geekwithsoul

A little primer for anyone inexperienced in watching election returns from someone who has been following them far too closely for far too many years:

1. Don't be worried when initial returns for a state show big percentages towards Republicans. Rural communities tend to lean conservative and because of the relatively low populations, those counties tend to report results quicker than the suburbs and cities. This is not some conspiracy causing the "numbers to change" as Trump claimed in 2020, this is just low population areas reporting results before higher population areas.
2. News channels will be showing you tons of state maps broken down by counties as results come in and it's going to be very disheartening if you don't realize that most of those red counties have much, much lower populations than urban and suburban areas. In an ideal world, they would show state totals with counties sized by population, as that would make this issue much more evident.
3. We almost certainly won't know who the winner is in the presidential election on the night of November 5. It's likely going to take awhile, so don't go in with the expectation that we'll finally be able to put the chaos behind us immediately. The GOP will likely continue to work to disenfranchise voters for weeks after the election, and we have to hope the courts don't let them steal the election. It's why it's so important everyone votes and the margin is as large as it can be.
4. If you have access to results from 2020 and 2016 (usually available via the state government's website), you can make some educated guesses about how things will ultimately turnout by looking at the turnout and results from some of those rural counties and comparing to previous years. For example, if some rural county went 73% for Trump in 2020 and had record turnout, and this year he's only getting 60% and turnout is lower, chances are Trump is going to have a bad night. For smaller, more local races, results in a single precinct can be a bellwether for an entire election - not because a candidate won it, but by the size of the margin of victory.
5. Following along with #3, don't stay up all night trying to get the returns. As I said, this is going to take awhile, and it's important to pace yourself or else you'll drive yourself crazy. Hopefully you've already taken the most important action you can by casting a ballot, so you've done what you can.

Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote. The timing of this push to build outrage over alleged illegal election activity might strike some observers as ironic, given that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office has just sued Musk for running his own “illegal…scheme” to entice conservative leaning voters with the prospect of cash.

On average, the D less R margin in the early vote mispredicted the final Clinton/Trump margin by 14 points! Pollsters get yelled at when their polls are off by even 3 points, and anything more than that is considered an absolute disaster. Imagine if a poll was off by 14 points: no one would ever listen to it again! And yet we get the same frankly amateurish analysis of the early vote in every election.

America PAC door knockers were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they’d have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised they were working to elect Donald Trump.

“If you go to Payless, or go wherever, it says sample and you usually can take a sample,” Savage said, according to Fox59. “So that is the way I took it. I thought they were fake fucking ballots.”

Speaking with Fox59, Savage claimed that he was an elected official and that he was “just trying to fight for our country.” (Savage, a businessman, came sixth out of eight candidates in the Republican primary.)

Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said that Savage’s act was a deliberate attempt to “undermine our election process.”

Recent video purportedly showing a man destroying ballots marked for Trump is a disinformation campaign, say officials

Russian actors were behind a viral video falsely showing mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in the swing state of Pennsylvania, US officials said on Friday, amid heightened alert over foreign influence operations targeting the upcoming election.

The video, which garnered millions of views on platforms such as the Elon Musk-owned X, purports to show a man sorting through mail-in ballots from the state’s Bucks county and ripping up those cast for the former president.

A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election.

The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”

This spring, an eye-opening poll from Axios suggested what once seemed unthinkable: Four in 10 Democrats were open to the idea of the US government deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. Though that share of support might seem high, other polls conducted since have found something similar, suggesting Americans at large are open to harsher, more Trumpian immigration policies.

And yet, as attention-grabbing as some of the headlines on support for mass deportations have been (and as Donald Trump and his allies continue to talk about his plans for such), those polls may not accurately capture the mood of the American electorate. Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues.

That disconnect is because standalone polls and headlines do very little to capture the complexity of many Americans’ feelings about immigration, which often include simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, support for more immigrant-friendly policies alongside draconian ones. The real answer, more specific polling by firms like Pew Research Center suggests, lies somewhere in the middle: A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country.

I guess that's at least a little better, but goddamn I still don't understand it.

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.

Citing the American revolution while misspelling “Britian”, Donald Trump’s campaign has filed an extraordinary complaint against the UK’s Labour party for what it claims is “interference” in the US presidential election.

"The intelligence community assesses that Russian influence actors created and amplified content alleging inappropriate activity committed by the Democratic vice presidential candidate during his earlier career," an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday.

"Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win because he knows Trump will roll over and give him anything he wants. We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in U.S. elections," said Morgan Finkelstein, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign.