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TropicalDingdong

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TropicalDingdong ,

15$?

Register a domain name based on some hair brain fantasy for the year.

Then spend the year ideating and fantasizing about what might be while doing nothing.

Thats a whole year of value for 15 bucks.

TropicalDingdong ,

I’m gonna pay my $15 to watch.

TropicalDingdong ,

Unlikely to improve. The Biden team is making it clear that they intend to move to the right to get the voters they think they need this election cycle.

Its also pretty clear to any one with eyes that he’s not going to find the voters he needs there, but it is what it is.

For context, no incumbent has ever won a second term with an approval of less than 51%.

TropicalDingdong ,

has ever had a second term with someone between either…

Once. Grover Cleveland. His party basically blew the 4th year election, and his second term was a pretty strong showing.

TropicalDingdong ,

You are misinterpretting the XKCD.

Its not as if incumbents with approvals this low haven’t competed. They have.

We have the data on it. You don’t win the presidency with an approval this low.

TropicalDingdong ,

My (parent) comment didn’t mention Te-felon Don.

So I’m sticking with them not understanding the XKCD or the parent.

TropicalDingdong ,

I think that tells you everything you need to know about Biden as a candidate.

Non-viable. If you can’t out approval a 34-count convicted felon, we shouldn’t be running you as candidate.

TropicalDingdong ,

No, its not. Again, a misunderstanding of what was said.

The point isn’t that it hasn’t been attempted. It has, repeatedly. The XKCD is all examples of things that haven’t happened.

The example provided is something specific that has been attempted, repeatedly, where we know the answer (not the felonious aspect, but the low approval. Don being a felon was never a point of discussion).

Its both a misunderstanding of the XKCD and the statement.

Plenty of incumbents with low approval have run. They don’t win their elections. We’ve got lots of data on this.

TropicalDingdong ,

Sure, but its still a misinterpretation.

Consider why the comic cites categorical reasons, not continuous ones.

Specifically, I can put a mean and a standard error down on polling, approval, and using a factor like incumbency calculate a probability of re-election based on a given approval or polling metric.

Polling and approval data, is something at least hypothetically ‘exists’ for all candidates, ever, even if it went unmeasured.

And it does exist for these candidates. Don’s felony would fall within the bounds the premise of this comic, but not polling or approval. The relationship between polling, approval, and incumbancy doesn’t because we do actually have those information on those things. We can look at all presidents prior to now that we have data for, we can divide them into ‘re-elected’ and not ‘re-elected’, calculate a mean and standard error of their polling, and their approval, anything we can measure, and look at the probability of occurrence for the thing given their polling. We couldn’t actually do that with any of the factors in the XKCD because we’d be dividing by zero. We literally couldn’t create the statistic to get a probability distribution from because there are no examples of President running has parameter “thing B”, which is the actual point of the comic. “thing B” gets more and more ridiculous as the comic goes along.

Why the current example isn’t that case is that we do have examples of incumbents with low approval trying to be elected. The “thing B” about the incumbent exists and has been tested, so we can calculate the probability distribution.

TropicalDingdong ,

against a convicted felon. And we have the data on it. You don’t win the presidency with a felony conviction.

…

I mean the felon part actually would be in bounds of the logic of the comic. We can’t observe the probability of a felon getting elected because it hasn’t occurred before, and therefore we can’t calculate a statistic.

TropicalDingdong ,

Its a divide by 0. We can absolutely put down a probability of Bidens likelihood to win based on current polling or approval, because we have an N to divide by.

We don’t have an N to divide by in the felony issue (or any of the issues cited in the comic), and so can’t calculate a probability.

TropicalDingdong ,

It absolutely does. Biden is the right pick over Trump.

I mean that’s an editorial or moral opinion. Which is fine, but not relevant.

Trump was more than 3% LOWER in approval.

Was. Not is. Trumps approval was also much higher then Bidens ever has been at some points. Do those times not count?

What should matter is that right now. Trumps approval is 5 points higher than Biden. Not at some other time. Not cherry picking one time for one and a different time for the other. Just the facts ma’am.

Living in exacerbated disbelief of reality or in a heighten state of moral panic over the fact that, apparently, the country approves of Trump more than they do Biden does nothing to change the political reality we find ourselves in.

There is no moral comment being made when we show through data that Biden is losing this election. Living in a constant state of outrage because reality doesn’t meet your expectations and other people obviously don’t share them is delusional to the point of exhaustion.

TropicalDingdong ,

Yeah, I mean, its super interesting in an academic way.

And, you know… panic inducing in almost every other way.

If Cornell West hadn’t clustered the fuck out of his candidacy, we could have been seeing a Green party & Independent coalition representing a viable third party threat this year. The Green party is the only third party that had the infrastructure in place to get onto the ballot in all 50 states. But West screwed the pooch. I think he with Stein as running mate might have actually been able to make it happen, purely based on how hated the two extant candidates are.

TropicalDingdong ,

Thats just not how probabilities work.

TropicalDingdong ,

The comic is highlighting the absurdity of taking something that is technically undefined, and thinking that you’ve got a counter-factual (with is, like, exactly what is happening for most people in this thread).

If no felons have ever previously run for president, you have no data on how felons perform. You have an N of 0 because the event hasn’t occurred. Its a null result. NA. Undefined. You have no information. Its untested.

Even further, it highlights the very exact point of the comic, which is that when you rely on currently has an N of zero as a counter factual, you are going beyond the scope of what your data is capable of speaking to.

To assess the impact of a candidate with a felony on their chances of winning a presidential election, we need to know how many felons have run and how many have won. However, if no felon has ever run for president, we have zero data points for both felons running and winning. This means our calculation for the probability of a felon winning would involve dividing by zero, which is mathematically undefined and impossible. Without any previous instances to examine, we simply cannot make a statistically grounded prediction about the impact of a felony on a candidate’s electoral prospects; we lack any empirical evidence to base such an assessment on.

TropicalDingdong ,

Oh my good clam-baking mullet wearing jesus my dude.

Why is it always projection with you people?

The thing that has never happened: a felon is a candidate. We have no information on this or how it will impact the results of a presidential campaign.

You want to interpret this as a result, but you shouldn’t. We have no data here.

TropicalDingdong ,

Except that we actually have approval ratings and polls for about 90 years of elections. From which we can build the appropriate counter-factuals to actually create a statistic because an approval rating is a continuous variable, not a discrete variable. An approval rating of 51% is directly comparable to an approval rating of 31%, and all Presidents ‘have’ this condition, even if it went unmeasured. I also have a sufficient range of variation to build the negative case example because I have presidents and candidates across the range of variation observed in the condition, and variation in the outcome: winning an election.

Being a felon is also a condition, but 100% of the data we have is “not a felon”. And we have no variation in the observed outcome. Some non-felons won, some non-felons lost. We’re not testing if they are a felon or not, we’re testing if they win the election or not.

Look I get that this is beyond you, but you really aren’t making the point you think you are here. Also, you are on the wrong side of the fallacy the comic is presenting. I’m not trying to interpret being a felon has on becoming president, you are. I’m interested in what the polling data has to say about the probability of winning, which is a statistically and scientifically grounded thing to do.

You mostly seem like you have an axe to grind because Biden is losing the election for you. I’m sorry for that.

TropicalDingdong ,

Obama was pretty firmly in the internet age, and left office in his second term with an approval rating of 55%.

TropicalDingdong ,

There is an interesting cognitive dissonance around the economy.

The tone, the memes, the lived experience are all: We’re struggling to barely survive. But when this gets brought up in the context of the current administration and their policies its: Its the best economy in a decade.

When you look at polling data, its always the economy at first position in terms of how people are going to vote. I think the current congress and the administration really shot themselves in the foot with the what they approached as priority in current legislation. It was all “might make a difference to peoples lives in 5-10 years” and almost nothing that “makes a difference in peoples lives they can sense right now”. Its not like that bigger picture stuff didn’t need to be done, but convincing a few wonks on the edges doesn’t get you elected to a second term.

Ultimately voting is transactional. If voters vote for you and you don’t provide the goods, they’ll move on.

Trump to make taped remarks to a Christian group that calls for abortion to be 'eradicated entirely' (apnews.com)

Donald Trump on Monday will make a virtual appearance before a Christian group that calls for abortion to be “eradicated entirely,” as the presumptive Republican nominee again takes on an issue that Democrats want to make a focus of this year’s presidential election....

TropicalDingdong ,

I wonder how long before the Biden team decides they need to go after these voters too.

TropicalDingdong ,

Polling matters, a lot. But its not a monolith.

A few things we know right going into this election:

1: Polls have historically underestimated how well Trump does on election day. 2: Polls have historically overestimated how well candidates like Biden, and Clinton do on election day. 3: No incumbent president has ever kept the role with polling below 51% nationally (Bush, 2nd term was the lowest). 4: Both Biden and Trump enjoy approval ratings below any candidate that has won a second term (not polling but approval).

When you look at polling data, you should think “Tied is winning” for Trump. Not for his sycophants, not for MAGA, but for Trump specifically, he consistently gets more people, people who are otherwise “Not likely to vote”; a great deal of effort is placed into getting polls to be unbiased, but you can’t measure something that you don’t know about, which is fundamentally why Trump so consistently outperforms his polling. I think this also explains why progressive candidates consistently outperform their polling, but that’s beyond the scope rn.

I’m planning on digging into these for my mid-month polling update and wanted to give it a solid few weeks for the Trump trial news to saturate so we can see if there really is a significant effect. I’m also planning a ‘battleground’ state analysis for this update to start building a “road to 270” outlook.

The other thing that really matters here, is going to be the trends. There has been much ado about the latest batch of polls, but its not really clear to me that Biden has ‘ticked up’ in polling, so much as that Trump has “ticked down” post becoming a felon. To just put that into context neither Trump or Biden have been ‘improving’ in their polling since last summer, although Biden’s had dropped more precipitously than Trumps. We’ll see if Trumps ‘dump’ here is as real as the news cycle would have you believe, but keep in mind that no incumbent president has ever been competitive with an approval even remotely close to Biden’s.

My hope is by getting a little more granular into the battle ground states, the snr will be a bit better. I’m hopping to get the work done wednesday.

TropicalDingdong ,

National polls are useless

yeah no. Almost all national polls are actually regional polls. So the sentiment belies a misunderstanding of how polls work.

TropicalDingdong ,

I might actually consider buying a Tesla at that point. The SO and I nixed the car as an option purely because of that guy.

TropicalDingdong ,

Damn they found 24 22 kilos?

TropicalDingdong ,

I don’t think Biden is interested in the progressive vote.

TropicalDingdong ,

That’s not what the last 25 years of elections tell us.

When Democrats run on a progressive, or at least apparently progressive platform, they win, even if that’s not how they ultimately govern (Obama 08, 12; Biden 20). Biden’s 2020 platform was a lift and shift of every single one of Bernie’s policy positions: His platform was Biden in name only. Obama’s was also highly progressive. I’d put Gore in here too for a half point, considering that was basically a stolen election (SC decided Floridians voters didn’t matter), and he ran almost competently on climate change; he won the popular vote and the EC, but the SC decided that wasn’t relevant.

When they run center right candidates (Kerry 04, Hillary 16) and platforms, they lose.

Voters who show up and get Democrats elected into office have shown one thing:

Progressive candidates and platforms win you elections.

So this:

Nobody wants a progressive candidate

Is just a demonstrably false statement, easily rebutted by even a cursory glance at history.

TropicalDingdong ,

Yeah this is just a non-sense statement with no grounding in reality.

What Presidential election have Democrats won without a progressive candidate or platform in the past 25 years?

TropicalDingdong ,

Its has the potential to lose him the election.

TropicalDingdong ,

They may have governed to the right, but that’s not what got them elected. Both of those candidates campaigned as progressives, or adopted highly progressive platforms.

You know. Campaigning. The part where you get elected?

And the two Democrats who campaigned to the center right, Hillary and Kerry, both lost their elections.

To be clear: We’re talking about campaigning right now, not governance.

TropicalDingdong ,

No, they didn’t. Not at all. You are just re-writing history to fit your narrative.

Obama ran on holding wall street accountable (he didn’t) and on fixing healthcare/

Biden xeroxed Bernies entire platform. Like verbatim.

TropicalDingdong ,

they’d be doing it

Who would be doing what? Biden took his platform far to the left in 2020 and it got him enough of Bernies collation to get him elected. Obama ran on healthcare and holding banks accountable.

And also…

A whole team of people who know far more than you are I,

No they fucking don’t. These are the same consultants that advised Hillary to prop up Trump in the primaries.

The fact is that if you are a Democrat running for President, at least giving lip service to progressive polices gets you elected. There is no requirement you govern that way once elected, but if you don’t at least entertain the Progressive vote as a Democrat, you don’t win the presidency.

TropicalDingdong ,

just happen to remember it with a bit more clarity than you it seems

No, you don’t. You are just making shit up. GO look up their platforms.

TropicalDingdong ,

Biden is a regressive chump

Biden has governerned as a regressive chump, but the DNC platform of 2020 was the most progressive platform for any major political party, pretty much since Roosevelt. Biden’s 2020 campaign was one of the most progressive in US history, from a policy perspective.

TropicalDingdong ,

I mean it got him elected. I’m cynical enough that I want him to do it again. But he’s not going to get elected continuing to spit in the face of progressives.

TropicalDingdong ,

To be clear, we’re only spending 0.35% of the amount we did to bomb it to rebuild it.

Basically a rounding error, something for the headlines.

TropicalDingdong ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d30cb81f-71c4-43b5-a3cf-2ef52318f519.png

TropicalDingdong ,

Yeah its been a journey. My cakeday for the an account I made on ml would be about now, and I think its around a month till this account is officially a year old.

Its an odd time to be on a platform like lemmy.

We’re seeing an almost complete adulteration of what we might call the internet 2.0 era sites into walled gardens of exclusion. Effectively, the stealing, en-masse of almost two decades of user generated content. The walls and gates of the gardens we planted get higher everyday; the enshittification of all things.

And yet here we are. On a self-hosted, federated, unbought, unbroken, and unbent platform. Obviously its not all roses, but for what its worth, both the users and developers have created something incredibly special: A ray of hope in a time where it seems like the world has only been changing for the worse. And while the instances have their differencs, we should be looking to embrace those differences as much as possible, because this is what truly gives the fediverse strength. If its Kbin or Lemmy or Mastadon; or .ml or .world or .blahaj.zone.

The point of the fediverse isn’t consolidation or control, but distribution and access. There is so much more possible simply because enough of us were willing to make the journey over here. We’re providing the future with an alternative that isn’t tracking them, trying to manipulate them with an algorithm, or to turn them into commodities. There is power in that.

So happy cakeday. Happy cake season to those who were messing around with a browser plug-in about this time last year, trying to delete their reddit history. Happy cakeday to the developers, to those who post, and to the commenters. And most of all, happy cake day to you dear lemming reading this. You make this place happen.

TropicalDingdong ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5e723155-0deb-4743-a406-3f8d51bb7306.png

TropicalDingdong ,

So I don’t know if I got a picture, but I was at a local beach right at sunset, and we had this moment where, for like just a moment, the entire valley behind us lit up with rainbows. Not a double rainbow, but like 5+ deep ‘double’ rainbows. It was utterly surreal.

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to...

TropicalDingdong ,

Happy cakeday.

TropicalDingdong ,

Good. As an American, I support this.

TropicalDingdong ,

I don’t see how that is relevant. It’s a problem that we’re not party to the ICC.

TropicalDingdong ,

Watch party?

TropicalDingdong ,

So why is Biden doing it except to screw over those seeking asylum?

Real answers?

Biden stopped growing in his understanding of politics in 1992. He thinks he can get voters this way.

TropicalDingdong ,

Ah yes, the false premise again.

The same way literally every law or policy has ever been passed will ever be passed. You and your surrogates take the policies into the public conversation advocate for them, and you convert people into adopting your position. You convince the voters of the politicians that your policy is the better policy, and you engage those voters in converting that politician. You form coalitions and you build the rhetorical case for whatever it is that you are doing. Its literally the work of all of politics.

You may not have been exposed to that because you’ve probably developed your political understanding under decades of Democratic rule where the only political maneuvers they know are ‘heal’ and “roll over”. But technically it is possible for Democrats to fight for good policies and get them into law, even if they seem physically incapable of it in their modern manifestation.

So I can understand if you are confused by the idea that Democrats could actually engage in leadership, but in-fact, it is actually what they are elected to do. If the American voters wanted Republican policies coming out of the White House, be it in the form of administrative orders or in the bills they are promoting in congress, they could have just voted Republican.

TropicalDingdong ,

Of course. There would never be answer you could accept because your question isn’t being asked in good faith.

TropicalDingdong ,

You aren’t a person who deserves charity. You are never arguing in good faith.

TropicalDingdong ,

That’s just… literally all of what politics is. Democrats should be doing the same things. It’s literally what we elected them to do.

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