…it’s not exactly a secret that I don’t generally have a plan for how I get from here to wherever I give up the unequal struggle & take refuge in tunes…but…there’s generally a few things I sort of think would be worth a mention…& I never get all of them in…so…there’s kind of one I keep not getting to that I might get to today…we’ll see…but…before I try…

In the 44 months since Jan. 6, 2021, according to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia:

• More than 1,500 defendants have been federally charged with crimes associated with the attack.
• Approximately 915 have pleaded guilty, including about 300 to felonies.

The guilty pleas covered a lot of ground: Assaulting law enforcement. Obstructing law enforcement during a riot. Assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous weapon. Seditious conspiracy – that is, conspiring to use force against the United States.

And the weapons used and carried on Capitol grounds by Trump’s “patriots” included: firearms, pepper spray, Tasers, a sword, axes, hatchets, knives, and makeshift items such as destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles and knuckle gloves.

In all, about 965 defendants have had their cases fully adjudicated and have been sentenced for their crimes, including 605 sentenced to prison and 141 sentenced to home detention.

But in one way, the Justice Department has had to scale back its work to impose accountability for this attack on American democracy.

The U.S. attorney’s office has taken notice of the June decision in Fischer v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the charge of obstructing an official proceeding can be applied only when the defendant “impaired the availability or integrity” of a physical document. Prosecutors reported this week that the decision has prompted a review of cases involving 259 defendants charged with or convicted of obstructing an official proceeding.

…if I did something glaringly illegal & there was a way to approach prosecuting me according to a narrow definition of an offence I hadn’t committed…I’d probably feel like that was a relief, I guess…but…it wouldn’t change the glaring thing…you’d asssume?

The prosecutors note that there are no cases where a defendant was solely charged with violating the obstruction of an official proceeding statute. They note that every charged defendant faced, or continues to face, exposure to other criminal charges. However, of the 133 defendants whose cases had been adjudicated by the time Fischer was decided, the U.S. attorney’s office did not oppose dismissal of 40 of the invalidate obstruction charges, in response to defense motions. In only one case to date has a defendant received a sentence reduction because of Fischer.

The overwhelming majority of defendants, however, have been found guilty of crimes committed on Jan. 6.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/13/trump-harris-debate-insurrection-cases-pardons/

…&…in a similar vein…the whole world saw the world-class definitely-not-an-accident-because-they-did-it-twice display of utter spinelessness & peverse self-interest that was the senate failing to convict the convited felon when that ball was in their court…so…it’s not a secret that the accusations are more accurate than the convictions for that guy…in no small part by that same process of finding a formulation that says “the illegal thing he did was a different illegal thing & you accused him of doing the thing I say means something he didn’t so I get to drop those charges…or just “guess what – I’m a judge, if you can believe that shit, so if I want to ignore one of the most concerning patterns of conduct & behavior ever displayed by our head of state & rule that there’s nothing to see here…I get to do that”…just like it’s true that you can conspire to your heart’s content so long as you keep denying that you’re guilty of collusion because that’s not the word used in the language of the statutes that treat it as an offense…& that you can have your AG announce that you’re exonerated if you can get a special prosecutor to admit that you managed to evade & obstruct investigations to a point where he can’t hand prosecutors a complete suite of evidence that you definitely did stuff the whole world watched you do as it got published in the public record

On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case brought against Trump (and a number of his allies) in Fulton County, Ga., dismissed two more of the 13 charges Trump had originally faced. He’d already set aside three of those charges, meaning that the threat to the former president now centers on only eight criminal counts.

…I get it…it’s a problem to put “the president of the united states” in the context of “the accused”…it opens up a shit-ton of shit-slinging nobody needs going forward & diminishes the office…all the stuff that informed nixon’s departure from office taking the shape that it did to preserve “the dignity of the office” & such…but…once they said the orange man was one nobody really had any dignity to speak of so maybe it’s not surprising that they gave less than no fucks about protecting that &…I dunno…skinned the office so they could wear its hide like armor, maybe…something gross…pick your own metaphor

None of this is how Trump’s critics hoped the situation would play out. There was an ongoing assumption — or perhaps hope — that the criminal charges or any convictions would hobble Trump, reducing the odds that he would win the White House again. (Trump likes to present this assumption as the predicate for the charges, a claim for which there’s no evidence.) That clearly hasn’t happened. It is unlikely that will change; with less than two months until Election Day, the charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results — those in D.C. and Georgia — will not be tried.

From the outset, Trump’s political fate was intertwined with his legal one. Winning the presidency wasn’t just an ego boost, it was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. But thanks in part to the slow workings of the justice system and thanks in part to (obviously sympathetic) judges in Florida and at the Supreme Court, the legal landscape is already very different — even before the election arrives.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/13/trump-once-faced-91-charges-now-he-faces-12/

…now…I don’t for a moment think it argues for voting for not-the-dem or anything…but…that all does sound rather indistinguishable from…well…your average joe having some reasons to believe “the system” is broken/rigged/FUBAR/[your-euphemism-goes-here]…doesn’t it?

…a lot of “if we pare off all the ways a plain reading of the language makes it clear we’re all the way guilty then we can say we’re not & the courts will let us”…while any number of people are getting screwed like nobody’s business for some low-level shit like parking tickets…or speeding…or getting pulled over with weed in the car…or whatever…that’s discordant…of course most of those people didn’t chip on down to see if they could over-run the capitol building like a bunch of hooligans invading the pitch because their team’s losing & they don’t want the ref to be able to call full-time on the game…but…sure seems like it might be nice if we could dial down the dissonance…after all…if even the VP…while campaigning for the chance to go that last promotion…is straight up telling the population that the courts won’t save the nation & they need to step up & tell the bastards “no”…there’s an implication there that, well, shit is busted

How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity [NYT]

…as an intellectual exercise…I can see it…art imitates life imitates art imitates-yadda-yadda-so-on-&-so-on…pretending that the pretense of the thing is thing & the stuff that isn’t the pretense isn’t really there does seem like a pretty much functioning definition of how some people…& notably one candidate for the presidency…think it all works…& for them the stuff that means they have to expand their blind spots to claim aren’t visible is…well…approaching “everything” levels at this point…with exceptions only for the fragile & unbelievably brittle framing their “logic” has pretzeled the thing into so they can squeeze that camel through the eye of their needle

We’ve seen this play out many times before. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era is the former president’s willingness to believe (or at least profess to believe) virtually anything negative about his opponents — no matter how outlandish — and then repeat and amplify those claims until they permeate the Republican Party.

But I’m actually less interested in debunking each individual hoax than in answering some questions. Why is MAGA still so gullible? Why didn’t Republicans learn anything from 2020, when they fell for some of the strangest conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard about?
[…]
In the days after Jan. 6, 2021, I argued that years of extreme right-wing rhetoric had made millions of ordinary voters vulnerable to the wildest of ideas. If you watch right-wing television – or if you listen to right-wing radio – you will hear the most vicious insults against Democrats and the media over and over. It’s a constant drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric: “They” hate America. “They” hate Christians. “They” will destroy our country.
[…]
Hear this long enough, and it seeps into your bones. You begin to develop a level of antipathy and distrust so profound that you are capable of believing just about anything about your opponents.[…]

Another way of putting it is that animosity fuels gullibility. If you like or respect someone, you’re immediately skeptical of negative claims, and the more outlandish the claim, the more skeptical you’ll be. But if you loathe a person or a population, in a perverse way you become more receptive to the worst stories. After all, they’re the ones that vindicate your hatred the most.

But as our conspiracy crisis continues, I’m realizing that explaining gullibility primarily through the lens of animosity is incomplete. After all, the data shows that both sides have roughly equivalent (and extremely negative) views of each other. The vulnerability to misinformation doesn’t just run one way. There were moments, for example, during the Russia investigation when Trump’s opponents were all too willing to believe the most lurid (and incredible) claims against Trump.
[…]
Of course the friend/enemy distinction is older than politics, but the twist here is that right-wing media doesn’t just elevate the wrong heroes – by making the mainstream media an enemy every bit as loathed as its partisan political opponents – it also walls itself off from accountability. In a recent poll, The Associated Press found that Republicans trust “Donald Trump and his campaign” more than any media or government source to provide accurate information about the presidential election.

…&…I guess I’d argue that “trusting” sources that tell me the courts…& the senate in those impeachment proceedings…should have found what they had before them to be something quite different from what they carefully chose to see…is qualitatively different from, say, maintaining that the election result was false…which I actually had a fair bit of sympathy with back in the era of gore & those hanging chads…so…if we were to be charitable…isn’t even as unimaginable as all that, really…or any more dire in its implications than a senate that would let a legitimately impeached president skate or a supreme court that would enshrine “it’s legal if the president does it” as gospel…while thanking their god that he’s a he so technically it won’t apply to any abortions that might or might not otherwise be in that baggage train

To make matters worse, when you talk to people who are deeply embedded in MAGA America, you know that the friend/enemy distinction isn’t just relevant to how they view public figures, it also applies to personal relationships. MAGA is a very tightly knit community, which gives its members an immense amount of purpose, joy and fellowship, but that community is conditioned on unwavering support for Trump.

…in personal…or…intimate…relationships…that mechanic is widely understood to be a principle component in abusive relationships of the coercive control variety…there’s all sorts of echo chambers…but isolating your victims is the purpose of that sort…removing them from the context that would provide them with both support & the mundane understanding that “reality” & “normal” don’t mean what they’d need to mean for your lot to be as inescapable as it has to be to acquire the necessary levels of anguish to play along with the crazy to avoid excommunication

Share skepticism of any MAGA claim — especially if the source of skepticism is the mainstream media or the government — and you risk that connection. You will pay a social cost.

…& you’ve already got enough social costs sunk by the time you’ve sunk to being immersed in the MAGA well to begin with to feel like you’re all in…particularly if you’ve eliminated the middle man & made it your whole “personality”

There’s another cost to MAGA conspiracies. By constantly sidetracking real national issues, they distract us from dealing with genuine problems.

MAGA Will Fall for Anything [NYT]

…probably worth mentioning the guy writing all that considers themselves to play for team (R)…& on the “pro-life” wing…although he’s of the fringe that didn’t vote for orange foolius…& has in fact said this time it’s for enough marbles he’s voting for harris to try to make sure instead of writing in something that definitely won’t be the outcome

Last month, I wrote a column that generated intense blowback on the right because I argued that as a pro-life conservative I am voting for Kamala Harris. That was controversial enough, but what really seemed to make people angry was one of my stated motivations: that I am voting for Harris to try to save conservatism from MAGA. Defeating Trump, I said, gives conservative Americans a chance to “build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.”

The MAGA response was, in essence, you’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.

In fact, this argument is one way that MAGA keeps other Republicans in line. Like it or not, they say, this is the modern Republican Party. You can choose it, or you can choose the Democrats, but don’t think for a moment that a different party is possible.

But is that correct? We’re nine years into the Trump era of the Republican Party, and we can see a different reality: attempts to mimic Trump succeed in Republican primaries and deep red jurisdictions, but they fail in swing states and purple districts. Trump is MAGA’s most popular figure, and if he loses, then MAGA has nowhere to go but down.

Let’s look at the electoral record. The 2022 election should have been a red Republican wave. Inflation was close to its post-pandemic high, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a bloody disaster, and Russia had invaded Ukraine. High costs and global chaos are usually a recipe for an electoral catastrophe for the incumbent party.

But MAGA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. In swing state after swing state, Republicans nominated hard-core MAGA candidates, a collection of cranks and conspiracy theorists who went on to lose race after race. Most notably, Kari Lake lost her race for governor of Arizona; the Georgia football hero Herschel Walker lost his Senate race; and the Democratic candidate in the Pennsylvania race for governor, Josh Shapiro, crushed the MAGA-fied Republican, Doug Mastriano, by almost 15 points.

…now…I don’t think I’ve ever met a republican I thought made the better case for how things ought to be at an ideological level…but…assuming we don’t rebrand one of the only two teams in this particular world series…something answering to the republican party that can make a decent critique of policy & help refine it into legislation that moves the US forward & if at all possible gets from stopping things getting worse to making things get better for folks…is how all this is supposed to work…& we’ve done “basically half of government is in the business of making government not work” for longer than seems remotely sensible…so…in a world in which the relationship between the parties & the people were…less abusive…which could happen…that side of the aisle isn’t going to ret-con itself out of existence, after all

If the early polling numbers are any indication, this trend will continue in 2024. The race between Trump and Kamala Harris is too close to call in each of the seven swing states. At the same time, however, other MAGA figures underperform. In North Carolina, 538 gives Trump a very narrow lead, but the polls show hyper-MAGA Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee for governor, trailing by between four and 11 points. In Arizona, Trump also has a very narrow lead, but most polls show Lake trailing her Democratic opponent for the Senate, Ruben Gallego, by a decisive margin.

Trump is peak MAGA, and even peak MAGA hasn’t been able to achieve Mitt Romney’s share of the 2012 popular vote. Stronger turnout masked this reality, but Trump has never achieved even 47 percent of the total votes cast.

If Trump loses, there is no ready heir to his MAGA crown. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, would be saddled with at least partial responsibility for Trump’s loss, and the American people already view him unfavorably. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised to offer a perfected version of MAGA to Republicans – all of the Trump culture war and none of the Trump corruption (and he actually substantially outperformed Trump’s 2020 Florida margin in his 2022 re-election). But he’s a diminished figure after his disastrous presidential primary performance.
[…]
The rest of MAGA is a weird, scandalous mess. Just last week, Tucker Carlson – arguably the most popular media figure in MAGA America – interviewed a fringe right-wing history podcaster who claims that Winston Churchill is “a chief villain“ of World War II, which led to days of debate in the online right about – believe it or not – the relative merits of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

…speaking of bringing up the war

German aristocrat who hosted Samuel Alito at her castle in 2023 has revealed new details about her friendship with the rightwing supreme court justice, including that they share a mutual friend who played a key role in JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism.

Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a onetime party girl turned traditionalist Catholic activist who has faced criticism for her defense of far-right politicians in Germany, told the Guardian that she first met Alito in Rome – she could not remember what year – and that both were friends of Dominic Legge, a priest and Yale Law graduate in Washington who Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has often cited in discussions about his adult conversion to Catholicism.

The relationship between the 64-year-old noblewoman and Alito sparked media interest after the supreme court justice revealed last week in a financial disclosure form that he had accepted concert tickets worth $900 from the billionaire, who refers to herself as a princess even though Germany’s aristocracy was officially disbanded after the first world war.

She later told the German press that Alito had overestimated the cost of the tickets, but did not elaborate.

The princess and the judge: Samuel Alito’s ties to a German aristocrat who defends the far right [Guardian]

…if politics is about alignment…how many walks-like-a-duck-quacks-like-a-duck quack-heads need to be all in a row before bugs bunny turns up with a punt gun & spins their beaks round to the back of their heads…asking for a friend?

…&…I know…at some point you’re reaching…but…where…if it’s statistically credible that, for example, the margin in the north carolina might be small enough that by letting RFK take himself off the ballot having not withdrawn from the race until after the deadline for final paperwork…meaning ballots need re-printing…which may result in some “early” voting being late getting to the people who’d need to mail it back…which could be enough likely-harris votes to cost her the state…not saying it will or anything…but the numbers put that inside that whole margin of error window…so…at that point is there solid footing…or when the dust clears is that out there like wile e coyote when the clouds part & the bluff is three steps back the way he came?

Tenet Media’s website, which is a platform for content creators, lists popular right-wing influencers, including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson, as its “talent”. Pool, Johnson and the other purported beneficiaries of Russian largess pleaded ignorance, but even the most cursory review of their content indicates why Russia would want to amplify their voices. Pool, for example, recently proclaimed that “we should apologize to Russia” for supporting Ukraine, and that Ukraine is “the enemy of this country”.

In August, MAGA celebrated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, yet R.F.K. Jr. is popular with only a tiny fringe, and he might be one of the more bizarre politicians in American public life. This is a man, after all, who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park. That’s one of his strangest scandals, but hardly his most consequential. He’s a veritable font of dangerous medical misinformation and may well be America’s most influential anti-vaccine activist, attacking not just the Covid vaccine but also the common childhood vaccines that have also saved countless lives.

…remember when kooks used to be harmless? …me, neither

I know very well that Trump is just as scandalous and corrupt as many of the people I just talked about, but he succeeds where they fail in part because of the very thing I highlighted in the first paragraph. Before he was a politician, he was a monumental celebrity who built his brand on the notion that he was one of the most successful, astute and entertaining executives in the United States.

…the notion mind…never once come anywhere close to being a reality…cf. elon et al

I’m under no illusions that defeating Trump will resurrect Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party — or John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s. I’m also under no illusions about the fate of Never Trumpers in a post-Trump G.O.P. Many of us are seen as traitors and won’t be welcomed back into the fold, even if the Republicans finally do turn the page on Trump.

But the personal drama of the small band of Never Trump Republicans is meaningless compared with the national necessity of a healthy Republican Party. A two-party democracy is inherently fragile if one party is fundamentally broken. If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.

MAGA Is Nothing Without Trump [NYT]

…eh…I sympathize with the sentiment…but that feels inaccurate…the bet is all or nothing on the one guy…& for the one guy the all or nothing includes his ass on the line for actual for-real consequences that might yet include getting banged up for at least a token spell…but…even he doesn’t depend on him to unjam his ass from that crack…he’s just the pharoah…the pyramid doesn’t depend on the pharoah…it just wouldn’t be there without him…& the republican party would be…so even that undersells the disctinction, you’d have thought?

It might be interesting to journalists to know how Harris explains her changing views from 2019, when she ran for the Democratic nomination, to now, when she is the nominee. But it is not at all clear to me that it is interesting to viewers, who may be less concerned with how she deals with the question and more concerned with the actual substance of what she wants to do as president. A soft-focus question about a photograph, however iconic, seems less valuable than a question about Harris’s view of the presidency now that she’s spent almost four years in the passenger’s seat as vice president.

Speaking for myself, I am less interested in hearing candidates navigate controversies or speak to narratives than I am in hearing them talk, for lack of a better term, about their theory of the office. How does a candidate for president conceptualize the presidency? What would she prioritize in office and how would she handle an endless onslaught of crises and issues that may, or may not, demand her attention?

How does she imagine her relationship with Congress and how would she try to achieve her goals in the face of an opposition legislature? How does she imagine her relationship with the public and what value does she place on communication and the bully pulpit? Are there presidents she most admires — and why? Are there presidential accomplishments that stand out and how so? What are the worst mistakes a president can make? Why do you want this job in the first place?

I can think of other questions along these lines, but you get the gist.

Maybe We Are Asking Presidential Candidates the Wrong Questions [NYT]

…I think maybe I kinda do, at that

The American presidency is a strange office.

It is the most powerful elected position in the world. To hold the position is to lead a nation of more than 330 million people with a vast and intricate government that touches every aspect of daily life. You are responsible for trillions of dollars in spending, and you must manage the actions of countless civil servants, from your direct appointees — who number in the thousands — to their subordinates and underlings. You wield the full might of the American military and have direct access to a device that could, with the press of a few keys, end life as we know it.
[…]
The buck, after all, has to stop somewhere.

…it’s…kind of a big deal

But here is where it gets strange. All that power comes with limits so hard that it can feel, at times, like you don’t have any at all. You can only spend what Congress allows you to spend. You have discretion to execute the law but that can be curbed, even erased, by a vote of the Supreme Court.

There are things you can do by fiat — otherwise known as executive orders — but those can be overturned by a court or reversed by the next administration or resisted outright by hostile state governments. Lasting change, if that’s what you want, requires a vote of the legislature, which is to say that you have to put your goals in the hands of people who may not have your interests in mind, whether or not you share the same party. You can be a towering figure abroad — leading the nations of the free world in a crusade against aggression — and a fumbling, even weak one at home. Our constitutional order may be unbalanced, with an executive and judiciary whose influence seems to outstrip that of the legislature, but the checks and balances that do exist can still stymie the plans of an ambitious president.

…&…sometimes that part is a bug…sometimes a feature…not so long ago it was the most graceless saving grace I can remember, for example

But missing from this long menu of questions was anything about the day-to-day experience of the job — of managing the executive branch, of dealing with crises, of negotiating with Congress, of, in a word, governing. This despite the fact that these candidates have intimate experience with all of the above, one by virtue of serving as vice president and seeing the position up close, the other by virtue of having been president.

…he’s talking about the debate…because we’re still talking about that…but at least he’s talking about things that weren’t in the debate rather than hashing over what was for the umpteenth time?

To the extent that these issues were raised at all, they came as asides. Trump, for example, briefly mentioned that he fired a wide number of officials in his administration. “I fired most of those people,” he said, referring to his former national security adviser and secretary of defense, who now oppose his candidacy. “Not so graciously. They did bad things or a bad job. I fired them.” He then hit Harris and Joe Biden for not firing anyone. “They never fired one person.”

Trump was mostly ranting at this point. Still, it was a missed opportunity to discuss each candidate’s respective vision of the power of the presidency. Is the White House working if the president has to fire, on an almost regular basis, high-level officials? What does it say about his judgment? What process, if any, does he have for hiring subordinates?
[…]
The most you could do, as a viewer, was glean generalities from how they presented themselves. Trump, it’s clear, would govern as an authoritarian with little interest in the rule of law. And Harris, it appears, would continue the Biden approach of governing, as much as possible, with an eye toward consensus and coalition building.

Americans deserve a much fuller conversation than they ever get about the actual job at hand. Yes, it is important to know the goals and priorities of the people running for president. They should, when appropriate, talk about policy. But the fact of the matter is that a successful presidency is much more about organization, vision and values than it is the scope of a given legislative package.

The contingencies of politics are such that policies will change depending on everything from the size of the governing party’s congressional majority — or lack thereof — to the particular interests of the particular lawmakers. To answer the qualitative questions, on the other hand, is to get a good, more durable sense of how one candidate or the other might perform when the pressure is on or how they might prioritize when the pressure is off.

The presidency, as I said, is a strange office. Our presidential campaigns should probably be more focused on how candidates deal with what makes it so.

What Really Matters Is How Presidents Think About Power [NYT]

…&…I know…we can’t have that sort of thing because it’s anathema to the one team on account of it destroys their fig-leaves & exposes the bones of their whole deal…which is a beast of an altogether different stripe to the trompe l’oeil they’ve swathed the thing in…which by the transitive property is no fair because it unfairly biases people if they have to admit their biases instead of sublimating them like civilzed people

…so…before I get around to the part I vaguely alluded to at the outset…here’s a few things that seem like maybe we’d do well not to ignore

[…or there will be in a few minutes…but this is due now]

…don’t freak out

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/14/alarm-in-uk-and-us-over-possible-iran-russia-nuclear-deal

…don’t freak out

Biden admin says RT and Russian state media are waging covert information warfare around the world [NBC]

…well…maybe freak out a little bit

Russia accused of unprecedented missile attack on grain ship in Black Sea [Guardian]

The New York Times: Inside Elon Musk’s Mushrooming Security Apparatus

Donald Trump a de facto Russian asset, FBI official he fired suggests [Guardian]

IMF plan to visit Russia to assess economy prompts dismay across Europe [Guardian]

Russia expels U.K. diplomats; Putin warns against deep strikes with Western weapons [WaPo]

US homeland security chief warns of lone terror attacks at election poll sites [Guardian]

Fears mount that election deniers could disrupt vote count in US swing states [Guardian]

…&…look…it’s sunday…nobody says you gotta read a pile of paper that would weigh more than some children

I read the full 900-page Project 2025 manifesto – here’s why it matters [Guardian]

…but…every little helps

https://www.25and.me

…so…if we don’t get to ask the people we’d like to the questions we want answers to…& we’re stuck asking ourselves questions like “am I nuts or is this crazier than a box of frogs?”…well…I have questions…so…I’ll get this up & then set about setting a few of those out?

…so…about them polls (…stop groaning in the back)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/presidential-polling-averages

…I can’t get the graphic to re-appear here but WaPo give you the courtesy of a little thing that lets you “adjust” the current average to correct for how far out those were in 2020, 2016 & 2012…you know…for helpful context purposes…that don’t seem entirely helpful to me since correcting for those errors would very much be part of the methodology of the polls that offers to adjust that way again, near as I can figure what that translates to…but…it also offers a different scale of adjustments based on the polls underestimating the support of each candidate by up to 5% points…interestingly…it takes +2 for harris to have a tie be her worst result in all 7 battleground states…in a model with a 3% nominal margin of error…& that got me thinking

https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/06/26/presidential-polling-averages-methodology/

…that’s an interesting read

We only use the highest quality state and national polls in our polling averages. That means we only include polls that are transparent about how they are conducted, are not paid for by candidates or partisan groups and use methods that have demonstrated accuracy. The Post considers each survey’s methods in detail, including whether the sample was drawn using random sampling methods, how respondents are contacted and how samples are stratified or weighted to accurately represent the electorate. Historical accuracy in elections or other settings is also considered in identifying which polls to include.
[…]
Our averages also factor in how each state voted in the last two presidential elections. This isn’t our preferred method for gauging where the presidential race stands, but if we don’t have a lot of polls, this is a helpful proxy. The more polls we have, the less our averages rely on this metric.
[…]
There are three factors that drive our polling averages: state polls, national polls and a state’s presidential voting history in the last two elections. Our preference is to prioritize state polls in our calculations as they’re the best indicator of what’s happening in a given state, but we also use national polls in each of our state’s polling averages. National polls give us a sense of the race overall and where it might be headed next, and in states where we don’t have a lot of high-quality state polls, we can use national polls and a state’s voting history to see how the presidential race is shaping up there.
[…]
At the individual poll level we try to account for the possibility of a polling error in three ways. First, we include a larger sampling error than a poll’s standard margin-of-error calculation suggests. Research shows that the standard margin-of-error calculation (based on a poll’s sample size) underestimates the uncertainty present in a poll’s result. Next, we also try to account for the possibility of measurement error, or the idea that error that can be introduced when any process (in this case, people’s public opinion) is being measured. Finally, another source of error we try to account for is the uncertainty that comes with the choices (like weighting or likely voter screens) that pollsters make in the polls we use.

But we also try to account for systematic errors in our averages, like the possibility of a polling miss on the scale of what we saw in the presidential elections of 2020 and 2016. We found in the last few presidential cycles that the average modeled polling error in competitive states was 3.5 percentage points, so to account for this, our averages factor in the 90th percentile possible error (i.e., how bad would the error be in the worst 10 percent of cases).

…my stats must be rusty…because that sounds like they account for the thing they then offer a toggle to account for on top of that in that graphic…but…they say that’s not what that does

However, this doesn’t affect the output, or what our averages indicate the most likely outcome is. After all, it’s impossible to know before an election whether a polling error incorrectly measures support for Democrats or Republicans. Rather, our aim is to show where our estimate falls in a range of uncertainty. Our polling average page shows how our 2024 state averages would change under a 2020, a 2016 and a 2012 polling error.

…fine…let’s say that’s how that works…still seems like that thing about armies always training to fight the last war over again rather than the next one

…what was that?

AI can change belief in conspiracy theories – study [Guardian]

…oh…well, we can probably adjust to

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/11/china-to-train-thousands-of-overseas-law-enforcement-officers-to-create-more-fair-world-order

…wait…what?

Weeks ago, the world experienced another Maxim gun moment: The Ukrainian military evacuated U.S.-provided M1A1 Abrams battle tanks from the front lines after many of them were reportedly destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. The withdrawal of one of the world’s most advanced battle tanks in an A.I.-powered drone war foretells the end of a century of manned mechanized warfare as we know it. Like other unmanned vehicles that aim for a high level of autonomy, these Russian drones don’t rely on large language models or similar A.I. more familiar to civilian consumers, but rather on technology like machine learning to help identify, seek and destroy targets. Even those devices that are not entirely A.I.-driven increasingly use A.I. and adjacent technologies for targeting, sensing and guidance.

Techno-skeptics who argue against the use of A.I. in warfare are oblivious to the reality that autonomous systems are already everywhere – and the technology is increasingly being deployed to these systems’ benefit. Hezbollah’s alleged use of explosive-laden drones has displaced at least 60,000 Israelis south of the Lebanon border. Houthi rebels are using remotely controlled sea drones to threaten the 12 percent of global shipping value that passes through the Red Sea, including the supertanker Sounion, now abandoned, adrift and aflame, with four times as much oil as was carried by the Exxon Valdez. And in the attacks of Oct. 7, Hamas used quadcopter drones – which probably used some A.I. capabilities – to disable Israeli surveillance towers along the Gaza border wall, allowing at least 1,500 fighters to pour over a modern-day Maginot line and murder over 1,000 Israelis, precipitating the worst eruption of violence in Israel and Palestinian territories since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

…look…that was supposed to be just a saying about the last war/next war thing…you know…like a metaphor…or a figure of speech…you’re killing me, here

Take for example the F-35, the apex predator of the sky. The fifth-generation stealth fighter is known as a “flying computer” for its ability to fuse sensor data with advanced weapons.

Yet this $2 trillion program has fielded fighter airplanes with less processing power than many smartphones. It’s the result of a technology production system bespoke to the military and separate from the consumer technology ecosystem. The F-35 design was largely frozen in 2001, the year the Pentagon awarded its contract to Lockheed Martin. By the time the first F-35 was rolling down the runway, technology’s state of the art had already flown far past it. This year, the iPhone 16 arrives. Today, the F-35 is slowly progressing through its third technology upgrade with newer, but far from state-of-the-art, processors. The core issue is that this slow hardware refresh cycle prevents the F-35 from fully taking advantage of the accelerating advancements in A.I.

This is not an either/or argument. iPhones will not replace F-35s. The U.S. military requires unique platforms, such as stealth fighters and submarines, as well as newer technologies, including drones. All weapons systems, old or new, need to take full advantage of the software and A.I. revolution – a revolution driven forward primarily by Silicon Valley, not by large, traditional defense contractors.

There is progress. Merging these two systems of technological production – one for the military, another for everything else – is now a top Pentagon objective. Started in 2015, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, based in Silicon Valley, brings innovative commercial technology into the military, including A.I. It functions more like a venture capital firm than a military program office. D.I.U. created a faster way for startups to contract with the military that today has been used by the Department of Defense to acquire $70 billion of technology. (We helped build D.I.U.; one of us, Mr. Shah, now runs a venture firm focused on national security startups, including some that have received federal funding.)

…uh huh

Yet there is much left to do. While D.I.U.’s budget is more than 30 times as large as it was in its first full year of operations, now totaling almost $1 billion annually, the Pentagon spends only pennies on innovation for each dollar it throws at legacy systems. The Replicator initiative accounts for just 0.059 percent of the defense budget at a time when our adversaries are making monumental shifts.

China, of course, doesn’t need a D.I.U.; Xi Jinping and his predecessor, Hu Jintao, mandated that civilian technology be available to the People’s Liberation Army. This top-down, state-run economy is chasing quantum computers, nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons, and lofting into orbit its own 13,000-satellite equivalent to Starlink.

This is the civilizational race we’re in.

…if they’re right that prevention isn’t going to cut it…gotta admit…I don’t like the sounds of the cure a whole hell of a lot?

The way to win against both China and low-cost weapons in Ukraine and the Middle East is to unleash our market-based system so that scrappy, fast-moving product companies and the venture funds that back them revitalize our military’s technology pipeline. The good news is that market interest is robust: Venture capital funds deployed $120 billion of capital into national security startups over the last three years. Leading engineers are eager to work on problems that matter to preserving democracy. The question now is whether we can achieve this transformation in time to deter the next great power war and prevail in the more contained conflicts that threaten to envelop the U.S. and our allies.

The U.S. Military Is Not Ready for the New Era of Warfare [NYT]

…the fuck has any of that got to do with polls?

…you know…aside from the part where the polls are about reading the entrails of the news-cycle to soothsay about the outcome that decides who’s in charge of all that shit if the shit hits the fan

…well…how about we step back from the efforts of the likes of WaPo to provide averages & aggregate scores & see what the people at the coalfaces in places like that pewresearch.org lot have to say about getting to grips with that shit?

Confidence in U.S. public opinion polling was shaken by errors in 2016 and 2020. In both years’ general elections, many polls underestimated the strength of Republican candidates, including Donald Trump. These errors laid bare some real limitations of polling.
[…]
Restoring people’s confidence in polling is an important goal, because robust and independent public polling has a critical role to play in a democratic society. It gathers and publishes information about the well-being of the public and about citizens’ views on major issues. And it provides an important counterweight to people in power, or those seeking power, when they make claims about “what the people want.”

…ok…so…about that

The challenges facing polling are undeniable. In addition to the longstanding issues of rising nonresponse and cost, summer 2024 brought extraordinary events that transformed the presidential race. The good news is that people with deep knowledge of polling are working hard to fix the problems exposed in 2016 and 2020, experimenting with more data sources and interview approaches than ever before. Still, polls are more useful to the public if people have realistic expectations about what surveys can do well – and what they cannot.

…”what the people want” & “realistic expectations” don’t seem to run in the same traces overmuch these days…but…let’s not get bogged down in those details while we’re bogging down in these details…ok?

Pollsters are making changes in response to the problems in previous elections. As a result, polling is different today than in 2016. Most U.S. polling organizations that conducted and publicly released national surveys in both 2016 and 2022 (61%) used methods in 2022 that differed from what they used in 2016. And change has continued since 2022.

The second change is that many of the more prominent polling organizations that use probability sampling – including Pew Research Center – have shifted from conducting polls primarily by telephone to using online methods, or some combination of online, mail and telephone. The result is that polling methodologies are far more diverse now than in the past.

(For more about how public opinion polling works, including a chapter on election polls, read our short online course on public opinion polling basics.)

…ok…so if that’s “the basics” out of the way…what about the intermediate stuff?

All good polling relies on statistical adjustment called “weighting”, which makes sure that the survey sample aligns with the broader population on key characteristics. Historically, public opinion researchers have adjusted their data using a core set of demographic variables to correct imbalances between the survey sample and the population.

But there is a growing realization among survey researchers that weighting a poll on just a few variables like age, race and gender is insufficient for getting accurate results. Some groups of people – such as older adults and college graduates – are more likely to take surveys, which can lead to errors that are too sizable for a simple three- or four-variable adjustment to work well. Adjusting on more variables produces more accurate results, according to Center studies in 2016 and 2018.

A number of pollsters have taken this lesson to heart. For example, recent high-quality polls by Gallup and The New York Times/Siena College adjusted on eight and 12 variables, respectively. Our own polls typically adjust on 12 variables. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be necessary to have that much intervention by the pollster. But the real world of survey research is not perfect.

…funny that

Roughly a third of eligible Americans do not vote in presidential elections, despite the enormous attention paid to these contests. Determining who will abstain is difficult because people can’t perfectly predict their future behavior – and because many people feel social pressure to say they’ll vote even if it’s unlikely.

…in the “you either laugh or you cry” sense, if nothing else

Polls are used for all kinds of purposes in addition to showing who’s ahead and who’s behind in a campaign. Fair or not, however, the accuracy of election polling is usually judged by how closely the polls matched the outcome of the election.

…really?

Pollsters are rightly working to improve the accuracy of their polls. But even an error of 4 or 5 percentage points isn’t too concerning if the purpose of the poll is to describe whether the public has favorable or unfavorable opinions about candidates, or to show which issues matter to which voters. And on questions that gauge where people stand on issues, we usually want to know broadly where the public stands. We don’t necessarily need to know the precise share of Americans who say, for example, that climate change is mostly caused by human activity. Even judged by its performance in recent elections, polling can still provide a faithful picture of public sentiment on the important issues of the day.

The 2022 midterms saw generally accurate polling, despite a wave of partisan polls predicting a broad Republican victory. In fact, FiveThirtyEight found that “polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party”. Moreover, a handful of contrarian polls that predicted a 2022 “red wave” largely washed out when the votes were tallied. In sum, if we focus on polling in the most recent national election, there’s plenty of reason to be encouraged.

Compared with other elections in the past 20 years, polls have been less accurate when Donald Trump is on the ballot. Preelection surveys suffered from large errors – especially at the state level – in 2016 and 2020, when Trump was standing for election. But they performed reasonably well in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, when he was not.

…fancy that

During the 2016 campaign, observers speculated about the possibility that Trump supporters might be less willing to express their support to a pollster – a phenomenon sometimes described as the “shy Trump effect”. But a committee of polling experts evaluated five different tests of the “shy Trump” theory and turned up little to no evidence for each one. Later, Pew Research Center and, in a separate test, a researcher from Yale also found little to no evidence in support of the claim.

Instead, two other explanations are more likely. One is about the difficulty of estimating who will turn out to vote. Research has found that Trump is popular among people who tend to sit out midterms but turn out for him in presidential election years. Since pollsters often use past turnout to predict who will vote, it can be difficult to anticipate when irregular voters will actually show up.

The other explanation is that Republicans in the Trump era have become a little less likely than Democrats to participate in polls. Pollsters call this “partisan nonresponse bias”. Surprisingly, polls historically have not shown any particular pattern of favoring one side or the other. The errors that favored Democratic candidates in the past eight years may be a result of the growth of political polarization, along with declining trust among conservatives in news organizations and other institutions that conduct polls.

The real margin of error is often about double the one reported. A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points. That number expresses the uncertainty that results from taking a sample of the population rather than interviewing everyone. Random samples are likely to differ a little from the population just by chance, in the same way that the quality of your hand in a card game varies from one deal to the next.

…but…+2% maybe swings the full set of swing states into the kamala column…huh…well, I never

There are three other, equally important sources of error in polling: noncoverage error, where not all the target population has a chance of being sampled; nonresponse error, where certain groups of people may be less likely to participate; and measurement error, where people may not properly understand the questions or misreport their opinions. Not only does the margin of error fail to account for those other sources of potential error, putting a number only on sampling error implies to the public that other kinds of error do not exist.

Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.

…doesn’t appear to stop ’em…or even give them pause…but…there we are

For some, this raises the question: What is the use of national polls if they don’t tell us who is likely to win the presidency? In fact, national polls try to gauge the opinions of all Americans, regardless of whether they live in a battleground state like Pennsylvania, a reliably red state like Idaho or a reliably blue state like Rhode Island. In short, national polls tell us what the entire citizenry is thinking. Polls that focus only on the competitive states run the risk of giving too little attention to the needs and views of the vast majority of Americans who live in uncompetitive states – about 80%.

Fortunately, this is not how most pollsters view the world. As the noted political scientist Sidney Verba explained, “Surveys produce just what democracy is supposed to produce – equal representation of all citizens”.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/28/key-things-to-know-about-us-election-polling-in-2024/

…makes sense…upwards of a third of those will swallow any old shit & ask for more if you tell them that making the foreigners dissapear as if by magic, banning all the books that make them uncomfortable & saying you can’t get done for even overtly trying to co-opt the national interest for short-term personal advantage & the avoidance of legal redress…so they’d be hard to represent without including a lot of horseshit…anyway…

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/07/11/election-2024-july-methodology/

…that’s interesting…you know…if you like that sort of thing & you’ve had your shots so you won’t break out in hives…but…this one?

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/04/19/polling-landscape-methodology/

…that’s about how they put together the underlying stuff for all the block-quotes…& that’s fascinating…to me…probably to at least the person that wrote it up, too…but feel free to take my word for it

The initial coding of sample source and mode of interview was based on information available from a variety of sources including pollster websites, news articles, and the Roper iPoll opinion poll data archive. After this data was compiled, Center staff attempted to contact each organization and ask them to confirm whether the information for that organization was accurate. Most organizations that responded confirmed that the information gathered was accurate. When organizations provided corrections or additions, the study database was updated with that information. Each of these steps is described in greater detail below.

…what do you mean greater detail ain’t that great?

One important choice in designing this type of project is deciding whether to study the organization sponsoring a poll or the organization collecting the data (known as the “vendor”). For example, many Pew Research Center polls are fielded by Ipsos. Pew Research Center is the sponsor, and Ipsos is the vendor. This study focuses on sponsors and refers to them as the “pollster”. There are several reasons why sponsors are the focus rather than vendors, including:

• The sponsor is typically the organization commissioning the poll and attaching their institutional name to its public reporting. Sponsors decide whether to make poll results public or keep them private. Generally speaking, sponsors are the entity most responsible for any public reporting from the poll.
• Sponsors dictate, in broad terms, the budget available for a poll, and the vendor works within that constraint to find a design that fits within that budget. While the vendor will often decide the exact final price tag, they usually are reacting to information from the sponsor as to whether the budget available is, say, $10,000 or closer to $100,000. In other words, whether a poll uses a very expensive method or very inexpensive method is generally dictated by the sponsor.

One complication is that sometimes the sponsor and vendor are one and the same. Continuing with the Ipsos example, in addition to the polls they conduct on behalf of clients, Ipsos also conducts national polling and releases the results by themselves. Accordingly, Ipsos is among the 78 pollsters in the analysis based on polling that they (co-)sponsor. Other vendors only conduct work on behalf of clients and never put themselves in the role of sponsor. This explains why a few major companies that conduct polling do not necessarily appear in the study dataset. Their work is represented in the rows associated with their clients.

Admittedly, focusing on the sponsor rather than the vendor feels more appropriate in some cases than others. For example, some sponsors are very engaged in decisions about how their polls are conducted, down to the smallest detail. Referring to such sponsors as the “pollster” feels accurate. Other sponsors are much more hands-off, letting the vendor make most or all decisions about how the poll is conducted. In these cases, it is tempting to think of the vendor as the pollster.

Ultimately, to execute a study like this, researchers must rely on information in the public domain. Nuanced records of who made which decisions are simply not available, nor is it possible to gather such information about polls fielded as early as 2000. Of the options available, focusing on the sponsor was the best fit for this study, but we acknowledge that in some cases the sponsors were likely not deeply engaged with decisions about sampling frames and interview mode.

Another complication is that some polls have multiple sponsors. For example, ABC News and The Washington Post have a long-standing partnership for live phone polling. In addition, they sponsor polls either solo or with other partners. In this study, each pollster is credited with using the methods employed for national public polls that they either sponsored or co-sponsored. For example, this study’s records for both ABC News and The Washington Post reflect the use of live phone with random-digit-dial sample for the years in which they jointly sponsored such polls.

A few well-known, recurring national surveys were considered but ultimately excluded from this analysis because they are too different from a typical public opinion poll. The General Social Survey and American National Election Survey both measure public opinion, but their budgets and timelines are an order of magnitude different from a typical public opinion poll. On that basis, we decided it was unhelpful to include them. Similarly, the National Election Pool (NEP) poll and VoteCast are not included because they are designed specifically to cover election results not just nationally but at the state level. Their methodological and budget considerations are quite different from those of ordinary opinion polls. These studies are very valuable to opinion research in the U.S., but they are not comparable to the polling studied in this project.
[…]
The decision to consider a sponsoring organization as the pollster raised two practical questions when considering academic organizations. Colleges and universities may have multiple individuals or entities independently conducting polls within them, and so one question is whether these separate polling efforts should be considered as different pollsters or not. The second question is whether (or which) national polls conducted by faculty primarily for academic purposes should be included.

Although some academic institutions have more than one branded entity conducting public polls on politics and policy, publicly released surveys typically carried the institutional name. Moreover, there was no practical way to ascertain the degree of independence of the entities within a university. As a result, the decision was made to code all polling that met the study’s content criteria for inclusion as polling by that university.

However, this study does not contain all the surveys conducted by every college and university. Indeed, it would be nearly impossible to locate all such polling, since most of it is made public only through academic papers or conference presentations. We acknowledge that as a limitation of the study. This study does not purport to represent every national survey whose results can be found somewhere in the public domain. The ones that are included tend to have a news media partnership increasing their visibility; maintain a public website updated regularly with the latest polling results; and/or are archived in the Roper iPoll public opinion poll repository. It is worth underscoring that the goal of this study is to describe the nature and degree of changes in national public polling from 2000 to 2022. Research designed primarily for an academic audience (e.g., peer-reviewed journals) is not the type of polling people have in mind when they question whether polling still works after the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Among the news media organizations included and contacted in this study, only one raised the concern that multiple units within the organization might be conducting polls. Most of their polling was coordinated through their political unit, but a few polls over the years were not. Mapping out the decision structures within each organization was outside the scope of this project. In the interest of applying the same standard to each organization, this study includes the methods for any public polls we found during the years studied. In some cases, this yields a track record that does not reflect centralized decision-making. In all cases, though, this approach reflects what the public sees – either a poll was or was not sponsored by “Organization X.”

…but that’s page 3…page 1 had the better labelled version of that graphic from before

Pollsters made more design changes after 2020 than 2016. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, it was unclear if the polling errors were an anomaly or the start of a longer-lasting problem. 2020 provided an answer, as most polls understated GOP support a second time. The study found that after 2020, more than a third of pollsters (37%) changed how they sample people, how they interview them, or both. This compares with about a quarter (26%) who made changes after 2016. As noted above, though, these changes did not necessarily occur because of concerns about election-related errors.

…more of some stuff

Use of probability-based panels has become more prevalent. A growing number of pollsters have turned to sampling from a list of residential addresses from the U.S. Postal Service database to draw a random sample of Americans, a method known as address-based sampling (ABS). There are two main types of surveys that do this: one-off or standalone polls and polls using survey panels recruited using ABS or telephone (known as probability-based panels). Both are experiencing growth. The number of national pollsters using probability-based panels alone or in combination with other methods tripled from 2016 to 2022 (from seven to 23). The number of national pollsters conducting one-off ABS surveys alone or in combination with other methods during that time rose as well (from one in 2016 to seven in 2022).

…less of some stuff…or…no more, at least

The growth of online opt-in among national pollsters appears to have paused after 2020. The number of national pollsters using convenience samples of people online (“opt-in sampling”) – whether alone or in combination with other methods – more than quadrupled between 2012 and 2020 (from 10 to 47). In 2022, however, this number held flat, suggesting that the era of explosive growth could be ending.

…& the effects…are TBD

Whether changes to sample sources and modes translate into greater accuracy in presidential elections remains to be seen. The fact that pollsters are expanding into new and different methods is not a guarantee that the underrepresentation of GOP support occurring in 2016 and 2020 preelection polls has been fixed. Polling accuracy improved in 2022, but this represents only one nonpresidential election.

…shit changed for sure, though

The study found a different kind of change within the polling industry after 2020 versus 2016. After 2020, changes were both more common and more complex. More than a third (37%) of pollsters releasing national public polls in both 2020 and 2022 changed their methods during that interval. By contrast, the share changing their methods between 2016 and 2018 was 26%.

The nature of the changes also differed. About half of the changes observed from 2016 to 2018 reflected pollsters going online – either by adding online interviewing as one of their methods or fully replacing live phone interviewing. By contrast, the changes observed from 2020 to 2022 were more of a mix. During that period, some added an approach like text messaging (e.g., Change Research, Data for Progress), probability-based panels (Politico, USA Today) or multiple new methods (CNN, Wall Street Journal). About a quarter of the change observed from 2020 to 2022 reflected pollsters who had already moved online dropping live phone as one of their tools (e.g., CBS News, Pew Research Center).

A look at change over the entire recent period – from 2016 to 2022 – finds that more than half of national public pollsters (61%) used methods in 2022 that differed from those they used in 2016. As noted above, if features like weighting protocols were included in the analysis, that rate would be even higher.

A longer view of modern public polling (going back to 2000) shows that methodological churn began in earnest around 2012 to 2014. That was a period when about a third of national pollsters changed their methods. Change during that period was marked by pollsters starting to migrate away from live telephone surveys and toward online surveys.

[emphasis mine in that penultimate para]

…who says polls don’t tell us shit?

…okay…most of us say that…& it’s not not-true…but I don’t need a poll to tell me I should’ve STFU by now…so I’m off to contemplate how to get youtube to spit out things l like the sounds of?