The polls messed up

Back to my point, click Trump for Florida (which was considered a 31% chance) and the prediction looks a lot like our current map.

My opinion: I think deep down these people feel they are rationally wrong for voting in a president that promised to, and now is actually attacking USA's democracy and freedom which used to be touted as America's strong point. They know they're acting on instinct, and people tend to hide their instincts in public.

That paper covers the period 1989 to 2015. I based my idea that non-black minorities become "white" partly on the realization that in recent decades hispanic populations have integrated quite well, and are a growing Republican constituency. And I came to that opinion in the very early 2000s. (If not earlier--I distinctly remember mentally critiquing the assumption that both Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington made in their late 1990s books regarding the political effects of a future hispanic-heritage majority.) I'm a [late] Gen X'er who grew up in the Midwest and Deep South and from my perspective hispanic culture and identity was already going mainstream, to the extent it was even distinguishable as alien. By contrast, almost all the adults in my community quite clearly held strongly and uniformly to old, persistent stereotypes of hispanics.

If you look at hispanic mobility over previous eras, I'm pretty sure it would look different. (Though I could be wrong--I don't recall seeing hard data, just plenty of anecdata, including centuries of received cultural narratives.) That historical disparity and relatively slow integration is presumably why older scholars just assumed a growing hispanic population would lead to a cultural and political shift. And that old scholarship still influences modern assumptions among the liberal intelligentsia. But, of course, the fact that their mobility is now much like that of whites (notwithstanding a relative decrease in white mobility as compared to earlier eras) is evidence that whiteness is sufficiently adaptive and inclusive to forestall the racial reckoning--i.e. between white and black identities--that Americans have been facing for centuries.

In many ways the liberal achievements of the Civil Rights era sowed the seeds of its own political destruction. Not simply because it pissed off a bunch of white people leading to Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy, but because it opened the doors of economic and, more importantly, cultural opportunity to Latinos and Asians, much more so than for African Americans. With those two large (and growing) groups increasingly knitted into the fabric of the American white mainstream, much like the Irish, Italian, and slavic groups in earlier decades, there's less pressure to maintain the social efforts regarding the cultural, political, and economic enfranchisement of African Americans.

While not quite the same, I see many parallels with sex and gender equality, too. Anyone who thought the enfranchisement of women would bring a substantially liberal turn in American politics 1) never paid attention to the Temperance movement in history class, and 2) never took a peek inside a church to see who was sitting in the pews.

As I grow older I've come to better appreciate the critiques of mid-century African American writers: prejudice and racism is fundamentally about power.[1] One not-so-obvious consequence is that empowering the disenfranchised is more likely to lead to the once disenfranchised adopting and adapting prevailing prejudices than for those prejudices to be fundamentally overturned, simply because the salient effect of those prejudices is to preserve power by distinguishing the powerful. You could even see this with the gay marriage debates--it was astonishing how quickly gay culture began espousing what were once "heteronormative" ideas about relationships and family matters as gay marriage became more mainstream, often leaving their bi- and trans-gender allies in the lurch.

[1] No need to get into the specifics of what power means or the mechanics of how it manifests. I certainly have no sympathies for Marxist philosophies. I think many writers on racial and sexual equality gravitated toward Marxism because Marxism provided a vocabulary for discussing power. But it was the wrong vocabulary, and the dissonance is rather apparent in hindsight. Which isn't to say there isn't a huge overlap between racial and class power struggles. See, e.g., https://www.commondreams.org/author/adolph-reed-jr

Idk it seems like liberals act like they're morally superior. That's insufferable and why minorities, etc. are voting against them.

No one likes being told they're irredeemable and need to repent.

And insofar as "the liberals" can't introspect, they're not considering that they're deluding themselves into thinking they represent the working class when they largely represent the affluent, educated people who know the intricate socially profitable phrases to say among their conformist city friends.

So basically - are liberals so infallible that "disagreeing with liberals" means you're socially conservative? Hogwash!

I've been a long-time liberal and I sharply question aspects of all those things too as do many other long-time liberals I know. To suggest that people who aren't in agreement with the progressive left are social conservatives is to be utterly disconnected with what the general public really thinks, as current election results are showing.

So they think they have a representative sample, but they really don't.

It can be explained simply by pollsters mainly living in large cities, and not really understanding rural Americans.

The only real impediment/threat to voting is the Republican party doing any and everything they can to limit peoples’ ability to vote.

The overwhelming problem with American elections is electoral fraud, a term which encompasses such things as preventing eligible voters from voting, not counting legitimate ballots, voter intimidation, and jerrymandering. These problems cannot be fixed through measures intended to minimize voter fraud as they are the result of the state, and/or parties, abusing the democratic process rather than the citizen abusing it.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

You need to commit a lot of voter fraud to swing an election, it has to be a very close election. Like one state and 20,000 to 100,000 vote. A once in a 30-50 year election. You need to figure out before hand which state will be swing state that decides the election.

Now you have to commit voter fraud 50,000 times in that state. You can't do it in person because the numbers are too larger so you have to do mail-in. How do you find 20,000-50,000 people across the state who you can get a mail in ballot for, steal it, and turn it in without anyone noticing.

This is basically an impossible task that even if you pull off has a low chance of making a difference, and a large chance of sending you to jail.

I would trust mail ballots because they are delivered to your residence. Pretty hard for a foreign actor to fake/game that kind of system -- or at least, harder than posting a bunch of inorganic FUD comments on social media such as HN.

I agree there are possibly better ways, possibly force choice ranking, etc. But all a simple majority vote would do would be to ensure we would become a one-party system, the opposite direction we should be headed (a multiple-party system).

Having it be controlled by the states is a great testing bed for that, for example, in Maine. There's no reason to take that power away from states and make it federal.

IANAL, but my interpretation is that the part that is in the constitution is that it is up to the individual states to decide how to run their elections and assign electoral votes.

Let me give a practical example. Aboloshing guns. Note I'm not even talking gun control, but actually getting rid of classes of guns.

I've lived both in Texas ranch land, and in New York (Jersey, commuting to Manhattan). Those are very different contexts. In New York, guns are seen as nothing but a weapon. In Texas, guns are seen as a necessity in places. In New York, guns are to defend yourself or to hurt someone else, and are almost exclusively used against people. In Texas, guns are used for those purposes, but also to hunt, to kill boars that would hurt people otherwise (and are invasive, dangerous, and could kill animals and children), to put down animals, to kill coyotes who steal chickens, to kill a rattlesnake that is in the horse pen...they're tools. You know what AR-15s are useful for? Boars and coyotes, as well as cougars (not in Texas that I'm aware of though). They're great against small fast predators where you would need more than one shot in an easy to shoot gun. Wouldn't carry one for a minute in Alaska against Grizzly bears. That's an entirely different context than Texas, even though it's "rural". I don't think there's much need for one at ALL in Manhattan where if you fired one it'd shoot through three apartments' walls defending yourself. Second amendment and the right to defend yourself aside.

Even talking about defending yourself, how long do you think it'll take to get a county sheriff out to a 1,000 acre ranch in the middle of nowhere if someone is shooting at you?

The context matters. There's a lot fewer rancher Texans than there are people in Manhattan. Why should Manhattan get the full say in saying that the rancher's way of life is invalid? Maybe there is compromise, but I honestly don't think there is such a thing in our current climate.

This crosses many areas...which business get incentives? Should we give subsidies for corn, for food, etc. Should we encourage tech growth? What about migrant workers? Visa workers are very different than someone coming in to work a ranch or construction.

On some issues I agree with you. Particularly moral issues. We need to be "American" at some point, and not bipartisan. We need to have discussions on issues and not fight across party lines.

But some issues, the party lines are there because the parties represent different groups of people. We should discuss those issues too, but in almost all cases I've seen both sides don't even begin to understand the other side. They can't comprehend it because they've not walked a mile in the other people's shoes. "Who cares about coal miners?" Or the thoughts of Ivory Tower academics.

There's probably a more fair system than what we have. We need to destroy bipartisanship and limit the federal government so that local governments can give their people what they need, in my opinion, while keeping national issues like the environment as a topical national discussion. We're a LONG way from any of that though, and will continue to as long as there's this left/right divide, unwillingness to cross the aisle, and the view that the other side is the enemy, stupid, or evil/racist. BOTH sides see each other that way, my Facebook is full of people from both Texas and New York who see each other that way, and just don't understand...both sides mean well.

Economically, structurally, contextually, we need a government that gives some level of power to people who live in more rural areas. Not absolute, but a balance. Pretty much everyone in Manhattan I knew were either party line democrats or libertarians. Nothing wrong with that, but that is a big bucket of people that pretty much all believe the same things because of their context, and don't understand other areas as well. New York itself is split into different contexts, upstate New York seems an entirely different state/country than New York City.

Maybe some people do understand the issues and each other...again, we're people, it's complex, we have different backgrounds. But as it stands, our system is polarized into two groups that don't understand each other, but help each other in a weird symbiotic way. If you switch it to be purely population based...it's going to be one group that now doesn't understand 95% of the country's land area, and very little of the supporting infrastructure that enables things like tech or finance.

Note what I'm NOT saying...that the electoral college fixes all of this. I'm just saying that a purely popular democratic vote would not work like people think they would, because all they see are their issues, and the most populous groups mostly live in the same types of contexts (college educated cities with tech, finance, medical, education, and business sectors).