StrangeSox

House picks by State House Delegation, so there are 50 delegations and Republicans have a majority in 26 of the delegations. Yet another example of how dumb the Electoral College is, and how it gets dumber at every single step.

I wish Joe Biden was 10% as good as Republicans portray him to be

this is good, thanks!

I suspect that Fox News and AP will stick by their Arizona calls until the end, but it looks like a coin flip at this point. They'll be really hesitant to call NV or GA in Biden's favor, assuming he gets either one, as that'd put him over the top on a somewhat questionable AZ call. Hopefully Philly picks up their counting again and this is all moot anyway.

Ralston is the Nevada Vote Whisperer He's not sure there will be enough counted/reported today to firmly call it, but these first batches out of the biggest rural NV counties aren't enough with tons of Clark (Las Vegas) to drop still.

NV probably won't be called today: e: well right as I posted that:

If you want to obsess over every vote update, go here: https://alex.github.io/nyt-2020-election-scraper/battleground-state-changes.html IGNORE the "Votes remaining" column, and the "Biden needs x%" column, they're based on estimated data that isn't useful. But the "Vote Differential" "Change" and "Block Breakdown" are useful to look at.

If we didn't have the stupid Electoral College, we'd have had a clear winner on Tuesday night. Instead, we're heading into multiple recounts and razor-thin margins in multiple states. Fantastic system.

Dem President + R Senate = ungoverned country for 2 years minimum during a pandemic and economic recession or depression

We also haven't shifted basically all virology/vaccine research around the world to find treatments and vaccines for one specific coronavirus as quickly as possible. Colds suck but they don't kill you.

There were some election machine problems in one or two counties, but so far....that seems to be it nationwide as far as problems. No reports of intimidation, widespread failures. Thanks to so many early votes, not even the absurd hour+ lines that get treated as a good thing rather than a failure to have adequate voting infrastructure. So pretty good, so far.

All cable news causes severe brain rot.

Pretty much. And there's a perfectly normal and Constitutional way for Democrats to rectify this if they regain Senate/WH. Pass HR1, admit DC and PR (if PR wants it), expand the federal courts to handle the ever-increasing workload.

The Electoral College and the Senate aren't what make us a representative democracy, though. Lots of representative democracies around the world, none have our EC. I think Texas residents should have the exact same federal power as someone from Wyoming or Illinois or Alaska or Pennsylvania. Smaller states have more EV's per capita than larger states. They also have more Senators and Reps per capita. Rural areas and states are already ignored by Presidential campaigns. Instead, 5-10 states get all the attention, and generally large or mid-sized cities in those states.

The odds of the full national election being close enough to be Florida 2000 all over are much less than it coming down to a single contested state again, as it could do this year in Pennsylvania or another close state. Candidates absolutely do not make a token attempt to all 50 states as it is now. They focus almost exclusively on the handful of "Battleground" states while tens of millions get no attention at all. Large swaths are written off as unwinnable by each campaign from the start, or others are such a lock that it's not worth your time going there. e: Trump has pretty explicitly written off all the people that live in "blue states" and frequently threatens to withhold federal assistance for disasters or COVID. Because these are "blue states," even if they have millions of conservatives, he won't suffer any electoral consequences from it. You can do federalism without an electoral college or Senate. Germany manages pretty well! So does Canada, Sweden and a bunch of others.

IMPORTANT ELECTION UPDATE

Exit polls in the US are typically not the most reliable and will be useless this year given that over 100M people voted early and we expect heavy partisan splits. E: you can track voting turnout by party registration, but that doesn't really tell you a whole lot. Until this year, West Virginia had far more registered Dems than Reps! Lots of ancestral voter registrations, and about a third of the electorate is No Party Affiliation at all.

The point is that if you have power, you should wield it. I hope that, if the Democrats do regain the Presidency and the Senate, they take this lesson to heart.

The allegations against Hunter and Joe are at most corrupt business dealings and not treason, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum It was pretty close in the end and trending towards Leave. It was definitely still a shock, but was within the margin. Kinda like 2016.

What would your position be if the Democrats do manage to take the Presidency and Senate next year and decide to, say, add 3 four federal judicial circuits to better handle caseload and decide that the number of SCOTUS seats should match the number of federal circuits, allowing them to nominate 6 new justices? It'd be entirely within their legislative and executive power to do so. Is that the only criteria?

Brexit was within MoE. Australian polling missed badly in last year's elections because they were all herding the results. But at the same time, 2018 US polls were pretty good. So were 2012, though they overstated GOP votes.

Nobody really bothers with the vast majority of states today and instead focus on 10-15 at most. Aside from some fundraising trips here and there, the majority of the population gets ignored.

I don't think any politicians in the US are agitating for a fully nationally health care system like the UK's NHS. But today, those same decisions on care are made by your insurance company's actuarial department based on profitability. I won't claim to know the absolute best version of universal health care, but I'm very confident the current system isn't it.