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Whoops – I nearly made an elementary mistake betting on a Senate Democratic majority – politicalbett
Whoops – I nearly made an elementary mistake betting on a Senate Democratic majority – politicalbetting.com
Flicking through the Betfair WH2020 markets a few minutes ago I was taken with the longer than evens price currently available on the Democrats winning a majority in the Senate.
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https://starspangledgamblers.com/2020/10/26/the-top-sharks-in-the-uk-weigh-in-on-the-us-election/
https://twitter.com/kasie/status/1320887412571152387
https://twitter.com/mgerrydoyle/status/1320936786168692737
Thank you.
Now - are the Dems really going to win all... let me count 'em... THIRTEEN potentially competitive races?
No.
They're not.
But they've got a good chance of 5 or 6 net gains.
Indeed, I think I recall the same rule in Obama’s election.
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1320873994032205824
As Stern explains.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/10/barrett-election-bush-v-gore-vengeance.html
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1320876263440027649
Of course Barrett may well now help form a majority in favour of it. Which would see the recent 4-4 Pennsylvania decision, which Republicans are sending back to the court, go the other way.
" A majority of seats requires either party to control at least 51 of the 100 Seats in the US Senate. Independent or any other party Representatives caucusing with either the Democrats or Republicans will NOT count for the purposes of this market."
If the decision was about whether black people could vote then Roberts would be right there denying them the vote.
They really are begging Biden to pack the court.
According to electoral-college they are on course for 5.
SC, GA, MT and KS are close but feels a stretch to me.
I suggest that if you say "Mr Y" or "Don't know/won't vote" then you would be an unreliable poll respondant anyway.
Simply: CO, ME, AZ are the "easy" Dem pickups.
NC and IA is likely, GA (this time...) and AK are perhaps 50/50. And then you can add SC, KY, KS and GA (Loeffler vs Warnock) as unlikely, but far frm impossible.
"Analysis of COVID-19 hospitalization data from 13 sites indicated that 6% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 were HCP. Among HCP hospitalized with COVID-19, 36% were in nursing-related occupations, and 73% had obesity. Approximately 28% of these patients were admitted to an intensive care unit, 16% required invasive mechanical ventilation, and 4% died."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e3.htm?s_cid=mm6943e3_w
Note 4% mortality among presumably non-elderly.
Britain presents a sharp contrast to the binary polarisation in the United States, where partisan identities are deeply entrenched. Compared to Americans, political party attachment plays a much weaker role in British people’s sense of identity.
– Among those who identify with a political party, only 32 per cent say that being a supporter of a political party is an important part of their identity, compared to 67 per cent of Americans (and only 7 per cent say it is very important, compared to 31 per cent of Americans).
– Another measure of the importance of political parties to people’s sense of personal identity is whether people say that they have a sense of pride in their party. Only 43 per cent in Britain say so (compared
to almost twice this number in the US, in research for a report being published by More in Common in late 2020).21
https://www.britainschoice.uk/media/4yulkygt/moreincommon_britainschoice_report.pdf
Page 106
I would have Dems as underdogs in GA and AK, (KY is very unlikely IMO).
Most of those states are not competitive in the presidential election and are normally pretty Republican, but if this is a wave year it could well happen.
I think viral dose is part of the explanation. In the early days PPE was inadequate there too.
a) Dems won't get 50 senators in support
b)` Biden still believes in the false dream of bipartisanship.
But I think it will happen at some point because the Supreme Court are only going to get more involved in politics.
That is surely the same decision as we would make in this country. Votes that are in the post but do not arrive until after polling day don't count because they arrive too late. Of course in this country the counting would be finished before the postie was out on his rounds.
Don't get me wrong, it is obvious that the willingness of the SC to interfere in trivial matters like this is a menace to what is laughingly called American democracy, not a bulwark of it. The inconsistency of their decisions make them look partisan and selective. The constitutional base for this involvement is highly suspect. But I am wondering if I have missed something about this particular decision that makes it so egregious.
If you want to vote, get the ballot in the post in plenty of time or get your arse down to the polling station. Relying on a postmark seems fraught with danger and difficulty. Why take the chance?
The SC has just yanked that. Due to the shit was of the US Postal system that could end up invalidating votes that were posted yesterday.
US elections are not UK elections. Almost all the states with long history of postal voting operate on a " as long as it is postmarked before the election and arrives within X days of election day the vote will be counted" basis.
We could now see those election laws struck down state by state as the election is on going.
But i think a lot of the underlying concern relates to some of the rationale behind the decisions. And what it potentially means for a post election Supreme Court fight.
eg. there are apparently 18 states which take the "count based on post mark date". Could any and all of them potentially be challengeable if one party suddenly realises it could make a difference?
Roberts seems to be taking the stance that the Federal Court shouldn't intervene and the law should stay at State supreme Court level (hence differing decisions in Penn and Wisconsin). However post Barrett nomination even that position may not hold the line, given the rationale used by Kavanaugh which basically seems to allow the Supreme Court to rule in the Republicans favour, regardless of the legal position in the states (he seems to be saying that he will back decisions of state legislatures over state supreme courts).
I can't help reflecting that those who profess such a love of the rule of law overriding democratic decisions really should reflect on this a bit more. This is where giving excessive powers to courts to overrule democratic decisions leads. Its not a path we want to go down.
The Democrats main insurance against this is to win massively. Then it doesn't matter if you get 10k votes thrown out because you won by 100k.
Which is why we do verification, balancing the box totals, after all.
Why the sudden concern ?
https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/?view_type=State&demo=Voter Score&demo_val=Super Voter&state=FL&demo2=Registered Party
I think Tester and Manchin, in particular, could be names we will hear a lot more about, assuming Biden is President and the Democrats have nominal control of the Senate.
I seem to recall that Republicans were pretty successful in bringing pressure to bear on such senators during the period of Obama's Presidency when the Democrats had nominal control of the Senate.
Who is arguing for giving our courts powers beyond those they currently exercise ? The pressure for change seems to be very much in the other direction from our current administration.
If Barrett sides with him and the other three similarly minded conservatives in upcoming cases, which are numerous, then the floodgates are opened.
On a straightforward reading of the constitution, the role of the federal Supreme Court in presidential elections ought to be quite limited. The Kavanaugh view would make them arbiter of the result, which they are simply not.
My concern is that when Justices make decisions about political matters they undermine democratic legitimacy to the system and we should be careful what we wish for. For hundreds of years Courts took the view that into these areas they should not tread but that is no longer the view. The actions of the American Supreme Court are a good example of the hazards of that.
What I would say is something of a recent trend that might not be helpful is the habit of politicians to put policy objectives into law as a substitute to developing policy to achieve them.
This necessarily drags courts further into politics as the question of whether a government has been successful in achieving its policy objectives becomes a legal issue rather than a political one.
The pictures I've seen of assemblages of separate visors, masks etc seem uncomfortable and full of gaps.
(CNN):China has rolled out mass coronavirus testing for nearly 5 million people and imposed lockdown measures in the prefecture of Kashgar in the far western region of Xinjiang, after a single asymptomatic coronavirus case was reported on Saturday.
The testing drive has so far identified 137 additional cases -- and all are asymptomatic, according to Xinjiang's regional health commission. This is the highest daily number of asymptomatic Covid-19 cases reported in China in nearly seven months.
As of Sunday afternoon, some 2.8 million people have been tested. The government expects to finish testing all of Kashgar's 4.7 million population by Tuesday.
Kavanaugh's opinion didn't just cite it as a precedent, it cited an opinion within it that didn't even command majority support!
It was tied 4-4, and will be ruled on again after Barrett’s confirmation. We don’t know what the SC will now do.
https://twitter.com/PeatWorrier/status/1321003361290887168
Presumably we should balance of probabilities say these newly engaged voters are leaning heavily Democrat (or rather Not Trump), given clues such as Robert’s post the other day about increased youth turnout. It’s hard to see that Trump has captured a particular zeitgeist sufficiently to bring out new supporters in heavy numbers that he didn’t manage to engage last time.
In Australia they allow postal votes count as long as they are postmarked for that day. A constituency has to also wait for overseas and military votes. This means that like in the USA many seats are provisionally declared before the final counts are published, but in a few close seats it can take up to a couple of weeks before the winner is announced.
The point is that the rules are not the same everywhere, and that each US state should be allowed to carry out the rules regarding absentee and mail in votes that apply in that state, and not be overruled by the SC.
Less off topic and less celebratory, we have the latest ONS death data to look forward to this morning.
Gore v Bush, state by state until Trump gets the College looks quite likely- which is industrial scale voter fraud.
I don't quite understand it though, as it says that there are more Republican voters than Democrat registered ones, but if you look at the "Modelled Party Vote Share" then the Democrats are ahead there instead.
But you can see a trend in there that the Republicans are closing the gap, it was 35%-54% and is now 40%-49%, I guess as more rural votes are counted after the urban ones.
Parliamentary Sovereignty has the precise and technical (and boring) meaning that statutes duly enacted by the Crown in Parliament override everything else. That might sound like a piece of pedantic twattery, like people who know that the immaculate conception means something different from the virgin birth, but it is critically important because people misunderstand it as the HYUFD Doctrine - Boris has got an 80 seat majority so he can do what the fuck he likes till 2024 innit - and they think this insane, democratic tyranny doctrine is the bedrock of our constitution just because they have applied the wrong name to it.
Actually the system is symbiotic and feedback-based and to assert Parliamentary Sovereignty impliedly also asserts the sovereignty of the Courts: Parliament-made law is supreme, and so is the right of the courts to interpret and enforce it.
So actually, the only effect might be to have the Secretary of State/Electors ignore the official figures ordered by the Supreme Court and vote for Biden anyway.
Would cause chaos, but would be amusing since the electoral college is the only reason Trump got to 1700 PA in the first place.
So in the US, they are, in effect, electing the Supreme Court.
I would argue that a flexible constitutional settlement, regularly updated is what is required. Which would reduce the amount of "interpretational law" that the Supreme Court is required to do.
Which is what the US used to have - Lincoln didn't find some judges who would rule that due to an interpretation of the constitution re interstate commerce bounced at an angle off the right to privacy, that slavery had never existed.
He got the 13th Amendment passed.
As James Anthony Froude observed - "Constitutions are made for men, not men for constitutions".
The Courier is a fantastic paper, it will have several stories of this calibre on a good day. There is always much that is newsworthy happening in Dundee and its surrounding areas.
Although for a true taste of the absurdly parochial delivered with excessive solemnity the St Andrews Citizen is hard to beat.
The “brain fog” reported by many people weeks and months after their recovering from the virus may be a symptom of more serious cognitive deficits, scientists have said.
Research involving 84,285 people who had recovered from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 found that damage to the brain had happened to varying extents, depending upon the severity of the infection. However, more work is needed to identify how long this lasts.
“This is a large enough difference that as an individual you would notice an impact on the ability to cope with your normal job and everyday life,” Dr Hampshire said. “The results align with the ‘brain fog’ reported by many people who, even months after recovery, say they are unable to concentrate on work or focus how they did before.”
The team, from Imperial College, the University of Cambridge, the University of Chicago and King’s College London, also found that compared to people who had not had the virus survivors scored poorly on tests for logic and the meaning of words, spatial orientation, maintaining attention and processing their emotions.
https://twitter.com/MarkLevineNYC/status/1320394764286648324
Texas don't have party registration so their rely on their modelling and I have no idea if it is any good so have no idea if the chart means anything especially as it is giving daily figures.