Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

On the changing demographics of who is voting Democratic and Republican in the US

Two interviews with David Shor, one at Politico, one at New York Magazine (thanks to Benj Hellie for flagging the latter).  Shor doesn't seem to know much about the empirical literature on voter behavior, but there are still many interesting observations.  Some highlights from the first interview:

Politics is fundamentally about splitting the country in half. And if college-educated white people are 4 percent of the electorate, like they were in the immediate post-World War II era, you can’t do that. But if they are 38 or 40 percent, suddenly you can. So, it’s unsurprising that as the education share has gone up, we’ve seen this happen.

If you think mechanically about the reinforcing currents that caused this, as college-educated white people enter the Democratic Party and become an increasingly large share of the Democratic Party while the reverse happens to Republicans, that naturally is going to influence who wins party primaries and what kind of people win internal party fights. In practice — given the fact that college-educated whites donate at disproportionate rates and volunteer at disproportionate rates — I think it’s going to be very hard for Democrats to resist the pull of catering to their preferences, which is naturally going to lead to losing votes among people who aren’t them: not just non-college educated whites, but, as we as we saw this cycle, also non-white voters....

There is a broader trend, though, that as college-educated white people become a larger share of the Democratic coalition and a larger share of the Democratic voice, they do pull the party on cultural issues. Non-college educated white people have more culturally in common with working-class Black and working-class Hispanic voters. So, it should be unsurprising that as the cultural power of college-educated white people increases in the Democratic Party, non-white voters will move against us.

The Governor of California should resign

What a disgrace.  It's pretty easy not to have a dinner in a restaurant while people are dying from an infectious disease and you're requiring everyone else to not do this.   He should be crucified for this selfish stupidity.

On Brentano, the teacher

Linguist John Goldsmith (Chicago) comments.

ADDENDUM:  Two caveats:  (1) Professor Goldsmith treats "continental philosophy" as equivalent to 20th-century philosophy in the phenomenological tradition, which is an idiosyncratic usage, even if phenomenology was very important to one strand of philosophy on the European Continent in the 20th-century (it was largely irrelevant to the Marxian traditions in philosophy in the 20th-century); (2) what he calls "the Law of Dynasties" is almost certainly a sociological artifact, as he briefly suggests it might be, and there are many dramatic exceptions (e.g., Frege or Nietzsche).

The "Be Kind" mantra on the "left"

Philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex) comments.  We encountered related nonsense in philosophy cyberspace a few years back from Jenny Saul & co. at their now defunct blog:  as the late John Gardner remarked, "'be nice' is truly the new slogan of the vindictive and intolerant."

"Benford's law" and the election results

In right-wing crazy land, one of the "ideas" floating around is that Benford's Law shows that there's something suspicious about the electoral results in Chicago for Biden.  This is a nice, patient explanation of why this is all nonsense, as one might have suspected:

 

The human need for art in desperate circumstances

Philosopher Sarah Fine (King's College, London) comments.

Far more rural whites thought Trump cared about "people like them" than thought Biden did

Is it because they're racist?  Some no doubt are, but it turns out the majority also want to create pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, make police legally accountable for misconduct, and view white supremacists as a threat, among other striking findings.

As expected, state Republican leaders won't get involved with (illegal) efforts to change the slate of the electors

Political self-preservation triumphs over criminality!

Did suburbanites tired of Trump put Biden over the top?

That's the hypothesis here, and it doesn't bode well for Democrats going forward; an excerpt:

Biden was able to hit the numbers he needed in the crucial highly educated suburbs, but many of these traditionally Republican voters split their tickets down ballot, voting for the Republican in the US Senate and House of Representatives. Despite polls showing clear gains for Biden among white non-college-educated voters in the rural midwest, Democratic gains here were minimal, and in some places, like much of rural Wisconsin, Trump actually increased his margin after it had seemed like Democrats had hit rock bottom in 2016. With the hugely increased turnout, Trump actually netted more votes out of much of the rural midwest than in 2016.

Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. Exit polls show Trump winning more non-white voters than any Republican in a generation. This was most apparent among Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade county, who of course have their own idiosyncratic politics. But losses among Latino voters could also be seen in huge margins in the Rio Grande valley, one of the most impoverished regions in the country, in Osceola county, Florida, and up and down the map from El Centro, California, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Early returns also show consistent gains for Republicans among black voters across the board. Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.

It's hard to undo election results...

...but Trump is, as usual, doing a lot of damage that may come back to haunt us in the future.

The problem with polls

It's not "shy" Trump voters lying to pollsters, it's that the Trump voters aren't the kind of folks who respond to questions from pollsters (what I've been saying all along!):

[I]t turns out that people who answer surveys are really weird. They’re considerably more politically engaged than normal. I put in a five-factor test [a kind of personality survey] and they have much higher agreeableness [a measure of how cooperative and warm people are], which makes sense, if you think about literally what’s happening.

They also have higher levels of social trust. I use the General Social Survey’s question, which is, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” The way the GSS works is they hire tons of people to go get in-person responses. They get a 70 percent response rate. We can basically believe what they say.

Lord Kilclooney of Northern Ireland refers to Senator and VP-Elect Kamala Harris as "the Indian"

Old habits die hard.   But seriously:  what happens if the Mick loses his peerage over this?  Who gets it?  An Indian? A Colored?  A Yid?

Important philosophers/scientists who are theists and who weren't raised in religious households?

A mathematician elsewhere writes:

Are you aware of many (any?) good modern philosophers or scientists who are ardent theists, but who didn't have some kind of childhood religious indoctrination?  In my circle (mostly mathematicians), I haven't yet found such an example.  

I cannot think of any, although I can think of several philosophers who are atheists who were raised in religious households.   Readers?

ADDENDUM:  Just to clarify:  we're looking for cases of people who had no religious upbringing who ended up becoming theists.  People who converted from one religion to another are not relevant in this context. Thanks.

And now for a different perspective

My esteemed former philosophy colleagues from Texas, Daniel Bonevac and Robert  C. Koons, discuss the election here.  They are a bit to my right, hence their different take (scroll into the comments).

(Thanks to a mutual friend who flagged this for me.)

Hume and Trump

When Hume observed that, "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger," he was not thinking of a Trump humiliated. Let us hope the military professionals will be alert over the next three months.

Speaking of "fake news"...

...stories like this purporting to offer evidence-free explanations for Biden's victory are a staple of our media, and no one seems remotely embarrassed about running them.  Why did Biden win?  Here are some possible explanations:  (1) hatred of Trump sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for anyone other than Trump; (2) anger about the pandemic and the economy sent people to the polls to vote against him; they would have voted for any challenger; (3) Republicans and Democrats showed up, voted for their party's candidate, and then the "independent" voters (i.e., those who can't tell the differnce between night and day) showed up and voted on instinct or whim, and it broke for Biden, just barely.

Those three scenarios are at least as plausible (indeed, I'd venture more plausible) than the fictional NYT narrative according to which Biden won because he "campaigned as a sober and conventional presence, concerned about the 'soul of the country.' He correctly judged the character of the country."  

All politics is local

Back to Queens edition:

A 74-year-old Jamaica Estates developer has less than three months left at his current address after Americans overwhelmingly voted him out of the White House, the AP projected Saturday.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, lost his bid for reelection after a days-long vote count, becoming the 11th commander-in-chief to lose the presidency after a single four-year term and the first major-party candidate from Queens to twice lose the popular vote.

As of 11:40 am EST, Fox is the only major media outlet not to have declared Biden the winner

That's bad, but hopefully they will get there soon.  (UPDATE [11:46 AM EST] :  Fox has declared Biden the winner. Whew.)

On the other hand, the Drudge Report headline is "You're fired!" with this photo:

Both Georgia Senate contests head to a runoff

Although Republican incumbent Perdue beat Democratic challenger Ossoff by a couple of percentage points, he failed to get more than 50% of the vote, so they will meet again in a January contest.  The other race everyone knew would lead to a run-off:  incumbent cretinous social parasite Loeffler outperformed another Repug challenger (the two split the Repug vote), but trailed Raphael Warnock, the African-American senior pastor of MLK's old Church in Atlanta.  Note that the Democrats would have to prevail in both contests to have a 50-50 tie in the Senate, which Vice-President Harris would then break for the Democrats.  Gauleiter McConnell would have less power in a split Senate, but individual Senators would have more power to delay or derail agenda items.  (See, e.g., this or this.)   What are the odds that the Democrats prevail in both Georgia run-offs?  I wouldn't think they're very good, and I suspect Gauleiter McConnell will be in charge again come January.  One thing that is sure is that Georgia residents may soon yearn for the days when the only TV ads were for Wendy's and car dealers.

A propos nothing...here's the earliest known recording of Joni Mitchell...

...at age 19, singing "House of the Rising Sun."  It's instantly recognizable as her!  What a voice!

 

It's all over, except the mischief

Biden will win the electoral college:  he is ahead in Pennsylvania, Georgia (wow!), and Nevada (he won Arizona, although some media outlets seem nervous about calling that for him).  Pennsylvania alone gets him over 270, Nevada gets him to 270, Georgia gets him over 270.  All three gets him over 300 electoral college votes, but any one will do it.

What isn't over is the mischief.  Newt "just call me Adolf" Gingrich is already "going there".   The unknown is whether ordinary Republican legislators would go along with such outrageous tactics; my guess is not enough will, for fairly ordinary self-serving reasons:  they will fear being punished at the polls, since it will be quite clear to enough of them that not all their supporters are Trump supporters, and the latter will react with volcanic outrage to such theft of their vote.  Still, the fact that some Repugs are talking like Gingrich is breathtaking, and indicates how far gone we are as a polity.

ADDENDUM:  The legal challenges Trump is mounting are unlikely to make any difference.  (See also this more extended discussion by a leading election law expert.)

ANOTHER:  A hopeful sign is that a good number of Republicans are rebuking the monster-child.

STILL MORE:   Biden is going to win more than one of the outstanding states, meaning Trump would have to prevail in legal challenges on multiple fronts, which will be impossible.

Election open thread

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

I will moderate comments to keep things sane, but you've heard what I have to say, now it's your turn.  Please submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.  Thanks.

All the incumbents in the House of Representatives who lost...

...were Democrats, although Democrats still control the House.  Not a good sign, however.

On the pandemic and voter behavior

Reader Felix Sadeli writes:

Just want to share a thought in response to your blog post.

What I think is often overlooked is that responses to the pandemic by local governments that put heavy emphasis on prohibitions but showing little or no effort in keeping the economy alive are just another side of the incompetence coin.

I live in a blue island amidst a sea of reds in Florida and the local government strikes me as representing that other coin side. In mid-March I lost my two jobs that took me about three months to find. I was not able to get a job again until early August. During the months when I wasn't working, I often wondered what a healthy homeless I would make, living in this fine city that excels at stirring away from the pandemic by running over the economy.

My bet is that economically vulnerable people who were not directly affected by the pandemic saw the disruption to their ability to make a living as more of a threat than the pandemic itself. They may very well have been wrong, of course, but when supposedly millions of Americans are just two paychecks away from homelessness, the danger of pandemic was neither here nor there compared to the prospect of a life ruined by poverty.

There's probably something to this, although one upshot of the Achen & Bartels work on voter behavior is that voters are quite terrible at assigning causal responsibility for the harms that befall them:  so it would be just as plausible that voters would take their economic misfortune out on Trump as they would the direct effects of the pandemic on the health of themselves and their loved ones.

Why are the American stock markets elated with the election outcome?

Readers may recall they were also elated after 2016:  unified Republican government meant give-aways to corporations and the rich, and stock markets love that.   There was the downside that Trump was somewhat erratic and unpredictable and liked trade wars, all of which was bad for business.   Now the stock markets expect the best of both worlds:  a stable guy at the helm, Biden, who will be paralyzed from raising taxes by a Republican Senate.   Hence the booming markets.  Ain't capitalism grand?

Nevada is still undecided

Biden leads Trump by less than 9,000 votes, with tens of thousands of ballots still uncounted.  Although Biden has squeaked out victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, he needs Nevada if he loses Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is very far from being clearly in Biden's camp.  Indeed, given the massive polling errors, I'd bet on Biden losing Pennsylvania at this point, given that he barely won Michigan and Wisconsin where his lead in the polls was greater.  But we won't know about Nevada until tomorrow.  Oh boy.

ADDENDUM:  This generally smart election watcher is more optimistic about Pennsylvania.

USEFUL:   This article (circa 5:30 PM EST) gives the state of play with ballot counting in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.  This article even suggests that the latter two could tip to Biden.  I won't hold my breath.

A ballot initiative in a blue state and what it reveals about the electorate (plus a telling anecdote)

California voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin.  And yet California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have restored affirmative action in public employment and college admissions by at least a dozen points.

One might have thought that affirmative action (or "diversity" as it is now wrongly called) is a staple of the Democratic brand in American politics, yet voters can overwhelmingly prefer the Democratic candidate and yet also overwhelmingly reject this policy.  What might we learn from this?

Affirmative action is deeply unpopular, even with many Democratic voters, because admissions and employment are zero-sum games, and the outcomes of those "games" are perceived to be life-and-death matters, which to some extent they are:  under capitalism, everyone the market doesn't need is disposable, so not getting a job or a spot in a prestigious university can seem a serious matter.  And any perception of according an advantage in this life-and-death struggle to a whole group that one is not part of is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite unpopular with those adversely affected.

More election reflections...

...from Robert Paul Wolff, with whom, as usual, I am sympatico.

Election night post-mortem...

...since the actual election isn't over yet we can't do a post-mortem on that:  but it looks like Biden will just barely win the electoral college, but it's unlikely that the Democrats will take control of the Senate--more on that in a moment.

First, the polls were again mostly worthless (pollsters are the new astrologers).   People who make their living peddling analysis of this garbage data, like Nate Silver, should go get honest work.  Races that were supposed to be close (like Florida and Ohio) were not; states where Biden had big leads (like Michigan and Wisconsin) are states he will win, just barely.  There was some regional variation in how bad the polls were, but the bottom line is that the actual numbers were meaningless:  in large parts of the country, every poll has to be adjusted upwards a few points for Republican voters.  It's not, I suspect, that they're "shy" and not telling the truth about whom they're voting for; it's rather that--thanks to Trump and Fox and Rush Limbaugh--they are not living in a shared space with the rest of us, and view polling, like the "mainstream media," as dishonest and against them, so they simply aren't responding.  That's my best guess, in any case.

Second, as of about 11:30 am EST, it looks likely that Biden will emerge victorious in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada which, even without Pennsylvania, will get him to 270 electoral votes.  Georgia and North Carolina look like they are going for Trump, although they haven't been officially called yet.   But the margin of victory, if that is what it is, is sufficiently close that Trump is likely to try to sabotage it through legal and illegal challenges.  So while it appears Biden is winning the electoral college, we are in territory where the election might yet be stolen, with or without the help of the courts.  Biden's only dramatic triumph was in Arizona, where one suspects his longstanding friendship with the popular late Senator John McCain helped him a lot.

The asteroid has now breached earth's atmosphere...a final dispatch for this evening

It's quite clear, at almost 11 pm EST (well past my usual bedtime!) that there will be no Democratic landslide (Trump is winning Florida, may win North Carolina, doing well in Ohio etc. etc.).  I find this astonishing, although not because I think anyone other than academics and similar professionals are really exercised about Trump's casual racism, his less-casual sexism, or his vulgar mouth (the latter is purely a class-based obsession):  most people don't care, that's been clear for some time.  (It's also not what's really wrong with Trump, but that's a different matter.)  Most people also don't care about democracy or the rule of law, or, if they  care, they have no conception of how Trump is undermining them. 

What astonishes me is the following:  usually voters take it out on a President who presides over their being rammed up their anus with a red-hot railroad spike.  People tend to notice something like that, and they tend to react badly to it.  The pandemic has been that spike, and it has burned everyone directly or indirectly.  Ordinarily, the President who presided over this fiasco would be crucified (and irregardless of his own culpability, although obviously Trump is highly culpable).   But that isn't happening, even if the monster-child ultimately loses.  Somehow some number of voters are actually giving this world-historic incompetent a pass on this catastrophe.   Many dissertations in American politics will no doubt be written about this; Achen and Bartels are probably staying up late tonight. 

Meanwhile, I hope I awake tomorrow to a happy ending, even if the initial results this evening are mystifying.  Good wishes to you all.

A bit after 8 pm EST...the asteroid is hurtling towards earth, but may still be deflected from its course...

...but Trump's margin in hyper-Republican Sumter County in Florida is not notable with almost all votes in (only about two-thirds, not 70% plus, for Trump, and Biden is leading in Erie County in Ohio (which went for Trump last time), both good signs.  But keep an eye on Ashtabula County Ohio, no votes yet (Ashtabula went to Trump in 2016 in a landslide).  As Sartre said, "one must live without hope."

ADDENDUM:  Remember that some states count the mail-in ballots first, while others count them later, which can give a distorted impression of the results in both directions (on the plausible assumption that the mail-in ballots will favor Biden).

A good summary of what to watch for in the election returns

This comes from anti-Trump Lincoln Project:

FLORIDA
Florida—as with every election—is among the most valuable prizes on the map, and among the earliest to report. We should have a result from Florida tonight or in the early hours tomorrow.

Here’s the thing to remember about Florida: it’s a must-win for Trump—it’s not as critical for Biden. If Florida is called for Biden tonight, that’s an almost-sure sign that our country will be turning the page. If Florida goes the president’s way, there are a number of other routes to 270 for Biden.

NORTH CAROLINA & ARIZONA
North Carolina and Arizona are also must-wins for Trump that we should have pretty conclusive calls for by the end of the night. 

Trump’s path to victory is more-or-less by winning the same map he did in 2016. North Carolina and Arizona together count for 26 electoral votes that Trump can’t afford to lose. Either being called for Biden is a great sign.

A good Twitter source on election day

This guy is sober and sensible--he is on record as expecting a Biden win (he also said 2016 was too close to call, unlike most analysts), but he is pretty objective about the evidence as it comes in.

ADDENDUM:  This afternoon he posts that he's going off Twitter, but will be on NBCNews this evening.

When to expect election results, by state

This is useful.   Florida results may come in relatively quickly--if they show a Biden win tonight, that bodes very well.

A hopeful bit of news out of Florida

Rasmussen, a pollster whose polls always favor Repugs, shows Biden ahead of Trump in Florida by four points.  Wow!  We'll know soon enough whether this is a harbinger or noise.

Here's a good preview of the trouble that will start tomorrow night when Trump tries to declare victory...

...and discredit any votes not going his way.  Unless it's a Democratic blow-out, there is going to be trouble and turmoil for weeks if not months on end.

On "anti-hypocrisy"

Philosopher Susanna Siegel (Harvard) comments.

All eyes on Pennsylvania

More election worries.  If Biden takes Florida, this won't matter, but that's a big "if."

Another philosopher on the autism spectrum...

...reflects on the issues we've been discussing.

"Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of all civilized humanity," redux

Case in point.  RAWA knew.

More thoughts on living with autism and social interaction

A very smart former student of mine from the University of Texas, Mark Engelson, who is on the autism spectrum, writes:

I read the post you shared on the blog with great interest, and I share your doubts about ableism.

There are things that I do (at times, not at others) that can be deeply unsettling to others. My voice has a tendency to crescendo without my conscious intention, for example. This is of a piece with a particularly verbose, larger-than-life manifestation of my autism which is, to be fair, a lot. This combines with a distinct lack of grace (I can't drive, and I once broke a partner's toe when I tried folk dancing as a college freshman). As much as I might like to believe otherwise, I can very much be the bull in the proverbial china shop.

While I had some sense of this about myself, it wasn't really clear to me just how unsettling these traits are until I saw them in someone else. I had the opportunity to meet one of my heroes in music - I don't want to call anyone out - but this gentleman does the exact same thing with his voice, and his affect was like a coiled spring that had just done a line of coke. When I spoke to him, I experienced a brief moment of uncertainty in which I was afraid the guy was going to go apeshit - possibly violent - on me; he actually hugged me. While I know of no history of violence by this individual, his bearing had that effect on me.

Another pretend ethnic minority unmasked

An historian at Furman University.   I wonder how many of these cases involve attempts to take advantage of "diversity" initiatives in hiring?  It certainly seems like the clearest grounds on which such fraud could lead to loss of an academic position.

Regional patterns in polling errors in 2016, 2018

Polls underestimated Republican votes in the Midwest, Democratic votes in the Southwest.  Some useful comparisons with Clinton/Trump polls in 2016 too.  Bottom line is this analyst thinks Biden will win.

Academic freedom does not protect your "freedom" not to do your job

It cheapens the value of academic freedom for professors to invoke it as protecting their right not to teach their classes in "solidarity" with what they deem a worthy social movement.    Academic freedom does not cover failure to discharge professional duties; indeed, just the opposite.  Faculty who consistently fail to carry out their professional duties--whether teaching or research--can be terminated consistent with academic freedom. 

Academic freedom protects the freedom of faculty in their teaching and research, subject only to standards of disciplinary competence as assessed by their peers in the discipline.  That means faculty can design their classes as they see fit, and can explore any directions in their research--in both cases, subject only to the constraints imposed by their disciplinary competence.  A sociologist can certainly choose to focus on issues of race in their teaching and research, as long as what they're doing is competent sociology.  But a sociologist teaching a class on race in American society can't cancel class to make a political statement:  academic freedom does not cover that choice.

538 says there's now a 13% chance (up from 12%) of Trump winning the election...

...which might seem like a 13% chance of the apocalypse, so way too close for comfort.  While it would obviously be very bad if Trump were genuinely re-elected--especially for what it says about the level of pathology in this country--it's worth remembering that the other elections count too.  If the Democrats take the Senate and keep the House, then Trump's reelection is much less bad, since his greatest unconstrained power will be in foreign affairs, where he has been fairly benign compared to traditional Republican and Democratic war-mongers.  Domestically, he can still make a lot of mischief (especially if Republican Senators continue to refuse to hold him to account), especially through executive orders and control of administrative agencies.

On the other hand, if Trump is re-elected and the Republicans hold the Senate, that will be much, much worse, since the House can not really hold Trump to account without Senate support, as the impeachment earlier this year (remember that?) made very clear.

On being a philosopher with autism

Parts of this interview are quite eye-opening; for example:

[I]t’s not that uncommon for people to tune me out completely in the way that people in a public setting tune ou[t nearby conversations. The result is that people often treat as empty the space that I occupy in a social situation. For example, they make eye contact with everyone else while their gaze merely passes over me or they fail to hear (literally) my contributions. This treatment is most noticeable when I’m trying to socialize with people who are all, for example, standing around chatting at a conference during a break. Often when a group of people are talking while standing, how they stand in relation to each other depends on the size of the group. A group of four people might be standing at the four corners of a rough square. If one person leaves, then the others temporarily remain standing where they are so that they appear to be standing at three corners of a square, with the fourth corner empty. If no one else comes to fill the space, they tend to move in closer to form a rough equilateral triangle.

A good summary of the backtracking and dissembling by the NYT about its error-ridden 1619 Project

From analysts at the World Socialist Website, which has been at the forefront of exposing the scholarly problems and errors.

Some more reasons to worry about the electoral college map

You can play with the electoral map here.

If you look at the high quality polls at 538 (e.g., those with A-range ratings), Biden is at best slightly ahead in Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona, states that often land in the Republican column.  If those polls are missing anyone, it is surely Trump voters:  folks who believe in QAnon aren't going to be talking to pollsters one suspects.  So let's assume the missing folks all vote Trump, and Florida, North Carolina and Arizona go for Trump again.

Forget about Ohio and Georgia:  those polls sometimes show Biden up by a point or tied, but mostly show Trump ahead.  If Ohio and Georgia really go Democratic, then we're in Biden landslide territory, but I doubt it's going to happen (in part for reasons that some Trump voters reveal here:   that Trump is a bad person isn't enough reason to vote Biden if you basically like Republican policies.  As in 2016, the Democrats are counting too much on "Trump is an awful person.")

So if all the frequent or typical Republican states vote for Trump, that means all Trump has to do is to recapture one of the states he won in 2016.  The best bets are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania:  although Biden leads in both, the lead is not as strong as in Michigan (and nothing like his double-digit leads in places like Virginia).  If Trump flips Wisconsin, then no one wins the electoral college, and oh boy are we in for a nightmare (then, as I understand it, everything will turn on whether the Democrats capture a majority of states in the House of Representatives).  If Trump flips Pennsylvania, then he wins the electoral college, no matter how many millions more vote for Biden in California, Illinois, New York, New England, the Pacific Northwester, Colorado, Minnesota etc.

On the other hand, if Achen and Bartels (Democracy for Realists) are right, then Trump should lose in a landslide because of the pandemic and the economic carnage.  We'll find out soon enough.

QAnon and age-old anti-semitic tropes

Great news that millions of Americans believe this stuff now!  I'll have more to say about this later, but right now I have to get on a conference call with other members of the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy to make some decisions about what kind of economy we want for 2021.

New study of non-voters in the U.S.

Here; from the summary of the main findings:

• Non-voters have less faith in the electoral system than voters. Non-voters say they don’t vote for many reasons, including not liking the candidates and feeling their vote doesn’t matter. Compared with voters, they have less faith in the electoral system, don’t feel they have enough information, and are less likely to think increased participation in elections is good for the country. They are more likely to think “the system is rigged.” 

• Splitting the vote in 2020. If non-voters all turned out in 2020, non-voter candidate preferences show they would add nearly equal share to Democratic and Republican candidates (33 percent versus 30 percent, respectively), while 18 percent said they would vote for a third party.

• Evenly divided on Trump. They are more evenly divided on current political issues and President Trump than previously thought. Fifty-one percent have a negative opinion of Trump, versus 40 percent positive. While non-voters skew center-left on some key issues like health care, they are slightly more conservative than active voters on immigration and abortion.

• Non-voters are less engaged with news and information. They consume less news, are more likely to accidentally “bump into” news rather than seeking it out actively, and more likely to say they don’t feel informed enough to decide who to vote for.

• Eligible Gen Z voters say they are less interested in politics and 2020 election than non-voters. Americans aged 18 to 24 are less interested in politics and less informed. They are the age cohort least likely to say they will vote in 2020, and 38 percent say they don’t have enough information to decide who to vote for.