I mean the polls for Biden were bad and getting worse. Harris was only down a couple points… Biden was down double digits. I hate to say it, but with the 2 point polling error, Biden had 0 path to make it. I don’t know a single state that he would have taken off of Trump.

Ah yes. Great. We’re the election conspiracy theorists now. It’s apparently democrats turn to make completely baseless accusations.

This stuff is exhausting. We want to look for every reason except for the one that matters: Democrats lost America. We need to break the party apart and start over.

Every other excuse just delays and distracts. Democrats fucked it. We can be all high and righteous as we want, but we lost 2 of 3 to Donald Trump.

Face the reality. Democrats need to reinvent themselves or they will lose to shit candidates like Trump.

Iowa itself is a lost cause. It’s 75% Republican here. We’re gerrymandered to high hell, so even if Baccam squeaks through, Iowa state legislature won’t look very blue. If it’s 60/40 Republican I’d be absolutely shocked.

But contributing one Senator nationally would be pretty neat.

If Harris gets Iowa the race is over. These races are not truly independent - they are correlated. If Harris picks up Iowa, there’s a very good chance that means she’s swept every swing state.

Right - I just mean literally any attempt to try and cater to a specific group is gonna be like this.

Both campaigns go after different groups. I just think literally anything that is contained in these are going to sound racist.

In a less charged example, both candidates try and appeal to women. Those could be viewed as sexist.

To be fair… When the article’s opening line is “In outreach to Black Men”, it doesn’t really matter what you put after. It’s going to sound bad.

It can be both things.

There are no definitive data points that should lead anyone to believe that either candidate has a significant advantage.

I’m not sure anyone who is well versed in election projections or polling would say anything other than it’s a toss up. As a heavy consumer of said data and reporting, I haven’t seen anything to the contrary.

You’re not wrong about media incentives, but they’re also not wrong that this is a very close race.

Technically… But there’s also a lot of waste from the 500 pack that people throw out half of. It likely evens out.

… What?

Is this some weird “victim mentality” thing?

People love to use it because it got popular and grew to mean more than the original definition to the point where it just got generic to encompass a wide range of things. It’s the same as cringe.

I thought the same thing. People are obsessed with the word gaslighting.

This seems more like textbook hypocrisy. Person doing thing talks about the harms of others doing that thing.

Omg what kind of dog is that? It’s marvelous.

I think this is rather impossible to answer.

One of the biggest issues is that context changes over time.

FF7 in particular is nearly unplayable by modern standards, imo. The amount of transition times (random battles with 20 second intros and 20 second outros) and lack of QoL features make it ridiculously hard to swallow. There’s also an expectation of mindless “grinding” that has largely written out of modern games. Even the remake uses side missions, which at least have some interesting elements to them, rather than pure mechanical “go spend 2 hours killing basic enemies”.

OoT has many good things going for it, but the live controls and weird camera behavior have been largely solved by games nowadays.

If you consider them in the context of the current time, both were unlike almost anything that had been seen. And given the price/console exclusivity at the time, I’d venture that very few people actually played them at the same time in their contexts.

Both were absolute revolutions of their time, which isn’t capturable anymore. It reminds me of the movie Predator. It became the foundation for so many things, but modern movies have taken everything that Predator did and did them better. By modern standards it’s a clichéd action movie with basically no plot. Makes it hard to judge.

I mean generally it’s all correlated. It’s not perfect, but typically a 2-3 point national poll lead is close to an electoral college tie.

I have to say this is not a good take. Polls aren’t all the same, but news outlets treat them like they are. Even the same pollsters come up with slightly different numbers each time they run them.

Because there is a certain amount of uncertainty doesn’t make them invalid. We just need to be more educated on filtering the good from the bad.

You sort of have 2 options:

1. Get educated on polling errors, the statistics, and the methodologies of the polls and arrive at your own conclusions.

2. Ignore anything written by the main media outlets about polls, because looking at a single poll is really dumb.

They definitely do matter, and there’s validity to them, but they don’t claim to be the exact truth. If you know how to use them, they are quite helpful.

These are great points. I’ll have to think on this a bit further - thanks for the info!

I see your points here. I don’t think they are wrong, but I have a different opinion on Trump’s election.

I think the onset of social media created a real shit storm of misinformation particularly during the Obama years. I don’t think it was backlash because he was black (though I admit this is not knowable, just my opinion), but more because of the overall grievance with how things operate.

You can’t really separate race out of the equation, because I think Democrats had good messaging showing the effects of institutional racism and sexism against minority groups, particularly at a systemic level. However, there was a massive concentration of wealth in America at the same time.

Trumo came along and his message wasn’t really that novel. He just said hey, this shit sucks for everyone, not just minorities. White people are getting screwed too. And I’m the guy that’s going to fight for the rural voter.

I take your point that it’s not outright racism. It’s not someone saying I’m not voting for this person solely because they are X, it’s some end around way of going about it. But I think Trump played the White Greivance card and I think Democrats are getting a little better at leaning into it. The unfortunate truth is that both things are totally true. White people are getting screwed (concentration of wealth to hover levels) AND minorities groups are getting screwed (because of systematic racist effects that are still residual in daily life for them).

As I’m talking this out, I’m not sure where to land. There’s multiple pieces here that intersect with race, but I’m not sure they are the core tenant. I think there might be some voters who realize that everyone is getting screwed, but maybe worry that Harris would prioritize racial issues before overall everyone getting boned issues. Maybe that’s the group?

Didn’t come to a great conclusion, but your comment had some layers to it so it got me thinking.

I think you skipped part of the argument. I’m sure those people exist, but what about the number of disengaged voters who were over Joe Biden or disagreed with him on various issues? I think the number of votes lost because of race or gender is not 0, but the gains through reinvigoration are far, far higher.

Right… We become beholden to the laggards of social progress because we think we can’t win without them, and we alienate and stagnate the progress of those doing the most.

This is a hilarious misreading of polling data. Kamala may not win, but her percentage chance to win might be double or more of what Bidens was.

People I follow were estimating Biden at 10-15% by the time the election rolled around. All the models assume that a candidate would run a normal campaign. Something that he is not capable of doing.

How many people, realistically, would vote for a white male Democrat but NOT a non-white female?

People are talking about this, but I don’t know who this voter is. The hard line racists and sexists were not moderates, they’re all already Republican.

There are far more democrats that were against Biden because of his age than would be against Harris as a woman. This is a net gain. Fuck the people who won’t vote for her along gender or racial lines. I don’t want to try and appease them.

Give people something to vote FOR rather than vote against.