to check it out, I'll give you the tl;dr version: the smaller the population of the state, the greater the value of your vote across the country as a whole. The more populous your state, the lesser the value of your vote across the country as a whole.

So the result is that if you're rural and white, the EC is what's keeping you in power, and little else except a slew of vote/voter suppression efforts.

Thank you very much.
I always appreciate your insight.
 
I mean it depends how large the margin of error is, compared to the lead the poll says a given candidate has.

If the polls says Biden is up 36 points in California, it doesn't ****in matter whether the margin of error is 3 or 5 percent, Trump isn't going to win that one.

I also does not matter if the poll says Biden is up by MOE + 1% since it is still a weighted guess based on a small sample before he election. Even exit polls have been off by more than the advertised MOE.
 
i don't think so. i think that you just click listen or download. i listen to it on my phone using the TuneInRadio app. that's how i listen to pretty much every podcast. some people like other apps, but that's the one that i have been using for years. i also use it to stream news audio.
When I clicked on it I was given a number of different choices to listen to it from google to apple and so forth. Then when I clicked on a few of them I was asked to create an account. IDK helix. I really was interested in listening to it but sometimes I’m challenged with internet apps. Oh well.
 
Trump beat Hillary like the proverbial red headed stepchild in 2016. He should easily beat the basement denizen they call Biden in 2020..
 
I also does not matter if the poll says Biden is up by MOE + 1% since it is still a weighted guess based on a small sample before he election. Even exit polls have been off by more than the advertised MOE.
Usually a poll is not off by more than the margin of error unless it's methodology was downright terrible to begin with.
 
What is ridiculous is thinking that the polling industry can accurately foretell the electoral college result.

There is no reason to act like Joe Biden is Hillary Clinton. Voters like Biden, who has no criminal history and is not under investigation for anything. Pretending voters have not changed their minds about Donald Trump and do not have more enthusiasm to vote is stupid. So is thinking I said anything about forfeiting the Electoral College result.
 
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