The election is two weeks from today. When I took an intro psych course over half a century ago, I was taught in it that two weeks is the period of short term memory, the period in which we remember events with special salience. I do not know if this is still the official view of the profession, but it has since then made sense to me: I seem to be able, even now, to remember what happened day by day for the previous two weeks. Things before then are “in the past,” although certainly some are salient and on my mind. But those that happened in the past two weeks are just that much more on my mind.
With this in mind even four years ago when people asked me to forecast the election outcome I would drag this up and say “anything can happen in the last two weeks that can change it,” and four years ago it happened with the James Comey public reopening of an email investigation into Hillary Clinton 11 days before the election. Even though about two days before he announced nothing was found, the damage was done. This year we all remember this, and while he is further ahead in national polls than she was at this point then, Joe Biden is not much further ahead, and even behind in some, than she was in those crucial battleground states that will determine the outcome. So it remains fully possible that something unexpected can happen that will give Trump the victory.
I must admit, however, that I have been trying to think about what could do it. Much discussion focuses on “October Surprise,” as if things early in October have as much salience as those in the last two weeks. So far most of those surprises have hurt Trump more than Biden, and the poll gap has widened in Biden’s favor, with the new rise in cases and hospitalizations of the coronavirus seeming to be the dominant issue, and with Trump’s illness and superspreader events not helping him on that front. So if something happens to push it the other way, it is going to have to overcome a strong pressure coming on that front that I simply do not see moving in Trump’s favor. There will not be a vaccine approved prior to Nov. 3, much to Trump’s distress and despite all his efforts to force one through.
Of course, we have seen the Trump people try to push new stuff on the Hunter Biden case and Burisma, with last Wednesday’s New York Post story about his supposed laptop. But, not only did it come out before the final two weeks, it does not seem to be convincing anybody not already in the Trump camp, just too many holes and nonsense I shall not bother with. Yes, the brief blocking of it by Twitter et al gives it a few more legs, but it seems not to be going anywhere serious, mostly just another effort to get the Trump base out, if it was not already out.
My suspicion is that at this point the only thing that could really do it would be a genuinely unexpected event, with something from abroad the most likely, given that we pretty much know all there is to know about Joe Biden himself. A 9/11 style terror attack from the Middle East might do it, fits Trump’s narrative and would allow him to pull a “rally the troops around the national leader,” or something equivalent.
I close by noting a report I just saw that looked at October Surprises, not just final two weeks stuff, over elections dating back to 1980. In fact, most of them were pretty well baked in by the beginning of October, with few seeing movement in national polls exceeding 1%. 2016 saw the second-largest move, almost 3%. That was the Comey Announcement Effect. Curiously the only other election with a larger net move was 1992, when Clinton gained about 7%, although I do not remember a specific event or “surprise” that triggered that. So, in fact, the probability of something really election altering happening within the next two weeks is pretty low, although not yet to be ruled out.
Barkley Rosser
Short term mammary is even a bigger problem. It leads to insufficient empathy along with increased fearfulness, worry, and dread.
“… the probability of something really election altering happening within the next two weeks is pretty low, although not yet to be ruled out.”
[Although entirely true, it sheds no light on why the Democratic Party has been losing a growing number of elections during my lifetime. There are a lot of ways to raise a neurotic child, bottle feeding is just one, and not every neurotic individual is a Republican nor every Republican is neurotic, but there does seem to a correlating trend. Along with bottle feeding instead of breast feeding, then severe measures for potty training are the best known indications for latter garden variety adult neurosis. Sociopaths take a bit more damaging childhood to create, requiring either severe neglect or abuse.
Some people blame it all on racism, but hatefulness is not just learned behavior by itself. It takes a neurotic compulsion to act out subconscious fears enough to be deeply hateful. I was raised around racists myself, although my mother alone among my extended family was not so inclined. She also breastfed each of her three sons.]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614468/
Breastfeeding and Adult Personality
Abstract
Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits are implicated in long-term health-risk behaviors and outcomes. Less research has addressed how early-life experiences are associated with individual differences in these traits in adulthood. We examine whether having been breastfed is associated with adult personality and well-being in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. At Wave 1, caregivers reported whether the target child had been breastfed. At Wave 4, participants (N=13,113; 53% female; Mage=28.98) completed measures of psychological functioning. We tested for mean-level differences in the traits by breastfeeding status (yes/no) and by the duration of breastfeeding, controlling for basic demographic factors and early-life factors that could confound the breastfeeding-personality association (e.g., mother education). Participants who had been breastfed scored lower in neuroticism, anxiety, and hostility and higher in openness and optimism than those not breastfed. A curvilinear relation suggested that neuroticism was lowest for those breastfed for 9–12 months and highest for those either breastfed for >24 months or exclusively bottle-fed. Breastfeeding was unrelated to conscientiousness or state psychological functioning. This research suggests long-term psychological benefits to breastfeeding and indicates that early life experiences are associated with traits that are consequential for adult health…
I have sadly known too many of the A.A., Al-Anon, Alateen tribe. Worse yet I have known even more that should have joined, but did not. These folk are a special case with more going on than meets the eye and the strange political twists to match. Lots of anger in that hole that goes to a depth that I have not plumbed.
Loneliness, insecurity, anger, and fear motivates individuals to seek solace in tribalism and self-expression in hatefulness. Stopping the cycle of cruelty is easier said than done.
Abuse is the common thread whether substance abuse or child abuse or spouse abuse or more vulnerable others abuse. Abusers make more abusers.
He actually does not need to do this. Biden shady dealings with Ukraine and China are proven for whose who are interested in politics and understand a little bit Ukraine.
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC%20-%20Finance%20Joint%20Report%202020.09.23.pdf
Ukraine somehow became Dem politicians feeding frenzy ground: Kerry son was involved too. https://americaswatchtower.com/2019/11/14/ukraine-documents-show-millions-funneled-to-john-kerrys-family-and-hunter-biden/
As for China Biden activity is clearly corrupt and looks like Clinton style “pay for play” https://www.baldingsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/KVBJHB.pdf
As for Trump he has the same style of “pay for play”as Clintons and Biden: we have Kushner shady dealings with Qatar. https://www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeline-on-jared-kushner-qatar-666-fifth-avenue-and-white-house-policy/ And Ivanka dealings with China. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/22/ivankas-trademark-requests-were-fast-tracked-in-china-after-trump-was-elected/#4d4deb911d60
Both candidates are subservient to oligarchs. It’s just two slightly different group of oligarchs. So it is important to understand to which group of oligarchs they are subservient.
Trump is probably more subservient to Zionist lobby and old money.
Biden, probably is more subservient to financial oligarchy in general (as his nickname “Senator from MBNA” implies ) much like Clinton wing of Dems in general, and is somehow allied with Silicon Valley tech billionaires and media moguls (who I think run the neoliberal Dems as much as Wall Street.)
Both are equally subservient to MIC with Dems being now the second “war party” (Vichy left) and large part of the Dem brass is allied with the political wing of intelligence agencies (CIA-democrats) . As is classic Senator Schumer quote: Intelligence Agencies ‘Have Six Ways From Sunday Of Getting Back At You’
Biden is a classic neoliberal and supports neoliberal globalization.
Trump is more of a “national neoliberal,” while promoting neoliberalism within the USA (his tax bill is the most egregious example) he is hostile to “Clinton-style” neoliberal globalization, unless it is clearly plays in the hands of the USA.
Like Stalin said on a different occasion: “Both are worse” but to me Biden is preferable as the danger of nuclear war would probably slightly diminish, if he is elected. And he might extend the Start treaty.
That’s why for this election I am in the “Anybody but Trump” camp.
But we should have no any illusion as for whom they really represent.
Likbez,
Once again you prove unreliable.
Your two links about Biden have nothing substantial on Joe, although plenty on Hunter.
As for being “Senator from MENBA,” where did you come up with that? I googled it and no Biden ever showed up, although Sen. John Boozemans and even Mitch McConnell did.
As usual, you are full of it.
Thank you for the laugh
Bing that I use has plenty. For example:
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/10/14/hunter-biden-was-paid-consultant-at-age-21-to-large-credit-card-co-while-dad-helped-credit-card-industry-with-legislation-839084
Slightly off topic.
An astute summary of one aspect of the recent debate from another forum.
I will let the others beat you up.
@Likbez,
On general principle then I agree with most of what you wrote, but on the details then I do not care enough to look into them. The important point to me was “That’s why for this election I am in the ‘Anybody but Trump’ camp. ” On that detail we completely agree.
We all have the illusion of observing reality from our own little perch and then believing that we see everything. One cannot see everything in reality from a fixed point in space/time. Our illusions give us comfort in the vast darkness.
Did you grow up in Ukraine?
Xi and Putin are surely thugs by definition.
Meanwhile, perhaps the suppression has gone to the level where it will hurt the GOP. Thinking Stacey Abrams has done a great job bringing this to the national stage.
” Yet when early voting began in Texas on October 13, Abbott’s plan to limit Democratic participation appeared to backfire, as voters in Harris County, where voters of color make up a majority and where Hillary Clinton won by 12 points in 2016, surged to the polls.
The numbers in Harris County have been astonishing. A record 128,000
people voted on the first day of early voting, up from 68,000 in 2016
and a higher turnout than the entire state of Georgia on the same day.
Turnout has barely dropped since then. On Friday, Harris County surpassed 1 million early votes, exceeding its total from 2016 with a week of early voting still left, and nearly equaling the 1.3 million people who voted overall in 2016
Hollins, the first Black clerk in Harris County history and the youngest at 34, credits a backlash against voter suppression for the unexpectedly high turnout. “Efforts to suppress votes in Texas and across the South have very often been done in secret, in smoke-filled rooms, in ways the public can’t fully digest,” he says. “But a voter—a senior or a person with a disability—can feel when the governor says they have to drive 100 miles round-trip to drop off their mail ballot in person. When it’s thrown in your face like it has been this election season, voters are responding by saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ and coming out in record numbers to have their voices heard.”
Beto O’Rourke often said in 2018 that Texas was “not a red state; it’s a non-voting state.” This could be the year that changes. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s top executive and a 29-year-old Latina, says that “voters in Texas are used to the steady drumbeat of suppression,” which has often kept turnout among voters of color and young voters low. But she called Abbott’s declaration limiting mail drop-off locations “the straw that broke the camel’s back.””
https://www.motherjones.com…
Just ten more days. I am pregnant with anticipation, morning sickness and all :<)
For the record I misread where Biden was supposedly senator from at “MENA.” Yes, he was called “the senator from MBNA” in one National Review article.
Certainly Putin and Xi are thugs, although there are certainly limits on what he can do against them, which the very practical Biden will recognize. But what have we seen with Trump? On Russia he kowtows to Putin on all sorts of things he should not, but then botches a negotiation over strategic arms, not agreeint to an obviously wise one year extension of rthe New START treaty, which Biden is fine with going along with. Biden is simply far more competnent on such very important matters, just as he will be on dealing with the pandmic, which Trump has totally bothched, with this probably why he will lose the election, if he does.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inverted-beer-test/604282/
The Inverted Likability Test
Voters may be less interested in whether a candidate is likable than in whether the candidate would like them.
January 2, 2020
Yascha Mounk
Contributing writer at The Atlantic
The outcome of the 2004 election offered pundits a puzzle. George W. Bush had, as many of them saw it, been a disastrous president. He redistributed money from the poor to the rich. He started a war that was rapidly turning sour. Most irritating of all, he constantly stumbled over his own words. How, they asked themselves, could so many of their compatriots have once again voted for such a doofus?
As pundits dissected the outcome, one data point seemed to provide a plausible explanation. According to a poll taken two months before the election, most undecided voters would have preferred to drink a beer with Bush rather than his opponent, John Kerry. As one columnist for USA Today put it at the time, “President Bush, despite his many problems, strikes most of the American people as a pretty nice guy—the kind of guy they would feel comfortable with if he showed up at their front door.”
This way of analyzing candidates and their supposed likability is now routine. But what if the old beer line gets the truth exactly backwards?
Maybe it’s not that voters prefer the candidate they would rather have a beer with; maybe they prefer the candidate who would rather have a beer with them…
*
[Advantage Biden.]