Category Archives: Election 2020

Irrational Exuberance

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It’s everywhere, but most notably in the stock market and in election returns.

In the stock market, as exemplified by the S&P 500 index, there have been wild swings in the price-earnings ratio:


Derived from Robert Shiller’s data set. CAPE-10 is the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, where the cyclical adjustment amounts to a 10 year average of the ratio.

In a world where stock buyers weren’t driven by irrational exuberance — and irrational pessimism — the PE ratio would follow something like a straight line. It might be a rising straight line because, as some analysts have noted, stock buyers have acquired an increasingly greater tolerance for risk-taking. But it would be close to a straight line.

The zigs and zags of the stock market are echoed in the outcomes of presidential elections:


Derived from Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

To put it bluntly, almost every American who values his liberty and prosperity would in most elections have preferred the Republican candidate as the lesser of two evils. The success of Democrats testifies to the gullibility of many voters, who are swayed by — among other things — asymmetrical ideological warfare:

Leftists have the advantage of saying the kinds of things that people like to hear, especially when it comes to promising “free” stuff and visions of social perfection….

[L]eftists have another advantage: they’re ruthless. Unlike true conservatives (not Trumpsters) and most libertarians, leftists can be ruthless, unto vicious. They pull no punches; they call people names; they skirt the law — and violate it — to get what they want (e.g., Obama’s various “executive actions”); they use the law and the media to go after their ideological opponents; and on and on.

Why the difference between leftists and true conservatives? Leftists want to rearrange the world to fit their idea of perfection. They have it all figured out, and dissent from the master plan will not be tolerated. (This is very Hitleresque and Stalinesque.) Conservatives and libertarians want people to figure out for themselves how to arrange the world within the roomy confines of simple morality (don’t cheat, don’t steal, don’t murder, etc.).

The left’s ruthlessness was in full spate last year, when the election was bought and probably stolen as well.

In the same post (published on July 23, 2016), my prescience was on display:

If Trump wins in November — a very big “if” — it should be an object lesson to true conservatives and libertarians. Take the gloves off and don brass knuckles. This isn’t a contest for hockey’s Lady Byng Trophy. To change the sports metaphor, we’re in the late rounds of a brutal fight, and well behind on points. It’s time to go for the knockout.

The good news is that recent elections reflect the effects of political polarization. The swings have become less pronounced because the electorate’s “squishy center” has shrunk. The challenge before the GOP is to convince what remains of the “squishy center” that it is in their best interest to reject the anti-libertarian and anti-prosperity policies of the Democrat Party, which has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for an (anti) American brand of Hitlerism and Stalinism.

Thinking about Thinking — and Other Things: Beliefs, Herds, and Oppression

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This is the sixth and final post in a series. The previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here.

What this series adds up to is that human beings can and will believe anything. And much of what they believe – even “science” – is either mistaken or beyond proof. Belief, at bottom, is a matter of faith; it is a matter of what we choose to believe.

And why do we choose what to believe? We choose to believe those things that make us feel good about ourselves in one way or another. Here are four (not mutually exclusive) ways in which our beliefs serve that purpose:

  • Logical or epestimic consistency, which can be intellectually satisfying even if the logic is fatally flawed or the knowledge is cherry-picked to fit a worldview.
  • The (usually false) reassurance that a belief has been proclaimed “true” by an authority — “science”, religious leaders, political leaders, etc.
  • No skin in the game: The holding of views (for reasons listed above) that are inconsequential to the holder of the views but which (when put into action) are harmful to others (e.g., a rich person who has private security forces and lives and works in secure settings who calls for defunding the police).
  • Groupthink: Going along to get along, also known as “taking sides”.

On the last point, I defer to Michael Huemer:

There’s … a study that finds that political beliefs are heritable. (Alford et al, “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?”) They get a heritability estimate of 0.53 for political orientation (p. 162), much larger than the influence of either shared environment or unshared environment. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it — who knew that you could genetically transmit political beliefs? But of course, you don’t directly transmit beliefs; you genetically transmit personality traits, and people pick their political beliefs based on their personality traits.

But, as Huemer notes,

the primary choice people make is not so much which propositions they want to be wedded to, but which group of people they want to affiliate with. Maybe there’s only a very tenuous link between some personality trait and some particular political position, but it’s enough to make that position slightly more prevalent, initially, among people with that trait. But once those people decide that they belong to “the same side” in society, there’s psychological pressure for individual members of the tribe to conform their beliefs to the majority of their tribe, and to oppose the beliefs of “the other side”.

So, e.g., you decide that fetuses don’t have rights because the fetus-rights position is associated with the other tribe, and you don’t want to be disloyal to your own side by embracing one of the other side’s positions. Of course, you never say this to yourself; you just automatically find all of your side’s arguments “more plausible”.

And, as we have seen, belonging to a “side” and signaling one’s allegiance to that “side” seems to have become the paramount desideratum among huge numbers of Americans. “Liberals”, who not long ago were ardent upholders of freedom of speech are now its leading opponents. And many “liberals” – executives and employees of Big Tech companies, for example – demonstrate their opposition daily by suppressing the expression of ideas that they don’t like and denying the means of expression to persons whose views they oppose. They can conjure sophisticated excuses for their hypocrisy, but they are obvious and shallow excuses for their evident unwillingness to countenance “heretical” views.

This hypocrisy extends beyond partisan politics. It extends into discussions of race (i.e., the suppression of “bad news” about blacks and research findings about the intelligence of blacks). It extends into discussions of scientific matters (e.g., labeling as a “science denier” any scientist who writes objectively about the evidence against CO2 as the primary cause of a recent warming trend that is probably overstated, in any case, because of the urban heat island effect). It extends elsewhere, of course, but there’s no point in belaboring the obvious.

The worst part of it is that the hypocrisy isn’t practiced just by lay persons who wish to signal their allegiance to “progressivism”. It’s practiced by scientists, academicians, and highly educated persons who hold important positions in the business world (witness Big Tech’s censorship practices and the “wokeness” of major corporations).

In other words, the herd instinct is powerful. It sweeps all before it. Even truth. Especially truth when it contravenes the herd’s dogmas — which are its “truths”.

And a herd that runs wild — driven hither and thither by ever-shifting “truths” — is dangerous, as we are seeing now in the suppression of actual truth, the suppression of political speech, firings for being associated with the wrong “side”, etc.

Today’s state of affairs is often likened to that which prevailed in the years leading up to the Civil War. There is a good reason for that comparison, for the two epochs are alike in a fundamental way: One side (Unionists then, the “woke” now) assumes the mantle of virtue and thus garbed presumes to dictate to the other side.

Yes, slavery was wrong. But that did not justify the (successful) attempt of the Unionists to prevent the Confederacy’s secession on the principle of self-determination — the very principle that inspired the American Revolution that led to the Union.

Yes, it is fitting and proper to treat the (relatively) poor, persons of color, and persons whose sexual proclivities are “unusual” with respect and equality under the law. But that does not justify the wholesale violation of immigration laws, the advancement of the “oppressed” at the expense of blameless others (who are mainly straight, white, males of European descent), the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad), or the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well.

Ironically, the power of the central government, which was enabled by the victory of the Unionists, now enables “progressivism” to advance its dictatorial agenda with little effective opposition.

Donald J. Trump did oppose that agenda, and opposed it with some success for four years. That is why it was imperative for the “progressive” establishment — abetted by pusillanimous “conservatives” and never-Trumpers — to undermine Trump from the outset and, in the end, to remove Trump from power by stealing the election of 2020. There has never, in American politics, been a more heinous case of wholesale corruption than was evidenced in the machinations against Trump.

Having said all of that, what will happen to America? The slide toward fascism, which has been underway (with interruptions) for more than a century, now seems to have reached its destination: the dictation of myriad aspects of social and economic intercourse by our “betters” in Washington and their cronies in the academy, the media, and corporate America.

And most Americans — having been brainwashed by the “education system”, bought off by various forms of welfare, and cowed by officious officials and mobs — will simply acquiesce in their own enslavement.

Related reading:

Matt, “Varieties of Opinion“, Imlac’s Journal, March 14, 2021

Frank Furedi, “Big Brother Comes to America“, Spiked, February 8, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Animal Farm“, American Greatness, February 7, 2021

Arnold Kling, “Rationalist Epistemology“, askblog, February 26, 2021

Arnold Kling, “Cultural Brain Hypothesis“, askblog, March 5, 2021

Mark J. Perry, “Quotation of the Day on Truths That We Are No Longer Allowe to Speak About … “, Carpe Diem, February 2, 2021

Malcolm Pollack, “The Enemy Within“, American Greatness, February 13, 2021

Quilette editorial, “With a Star Science Reporter’s Purging, Mob Culture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase“, Quilette, February 9, 2021

How Are Americans Really Reacting to the Election?

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Forget the Democrat-media propaganda about “no evidence” of election fraud. Forget the trumped up (pun) charges of incitement to riot. Forget the selective condemnation of the mostly white mob that stormed the Capitol, after years of failure to condemn mostly black mobs that looted and burned cities across the land.

Forget all of that and look at what likely voters think about the state of the union.

Likely voters (polled by Rasmussen Reports) have become much more pessimistic about the country’s direction since the election, that is, since Biden’s stolen victory. Following a steep decline in the mood of the country during the months of pandemic panic, the mood began to lift as Trump began to close the gap with Biden. The peak at week 197 of Trump’s presidency came a week before the election of 2020. The ensuing decline suggests that likely voters, despite the assurances of “establishment” Republicans and the Democrats’ media allies, know what’s coming at them — and it ain’t pretty.

Here We Go …

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Down the tubes. It is almost certain that the Democrat candidates will be declared the winners of Georgia two Senate seats. The Senate will then be divided 50-50, and control will pass to the Democrats because VP Harris will cast deciding votes in the case of ties.

This won’t be the first time that Democrats have controlled Congress and the White House, but this Democrat Party isn’t your grandfather’s party, or your father’s party. It isn’t even the party that was led by Barack Obama, who was (and is) an ardent advocate of government control. Today’s party is filled with Obamas and politicians who make the Obamas seem moderate.

What, exactly, happens now (or as soon as Democrats get organized)? The follow list is borrowed from an earlier post. Not every item on the list will be adopted, but it won’t be for want of trying.

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establishment of a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare “unprotected” by the First Amendment, and to require media enforcement of bans on “unprotected” utterances and prosecution of violators (e.g., here). (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Reversal of the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increases in marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Imposition of new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

*      *     *

The list is in keeping with the direction in which the country is headed and, in many cases, has been headed since the 1930s — despite Reagan and Trump, and with the connivance of Ike, Nixon, the Bushes, and (in some crucial cases) the USSC.

The Constitution’s horizontal and vertical separation of powers, system of checks and balances, and limitations on the power of the federal government have been eroded almost to the point of irrelevance. The next few years will put an end to the pretense (or false hope) of governance in accordance with the Constitution as it was written. The next few years will see the destruction of liberty, the bankruptcy of America, and the onset of obeisance to Russia and China.

Proof of Election Fraud or Statistical Hocus-Pocus?

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There are many good reasons to believe that Biden’s almost-official election to the presidency was the result of electoral misfeasance, malfeasance, fraud, and judicial bias. But the statistical analysis reported at this link isn’t among them. The authors concocted a statistical model that, according to them,

explains 96% of county-level variance in Trump’s two-party vote share with four demographic variables (non-college white, college-educated white, black and hispanic) and one historical variable (the average of county-level GOP two-party presidential vote share, 2004-2016). All five variables are highly significant. This reinforces the conclusion that the model is generally a very strong predictor of vote shares, and so deviations from it should be considered surprising.

And

regression analysis shows Trump ought to have won AZ, GA, NV, PA, WI.

Are you convinced? I am not, because the authors (perhaps unwittingly) provide evidence that undermines their claim.

There is a table at the end of the article that gives Trump’s predicted share of the two-party vote for every State (except Alaska and Hawaii) and the District of Columbia. I compared the authors’ predictions with the State-level results compiled as of today at Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Elections. The absolute average of the prediction errors in 1.9 percentage points. The absolute errors for the six States listed above are as follows (in percentage points): AZ, 5.0; GA, 3.3; NV, 1.5; PA, 0.6; WI, 1.0; and MI, 1.1. So, as it turns out, the only outcomes (of the six) that the authors’ predictions might point to as fraudulent are the ones in George and Nevada.

Further, the authors don’t bother to highlight Trump’s significant underperformance (relative to their regression results) in many other States: CA, 4.3; DE, 3.5; ID, 2.4; IN, 2.0; KY, 3.0; ME, 2.5; MD, 3.3; NE, 2.1; NH, 2.2; NM, 2.1; OR, 4.9; TX, 3.6; UT, 6.3; VT, 4.3; and WA, 4.0. If their regression results for Georgia and Nevada are indicative of fraud, so are the results in California, Delaware, … , Vermont, and Washington. But I am unaware of any claims that the official outcomes in those States are bogus.

On top of that, Trump did significantly better than the authors predicted in DC (8.5 percentage points) and North Dakota (3.4 percentage points). Is anyone seriously suggesting that there was electoral fraud favoring Trump in DC, or that his campaign had to resort to fraud in deep-Red North Dakota?

The bottom line: The authors made some good predictions and a lot of very bad ones (20 of their 49 predictions exceed the average absolute error). But there’s nothing in the predictions to prove that Biden’s putative victories in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (or even Michigan) were obtained fraudulently. There is plenty of other evidence of misfeasance, malfeasance, and fraud in those States, but the authors’ statistical “proof” is nothing but a demonstration of the errors that abound in statistical analysis.

In this case, the errors resulted in the overprediction of Trump’s share of the vote in 39 States and D.C. — including, coincidentally, the six States that the authors claim to have shown were were stolen from Trump.

Texas v. Pennsylvania — The Supremes Cut and Run

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UPDATED 12/14/20

I was right about the Supreme Court, though the scenario played out differently than I had expected it to. As it turns out, there wasn’t a single justice with the guts to admit that Texas attorney general Ken Paxton had it right:

[T]he 2020 election suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities in the Defendant States [Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin]:

Non-legislative actors’ purported amendments to States’ duly enacted election laws, in violation of the Electors Clause’s vesting State legislatures with plenary authority regarding the appointment of presidential electors.

Intrastate differences in the treatment of voters, with more favorable allotted to voters–whether lawful or unlawful–in areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States.

The appearance of voting irregularities in the Defendant States that would be consistent with the unconstitutional relaxation of ballot-integrity protections in those States’ election laws.All these flaws–even the violations of state election law–violate one or more of the federal requirements for elections (i.e., equal protection, due process, and the Electors Clause) and thus arise under federal law. See Bush v Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 113 (2000)(“significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question”) (Rehnquist, C.J., concurring). Plaintiff State respectfully submits that the foregoing types of electoral irregularities exceed the hanging-chad saga of the 2000 election in their degree of departure from both state and federal law.Moreover, these flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections.Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome-determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes.

In sum, the citizens of States that were won by Trump were denied equal protection of the laws: Their votes were nullified because Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin flouted their own election laws. (To say nothing of massive instances of fraud, of which there is ample evidence, Democrats and media enablers to the contrary notwithstanding.)

William Rehnquist, who presided over Bush v. Gore twenty years ago, must be spinning in his grave.

This may have been a (futile) attempt by Roberts et al. to forestall court-packing, which surely will happen as soon as the Democrats garner a working majority in the Senate. Which is one reason among many to hope that the January 5 runoff elections in Georgia result in victories by the two Republican candidates.

Update:

An esteemed reader and correspondent sent me a link to a piece in which Alan Dershowitz is quoted at length. Here’s some of it:

Dershowitz agreed with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who indicated that Texas did have standing, saying they ”get the better of the argument,” but that the court just didn’t want to deal with what may be perceived as political.

”This Supreme Court decision sends a message,” Dershowitz said. ”The majority included the three justices appointed by President [Donald] Trump, and they all said, ‘We’re not going to hear the Texas case. We’re not going to get involved in this election.’

”I think this sends a message. It’s not a legal message, but it’s a practical message: the Supreme Court is out of this game.”

Elsewhere, Mollie Hemingway weighs in:

[H]ow can the state of Texas not have a judicially cognizable interest in her sister states living up to the compact they entered when they entered the Union?

Texas attempted in its briefs to crystalize the harm by stressing its interest in who serves as vice president, given the vice president’s tie-breaking status in the Senate and senators’ role as the representatives of the states. But a simpler and stronger argument came in a brief submitted by would-be amicus curiae [in] Citizen’s United:

When one state allows the Manner in which Presidential Electors be chosen to be determined by anyone other than the state legislature, that state acts in breach of the presuppositions on which the Union is based. Each state is not isolated from the rest—rather, all states are interdependent. Our nation’s operational principle is E pluribus unum. Each state has a duty to other states to abide by this and other reciprocal obligations built into Constitution. While defendant states may view this suit as an infringement of its sovereignty, it is not, as the defendant states surrendered their sovereignty when they agreed to abide by Article II, § 1. Each state depends on other states to adhere to minimum constitutional standards in areas where it ceded its sovereignty to the union—and if those standards are not met, then the responsibility to enforce those standards falls to this Court.

On Friday, the Supreme Court voted not to enforce those standards.

Maybe there is a good reason. Maybe Rehnquist’s view was wrong. Maybe the court found the alleged violations not “significant” enough to reach the level of a constitutional violation. (How “significant” would a violation have to be?) Maybe the court viewed a violation of the compact on which our country was founded as beyond its purview.

There might be a satisfactory answer, but Americans have yet to hear it. And that was wrong, both for the court and the country.

As the old saying goes, “we wuz robbed” by a cabal of crooked umpires.

Election 2020: Lost or Stolen?

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RE-POSTED FROM 11/15/20, TO NOTE THE ADDITION OF DOZENS OF LINKS TO THE PAGE “ELECTION 2020: LOST OR STOLEN?” (LINK IN FIRST SENTENCE)

I have created a page with that title. It consists of links to posts from various sources about the evidence that Biden’s apparent victory is fraudulent. I will continue to add links as long as the issue remains unresolved — which may be a long time from now. (See also “Election 2020 and Occam’s Razor“.)

Election 2020: Is It Done and Dusted? Has the Fat Lady Sung?

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 11/09/20; UPDATED 11/27/20, TO REFLECT THE MOUNTING EVIDENCE OF FRAUD.

Possibly, despite considerable evidence of fraud. In any event, Barring a smoking cannon or two, the Supreme Court probably won’t salvage the election for Trump. However, based on Gorsuch’s recent smackdown of Robert in the religious liberty case, I hold out some hope for a rescue by the Supremes, if a case that flips the outcome gets that far.

A post by Trump supporter Anatoly Karlin — though I don’t agree with all of it — makes some good points. The vote counts are incomplete in several States, but the results to date support Karlin’s central thesis, which is that Trump lost just enough ground in key States (or Biden gained just enough ground in those States) to cause them to flip from Red to Blue.

If fraud isn’t at the bottom of Biden’s tentative victory, what might be? A degree of revulsion for Trump that blinded many voters to the dire consequences of a Biden win, especially if accompanied by Democrat control of Congress. Nothing else, that I can see.

Here’s the table that shows Trump’s (almost) across-the-board slippage, where the light-blue fill indicates States that flipped from Red to Blue: This table shows, in light-blue shading, the States whose votes were manipulated to tilt the election toward Biden:

Despite my faint hope for a reversal of the apparent outcome, I will carry on:

I will continue to update the list of links to allegations of election fraud (here) … just in case.

When all of the votes have been tallied and certified, I will update the graph that describes the statistical relationship between GOP candidates’ shares of electoral votes and shares of popular votes. (See this post for a preliminary update.)

And I will write about the likely consequences of a Biden-Harris presidency (you read that right), with a GOP-controlled Senate, which are dire but not quite as dire as the outlook implied in this post.

Election 2020: Which Poll Came Closest?

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Despite my long-standing reliance on Rasmussen Reports, I have decided to add two polls to my must-follow list: The Hill/HarrisX and IBD/TIPP. Rasmussen’s final poll before this year’s election had Biden leading Trump by 1 percentage point. In fact — assuming that the final vote count resembles the current tally — the nationwide count of popular votes puts Biden ahead of Trump by almost 4 percentage points. That was the spread predicted by The Hill/Harris and IBD/TIP in their final pre-election polls. If I had used that spread in my final projection, I would have nailed Trump’s share of the electoral vote, which now stands at 43 percent (before all results have been certified and all court challenges have been heard and ruled upon).

In fact, this year’s (apparent) result is exactly in line with the equation that I had derived from the results for the elections of 1972 – 2016:

With the addition of 2020, the relationship between popular-vote share and electoral-vote share looks like this:

The only change is a slight improvement in explanatory power (r-squared rose from 0.92 to 0.93).

The GOP continues to hold an edge in the electoral college, but it is a slight edge. According to the equations in the graphs, a GOP candidate must muster at least 49.5 percent of the two-party popular vote to be sure of winning an electoral-vote majority.

Trump got lucky in 2016. Because of razor-thin victories in a few key States, he got 56.9 percent of the electoral vote with only 48.9 percent of the two-party popular vote (i.e., a deficit of just over 2 percentage points).

This year, however, Trump seems to have eked out only 48.1 percent of the two-party popular vote (i.e., a deficit of almost 4 percentage points), and the close calls (apparently) went to Biden. Result: A reversal of the 2016 outcome.

For more about the accuracy of various polls, see this piece at NewsMax (behind a paywall). Here’s some of it:

The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll defended its title as the most accurate pollster for predicting presidential outcomes. The pollsters take the No. 1 spot for the fifth presidential cycle in a row, a Newsmax review reveals. Among the worst polls were those from CNN and Quinnipiac.

One of only two polls to predict President Donald Trump’s 2016 win, the IBD/TIPP poll came closest to predicting the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The Hill-HarrisX poll also predicted election results with the same accuracy, according to American Research Group, Inc….

Also making the top of the list were Emerson and Rasmussen Reports — one of Trump’s favorite pollsters. Fox News, USA Today/Suffolk University, and New York Times/Siena College came in at the middle of the pack. Among the worst polls were Economist/YouGov, CNBC/Change, NBC News/ Wall Street Journal, USC Dornsife, Quinnipiac, and CNN. All predicted Biden would lead Trump by double digits.

In any event, among the many sources that I will never consult is Nate Silver’s overrated statistical mishmash called FiveThirtyEight. Silver predicted not only Democrat gains in the House (wrong) and a likely flip of the Senate (probably wrong), but also a 9-point spread between Biden and Trump in the nationwide tally of popular votes (very wrong).

Election 2020 and Occam’s Razor

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Occam’s razor

is the problem-solving principle that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” or, more simply, the simplest explanation is usually the right one…. This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same [phenomenon], one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.

Similarly, in science, Occam’s razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models. In the scientific method, Occam’s razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since failing explanations can always be burdened with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.

But simplicity isn’t a guarantee of correctness. More complexity may be necessary in order to explain a phenomenon or to make accurate predictions about it. Thus the weasel-words “without necessity”. If a thing is well explained by two independent variables, and a third independent variable adds nothing to the explanation, only two were necessary. But the number of “necessary” variables isn’t known ahead of time. It takes data-gathering, testing, and statistical analysis of the tests to determine how many are “necessary”.

Occam’s razor, in other words, is merely a tautology. The correct number of “necessary” explanatory variables is an empirical matter, not one that can be determined a priori by a vague and meaningless aphorism.

With that in mind, let us apply Occam’s razor to the presidential election of 2020. The tentative outcome of that election is a victory for Joe Biden. There are at least four explanations for the tentative outcome:

1. Every State that Biden won, he won fair and square. There were no fraudulent votes, no fraudulent counting of votes, and no errors in the counting of votes.

2. Biden’s victories in key States, though perhaps tainted by some degree of fraud or error, are legitimate; that is, the victories would have occurred absent fraud or error.

3. Biden’s victories in at least some States are illegitimate; that is, the victories wouldn’t have occurred absent fraud or error. But overturning the fraudulent or erroneous victories in some States wouldn’t change the outcome; Biden would still have enough electoral votes to be elected president.

4. Biden’s victories in at least some States are illegitimate; that is, the victories wouldn’t have occurred absent fraud or error. And overturning the fraudulent or erroneous victories in those States would change the outcome; Biden wouldn’t have enough electoral votes to be elected president. But this explanation, if true, may not be confirmed in time to change the tentative outcome of the election.

The simplest explanation, number 1, is almost certainly false. So much for Occam’s razor. What about explanations 2, 3, and 4?

I honestly do not know which of them to believe because I am withholding judgement until all of the legal votes have been counted correctly. That probably won’t happen before January 20, 2021, and so it will never happen. And so I will forever suspend judgement — but I will also suspend belief that Biden was elected honestly.

Why won’t the facts emerge before January 20, 2021? Dov Fischer explains:

[F]or those who have actual real-life professional high-stakes litigation experience, people like Rudy Giuliani and those of us who know what’s what, the reality is that no one can just walk into a courtroom a week or two after a massive fraud has taken place and just lay all the fraud on the table. It takes weeks, months, and years to unpack this stuff. No experienced attorney can just show up with all the evidence in a week or two. For example, who among us, even a week ago, had ever heard of “Dominion Voting Systems”? In only a matter of days, we now know not only of them but of their software and that they donated to the Clinton Foundation. And, oh by the way, their equipment was used in the election by North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania — comprising 84 electoral college votes in six of the tightest battleground states. On the other hand, Texas rejected using them…

Or take the dead voters. (Please.) Or the harvested and dumped ballots. Was it legal in the respective state to harvest the votes? If so, were the votes harvested by legally authorized harvesters — or by unauthorized out-of-state college kids who had nothing to do once it got too cold to march with Black Lives Matters thugs and threaten octogenarians at restaurants? It takes times — weeks, months — to unpeel that onion. And, again, what about the dead voters? It takes time to go through the voters’ rolls and to compare them with the rolls of the living.

And signatures. It is commonplace in litigations that, when disputes arise over signatures, handwriting experts are called in. One place to find handwriting experts is at a website called — take a seat for this one — www.handwritingexperts.com. But that is the point. When the stakes are high, you can’t just have volunteer housewives and househusbands comparing signatures. Not only valleys forge but people do, too. Could there be stakes greater than whether we have four more years of a Trump presidency or an alternative quadrennium of a Harris and Biden White House? Who is comparing the signatures on the mail-in envelopes with the actual signatures on registration rolls? How is it done? How carefully? How expertly?

It is wrong, unfair, and preposterous for media, including Fox News, regularly to parrot the Democrats and say that the Republicans so far do not have buckets and suitcases full of vote-fraud evidence. This kind of evidence — fraud — is the hardest to uncover and the hardest to gather. Mueller took two years. Durham, assuming there is such a person, already has been at it for a year and a half. States allow three years for claims of fraud. Usually, it takes document demands, demands for computer discs and drives, interrogatories, and depositions to root out the fraud and corruption. That is how long it takes. I know: I personally did this stuff for 10 years in matters entailing multi-million-dollar complex business disputes. Those of us who actually know the practice of law, not from Ally McBeal and from the 45 cable stations that simultaneously televise Law and Order reruns but from real life, know that the Trump team cannot possibly have all its evidence at hand yet.

Nevertheless,

they indeed are compiling anecdotal evidence, testimony of poll watchers who saw abuses and were kept away from monitoring ballot counting. The Trump team is gathering sworn affidavits, a recognized form of admissible evidence, and they are going as fast as they can. They report that they already have 234 sworn affidavits. Steve Cortes has published a wonderful piece raising four examples of circumstantial evidence arising from logical improbabilities:

1. Incomprehensibly high turnout in Wisconsin. For example, Milwaukee ended up with an 84 percent turnout, while a nearby Midwest city with a comparable demographic, Cleveland, had a 51 percent turnout. In all, Wisconsin reported voting by 90 percent of their registered voters. Numbers like that are off the charts. Biden inched ahead of Trump in Wisconsin by under 1 percent. By contrast, Trump’s lead in Ohio was too large to overcome with shenanigans.

2. The improbability of a lethargic Biden scoring significantly stronger voter turnouts than did an energetic Obama in certain battleground Obama districts.

3. The quirk of over 450,000 Biden-only ballots, on which the submitted ballots showed a vote for Biden but no one else at all, even in states where there were tight congressional and Senate contests down-ticket. That of course is technically possible, and certainly some such ballots could be expected. Curiously, Biden-only ballots were predominantly prevalent in battleground states like Georgia. By contrast, there were only 725 such ballots in Wyoming, which was a Trump–Republican blowout. For comparison, there was only a fraction of Trump-only ballots in Georgia.

4. The virtual absence of mail-in vetting. In New York, which tried large-scale mail-in balloting for the first time last June, the natural process of vetting saw 21 percent of ballots disqualified. Likewise, it is common that, among people mailing in ballots for the first time in their lives, usually some 3 percent get disqualified. That simply is the human nature of some who forget to sign, forget to date the ballot, fill it in wrong, and otherwise mess up. That’s people. Yet, in Pennsylvania only 0.03 percent of such ballots were rejected, 10 times fewer than all experience would have anticipated.

Circumstantial evidence matters and carries serious evidentiary weight. Murderers have been sentenced to death based solely on circumstantial evidence. Honest, reasonable minds cannot expect all evidence of fraud to be at hand only 10 days or even a month or two after the election has ended. Democrats had half a year and more to plan strategies for aspects of their fraud and ways to cover it up. If given enough time, enough production demands for computer drives and discs, enough time to read secret and deleted emails, the Trump team would have an opportunity to say “We have the evidence” or to present as Mueller did after his two-year investigation. Any shorter time frame is unrealistic.

Conclusion: The correct explanation of the tentative outcome of the presidential election of 2020 will never be known. Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021 (if he lives that long), and the memory hole will swallow almost all doubts about how Biden won. Remaining doubts, and even hard evidence, will be dismissed as delusional and fabricated.

And so we will be frog-marched into a brave new world.

Election 2020: Modified Betting Propositions

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In “Election 2020: Some Betting Propositions“, I laid out the terms of a bet that I had proposed to correspondent who is a “conservative” collabo. The underlying conditions — Democrat control of the White House and Congress — may not be met, at least not in 2021-2023. But the day will come, and Americans will rue it.

So, what will happen if Biden is elected but the GOP still controls the Senate and is able to prevent the left from enacting some of its agenda? Plenty. I have gleaned some examples from the blogosphere (links at the bottom of this post), and here they are:

Stopping construction of the border wall by not requesting funds for it, not reapportioning funds to it, and canceling all work in progress.

Encouraging illegal immigration (e.g., lax enforcement, reinstatement of DACA) to reopen the floodgates at the southern border.

Issuing executive orders that reverse the economic recovery in the name of combating COVID-19.

Rejoining the Paris climate scam, severely restricting U.S. oil production and the use of fossil fuels, and promoting “renewable” energy through  executive-regulatory actions, which will have almost zero effect on the climate and make Americans generally poorer and more miserable. (A full-bore legislative package — if Biden could get it passed — would be disastrous.)

Reinstating U.S. support of WHO, a corrupt pro-China, anti-life operation.

Reinstating Obama’s supine, America-last foreign policy. In particular, reinstating the Iran nuclear deal and resuming the shipment of bales of money to Iran to finance its “peaceful” nuclear research, continue to build its regional military prowess, and acquire the means to strike the U.S. with missiles; and ilting strongly in favor of radical Islam and Palestine, and strongly against Israel, which will foment conflict in the Middle East.

Progressing further toward thought control by encouraging more and stricter pro=left censorship by internet-based purveyors of “news” and anti-social media.

Advancing “critical race theory”, which blames whites for all of the miseries of blacks, many of which are self-inflicted by black culture, and others of which are due to innate racial differences in intelligence.

Actively pursuing extra-legal “punishment” of Trump’s allies and supporters.

Using the Justice Department to further erode law and order in the United States by hamstringing police departments.

Not mentioned at any of links below, but a key proposition from my earlier post: Diminution of America’s armed forces in the face of increasing adventurism by Russia and China — thus encouraging even more and bolder moves by those countries against American’s interests. This is a move that Harris-Biden can make unilaterally by slashing defense budgets submitted to Congress, and which the House can help to attain by holding the defense budget hostage until the Senate acquiesces in the cuts.

And one more crucial thing. Harris-Biden will openly flout rulings by the Supreme Court when such rulings conflict with the regime’s policies. (This is something that Trump/Hitler never did.)

I will package these items as a proposed bet for my correspondent. He will probably decline to take the bet (as he declined my earlier offer) because, in his ostrich-like way he doesn’t want to acknowledge the damage that Harris-Biden will do to the nation. He couldn’t see past his Trump hatred.

I will end this on a more pleasant note, with a link to Joy Pullman’s post at The Federalist, “12 Ways For Trump To Bomb The Battlefield While Biden Claims The Presidency” (November 10, 2020).

Links:

Carina Benton, “Totalitarian Left Promises Purges And Punishment For All Trump Voters“, The Federalist, November 10, 2020

Sam Dorman and Hillary Vaughn, “Biden Plans to Rejoin Paris Agreement, WHO, and Undo Other Trump Decisions on Day 1“, Fox News, November 9, 2020

Tilak Doshi, “The Coming Energy Shocks Under a Biden Administration“, Forbes, November 11, 2020

David Gerstman, “Former Biden Aide: Rejoining Nuclear Deal Is ‘High’ on Biden’s Agenda“, Legal Insurrection, November 10, 2020

Fred Lucas, “7 Big Items on Biden’s White House Agenda“, The Daily Signal, November 8, 2020

Heather Mac Donald, “The Biden Threat to Law Enforcement“, City Journal, November 10, 2020

Steve Postal, “How a Biden–Harris Administration Would Unravel Middle East Peace “, The American Spectator, November 10, 2020

Jarrett Stepman, “Biden Would Likely Issue Flurry of Executive Orders on Climate, Abortion, Immigration“, The Daily Signal, November 10, 2020

Jonathan Turley (eponymous blog), “‘Shredding The Fabric Of Our Democracy’: Biden Aide Signals Push For Greater Censorship On The Internet“, November 10, 2020

Francis Menton, “How Much Damage Can Biden Do to America with His Climate Plan?“, Manhattan Contrarian, November 14, 2020

Eugene Volokh, “Biden Transition Team Member’s Op-Ed on ‘Why America Needs a Hate-Speech Law’“, The Volokh Conspiracy, November 17, 2020

Frances Martel, “Six Disastrous Obama-Era Foreign Policies Set to Return Under Biden“, Breitbart, November 26, 2020

Art Keller, “Will Biden Resurrect the Iran Deal?“, Quillette, November 29, 2020

Election 2020: What Will the Supreme Court Do?

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Here’s my guess. Roberts, who has shown animus toward the Trump administration in some of his opinions will join the “liberals” — Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan — in decisions that favor Biden. Many commentators will simply ascribe Roberts’s rulings to his desire to maintain an appearance that the Court is non-political. They will also ascribe to him a desire to fend off court-packing by making it seem less threatening to Democrats, despite its supposed conservative majority. The mainstream media will simply ignore or minimized Roberts’s animus.

But Roberts plus the three lefties do not a majority make. So how will Roberts achieve his real objective, which is to remove Trump from office? He will appeal to Gorsuch, who seems to march to a different drummer than the Court’s real conservatives (Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). “Neil”, he’ll say, “here’s our chance to reassure the Democrats, who would surround us with their lackeys, that we aren’t rubber stamps for Republican policies.” And so Gorsuch will join Roberts and the lefties, for an anti-Trump majority. And perhaps (though I doubt it) Roberts will be able to recruit Kavanaugh or Barrett to the cause of making the Court seem to be above partisan politics. (Ironically, that’s precisely what Roberts will be engaged in, and everyone will know it.)

And so, Trump will lose despite evidence of massive election fraud in key Democrat-controlled States. And when the Democrats next get their hands on the Senate, court-packing will proceed apace, and Roberts will be an impotent chief justice who is dominated by the Court’s new, permanent left wing.

Election 2020: State of Play and Accuracy of Polls

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UPDATED AT 4:00 PM CST, 11/04/20

In yesterday’s post, I forecast a 285-253 electoral-vote victory for Biden. As of this morning afternoon, according to FoxNews, Biden has locked up 264 electoral votes and is leading in three States (Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) whose electoral votes would give him a total of 270 — just enough for victory. It’s possible that Biden’s total could be higher, given the number of votes still to be counted in Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, where Trump is currently ahead. And, of course, Biden could still lose any or all of the three undecided States where he is currently ahead. And both candidates can be expected to demand recounts, and recounts of recounts, and to seek judicial intervention all the way to the Supreme Court. But, whatever the outcome, I am pleased by the accuracy of my forecast. (Though I will be most displeased by the outcome if Biden proves to be the winner.)

I based my forecast on polling conducted by Rasmussen Reports, which has been my go-to source for presidential polling for the past 12 years. Rasmussen has acquired a bum rap for being pro-Republican because its generally accurate polls aren’t biased toward Democrats as are most other polls. This year’s presidential race provides further evidence of Rasmussen’s lack of bias.

As of now, Biden has a 2 percentage-point lead over Trump in the nationwide tally of popular votes. That lead might rise a bit when all of the Left Coast votes have been counted, but it’s statistically the same as the 1-percent edge forecast in Rasmussen’s final poll. And how did Rasmussen do relative to other major polls? See for yourself:

Election 2020: When Will the Winner Be Known?

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Who knows? But the results from a few States in the Eastern time zone may tell the tale. Look at the results reported by late Tuesday and compare them with Trump’s performance in 2016.

The following information is borrowed from The New York Times and Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections.

Maine (polls close at 8 p.m. EST):

Officials are not expecting delays processing mail ballots. As of Sunday, the vast majority of absentee ballots had been returned.

Trump won 48 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.

New Hampshire (most polls close at 7 p.m. EST):

No information provided about counting mail ballots, but New Hampshire is a small State.

Trump won just under 50 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.

North Carolina (polls close at 7:30 p.m. EST)

Early votes and processed mail ballots, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Biden, will be reported around 7:30 p.m. Election Day results, which are likely to be relatively stronger for Trump, will be reported between 8:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. As of Monday, officials estimate that 97 percent of ballots cast will be reported on election night. Although postmarked ballots can arrive as late as November 12, a clear winner may emerge on election night.

Trump won 52 percent of the two-party vote in 2016.

In general, look to States where most of the ballots have been counted by, say, midnight on election night and compare Trump’s percentage of the two-party vote in those States with the results for 2016. You can guesstimate the outcome by adding and subtracting electoral votes from Trump’s tally in 2016:

If it’s a blowout for Trump or Biden, mostly complete returns by late Tuesday or early Wednesday should tell the tale. If it’s too close to call, look for an election that’s decided in the Supreme Court.

Election 2020: A Penultimate Prognostication

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Tomorrow I will issue a firm prediction about the outcome of the presidential election of 2020. I will base the prediction on the indicators discussed below.

The mood of the electorate was rising sharply in 2012 when Obama was re-elected. Recently, the mood has risen sharply from its COVID-induced depths, which is a good sign for Trump:

Trump’s standing with likely voters has, as measured by Rasmussen Reports, has rebounded to levels well above those attained by Obama at the same point in 2012:

According to White House Watch at Rasmussen Reports, which nailed Clinton’s popular-vote edge four years ago, Biden is not out-performing Clinton:

Biden’s narrow lead and Trump’s standing with likely voters translates into a slight edge in the electoral vote:

If I were calling the election today, I would call it for Trump — subject to the caveat that the outcomes in some key States may well hinge on decisions rendered by Democrat-appointed judges.

Election 2020: Gallup’s Timely Departure

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Gallup isn’t polling Election 2020. It’s polling a lot of related things, but not voters’ preferences as between Trump and Biden. Why is that? It seems that Gallup abandoned the business of presidential prognostication after its poor (but not uniquely poor) sounding of the 2016 presidential election.

Gallup’s final poll had Clinton leading Trump by 4 percentage points, 46 to 42. A 4-point spread surely meant that Clinton would win. But Trump won, despite Clinton’s final 2-point “victory” in the mythical nationwide popular vote. (Why? See this.) Trump exceeded Gallup’s final estimate by 4 percentage points while Clinton bettered it by only 2 percentage points. Game, set, and match to Trump.

It was only the second time since Gallup’s first presidential poll in 1936 that Gallup recorded a clear failure. The first time was when Gallup had Dewey ahead of Truman 50-45 in the 1948 race.

There were several races in which Gallup’s final spread was 2 percentage points or less, so failure in those cases could be attributed to sampling error. Even in those cases, the candidate who was ahead, in Gallup’s estimation, lost only once: Gerald Ford in 1976.

Gallup’s departure signaled a realization that polling had become too fraught with uncertainty because (a) voters have become increasingly reluctant to respond to pollsters. And among those that do, there are more and more voters who are unwilling to divulge their true preferences (e.g., “shy” Trump supporters).

Election 2020 confirms the wisdom of Gallup’s departure from the field. Almost all of the pollsters, including the highly overrated FiveThirtyEight, are predicting victory for Biden. This comes in the face of huge pro-Trump crowds, a late swing toward Trump in Iowa, unusual endorsements of Trump (e.g. police unions, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and Trump’s standing in an unbiased poll, that of Rasmussen Reports.

I’m not quite ready to say that Trump will win. But the outcome will be a lot closer than FiveThirtyEight et al. would like it to be. (Yes,”like” is the proper word.) I will issue my final prediction on the morning of Tuesday, November 3.

Election 2020: Daily Forecast of Electoral Votes

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UPDATED 10/31/20 — IT’S TIED AGAIN.

As of yesterday:

The estimates represented in this graph reflect Trump’s daily strong approval/strong disapproval ratio (derived from the Daily Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports), the relationship between that ratio and Trump’s share of the popular vote (based on White House Watch at Rasmussen Reports), and the relationship between share of popular vote and number of electoral votes (see this).

Previous posts in this series:

Liberty Is at Stake

The Dark Side Is on the March

Keep Your Eye on Rasmussen Reports

The GOP’s Edge in the Electoral College

Some Betting Propositions

Don’t Believe What You Read about Biden’s “Lead” in the Polls

Deja Vu?

Election 2020: Don’t Believe What You Read about Biden’s “Lead” in the Polls

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I have read commentary to the effect that Biden is in better shape now than Clinton was at this point in 2016 because he has a bigger lead in the polls than Clinton did. I believe that observation is flawed because it seems to rely on conglomerations of polls (like those tracked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight), the quality and composition of which varies from day to day, and which has probably changed a lot since 2016.

I follow White House Watch at Rasmussen Reports. It’s superior to most polls because it’s a tracking poll that samples the same group of likely voters throughout a campaign. I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that there’s a lot of overlap between the 2016 sample and the 2020 sample.

The graph below compares Clinton’s and Biden’s lead or deficits against Trump, given the number of days left before election day. As that day draws nigh, Biden is actually doing worse than Clinton.

Notably, the final Rasmussen poll in 2016 hit the popular vote gap right on the head: Clinton “won” the mythical nationwide popular vote by 2 percentage points. And it did her no good because her popular-vote “victory” was the result of lopsided outcomes in deep-Blue States (e.g., California), where extra popular votes didn’t translate into extra electoral votes. I expect the same kind of result this year, though some of the States that went narrowly for Trump in 2016 may flip in 2020.

Election 2020: Some Betting Propositions

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This post is adapted from “Election 2020: Liberty Is at Stake“. I have recast it as a set of 17 betting propositions, which I have in fact offered to a correspondent who is blind to the danger of a Biden victory because he is a “conservative” collabo — and a Trump-hater to boot. To make the bet more interesting, I revised the terms on 10/07/20.

UPDATE (10/11/20): My collabo correspondent has yet to respond to my betting propositions. Like a lot of never-Trumpers, he is cutting off his head to spite his body.

If Biden wins the upcoming presidential election and if Democrats control both the Senate and House from January 2021 to January 2023, I will bet any amount up to $xxxx against your bet of one-half of my bet on the initiation of at least 6 of the 17 items listed below. (My parenthetical comments in the various items are asides, not conditions to be met in deciding the outcome of this bet.) My specific bet is that from January 3, 2021, through January 3, 2023, at least 6 listed actions will be initiated by a presidential executive order, a draft regulation, a legislative proposal from the White House, or a draft bill under consideration by a committee of Congress. Further actions – including but not limited to disapproval of a final regulation, presidential veto of a law, judicial rejection of an enacted law – aren’t relevant here. Initiation of an action, as described above, is what counts in the context of this bet.

Additionally or alternatively:

If Biden wins the upcoming presidential election and if Democrats control both the Senate and House from January 2021 to January 2023, I will bet any amount up to $xxxx against your equal bet on the initiation of at least 9 of the 17 items listed below. (My parenthetical comments in the various items are asides, not conditions to be met in deciding the outcome of this bet.) My specific bet is that from January 3, 2021, through January 3, 2023, at least 9 listed actions will be initiated by a presidential executive order, a draft regulation, a legislative proposal from the White House, or a draft bill under consideration by a committee of Congress. Further actions – including but not limited to disapproval of a final regulation, presidential veto of a law, judicial rejection of an enacted law – aren’t relevant here. Initiation of an action, as described above, is what counts in the context of this bet.

Here are the actions that I am offering to bet on:

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establish a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare unprotected by the First Amendment. (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Rescind the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increase marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Impose new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

*      *     *

I don’t believe that the Democrats would try to launch all 17 of the initiatives in the next two years, or that every initiative that they do launch will become established in law. But I offer the list because it is a good representation of the initiatives that are strongly favored by radicals in Congress, in elite circles, among large swaths of the populace, and in the streets. The list is in keeping with the direction in which the country is headed and, in many cases, has been headed since the 1930s — despite Reagan and Trump, and with the connivance of Ike, Nixon, the Bushes, and (in some crucial cases) the USSC.

The Constitution’s horizontal and vertical separation of powers, system of checks and balances, and limitations on the power of the federal government have been eroded almost to the point of irrelevance. The next few years, if Democrats control the White House and Congress, will put an end to the pretense (or false hope) of governance in accordance with the Constitution as it was written.

Previous posts in this series:

Liberty Is at Stake

The Dark Side Is on the March

Keep Your Eye on Rasmussen Reports

The GOP’s Edge in the Electoral College