He’s apparently an idiot, since every time Democrats haven’t won, the entire country has been dragged right.

Immigration is an interesting example of this. Funny enough, when Democrats were in power, policy trended further and further left with amnesty for dreamers and accepting refugees. After losing in 2016, the Democrat position has moved towards stronger enforcement and border security.

If Lawrence has not changed his mind since then, he’s a giant fucking idiot who doesn’t see reality. The problem with not voting for Democrats is that it means Republicans win, and they have a habit of moving all issues to the right.

You want the party to move left? Elect more progressives. Understand why voters are picking moderates over progressives in primaries, and course correct. It isn’t dark money, because there’s been plenty of that thrown around, and fake progressives have had more on hand versus their primary opponents.

Uncountably many

Only an idiot would decide to mindlessly trawl Reddit to train an LLM. They’ll be confused when their model suddenly is confidently wrong about everything and have no clue.

It’s only easier to verify a solution than come up with a solution when you can trust and understand the algorithms that are developing the solution. Simulation software for thermodynamics is magnitudes faster than hand calculations, but you know what the software is doing. The creators of the software aren’t saying “we don’t actually know how it works”.

In the case of an LLM, I have to verify everything with no trust whatsoever. And that takes longer than just doing it myself. Especially because an LLM is writing something for me, it isn’t doing complex math.

Still highlights a vulnerability doesn’t it? The system is only as secure as the most vulnerable piece.

Techbros try to address global warming instead of addressing the next big scam fad (impossible)

I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s a very valid take – and you’re spot on about underestimating Trump but overestimating Republican cohorts in polls. My only qualifier there is that we don’t know if 2022 models were overtuned for only Republicans, or also Trump support.

I don’t know if we can take 2016 as representative of our current dynamic. I think it’s certainly more representative than 2020 however, but shifting populations and world/domestic events have had massive impacts.

In short? I don’t know which outlook is more accurate. What I can reasonably assert though is that the reality will be somewhere between the less optimistic and the more optimistic outlooks. Taking these poll results at face value is probably the better strategic option anyway to create pressure to go vote and campaign.

I agree though, we shouldn’t be totally dismissive of these polls. It’s fine to scrutinize and question them like I’ve said, but it shouldn’t take away from the very real possibility that these are correct. Oddities don’t create impossibilities.

That’s the thing, we don’t know how they’re correcting for it, and if it is just a fudge factor. The issue is there’s more confounding factors that anyone could list which could be the culprit here.

A fudge factor is easy, but the wrong solution here. But the right solution is incredibly complex and difficult to even identify. In my field we can get away with using a timer instead of a precise calculation sometimes. That really isn’t an option for polls. I don’t favor the people trying to fix the models.

To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.

But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.

Huh. Well I’m willing to believe that’s reality then.

This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!

My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.

My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.

It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.

All I know is that I don’t know.

I dislike doubting polls, but there’s just some odd stuff in here.

• 10% go for RFK Jr, and it’s equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
• 20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
• They’re TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
• After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?

This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "

Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don’t make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings – to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.

This isn’t to say this can’t be what’s going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn’t summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.

TLDR: Something’s fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.

Yeah that is something that bothers me. A lot of the affordability isn’t necessarily because of lower quality imo, but because they pay shit wages. It’s why labor is cheaper in China and companies want to outsource there. They don’t pay their workers adequately or have the and level of workplace protections.

I disagree. I’ve met plenty of people who are far left and are all in on working together to stop Trump. Don’t be swayed by the terminally online, vocal “leftists”. We don’t know if they’re even genuine people, and they’re assuredly the minority.

I don’t want to be judged based on a false stereotype, and I don’t think we should judge them on a false stereotype either. The far left is antithetical to Trump.

This is an interesting situation where I disagree personally but agree geopolitically. It’s strong for the domestic economic to keep US automakers competitive.

But damn, cheap EVs would be really fucking nice.

This is the one space where we should never stoop to their level. Kids are off limits unless they’re actual adults. Leave them out of it.

I’m really glad that Barron isn’t going to involve himself here, because I don’t want him to get sucked into this unless he decides it’s what he wants to do.

I can’t really disagree with you. The issue is we have reached the actual point where the current crisis dwarfs all others. Maybe I was just younger then, but it didn’t feel like we had such existential threats in the Bush and Obama years. I remember people said that Romney winning would be the apocalypse, but it’s laughable to say that would’ve been the case in hindsight.

I think what we can take heart in is that we’ve been seeing a gradual increase in progressiveness in the party. And not just a small constant increase, but a significantly growing one. There are a nontrivial number of Congressional members who are incredibly progressive, and they’ve shifted the mood of the party notably leftward. The Inflation Reduction Act was a historic level of climate spending, to the point that Europe felt pressured to pass similar legislation. And the IRA actually closed the corporate tax loophole too – large corporations raking in billions in profits now have to pay a minimum 15%, even if they could previously loophole their way to $0.

I wish things were faster. Gaza in particular has highlighted to me just how frustrating it is for things to only improve at a snail’s pace. And specifically with Gaza, I don’t think the progress is actually amounting to material changes.

We are seeing material changes in other areas though. Healthcare could be a hell of a lot better, but as someone who relied on Obamacare for a few years, things have actually improved for people. The important thing is that we don’t lose heart, and that we keep pushing for better. The US has a rich history of leftists persevering to accomplish women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor rights, and gay rights and equality. As long as we press forward, just like they did, we’ll be successful. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice and good.

If we could just bury the fascists for good, we could start to make serious progress.

The API is apparently obscenely expensive to use

Pretty much. This is going to keep cropping up until we deal a decisive loss to fascism. They need to be beaten by huge margins.

We’re gonna need a bigger tent