Google’s Conceit

Mountain View, California

My problem with the O’Keefe docdump and expose on the Goolag:

It’s Google’s conceit.

People are still eating the rotten dog food that tech swayed 2016, because the false notion that tech swayed 2012 wasn’t adequately refuted in terms of full public understanding.

Whatever happens in 2020, presuming there’s a 2020 in the way we think there will be, will have nothing to with Google, Facebook or Twitter, or any such.  I predict that whatever happens 2020 will happen because of the same old fashioned time honored political factors that caused the binary outcome in 2016, 2012, the dog catcher election Podunkville in 1937, and everything in between.

I suppose what it’s going to take is for Google et al. to “crack down” as hard as they think they can, Trump wins anyway, then people finally figure out that tech doesn’t matter that much.

As Inevitable as a Tornado in Oklahoma in May

Burlington, Vermont;  Canberra, NCT, Australia

FEC raps Bern’s knuckles for what an O’Keefe expose turned over.

Reality check.

Your temptation is to snicker and make fun of Bern.

The problem is that since the United States of America is for all intents and purposes an empire, and itself a democratic republic, and with many client, vassal, protectorate and semi-protectorate states in its aegis that also happen to be democratic republics, including Australia, it’s inevitable that we will interfere in their elections and they in ours.

What is a bit surprising is that there is anyone left in the Australian Labour Party that Feels the Bern.  That party is as thrown in to plutocratic gentry urban cosmopolitan neoliberalism as are the American Democrats.

Fool Me Twice

Manhattan

There’s something a little bit disconcerting going on within the Trump Tent.

What got me thinking about this and thinking this way is when we found out a few days ago that the OCGE is hiring his own digital-data-online manager from 2016, Brad Pascale, as his overall national campaign manager for 2020, (even though I don’t think he’ll have to worry about that).  On top of that, there’s this from a few days ago about the Trump 2016 campaign’s data game, and of course Pascale is mentioned.

What is disconcerting to me is that Trump is making the same mistake Obama did.

Remember, after Obama eked out re-election in 2012, for months and months after election day, all we heard about was the invincible juggernaut that was the Obama-DNC data game, and how it and it alone pushed Obama over the line.  Then in the middle of the next year, the Census Bureau released its voter turnout analysis, and found that the niche constituencies that the Obama 2012 data game heavily appealed to had lower turnout rates than they did in 2008, and that combined with other post-election surveys which showed that those same constituencies voted Obama at slightly less percentages (even if for him at landslide proportions) in 2012 compared to 2008, should have ended all the MUH DATA talk forever.  Too, for the fact that the constituency that saved Obama’s bacon in 2012, elderly black women (EBW), aren’t really on the data game radar, and also for the fact that the way the Obama-Romney politics worked out, swing state rust belt workding class whites (SS RB WCWs) just weren’t feeling Willard.

Yet and still, almost everyone that drank the MUH DATA kool-aid before mid-2013 kept on believing it.

Fast forward to the present, Trump is making the same mistake, assigning way too much credit to MUH DATA for his own win.  Hence, giving Pascale the store for 2020.

Seriously, are we to think that Trump was able to flip the 2012 script in 2016, lowering the turnout of EBW and boosting the turnout of SS RB WCWs, because of Pascale’s clever use of Facebook?  How many EBWs and SS RB WCWs are even on Facebook?  The answer is hardly any — Old fashioned politics caused their voting or non-voting habits both in 2012 and 2016.

The Memo

Washington, D.C.

Nothing more than what we the tuned in people already knew.

The highly politicized FBI bought into the same conventional wisdom and Silver Mines handouts that just about everyone else did.  You know, ZOMG 97.3% ODDS LOL~!!!!!1.  All the FBI was doing was banking on inevitability and getting ready to please the new boss same as the old boss.

Whether anyone will ever face the music for this, I have my doubts.  After all, I don’t exactly see the inevitable President wearing leg irons and slumming in Alderson in Martha Stewart’s old cell.

Subtraction Is Addition

London

NBC:

Archbishop of Canterbury baffled by Christians who back Trump

England’s top religious authority, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said Sunday that he doesn’t understand why so many Christians in the U.S. support President Donald Trump.

The Most Reverend Justin Welby told ITV’s “Peston on Sunday” program that he “really genuinely” can’t comprehend why fundamentalists have provided such a strong base for Trump.

They were told for decades to drop the social issues, and in 2016, they did.

Simple math:

Religious right minus social issues equals populist-nationalist.

My Unique Take on Donna Brazile Going Rogue

Washington, D.C.

Aside from the fact that I think her whole book is a gigantic post hoc CYA, and while I do think the DNC at the official level both attempted to rig the 2016 Democrat Presidential primaries and essentially merged with the Clinton political machine, I have never bought into the notion that any of that was the proximate cause of HRC winning the nomination ergo Bernie Sanders not, and even more than that, that outcome would have happened even if such rigging would have never happened.

That’s because there’s a very simple and obvious explanation for HRC’s margin of victory over Bernie:

Black voters.

They were the singular difference in:  (1) HRC winning more states than Bernie, (2) HRC winning more vote-determined delegates than Bernie, and (3) HRC winning more total primary and caucus raw votes than Bernie.  Which means they were the singular difference in HRC winning the nomination overall, because the superdelegates lined up behind her once all three of these things became known.  Back out all black voters, and Bernie wins more states, more regular delegates, more raw votes than HRC, at which time the supers would have fallen in line behind him and given him the nomination.

Another thing that has to be addressed, one of those lies that made it halfway to the other side of the world before the truth was able to get out of bed and put its boots on, is that Donna Brazile never claimed she had the unilateral plenary power to swap out the Clinton-Kaine ticket for a Biden-Booker ticket after HRC’s fainting spell on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.  Personally, I don’t think she was ever really considering doing that in terms of something she wished she could have done, because I don’t remember the political gossip circuit lighting up at the time that she had those desires.  In fact, in searching my own posts, the only entry I have for September/October 2016 with Brazile either in the title or text is a short allusion to this minor scandal that broke about her during that time, but nothing about swapping out Presidential nominees.  I think that is just something she’s saying now for what I just said — post hoc CYA.

Whatchya Doin, Hillary?

Brooklyn

Just as we in the Alt-Right see spray painted swastika and immediately think, “Whatchya doin’ Rabbi?,” and we see KKK graffiti and immediately think, “Whatchya doin’ Leroy?,” turns out this whole MUH RUSSIA thing was purely a matter of “Whatchya Doin’ Hillary?”

The only way she comes out of this smelling less bad than she otherwise would is if we learn in the long run that the British intel agents exclusively made up the golden showers documents, which of course were the proximate causation of any and every element of the phony “Russian collusion” hysteria/investigation, and at the same time there is affirmative evidence that she thought they were real.  My instincts tell me that she knew that she was paying for hoax documents even if she didn’t help concoct what was in them.  My cynicism informs me that more than that, she was part of the fabrication of the contents.

The much ballyhooed indictment of Paul Manafort, (a matter of Robert Mueller digging for gold and accidentally finding copper), is a paintball that is way more likely to splat in the face of the 2016 Democrat Presidential nominee than the fact of the 2016 Republican Presidential nominee.  Speaking of, when the news broke that Manafort was being indicted, I bet a certain Corey L. did a boogy woogy victory dance.

Already Two Years

Manhattan

Trump rode down the escalator two years ago today.

Here was my reaction about that on that day.

The Data Game Doesn’t Matter (That Much)

Brooklyn

Politico:

Clinton: I was the ‘victim’ of an assumption that I would win

And also, the victim of a vast right wing conspiracy.

(snip)

Clinton hit at the Democratic National Committee, too: The DNC, she claimed, handed her an inferior data operation when she won the party’s nomination last summer, while the Republicans had invested heavily in data infrastructure between 2012 and 2016.

But wait!  All we heard for four years was that the Democrats’ data game was first rate and first class.  Now we have to sit hear and listen to her caterwaul about the DNC’s inferior data operation?

From what I can ascertain, DNC/HRC’s data game > RNC/Trump’s, in 2016, and DNC/Obama’s > RNC/Romney’s in 2012.  So, why were the actual outcomes different?

Because in politics, big data don’t matter that much.  See also:  Debates, money.  Sure, you have to have a good enough data game, even if it’s not better than the other person, and you have to do well enough in debates, even if you don’t win them, and you have to have enough money, even if the other person has more.  Data, debates and money are pass/fail propositions, not competitive gradations.  If you pass all three, then the election comes down to other, traditional, way more important factors.

Because the techiest areas of the country are also some of the bluest, that’s why the blue team party will generally and consistently have a better data game than the red team.  From there, it’s a matter of how the data are used:  In 2012, the Obama team thought they used it well, but later we found out that what they used was irrelevant to the outcome of Obama’s victory.  Mainly because the niche “coalition of the ascendant” coalition that the Obama team data game revolved around had a lower turnout rate.  In 2014, the Democrats had more data, but the Republicans used their inferior infrastructure more effectively, by being able to identify, effectively target and turn out the right kind of niche constituencies, especially sporadic turnout red team leaning people.  In 2016, once again, D > R, but, based on bad assumptions which in turn were based on their hubris, Team HRC misused their superior data.

Heavy Weather, Many Many Many Miles Ahead

Atlanta

The GA-6 hoopla serves as a backdrop for the Silver Mines telling us what we figured out quite some time ago and predicted long before that.

I’m going to take it a step further and reiterate the prediction I made here three years ago that these are gray skies that will remain over blue team club house for a very long time to come.  Provided the democratic republican system is still extant when this happens, i.e. provided there isn’t some drastic political upheaval, one sort of which this neoreactionary is hoping for.  Voting, in voting-intensive political climates with a lot of black people, is something black people really want when they don’t have it, and will use if they get it from a vantage point of never having it before, but like the toy that a six-year old just has to have but quickly gets bored with it, given enough time, black people will get bored with the franchise, and once all the black people who have any conscious memory of a time when they couldn’t vote have become mentally incapable and then moved on to the next world, the black voting rate is going to fall very precipitously, in ways that would shock even Nate Silver.

Something tells me that someone in the blue team deep state has also figured this out, and that’s why that party so badly wants mass immigration.

Case Closed

Washington, D.C.

It wasn’t the “Russians.”

It wasn’t Kim Dotcom.

It was Seth Rich.

Don’t count on this Russia hysteria to go away, oh no.  Remember, the Fergaza Strip became a closed case on August 18, 2014, a mere nine days after the precipitating event, and by the time August 18 was over, we had both the first autopsy of the remains of GENTILIVUS GIANTIVUS, and also the Ferguson Market’s surveillance footage.  Yet, to this day, coming up on three years on, the fictional narrative is still being used as a justification for various peoples’ and groups’ pet agenda items.

As I Figured

Washington, D.C.

Census lets loose of 2016 voter demographics research data, as the Bureau tends to do in May or June following the November elections of even-numbered years, Presidential or midterm.

The main conclusion was that black turnout was way down, compared to the two Obama cycles.  That’s something I knew would happen before it actually happened, and after it happened, I was able to confirm my own prediction which turned out to be correct with the fact that the raw total vote counts from heavily black counties and jurisdictions in 2016 was significantly down compared to 2012.  For instance:  St. Louis City had 144k total votes in 2012 compared to 129k in 2016.

Also, this same data set showed that 18-24 yo voters turned out way less in 2012 than they did in 2008 or even 2004.  Though they had a mild increase in 2016 compared to 2012.  The importance of that is that we had to hear a lot of noise in the 2012 postmortem about young voters, Millennials and the coalition of the ascendant.  Then, the Census Bureau in June 2013 came out with this same research, and showed that Obama’s re-election rode on the backs of stratospheric turnout among middle aged and elderly black women.

Electoral College Versus Popular Vote

What’s the Matter With That One State Over from Kansas?

Marceline

Thomas Frank does Walt Disney’s home town and north central Missouri in general.

This little spreadsheet may shed some light on the situation.

Your Turn

Washington, D.C.

Four years ago, the red party got their autopsy wrong.  Mostly due to donor pressure, they deliberately misdiagnosed the cause of death, and promised to double down on that which caused them to lose, that which crucially marginal voters found abhorrent.  Luckily for the red party, an orange crowned spirit descended from the sky and down an escalator to save them from themselves in the time since then.

Now, it’s the blue party’s turn to get their autopsy wrong, and the double down on that which caused them to lose.

Coronal Options

USA

Me, November 10:

We were lectured in the current year that white evangelical/born-again voters would sour on Trump because of his personal life and his social issue liberalism.

In 2012, Romney carried 78% of them.  That matched the record for that group voting red, with Bush 2004.  That was important, because there was a fashionable theory that white evangelical/born-again voters soured on a Mormon, and this statistic refuted that.

That record is now gone.

Trump got 81% of them.

The Atlantic, three days ago:

Many of those 81 percent are accommodating cultural changes in America that are deeply problematic. Liberals have been trying to convince Americans, and evangelicals in particular, that America is not a Christian nation. The 2016 election was evangelicals saying, “Yeah, you’re right! We can’t expect to have someone who is Christian like us. We can’t expect to have someone with a perfect family life. What we can expect is someone who can look out for us, just like every other group in this country is looking for a candidate who will look out for them.”

An easier way to say this is that when the traditional Evangelical issue base is taken off the table, they won’t stay home, but instead fall back on populism and nationalism in other issues.  And that’s how you get to 81%.  This also means that the very people who have been demanding that these issues are taken off the table can’t turn right around and blame the people they wanted not to have this choice for not thinking about these things when casting their votes.  It was like:  “The social issues shouldn’t matter anymore” on the one hand, but “How could you vote for such a lecher like Trump?” on the other hand.

Medieval Scholastic Nitpicking

Alexandria, Virginia

Aww, isn’t that cute?  He’s in the same line of work I am, (or at least I am for two more days), and he’s goosing a pseudo-scientific narrative around his and his firm’s ideological-professional interests!  They’re so cherubic when they do that!

The cynic in me (though I repeat myself) senses that this is far more a paid advertisement than a bona fide op-ed.

“But look but look but look!  Trump didn’t do as well as Romney south of Nashville and north of Columbus!”

That’s right, President Romney does have that to his credit.

Wait what?

A Few Screaming Foilheads

Jefferson City

Couldn’t prevent Missouri’s ten electors from voting for Trump/Pence this morning at the Capitol.

“Respect the will of the people,” it says here that one protester yelled.

That they did.

Turning Georgia Blue

Atlanta

Or trying to.

Yeah, that’s what that was all about.

In Even More Stark Terms

USA

A website called Rynerohla has, since about a week after Election Day, been compiling and adding red-blue maps of states by precinct.

It just added Illinois today.  Before you click, your browser will probably downscale this very large (7000 x 9280) image to fit your browser.  If you click on it to make it native size, it will take a few seconds to show.

Just looking at it, without knowing anything else, you wonder how Trump didn’t win it.  But then you come back to your senses and realize that there are a whole hell of a lot of people where all the blue is up in the upper right corner.

Demography Really Is Destiny

Vista, California

Darrel Issa had to eke out a re-election win.

Let me repeat:

Darrel Issa.

His district includes southern Orange and northern San Diego County, some of the last red areas in SoCal.

Though since it also includes Camp Pendleton, and the Democrat is a retired Marine Colonel, that explains part of it.

Also, the scant few remaining Republican House members from SoCal won easily, including Duncan Hunter and someone on Trump’s short list for SoS, Dana Rohrabacher.

But, on the flip side, for the first time since the Depression, Orange County was not red in a Presidential election.

Thinking Cap

Washington, D.C.

WaPo:

Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election

By Jim Tankersley

In the modern era of presidential politics, no candidate has ever won the popular vote by more than Hillary Clinton did this year, yet still managed to lose the electoral college. In that sense, 2016 was a historic split: Donald Trump won the presidency by as much as 74 electoral votes (depending on how Michigan ends up) while losing the nationwide vote to Clinton by 1.7 million votes and counting.

But there’s another divide exposed by the election, which researchers at the Brookings Institution recently discovered as they sifted the election returns. It has no bearing on the election outcome, but it tells us something important about the state of the country and its politics moving forward.

The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.

(snip)

As Muro notes, many state legislatures are divided on similar grounds, between higher-output metro areas and lower-output rural ones. Often, that divide pushes governors of those states, even the ones who hail from cities, to push hard for economic development in lower-output areas.

Uh, Jim? That’s precisely why Trump won.

Think it through.

Recount Schmeecount

Brooklyn

FYI, Michigan has already been recounted, because its preliminary margin was Trump +0.3, and there was very little change post-recount.  In contrast, the preliminary margins out of the two other supposedly contestable states are +1.0 (WI) and +1.2 (PA).  In both instances, Trump won far beyond the margin of lawyer.

It’s all about Jill Stein raising money, and the left prefabricating the narrative that Putin hacked voting machines in crucial swing states.  Critical self-introspection…absolutely prohibited.

Dueling Narratives

Washington, D.C.

A Shredded Rose By Any Other Name

Brooklyn

What’s really going on here?

The “fake news” excuse is wearing thin, so they’re slowly going to dog whistle that Putin hacked the voting machines.

But didn’t Putin also hack Facebook to insert fake news?

Hillary’s Choice

Youngstown, Ohio

From the above:

The [Mahoning County, Ohio Democrat Party] chairman feels very strongly now that Clinton could have won Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan if she had just kept her eye on economic issues and not gotten distracted by the culture wars.

That’s the shot. Here’s the chaser:

Meaning, who has time to care about burgeoning income, wealth and resource inequality and increasingly centralized power of the government-corporate borg when someone somewhere said something transphobic?

Somewhere, HRC is probably still hung over.

In and Out Burgers

Washington, D.C.

The generic Congressional vote in 2016 was 50.1% R, 47.2% D, yielding a 239-146 Republican majority, with the two Louisiana runoffs pending, though one will actually be R, because its runoff is R versus R, and the other, while R versus D, is most likely an R win.

Which means we won’t be hearing noise about gerrymandering for the next two years.  Even though in lieu of that, we will be hearing about the Electoral College.

ICYMI, I told you two years ago why this gerrymandering noise is just hot air.

ICYMI, here’s something else I was right about, the last paragraph.

Paranoia Is Sexy, Reality Is a Basic Bitch

Manhattan

A few current years ago, if you read a lot of nodes that later came to be known as alt-right, you read these two speculated truisms about conventional politics:

(1) The Iraq War was such a debacle that the American national electorate would never again trust the Presidency to a Republican (or even a Democrat) that was too close to and comfortable with neoconservative foreign policy ideology.

(2) Paul Ryan’s toying around with relatively drastic changes in Social Security and Medicare cost Mitt Romney the state of Florida.

And what happened this year?

The Republican nominee all but wrote a promise in his own blood to leave SS&M as-is, and said with enough credible evidence to be believed that he opposed the Iraq War.

And guess what?  He won both Florida and the Presidency.

Among other reasons why he did.

Easy, practical, easily digestible.

But no, it’s much more sexy to cook up theories that Vladimir Putin hacked Facebook to insert fake news in its news feed.

Jus’Sayin

North Dakota

Trump won North Dakota by 36, compared to Romney only winning it by 20, and this is in spite of Gary Johnson getting 6% this year, compared to 2% four years ago.

North Dakota was supposed to be one of those too-nice-for-Trump too-cool-for-school states.

Midweek Orange Crowned God-Emperor Wrap-Up

* BuzzFeed (!!!), with original research.

* This might violate ’67 Anti-Nep, and that’s why Trump didn’t want to appoint Jared Kushner as his chief-of-staff, because he didn’t want to pick a constitutional fight on ’67 Anti-Nep before his Presidency even begins, but if it didn’t, I’d give it to her if I was Trump.  Remember, when his campaign started, someone yelled something about rape, and Ivana came right out and shut the shit down, and then said that she was voting for Trump, would help his campaign however she could, and thought that he would make a great President.

* First sentence tells all.  There never is any such year.

* “But but but the legally meaningless popular vote lulz”

* It’s like 10,000 spoons when you all you need is a knife.  Now, when it doesn’t matter.

OTOH, it was the sprouting of the TPM in 2009 that got Trump interested in public affairs in a way he never was before.

* Alright.  Can we PLEASE finally admit that the data game, while necessary to a point, is overrated?  The only reason anyone ever thought it mattered that much was because data got the credit for the Obama re-elect four years ago.  But as we later found out, the targets of Obama’s ’12 data game turned out less than they did four years prior.

* Meanwhile, one of the architects of the RNC’s data game is both a young woman and a native St. Louisan.  But my point remains the same:  The data game is pass-fail, all you need is a good enough one, but once you pass the pass-fail barrier, that doesn’t by itself guarantee your horse’s win.

* Such a complex weave of left wing bromides and tropes, I just don’t have time to untangle them all.

* Welcome back, Winston.

* Obama’s right.  I don’t want a crude form of nationalism.  I want a pure and sophisticated form of nationalism.

* Like I’ve been saying, teachers and administrators are behind it.  You should realize it axiomatically by now.

* Somebody joked about having to sit in the back, so obviously, it’s a major crisis.  And an opportunity for more NAACP face time.  There was a teacher/administrator provoked walkout today.

* We may never know for sure if the human blockade was a proximate cause of his death, but OTOH, they should really feel good about themselves for it.

* Pauline Kaelism.  But, to give Kael due credit, she knew one person who voted for Nixon.

* Yet another good thing about the Trump Era — It has exposed the fraudulence of the House FreeDumb Caucus.  And justified my passing on almost the entirety of MUH DOWNBALLOT.

* Is this why Charles Murray was so unhinged about Trump?

* And now, the Clinton World Empire is now pinning all its hopes on Ugly Betty.  The talk is she’ll run for Congress.

Because when the husband was President for eight years, the wife was Secretary of State and a few hundred thousand votes in several states away from being President herself, the way to continue a political dynasty is to have the daughter run for and win a Congressional seat in a safe deep blue Congressional district.  She’d sure be able to wield lots of influence!

Then again, her apartment is apparently St. Elsewhere.