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A Deeply Fractured US

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Not earth shattering nor consequential. Trump already has the endorsement of much more powerful people. Oh, and he has the nomination. Pence is pretty well a nobody. Might as well be Jimmy Kimmel or Nancy Pelosi announcing they won't back Trump. White noise.
Oh, I know it isn’t going to move the needle for the Primary. The issue is death from a thousand cuts in the election. Biden seems to be closing the polling gap so I wonder how much of that is being pushed by disafeffected GOP who will stay home or vote Biden.

Have we ever seen a former VP from the same party not endorse the candidate they put forward?

What would be a concern would be if more people step up to not endorse. This will be a tight race and neither candidate can afford to lose any support, especially support that traditionally they should be getting.
 
Biden closing the gap? Perhaps in some state polls. Overall he is still losing ground. Trump is eating bidens lunch with Hispanics and Black's going over to Trump. Biden also has a large percentage of registered democrats sitting out. More than ever.
 
Biden closing the gap? Perhaps in some state polls. Overall he is still losing ground. Trump is eating bidens lunch with Hispanics and Black's going over to Trump. Biden also has a large percentage of registered democrats sitting out. More than ever.



Possible blip.
 
Did you say that with a straight face?😄 Democrats and liberals come to mind. Are you fine when they do it or just when the Republicans do it?

"New York’s Adult Survivor’s Act went into effect Thursday, allowing survivors of sexual assault or abuse who were 18 years or older at the time to file a civil lawsuit against their abuser past the state’s statute of limitations. The act was signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul in May and amends the statute of limitations for civil actions related to sexual offenses committed against adults in the State of New York. Under the act, civil actions which were previously barred by the statute of limitations are now revived. Survivors now have a one-year window to file the allowed civil actions for cases of sexual assault for which they previously could not file suit past the time limitation placed on the crime"

Enacting special legislation in order to charge Trump. Blatant and partisan, but OK because it was democrats and it was to get Trump.

I did say it with a straight face, and I’m speaking directly to what he was talking about- legislative efforts in Georgia that could (not yet have) manifest in a direct and blatant interference with the election interference prosecution.

I’m not OK with any parliamentary interference in criminal prosecutions in any cases.

I’ll point out that you’re talking about a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Trump was sued, not charged. I’ve also largely avoided bringing up or offering much comment on Trump’s various civil matters; my focus is on the criminal. We’ve had this conversation before, briefly.

I will say that there’s a distinct difference between, say, creating an ex post facto criminal offense, and opening up a window outside of normal statute of limitations for civil wrongs. Apples and oranges. Trump was merely one of several thousand defendants who was sued as a result of the Adult Survivors Act passed in New York on the tail of the “Me stop” campaign. I’m not taking a position on if they ought to have passed that law or not, but I’m also not going to pretend Trump was some sole specific target of it.
 
It looks like the Willis fiasco won't get off the ground until after the election anyway.


"Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ politically motivated, wrongful attempt to deny President Trump due process of law by arguing that no severances should be granted has been summarily squashed by the court,” a spokesperson for Trump said. “Willis’ unjust rush to judgment in order to please her radical political base has simply failed.”

While McAfee didn’t set a trial date for Trump and 16 of his co-defendants, the timeline he sets out in a court order Thursday means they wouldn’t go on trial before at least December.

The new schedule laid out by the judge signals he wants to start hashing out pretrial disputes with the batch of 17 defendants by the end of the year. The judge is ordering discovery to start by October 6.

However, there is no set timeline yet for the trial for the 17 defendants nor is there one for resolving disputes over what evidence can be presented to the jury. McAfee ordered that other types of pretrial motions be filed by December 1, but he has not scheduled a hearing on those requests."
You realize that’s a September 2023 article, right? Where it refers to October and December, it’s talking about 2023. Those defendants it mentions seeking speedy trials at that time have since been convicted on guilty pleas. I wouldn’t try to read seven month old tea leaves on trial scheduling; they’re soggy. It’s possible that Trump’s successes in delay at the federal may leave his calendar open enough for a relatively earlier Georgia trial; discovery in that matter has been ongoing for quite a while.
 
Two polls. I certainly wouldn't count a 1% lead inside the margin of error, on two polls, as stunning. But, it's going to be up, down and sideways until the November poll, which is the only one that counts. I really try not to take polls into consideration, trust or truth. Too many variables and loaded questions.

 
You realize that’s a September 2023 article, right? Where it refers to October and December, it’s talking about 2023. Those defendants it mentions seeking speedy trials at that time have since been convicted on guilty pleas. I wouldn’t try to read seven month old tea leaves on trial scheduling; they’re soggy. It’s possible that Trump’s successes in delay at the federal may leave his calendar open enough for a relatively earlier Georgia trial; discovery in that matter has been ongoing for quite a while.
My bad.
 
I did say it with a straight face, and I’m speaking directly to what he was talking about- legislative efforts in Georgia that could (not yet have) manifest in a direct and blatant interference with the election interference prosecution.

I’m not OK with any parliamentary interference in criminal prosecutions in any cases.

I’ll point out that you’re talking about a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Trump was sued, not charged. I’ve also largely avoided bringing up or offering much comment on Trump’s various civil matters; my focus is on the criminal. We’ve had this conversation before, briefly.

I will say that there’s a distinct difference between, say, creating an ex post facto criminal offense, and opening up a window outside of normal statute of limitations for civil wrongs. Apples and oranges. Trump was merely one of several thousand defendants who was sued as a result of the Adult Survivors Act passed in New York on the tail of the “Me stop” campaign. I’m not taking a position on if they ought to have passed that law or not, but I’m also not going to pretend Trump was some sole specific target of it.
OK, whatever you say.
 
Two polls. I certainly wouldn't count a 1% lead inside the margin of error, on two polls, as stunning. But, it's going to be up, down and sideways until the November poll, which is the only one that counts. I really try not to take polls into consideration, trust or truth. Too many variables and loaded questions.

…so where does the Hispanic and Black shift to Trump, as well as Biden losing ground, come from? How would folks know those trends if not for polling?
 

And every 4 or 5 years I get to join my fellow Canucks in trying to change the rule changers.

Even then, only about 60% of your fellow Canucks turnout for federal elections. About 44% of the total population.

Not all Canucks are "fired up". Sometimes described as "political apathy".

…so where does the Hispanic and Black shift to Trump, as well as Biden losing ground, come from?

Might be a bit of a gender gap.

Since 1980, women have turned out to vote at higher rates than men in every US presidential election.

Women have voted for the Democratic candidate at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980.

In the month after the Dobbs decision that struck down Roe v Wade, the number of women registering to vote in the 2022 midterms surged by 35 per cent – roughly four times the rate of men.


More women said they would support Biden over Trump in this latest survey, with 58 percent backing Biden and 36 percent backing Trump.
 
Since everyone is talking about polls, the LA Times has an interesting article on the problems facing pollsters and why they sometimes get it wrong.

Column: Polls get it right most of the time. Here’s what to be wary of​

Before voters cast ballots, pollsters try to figure out what’s on their minds. It usually works out.

BY DAVID LAUTER SENIOR EDITOR
MARCH 15, 2024 3 AM PT


WASHINGTON — Without polls, you can’t understand politics; with them, you can misunderstand a lot.

With both major party presidential nominations sewn up, we’re deep into the season in which fretting over polls can become an obsession. That’s especially true this year, as former President Trump holds a small but persistent edge over President Biden in most national and swing-state surveys.

That’s led many Democrats to search deep into the innards of polls in an often self-deluding search for error.

The fact is, polls continue to get election results right the vast majority of the time. They’re also an indispensable tool for democracy — informing residents of a vast and varied nation what their fellow Americans believe.

At the same time, errors do exist, often involving either problems collecting data or troubles interpreting it.

This week, let’s examine a couple of examples and take a look at how L.A. Times polls did this primary season.

A Holocaust myth?​

In December, the Economist published a startling poll finding: “One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth,” the headline said.

Fortunately for the country, although perhaps not for the publication, it’s the poll finding that may have been mythical.

In January, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center set out to see if it could replicate the finding. They couldn’t. Pew asked the same question the Economist poll asked and found that the share of Americans ages 18-29 who said the Holocaust was a myth was not 20%, but 3%.

What’s going on?

The problem isn’t a bad pollster: YouGov, which does the surveys for the Economist, is among the country’s most highly regarded polling organizations. But the methodology YouGov uses, known in the polling world as opt-in panels, can be victimized by bogus respondents. That may have been the case here.

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Panel surveys are a way to solve a big problem pollsters face: Very few people these days will answer phone calls from unknown numbers, making traditional phone-based surveys extremely hard to carry out and very expensive.

Rather than randomly call phone numbers, polling organizations can solicit thousands of people who will agree to take surveys, usually in return for a small payment. For each survey, the pollsters select people from the panel to make up a sample that’s representative of the overall population.

Some people join simply for the money, however, then may speed through, answering questions more or less at random. Previous research by Pew has found that such bogus respondents most often claim to belong to groups that are hard to recruit, including young people and Latino voters.

Pollsters have found evidence of organized efforts to infiltrate panels, sometimes involving “multiple registrations from people who are outside the U.S.,” Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist at YouGov and a political science professor at Stanford, wrote in an email. Those could be efforts to bolster particular causes or candidates or, more often, schemes to make money by collecting small sums over and over again.

“We have a whole host of procedures to screen out these panelists,” Rivers wrote, adding that the firm was continuing to analyze what happened with the Holocaust question.

On polls of close elections, bogus respondents answering at random will usually “more or less cancel each other out,” said Andrew Mercer, senior research methodologist at Pew.

“But for something that’s very rare, like Holocaust denial,” random responses will produce error that is all on one side. “It’s going to end up inflating the incidence,” he said.

In previous research for example, Pew found that 12% of respondents in opt-in survey panels who said they were under 30 also claimed that they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine.

The lesson here is an old one, popularized by the late astronomer Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If a poll result seems just too startling to be true, there’s a good chance it isn’t.

Leaping to conclusions​

A second category of potential problems doesn’t involve the data so much as the way people, especially us journalists, interpret them — drawing definitive conclusions from less than definitive numbers.

Consider the question of how much progress Republicans are making among Black and Latino voters.

There’s no question, as I’ve previously written, that Republicans gained ground between 2016 and 2020, especially among Latino voters who already identified as conservatives. There was also smaller movement toward the GOP among Black voters.

Has that trend continued? Some recent surveys, including the widely cited New York Times/Siena College poll, indicate it may have accelerated. Biden has hemorrhaged support among younger Black and Latino voters, that poll has found.

In a recent article that drew a lot of attention, John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data journalist for the Financial Times, stitched together data from several different types of polls to declare that “American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.”

The response from many political scientists and other analysts was, in effect, “Not so fast.”

Pre-election surveys can tell you what potential voters are thinking today, but comparing them with past election returns is dicey, they noted.

If the actual results in 2024 track what the New York Times/Siena polls are currently finding, “fine, let’s talk racial realignment,” said Vanderbilt University political science professor John Sides. Until then, however, “we have to wait and see.”

How we did​

Our UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times polls had a notably good year predicting elections.

The final poll before this year’s primary showed, for example, that Proposition 1, the $6.4-billion mental health bond measure backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, had support from 50% of likely voters.

As of Thursday morning, that was almost exactly where the “yes” vote stood — 50.2% — with almost 90% of the state’s votes counted.
The poll also correctly forecast that Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff of Burbank and Republican former Dodgers player Steve Garvey would be the top two finishers in the primary for Senate, with Democratic Rep. Katie Porter of Irvine in third place.

In the survey, taken about a week before the election, 9% of voters remained undecided. Among those who had made up their minds, Garvey had 30% of the vote, Schiff 27% and Porter 21%, the poll found.

The poll appears to have been very close on Garvey’s number — with about 800,000 votes still to count, he has 32%, well within the poll’s estimated margin of error of 2 percentage points in either direction. The survey slightly understated backing for Schiff, who also has 32%, and overstated support for Porter, who currently sits at 15%. That could mean that final group of undecided voters broke for Schiff.

That level of accuracy is not uncommon. In the 2022 midterms, for example, polls by nonpartisan groups, universities and media organizations were extremely accurate.

There’s a takeaway in all this for people interested in politics, especially in a hotly contested election year: Don’t over-focus on any individual poll, especially if it has a startling finding that hasn’t cropped up anywhere else. Be skeptical about sweeping conclusions about events that are still unfolding. And even, or maybe especially, when a poll shows your favored candidate trailing, take it for what it is — neither an oracle, nor a nefarious plot, but a snapshot in time.

David Lauter is a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, based in Washington, D.C. He began writing news in Washington in 1981 and since then has covered Congress, the Supreme Court, the White House under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and four U.S. presidential campaigns. He served as Washington bureau chief from 2011 through 2020. Lauter lived in Los Angeles from 1995 to 2011, where he was The Times’ deputy Foreign editor, deputy Metro editor and then assistant managing editor responsible for California coverage.

Link

 
Did you say that with a straight face?😄 Democrats and liberals come to mind. Are you fine when they do it or just when the Republicans do it?

"New York’s Adult Survivor’s Act went into effect Thursday, allowing survivors of sexual assault or abuse who were 18 years or older at the time to file a civil lawsuit against their abuser past the state’s statute of limitations. The act was signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul in May and amends the statute of limitations for civil actions related to sexual offenses committed against adults in the State of New York. Under the act, civil actions which were previously barred by the statute of limitations are now revived. Survivors now have a one-year window to file the allowed civil actions for cases of sexual assault for which they previously could not file suit past the time limitation placed on the crime"

Enacting special legislation in order to charge Trump. Blatant and partisan, but OK because it was democrats and it was to get Trump.
In the days of DNA etc, should there be time limits for crimes to be charged?
 
There's no point looking to cheerleaders, whether individuals or institutions, for poll interpretation.

Ruy Teixeira and Nate Silver are concerned about Biden's chances. Whatever they have to say is worth paying attention to for people worried about where the result might land.
 
In the days of DNA etc, should there be time limits for crimes to be charged?
Like most legal matters in the US . . . it's complicated. As you know, Unlike here, most criminal and civil law is State-based except crimes and civil actions that come under federal jurisdiction.

A number of states have either modified or in a few cases, eliminated their SoL for 'felony sex crimes'. Modified limitations vary depending on when the victim reported and/or the existence of DNA evidence on file.

Up here, there is no time limit for virtually all indictable (felony) offences.
 
In the days of DNA etc, should there be time limits for crimes to be charged?
The "New York’s Adult Survivor’s Act" was enacted to allow people to sue no matter how long ago any sexual abuse occurred, it has nothing to do with criminal actions, just civil suits. It was for a 1 year period and expired in November. It followed a similar law from 2019 covering children.
Similar to the Child Victims Act, the Adult Survivors Act will empower survivors of sexual offenses that occurred when they were over the age of 18. The one-year window will begin six months from signing and will allow survivors to sue regardless of the statute of limitations. For many survivors, it may take years to come to terms with the trauma of sexual assault and feel ready to seek justice against an abuser, while possibly experiencing fear of retaliation or shame.
In 2019, New York extended the statute of limitations to 20 years for adults filing civil lawsuits for a select number of sex crimes. However, that legislation only affected new cases and was not retroactive.
NY Gov Link
 

Weird Irony since I thought his whole defence was that he was worth more than he was being portrayed as…
His usual source of funds has other commitments right now.
 

Weird Irony since I thought his whole defence was that he was worth more than he was being portrayed as…
His worth is inclusive of all assets. He has property and investments. You just can't liquidate everything to satisfy a witch hunt by spiteful democrats.
 
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