The election forecast and it being this close means it never happened. FYI Gilead was also "tough on crime"

I can’t believe what the polls are saying. How are people still not fucking voting?!

Edit: my hope is that there will be a surge on Election Day but oof.

Polls are worthless. It's way too easy to select the people polled to get exactly the result you are looking for.

Polls are dumb

Polls are archaic and inherently skewed because of societal changes. A 2020 study out of Berkeley showed that election polls are 95% confident but only 60% accurate, meaning that while polling outlets are confident that their polls have an accuracy of 95%, in reality only 60% of all poll results successfully predict election outcomes within their margin of error. In point of fact, those margins of error would need to be twice as large as they actually are to achieve that 95% success rate.

https://psyarxiv.com/rj643

The reasons for this are still highly debated. Conventional wisdom suggests that polling results are skewed because more and more often, people don’t have landlines, and the only people who still do fall within older age demographics which skew more conservative, meaning poll results via phone skew more conservative, since pollsters don’t cold-call cell phones.

However, this doesn’t account for everything, since numerous poll outlets like the Pew Research Center have long since moved onto online polling. This makes it difficult to tell what the skew there is, since the method by which they reach out to poll respondents could drastically change their demographics, even if they try to control for a representative sample. Additionally, the wording of poll questions can drastically alter outcomes in ways pollsters may not predict. Poll outlets themselves debate this, but then again, they’re far from as accurate as they think they are, so that needs to be taken with a heaping helping of salt.

Bottom line, it could go either way. Statistically, the party that has the incumbent president tends to lose the midterm elections overall and control of the Legislative shifts to the other party. However, that adage applies to historical circumstances, and these are not traditional political times. The divide between the two major parties has rarely been so stark, perhaps not since the Civil War, and the USSC overturning Roe was galvanizing for a lot of people.

Personally, at this point, I don’t see this conflict being resolved democratically. The system is just too skewed and broken, and we don’t really have an opposition party of the sort we’d need to fight an extremist party like the Republicans; despite the gulf between them, the Democrats are closer to the GQP from a practical standpoint than we’d like to admit. They spent too long trying to play politics as usual, not realizing that their opponents are playing a completely different game by completely different rules, and while they appear to have woken up to that reality, they did so far too late.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I think this is all going to end in blood and violence. Just looking at historical patterns both recent and more distant, I don’t see how this all comes to a peaceful resolution. We probably could have achieved that, but the necessary work would have to have been put in many years ago, and the opportunity has passed because our leadership ignored history in favor of short-term gains.

With any luck, the more intelligent side will win out and fix the necessary issues to give our descendants a chance to avoid the same mistakes. But I believe that is our only way forward at this point. Still going to vote in the faint hope of averting that outcome, but I don’t really believe it’s possible at this point. It’s time to prepare for the inevitable however we can.

Friendly reminder that trying to fight someone online is about as effective as throwing a bagel at a bulldozer. A lot of what we talk about gets people pretty emotional, but be mad at policies, not other users.

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Just vote and get your friends to vote. Knock on doors if you're still stressing. We won't know until next weekend after the votes are counted.

For some reason the polls tend to be accurate, but only when those polls favor Republicans.

Just because there is a pro-choice uproar from the Left does not mean that the vast majority of individuals are pro-choice. According to Gallup, 49% of respondents identify as "pro-choice" while 47% of respondents identify as "pro-life." Asking the public to describe "how most Americans feel about abortion," Gallup also discovered that 51% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-choice" while 35% of respondents feel the public is mostly "pro-life." This general perception that the pro-choice viewpoint prevails contrasts with the nearly even division of actual views.

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