Luciom,

This entire argument is just terrible. First, you have no evidence that the Clinton campaign or the DNC wanted the polls to be skewed in favor of HRC. It's true in some game theory scenarios both inside and outside of politics that undecided people want to be on the winning side. But in politics specifically, it is also true that people tend to stay home when they perceive that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Low turnout is the last thing that Democrats want in presidential elections. There is a reason why, in every election, supporters of the Democratic party do public service announcements encouraging people to vote.

Second, you have no evidence that the Clinton campaign or the DNC actually caused polls to be skewed in favor of HRC.

Third, as you yourself have acknowledged, pollsters were subject to a lot of criticism after the Trump won the 2016 election. We can debate how much of that criticism was valid and how much of it was the product of statistical illiteracy, but in any case, it was entirely foreseeable the pollsters would be skewered if Trump won. Your proposition is these people were willing to take on a significant risk of embarrassment (and perhaps damage to professional reputation) in order to skew polls in favor of HRC. That seems highly improbable to me.

Fourth, a lot of these polling companies have been around for many election cycles. They do not inevitably skew in favor of Democrats. To the contrary, there have been plenty of presidential elections in which the polls correctly suggested that the Democrat would lose.

Deuces,

Based on your self-reporting, it seems obvious that you could outperform nearly everyone in nearly any area. Given your prodigious abilities, should I assume that you are, in fact, a person of considerable importance and influence in the world? And if you aren't a person of considerable importance and influence in the world, should I assume that you have made some sort of deliberate choice to keep a lower profile?

I wouldn't go that far, but I have trouble seeing how anyone couldn't see that Dalton is a much better QB than Young. The whole coaching staff and the locker room had to know this. And yeah, I am the type of person to question authority, obviously. And it could only have been authority of the owner keeping Young in the starting role.

It's funny you choose that example because it is precisely the strategy to be obsequious to power to maintain their relative position that differentiates the liberals from the Left. The situation is emblematic of the liberals relationship to capital. Any Leftist would be stronger on meritocracy and would have absolutely benched Young last season and into this season as well. I might have even had the offensive players vote on it. You, who does not question authority, would have maximized your chances to keep your job by sucking up to the owner who clearly was invested in Young working out. Only when you figured Young's continued starting would hurt your career more than sucking up to the owner would help it would you then lobby to bench Young.

It isn't unusual for terrible teams to let younger players with more upside get experience at the expense of veterans, even if the veteran might give the bad team a somewhat better chance of winning in the immediate term. This is especially true if the team is looking toward its position in the upcoming draft.

The problem is that Young probably doesn't have upside. He never plays well. And that offense was so bad that they were alienating their fan base by continuing to run him out there.

To be fair his claim is even dumber than that. He’s talking about aggregators who simply took polls and spit out a probability Trump would lose. They have very little power. The polls had Trump losing so the models gave Clinton a higher chance of winning. Any aggregator saying Trump was 70% to win would have been ignored. People that had Clinton at 99% made a basic error of saying (Trump needs to outperform his polling by 2% to win, the odds of that are 20%, so the odds of him doing it in PA, MI and WI are about .8% when really it was much closer to 20%.

139

While this explanation seems entirely reasonable, it leaves no room for malfeasance by "teh leftists", so I'm afraid we will sadly have to discard it.

Oddly specific. How does a 110 tell the difference between a 135 and a 140?

Some discussion? Bro you realized that there were people trying to hand the alternate slates to the VP so he could count them, right? This was on the day of certification. At the behest of the president. With him putting Pence on blast through twitter and in his speech

I don’t think I could win with the panthers no matter what. I also don’t think I could have trump leading by 10 either. But I have a non delusional understanding of my own abilities.

As for Young, I didn’t know he’d be as bad as he has been, no idea CJ Stroud would be as good and don’t know where Caleb Williams will end up either. You probably already know though.

The guy is (most likely) a previously banned bad faith clown/troll. You're wasting your time.

Try to reread my argument though, given it was about AGGREGATORS not polling companies.

Dunno what you mean by that, they were discussed 24/7.

Yes they made a similar "mistake" in your eyes as that done by some insurers with subprime mortgages, "what are the odds the same bad thing with default rates happens in northern Ohio, and southern Nevada", except it's such a silly thing to imagine they don't know how something can correlate nationwide and that those aren't independent events, that you have to presume bad faith

Just because I say I could guide the Trump campaign to victory doesn't mean scores of others couldn't also do so. Trump is listening to his fail son and out of touch billionaires. I think most political strategists and many observers could see much better paths towards a Trump victory. Just because I say I could do something doesn't mean I alone could do it.

I don't really believe in individual influence on the grand chessboard. I think that is a less and less significant phenomena over time. Lincoln yeah ok. It mattered that Lincoln the individual existed and was the way he was. And if he hadn't been killed we might be living in a radically different world now. Cut to the 90's and to Bill Clinton who famously asked (paraphrasing) "so I've got to do what a bunch of bond traders tell me to do?". Even Elon Musk has to go to Israel and kiss the ring because he tweeted the wrong tweet. He realized the Twitter business model depends on cooperation with other capitalists. He can't even do whatever he wants and he's the richest man in the world.

Power and influence are institutional phenomena. One could point at Trump, a political phenomenon very unique and very much tied to the specific person of Trump. But when he was in office he didn't do anything that upset the establishment outside of his rhetoric. And when he issued the order to assassinate Assad the generals told him no we're not doing that. Trump said he was going to drain the swamp. Once he got in we saw all the nastiest swamp monsters from Goldman etc. appointed to powerful positions.

Finance capital runs this. Other institutions have some influence. Individuals don't really matter and the ones who are delusional enough to think they do are the ones who cozy up to capital are in reality are just sitting on daddy's lap pretending to steer the car while the superstructures with actual power are there to correct any deviance from he path of "infinite" growth and eventual self destruction.

They take polls and spit out a result. If Trump was leading in polls they cant say Clinton is 70% either. That are totally at the mercy of their inputs. Most people get that.

The same arguments would apply to aggregators.

I don’t know anyone else who thinks they can have Trump winning by double digits other than Trump himself.

I consider it in the context of the population being dissatisfied with either choice and there being a lot of potential for more popular candidates. It's hard to remember but there was a time when large portions of the population were voting for something rather than for the negation of the worse option. A pretty small percentage of people actually like these candidates. Kamala didn't even win a primary vote even with all the backing of the establishment power. There is a lot to attack there and the line of her being a Marxist is one of the dumbest attack lines which could be taken which is even plausibly effective. Trump could make himself look a lot more attractive by exploiting the gap between what people want and and the policies in place and he could make Kamala look a lot worse if the attacks he chose weren't based on wingnut derangement.

You should blog your 6 months worth of predictions and we can revisit them and your skill set later rather than just claim how good they are after the fact.

I predict that he will come up with an excuse not to do this. What do I win?