So, it's basically all over for Joe Biden, yes? This doesn't seem like a salvageable situation for him, 27 governors just told him to shove it where the sun don't shine.
If I understand correctly, the military is in the hands of the states & not the president directly, correct? I remember one of the governors calling back soldiers from his state when Joe Biden decided that a concrete parking lot was adequate accommodation for sleeping quarters for the people keeping the rabble at arms length. Please correct me if I'm wrong,
@Gehenna.
About that, it's twenty-four governors, all of them Republicans. Not a single Democratic governor has said they would fight the vaccine mandate. Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky all have Democratic governors and, predictably, none of them spoke out against the mandate. The reason why these three states are red in the picture below is because their Attorney General spoke out against it. If a state's Governor and Attorney General are Democratic, they are in favor of the vaccine mandate.
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The good news is that all three states with Democratic governors I mentioned are - for now - solid red states. That means next year in Kansas and 2023 for the other two, if you live in those states, you have an opportunity to vote them out.
Right, normally polls follow a pretty basic pattern. First you, through a mixture of phonecall and online means, obtain a sample of voters from a given area. You ask some basic identifying questions "Are you registered to vote, have you voted, are you likely to vote" etc. From there, you ask a series of increasingly more specific questions.
This is where the first bit of fuckery begins. The questions are generally -very- misleading, For example: "Do you approve of increased measures to ensure vaccination" (That is a verbatim example from CNN). Frankly, the fact that question -only- got a raw 64% yes response is amazing. It's so god damn broad and open that everyone is like "yes". But it's also priming the pump, we already agreed SOME increased measures are fine. So the next questions are very, very slowly more severe, and lead to additional positive answers.
Now comes the second fuckery. The next bit is to compile the data to see what kind of range of answers you got. The traditional value is to put them into Republican/Democrat/Independent groups. This is where oversampling comes in. Now, ove sampling is -not inherently bad-. What is normally done is you weigh your numbers based on national averages or regional averages, so they balance it out. To massively oversimplify, if you know there is a 50/50 split of Dems to Republicans, but you got 12 Democrats and 8 Republicans you'd weight the democrat responses down to 0.83 and weigh the republican responses up by 1.25 so they both are 'equal' to 10.
The democrats, and CNN, technically do this. But they -massively- overweight Democrats.
This leads to our final bit of fuckery, Time period. CNN in particular is now taking 'polls' over the span of months and compiling them into one to provide a more 'accurate' view. This is bullshit. People's views change over time, it's why we use graphs to indicate changes over time in the day to day. No poll is accurate out to more than a week which is why they are generally shorter. Polls are an indicator of the movement of opinion, not the opinion in and of itself. In isolation, any given poll can only tell you a snapshot -at the time- of an opinion. Having them spread that out over months is going to garble it with utterly useless info and be utterly meaningless.
This is a good post. The problems of the polling industry is difficult to understand unless you have been following it on conservative-leaning (more like moderate if we're being honest) media or worked on how to make accurate polling in the age of online like People's Pundit with Big Data Poll, Trafalgar, or Susquehanna have. Here are some of the claims the polling industry swore up and down would happen that did not,
- Thom Tillis would lose to Democratic Senator Kay Hagan. He won by 1.5 points.
- Hillary Clinton would win the election. Trump won and significantly outdid his polling in places like Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
- Predicted that Andrew Gillum would win Florida in 2018 and that Democrat Bill Nelson would keep his seat. Neither happened. Ron DeSantis is in the governor mansion while being an example of what a populist should do and Rick Scott flipped Nelson's seat red.
- Claimed that Democrats would expand their House majority. It in fact narrowed as not a single Republican incumbent running for re-election lost their seats whereas we had Democrats running that lost theirs.
- Every poll predicted Sara Gideon would beat Susan Collins for Senator in Maine, yet Collins won by a comfortable margin.
- Claimed that a Biden landslide was inevitable. Sure Biden "won", but he didn't get even an Obama-tier landslide and he only obtained the presidency by 40,000 votes.
A solid pollsters will have misses, but the key thing is that the misses will occur on both side and they are transparent about the method they use. The problem with the MSM polling industry is that they are just are corrupt as the mainstream media that employs them, and that's reflected on significant misses outside of the margin of error - occasionally even double-digit - that they keep having. Yet we were told that Biden had Obama-level approval rating when we're now witnessing the fastest collapse of an administration since Gerald Ford (who was dealing with Nixon's tainted hands). The fact that CNN had to change their polling methodology in response to backlash speaks volumes about how untrustworthy most pollsters are.
Manchin is angling to absolutely gut the pork in it, which will in turn just absolutely wreck the attempts to refinance the coffers. The man increasingly is angling for a governor position, and the revelation that Governors can have more power than the President may just have been the last bit of oomph he needed to go full 'fuck it'.
FYI:
https://nypost.com/2021/07/01/sen-joe-manchin-talks-switching-parties-to-join-gop/ The rumblings began around July that Manchin was possibly considering switching parties. He hasn't yet out of some lingering loyalty, but that loyalty is -frayed- to hell and back.
Fuck no. Manchin voted for Trump's impeachment when he had an opportunity to stand against his colleagues. He's a liberal that would be the definition of a RINO, backstabbing a possible Trump or DeSantis term just as hard as Romney or Collins does, if not more so. He should stay in the Democratic Party and pretend to be a moderate if he wants to pretend party label is not important to him. Sure he might be responsible for preventing the worst of Biden's laws coming to fruition, but that is only because he knows West Virginia would vote him out in landslide if he approved shit like H.R.1 (fortifying voter fraud on a nationwide scale) or H.R.8 (banning "assault weapons").
Come 2024, West Virginia should make the point of denying him a Senate or Governor position. We need more populist Republican Senators and few states have a better shot at a flip than West Virginia. If Manchin does run for governor in 2024, the voters should vote to keep Jim Justice or elect a new populist governor.