BigAppleBucky

Bill Maher - Civil War

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Wisconsin posted data today showing republicans leading in both registrations and mail ins by a nice margin, so unless 100% of walk in early voting went to Biden, this poll is dog shite.

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That cannot be known since Wisconsin does not track that information.

If you look at the states releasing information, Wisconsin is not among them.

I wish there was a more recent Marquette Law School poll than October 4. For Wisconsin they have been the gold standard. The poll they released on the 7th, with data from the 4th had Biden at 46%, Trump 41%, and Jorgensen at 5%. That implies 8% undecided, which is a lot for this election. And, of course, a lot has happened since the beginning of the month.

Ah yes, Jason Miller.
Jason Miller

Jason Miller:
- Doesn't pay child support.
- Has admittedly hired prostitutes.
- Was accused of drugging a stripper with an abortion pill.

So, of course he works for Donald Trump.

Trump can still win, but he's going to have to be amazing at the debate or Biden really bad Thursday night. Some 20 to 30% of the votes are in already and polling indicates only about 2% of remaining voters are undecided.

I doubt some October surprise will make a difference.

Most likely Biden will be projected the winner on election night, though much of the counting of absentee ballots will take an extra two weeks in some states. Final tallies won't be done until December.

I know how it works in New York. The Board of Elections doesn't even start counting absentee ballots until the day after the election and that's only with a part of their staff since the majority are collecting the tabulators from election sites and safely securing them for a day or two.

Every step in the process must be witnessed by both a Republican and a Democrat. That ensures fairness, but also slows things down.

We are likely to have races (not the presidential) that are counting and recounting votes at least half way through November and probably to the end of the month.

In 2016 nationwide polls had Hillary getting 45.7% of the vote and Trump 41.8%. The final nationwide results were Hillary 48.2% - Trump 46.1%. Instead of a 3.9% gap it was only 2.1%. 1.8% off which isn't huge. Not like Truman-Dewey in 1948.

Of course the 2016 polling in critical states missed the shift in voters over the last ten days of the election after the Comey letter. That was where they really missed.

The thing is there were fairly large numbers of undecided voters in 2016. This year the undecideds add up to only 2%, or so.

Polling organizations are also trying (successfully??) to accurately gauge state by state numbers better than in 2016. My former home Wisconsin, for example, has been polled much more in 20 than 16.

We'll know in about three weeks. (I'm allowing for a week after November 3 to count absentee ballots.)

US spies say the Hunter Biden email controversy shows how 'exploitable' and 'grotesquely vulnerable' Trump and Giuliani are to Russian intelligence


Business Insider story

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Former spooks told Business Insider that Rudy Giuliani's role in coordinating a widely discredited New York Post story and President Donald Trump's willingness to seize on it highlights how vulnerable they are to being duped by Russian intelligence.

Federal authorities are currently investigating whether purported emails in the story featuring communications between Hunter Biden and a Burisma Holdings executive were part of a foreign influence operation.

Giuliani's access to Trump, the two men's personality traits, their eagerness to obtain dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, and unwillingness to acknowledge Russian interference makes them a goldmine for foreign intelligence services, ex-spies said.

They are "grotesquely vulnerable, exploitable targets" and "any foreign intelligence service would be derelict if they did not try to exploit this," said a former CIA covert operative.

Steve Hall, the CIA's former chief of Russia operations, also said Trump and Giuliani's tendency to traffic in conspiracies and the rise of misinformation in right-wing media mean "we're doing a lot of [Russia's] work for them."

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Trump may end up at Rikers Island by the end of 2023 if he loses re-election: legal experts

Yahoo Story

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If President Donald Trump loses re-election, he could find himself the first ex-president to be charged with a crime.

More than a dozen investigations are already under way against Trump and his associates, so his potential legal exposure is "breathtaking," according to New York Magazine columnist Jeff Wise.

"You might think, given all the crimes Trump has bragged about committing during his time in office, that the primary path to prosecuting him would involve the U.S. Justice Department," Wise wrote. "If Joe Biden is sworn in as president in January, his attorney general will inherit a mountain of criminal evidence against Trump accumulated by Robert Mueller and a host of inspectors general and congressional oversight committees. After the DOJ's incoming leadership is briefed on any sensitive matters contained in the evidence, federal prosecutors will move forward with their investigations of Trump."

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GOP Senators and others are jumping ship in anticipation of a Trump loss. As I said, he can avoid federal prosecution by allowing Pence to become president and pardon him.

But he cannot avoid NY State prosecution that way.

Huge Absentee Vote in Key States Favors Democrats So Far

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In Wisconsin, about 146,000 people voted by mail in the 2016 general election. This fall, about 647,000 people have already voted absentee, many in Democratic strongholds.

In Madison, Wis., thousands of people have gone to parks to deliver their ballots during Saturday voting festivals. In Milwaukee, Facebook feeds are inundated with selfies of Democrats inserting ballots into drop boxes. And along the shores of Lake Superior, voters in Wisconsin’s liberal northwest corner still trust the Postal Service to deliver ballots.

Of all the mini-battlegrounds within Wisconsin — perhaps the most pivotal state in November for both President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. — the mother lode of absentee ballots is coming in Dane County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Madison. As of Friday, the number of submitted ballots there amounted to more than 36 percent of the county’s total 2016 election vote, a sign of significant enthusiasm; that figure is 10 percentage points higher than in any other county in the state.

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I thing it's fair to say more Republicans, probably significantly more, plan to vote November 3.

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City officials in Madison, Wis., dispatched 1,000 poll workers to help voters and collect ballots in city parks the last two Saturdays. Credit...Lauren Justice for The New York Times

This was predicted by nearly everybody.

In general, Democrats are more fearful of COVID than Republicans and would naturally be more likely to vote absentee or early.

There were three hour lines yesterday to vote early in Ohio. No way in the world would I wait that long to vote early.

20% of the world's deaths, only 4% of the population. In spite of the USA supposedly having the best medical care in the world.