Hacker News Reader

Comment by C1sc0cat | Hacker News Reader

He is Fucked if Biden wins - and I suspect the dual stock structure used to maintain control might get looked at by the SEC.

The Board need to tell him

" Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

In the name of God, go!"

View on HN

And then he'll appoint Peter Thiel as his successor.

As an outsider (from a different continent), it doesn't seem at all likely that there is a chance for Biden winning.

It probably looks the same from where Zuck is sitting.

We might, of course, both be wrong :)

I think that’s a take without merit. It’s certainly not clear-cut.

Here’s The Economist and FiveThirtyEight both saying that they favor Biden to win (at the time of my posting this):

https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

Not sure what your saying. But if your saying they got it wrong they gave trump a 25+% of winning. Things with a 1/4th probability happen all the time.

Sure, they happen, but how often? One in hundred times?

Things with a 1-in-4 probability happen about 1-in-4 times.

Bad joke, apparently.

Aww, you got me. :)

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/08/25/armadeaddon-gr...

Is there a point? 538 showed Trump having a 1 in 4 chance of winning the election on the day of the election. Flipping a coin twice and getting two heads is not particularly surprising.

538 is showing Trump of having a 1 in 5 chance of winning 2020: not favored but very possible. But if you dig deeper, the main reason that his odds are that high is that there's lots of time for stuff to happen between now and November 4th. If the election were to be held today the odds would be 1 in 19 for Trump.

edit: rereading it sounds like I'm discrediting the 1 in 5 forecast. Not at all, I think they're right about the 1 in 5. There are two main reasons to go from 1 in 19 to 1 in 5:

- future unknown events. Like Comey in 2016. Some of these events will help Biden and some Trump, but if they're random they will pull the odds toward the middle.

- when asked who would better handle the economy, Trump has the lead over Biden. Elections have always been about the economy, but 2020 hasn't been so far. Reversion to the norm is always a good guess.

I'm badly summarizing 538 in my comments, this is not original thought.

Yeah, and probably Zuck has better data than both ;)

My money is on Biden receiving the most votes in the popular vote, but Trump still being in power next year, and a huge amount of litigation and riots in the meantime.

(Not sure why this got downvoted; Clinton won the popular vote last time, I see no reason that won't happen again?)

Yeah, chiming in from the Mid-West, the Trump base is out in full force. Lots of Trump signs in yards (with varying degrees of offensive slogans), seeing Trump flags flying from the back of pickup truck beds and yards everywhere... one gets the opposite impression. Whether the 'silent-majority' is truly the majority or actually the 'extremely vocal minority' will decide the election. However, there is no denying Trump has a very energized base out here. I have a feeling the Trump will lose the popular vote, but as 2016 has shown, mid America will be the deciding factor.

The other troubling thing, as related to the article, is the huge role conspiracy theories like Qanon will play in this election. Just as the article describes, through FB's algorithm, people engaged with traditionally left-leaning communities (non-GMO, alternative medicine etc) are getting sucked into this madness. FB's work to suppress this is not only too little, too late, it also creates a self-enforcing narrative that 'the elites' are actively engaged in a cover-up. It's pretty scary stuff. Not to mention, the cognitive dissonance is only amplified by civil-unrest and a global pandemic. The psyche of the body politic has been absolutely ravaged by the events of 2020, creating a perfect-storm for the unexpected to occur.

The midwest likes the Republican candidate, but the entire Midwest gets a the same number of electoral college votes as, what, eight or nine coastal states?

I should have included the South in my assessment, when you have states like Texas and Florida with 2nd and 3rd most (tie) amount of electoral votes, not forgetting 'swing' states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan that have a lot of pull. The middle of the US, and the East Coast South of the Mason-Dixon line is solid red. Gerrymandering has made it so even states like Georgia with a majority African-American population concentrated within congressional districts with enough political power to theoretically do something (Atlanta) will likely never flip blue (assuming said population were to vote blue). Same story where I live in southern Ohio. It's pretty sad. I think the electoral college needs to go away, but I doubt I'll ever see it in my lifetime. Hate to be a bummer on this, just tempering my own expectations.

People probably misunderstood what he was saying. If trump loses the electoral college there’s no way he will be in power next year. But, Trump could plausibly win the electoral college again and is almost guaranteed to lose the popular vote. For reference, 538 has Trump right now at 22% chance to win the electoral college. The day before the 2016 election they had him at 28% to win.

I would hope that Biden's team learned from Clinton's run that they need to focus on winning the most electoral votes this time and not just the most votes, period.

FWIW here's my take:

- No one voting for Hillary in 2016 is voting for Trump in 2020

- People voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016 are either not voting or voting for Biden in 2020

- Democrats who didn't vote in 2016 out of protest for Bernie Sanders not getting the nomination are either not voting again or they're voting for Biden in 2020

- People who voted for Trump in 2016 fall into three camps: they're either voting for Trump in 2020, voting for Biden in 2020, or not voting at all.

All in all it looks like Biden is going to get more votes than Hillary did in 2016 and Trump is going to get fewer votes than he did in 2016. Trump's incredible campaign gaffe in Minnesota has cost him that swing state and is swinging the rest of the swing states of the U.S. Midwest, which is where I live, to Biden.

Bottom line - Biden's path to the White House appears to be less shaky than Trump's path to the White House. However, Trump has made comments indicating that he's willing to make this election cycle very ugly and we may be looking at our first non-peaceful transition of power in American history.

I'm no political science expert or anything, that's just how things appear to me.

Your first point is off, people have switched camps to the right since last election, despite how hard this may seem to believe. They look at how childish the left has become and have decided the right is less evil.

> They look at how childish the left has become and have decided the right is less evil.

The left is childish? President of the United States literally tweets gifs of himself beating up CNN on Twitter.

We live in differently realities. I see one side that shows some semblance of decorum and another that is basically the political equivalent of the Joker but without the charisma and philosophical consistency.

>We live in differently realities.

That sums it up doesn't it? Both sides only see the worst the other side has to offer. It feeds the algorithm for it to be so.

But that illusion is actually quite fragile and hard to maintain, and the other side has an obvious incentive to shatter it by any means available. I would guess a lot of people, on both sides, will switch votes this time around.

You can generally see the worst the republican side has to offer directly from their own news media and the Presidential twitter account.

this shows how dangerous the Left Wing filter bubble has become.

undecided voters dont care about a 2 year old funny meme gag video. they care about 100+ days of nightly riots in dozens of cities. they care about police officers being shot by assassins and ordinary home owners being assaulted by mobs with impunity. they care about sky rocketing homeless, murders, burglaries and robberies. they care about millions of small businesses being permanently closed and tens of millions of unemployed.

just like in 2016, the Left drank its own kool-aid and believed in its own filter bubble propaganda and got blind sided by the freight train of Reality.

Trump will win again, and the Left will be shocked and cry again because they walled themselves off from the real world.

We've banned this account for using HN for political and ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, regardless of which politics you favor or oppose.

More explanation here, and links to plenty more, if anyone wants it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582668.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The burning of american cities by antifa could not have played into trumps hands any better. I almost wonder if right wing organisations are behind them sometimes.

> I almost wonder if right wing organisations are behind them sometimes

There's extensive discussion of "provocateurs". Very little is ever proved, although at one point there was an attempt to build a crowdsourced facial recognition database of police to spot undercover agents.

What burning? I asked my friend in Portland about how the anarchy in Portland is, and he responded, "Eh, a bunch of people are pissed in about one city block."

Here in Chicago, things are completely fine and have been except for the day or two after George Floyd was murdered.

Reality doesn't matter all that much. The news has played up the violence to get viewers and ad impressions because that is its nature and its lifeblood. That can be easily be given the right spin to sway voters on the fence away from the left.

Had the protests been purely peaceful, it would've been looked really good for the left. As it stands, it's been a heaven-sent blessing for the right to use as propaganda instead.

40 people being shot every weekend in Chicago is "fine"?

Murders are up 55% in Chicago this year. CPD clearance rate for solving murders is 45%.

citation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/chicago.suntimes.com/platform/a...

that is not "fine." the Left choose to ignore reality and see a happy little tree illusory version of reality. that is why the Left keep losing elections.

Sure that happens in any big city. It has more to do with systemic poverty and gang violence than it does with imaginary "antifa" bogeymen Fox News keeps yammering on about.

Also OP mentioned American cities burning. While 40 murders is awful, nothing is "burning". And keep in mind this 40 is in a city of 4 million... ie a bigger population than the 20 least populated US States.

My conservative news watching relatives told me they wouldn't feel safe in my city due to the "riots"

The actual "riots"?: like 100 people laid on the ground in front of the police station for a few hours and didn't do anything and marched around town chanting slogans or singing songs. I think maybe a streetfront window was broken in? But I could be misremembering.

These people are so terrified of boogeymen they've never seen, of post-apocalyptic events that don't even happen. What the fuck

Are you joking?

Here's a map for you - https://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-st-paul-buildings-ar...

And a portland example I think most people have seen - https://usagag.com/2020/09/04/antifa-burn-portland-mayors-ho...

I think you're mostly getting downvoted for speaking in certainties. That's a reasonable take if you said "most" in front of each bullet, but claims of "no one" only take a single person for the claim to be wrong.

Polls currently favor him to win.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com