A respected Chinese virologist appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News in mid-September to share the results of her just-completed report. The conclusion: The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. On Carlson's show, she claimed it was intentionally released into the world.

The publication of the paper by lead author Li-Meng Yan -- an ex-patriot from China seeking asylum in the US -- was quickly linked to former White House adviser Steve Bannon, long a strident critic of China's government.

thephan wrote:

A respected Chinese virologist appeared on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News in mid-September to share the results of her just-completed report. The conclusion: The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was likely engineered in a Chinese lab. On Carlson's show, she claimed it was intentionally released into the world.

The publication of the paper by lead author Li-Meng Yan -- an ex-patriot from China seeking asylum in the US -- was quickly linked to former White House adviser Steve Bannon, long a strident critic of China's government.

TL;DR: Actual science balks at the "research" as it seems completely baseless.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics ... index.html

06hawkalum wrote:Absolutely not, for two reasons:

1. Trump probably will be dead in four years.

2. He never wanted to be POTUS, he wanted free publicity for the Trump News Network.

I am starting to think that he will lose, actually concede, and then move ahead with making bank.

[Reveal] Spoiler:

Monkeyboy wrote:

06hawkalum wrote:

MoBettle wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:whoops, just saw this thread. I'll repost here.



Yes, he just needs to win one of them and I really think he will win PA because it will go to SCOTUS. It's already set up.

But even without cheating, if he's got a 15% chance at all 3, then he's got a 45% chance to win one of them. If we get a 3% swing towards Trump with bad polling or GOP voters coming home to roost (which they almost always do), all those states propping up Biden's win % will disappear and we'll be down to the same 3 states again. It's hard to replace PA electoral votes without winning FL or needing multiple red states to turn blue. With his unpopularity on the coasts being off the charts, he could lose the popular vote by 5% and still sneak out the electoral win.

And I’ll just repeat that’s not how it works. Silver explains this in one of the first questions on the 538 podcast on Friday last week.

Thanks, this business about state legislatures or the SCOTUS stealing the election for Trump is just misinformed fear porn imo.

**ring** *ring*

It's 2000 on the phone. They want to speak with you.

I usually don't listen to podcasts because I'm easily distracted with two kids and being up all night. I find I lose attention and then have to rewind to try to find where I left off. Despite being an auditory person, I prefer to read the news because I can just stop and then come back to it more easily.

That said, I'll try to take a listen to the podcast if I have the time tonight.

I think anyone scarred from the mental gymnastics the SCOTUS showed in 2000 is rightly nervous about this election and what seems to be clearly a scramble to get her on the court before the election. She was involved in 2000 and they will steal it for him if they get the chance. Maybe they won't get the chance.

Assumption No. 4: State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.
In 2012, Obama beat his polling by 2 or 3 percentage points in almost every swing state. The same was true in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won in a landslide — instead of the modest lead that polls showed a few days before the election — and claimed 489 electoral votes by winning almost every competitive state. You also frequently see this in midterms — Republicans beat their polling in almost every key Senate and gubernatorial race in 2014, for example.

Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.

What if we changed this assumption? If we assumed that states had the same overall error as in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only model but that the error in each state was independent, Clinton’s chances would be … 99.8 percent, and Trump’s chances just 0.2 percent. So assumptions about the correlation between states make a huge difference. Most other models also assume that state-by-state outcomes are correlated to some degree, but based on their probability distributions, FiveThirtyEight’s seem to be more emphatic about this assumption, accounting for both the possibility a significant national polling error and other types of correlations, such as between states in different regions.

CalvinBall wrote:Some sort of election security announcement from the FBI incoming

06hawkalum wrote:“Beijing Barry” handed Trump his ass this afternoon:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics ... index.html

PHILLY PHILLY!!!

MoBettle wrote:For context, the Comey letter dropped on the equivalent of this coming Friday (Remember when people compare equivalent dates 4 years ago, the election is happening almost a week earlier this year, thank heavens). It will probably take a “scandal” of that nature plus a similar polling error (or a small scandal but larger polling error or vice versa) to get close to a 2016 map. Is it implausible, no, is it likely, no.

If anything it seems more likely that pollsters are really gunshy about getting it wrong in the exact same way as 2016 and overcorrect, but who knows.

06hawkalum wrote:Absolutely not, for two reasons:

1. Trump probably will be dead in four years.

2. He never wanted to be POTUS, he wanted free publicity for the Trump News Network.

I am starting to think that he will lose, actually concede, and then move ahead with making bank.

MoBettle wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:

06hawkalum wrote:

MoBettle wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:whoops, just saw this thread. I'll repost here.



Yes, he just needs to win one of them and I really think he will win PA because it will go to SCOTUS. It's already set up.

But even without cheating, if he's got a 15% chance at all 3, then he's got a 45% chance to win one of them. If we get a 3% swing towards Trump with bad polling or GOP voters coming home to roost (which they almost always do), all those states propping up Biden's win % will disappear and we'll be down to the same 3 states again. It's hard to replace PA electoral votes without winning FL or needing multiple red states to turn blue. With his unpopularity on the coasts being off the charts, he could lose the popular vote by 5% and still sneak out the electoral win.

And I’ll just repeat that’s not how it works. Silver explains this in one of the first questions on the 538 podcast on Friday last week.

Thanks, this business about state legislatures or the SCOTUS stealing the election for Trump is just misinformed fear porn imo.

**ring** *ring*

It's 2000 on the phone. They want to speak with you.

I usually don't listen to podcasts because I'm easily distracted with two kids and being up all night. I find I lose attention and then have to rewind to try to find where I left off. Despite being an auditory person, I prefer to read the news because I can just stop and then come back to it more easily.

That said, I'll try to take a listen to the podcast if I have the time tonight.

I think anyone scarred from the mental gymnastics the SCOTUS showed in 2000 is rightly nervous about this election and what seems to be clearly a scramble to get her on the court before the election. She was involved in 2000 and they will steal it for him if they get the chance. Maybe they won't get the chance.

Well you want you can just read the explainer behind the model: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ho ... -covid-19/

Here's something more directly on point (ironically in an article a month before 2016 explaining why 538's model was more optimistic about Trumps chances than others) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/el ... -on-trump/

Assumption No. 4: State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.
In 2012, Obama beat his polling by 2 or 3 percentage points in almost every swing state. The same was true in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won in a landslide — instead of the modest lead that polls showed a few days before the election — and claimed 489 electoral votes by winning almost every competitive state. You also frequently see this in midterms — Republicans beat their polling in almost every key Senate and gubernatorial race in 2014, for example.

Basically, this means that you shouldn’t count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if they’re demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.

What if we changed this assumption? If we assumed that states had the same overall error as in the FiveThirtyEight polls-only model but that the error in each state was independent, Clinton’s chances would be … 99.8 percent, and Trump’s chances just 0.2 percent. So assumptions about the correlation between states make a huge difference. Most other models also assume that state-by-state outcomes are correlated to some degree, but based on their probability distributions, FiveThirtyEight’s seem to be more emphatic about this assumption, accounting for both the possibility a significant national polling error and other types of correlations, such as between states in different regions.