us politics

I Predicted Trump’s Win…

by
A screengrabbed online newspaper headline and a photo of Donald Trump.

With no particular pleasure, I predicted Donald Trump’s win, in the week before the election, in print, in the pages of the News Letter (and on their website, here). Then, when everyone got giddy about Harris’ chances after the Selzer Poll that turned out to be a spectacular miss, I doubled down on my predictions on Slugger O’Toole (available here) based on this Twitter thread I posted.

I’ve reproduced the text of both articles below. The polls were clear and the polls were right, but people only see what they want to see in them, which raises wider challenges to the way we think our beliefs about the world are based on hard scientific evidence. But anyway…

Gerry Lynch: The two reasons why Donald Trump will win the US presidential election

A screengrabbed online newspaper headline and a photo of Donald Trump.
Truman Defeats Dewey

Published 1st Nov 2024, 00:01 GMT

Donald Trump is running neck and neck with Kamala Harris in the polls, so if this is an underestimation of his support – as has happened in the past with polls – it looks like Trump will win the popular vote, and win the Electoral College

In his two previous presidential campaigns, the polls significantly understated Trump’s actual result.

This year, for the first time, the polls do not put Trump well behind in the final days, but instead show him running neck and neck with Kamala Harris.

If the past tendency of polls underestimating his support continues, we would expect Trump to win the popular vote for the first time ever, and to win the Electoral College comfortably. I think it is that simple.

Read more

The Opioids of the People

by

Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

The United States government has launched a new anti-opioid campaign featuring true stories of people so desperate that they inflicted gruesome injuries on themselves to get another prescription.

Such stories have already been more effectively told in poetry. The epidemic’s most searing skald is William Brewer, a son of Oceana, West Virginia, a post-industrial town so gripped by addiction that it is nicknamed Oxyana.

We were so hungry; Tom’s hand
on the table looked like warm bread.
I crushed it with a hammer
then walked him to the ER to score pills.

The United States has now experienced its second consecutive year of declining life expectancy. A significant part of the change is driven by what have been called ‘deaths of despair’ among middle aged White people: as well as drugs, alcohol and suicide are also spiralling. Death rates among White Americans aged 45-54 increased by 0.5% per year between 1999 and 2013, and there is no sign the trend has reversed since. While the death of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain this weekhas brought fresh awareness of suicide, rates have been rising for years, especially among middle-aged men, and are now 25% higher than they were at the turn of the millennium.

Read more

US Election Braindump

by

Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…

I am too tired and too discombobulated from number crunching to post a coherent, concise article, but there is much of interest in yesterday’s American election results. This was a decisive election for the world’s most powerful nation and, ipso facto, for the whole planet. So I’m just going to do a brain dump on lessons from yesterday. This is probably too long, and certainly insufficiently intellectually rigorous, but I would be interested in Sluggerites’ opinions (and we all have opinions, don’t we?)

Read more

Know Your Battleground States 9/9: Florida

by

Florida, the United States’ incredibly flat protrusion into the sub-tropics, is an enormous and rapidly changing state, perhaps about to overtake New York as the third most populous state in the Union, and by far the biggest of the battleground states with 29 Electoral Votes in play.

Florida entered political legend when the 2000 Presidential contest in the state came down to just a few hundred votes out of more than 5.8 million cast. Weeks of scrutinising disputed ballots and bitter court battles ended with George W Bush winning the state, and with it the Presidency, by just 537 votes after an acrimonious US Supreme Court decision. The world watched in horrified fascination as the nation that has always claimed to be planet’s foremost democracy descended into national crisis over malfunctioning voting machines, butterfly ballots and the notorious hanging chads.

Florida is familiar to many foreigners, of course, as a holiday destination and mainstay of popular culture from Miami Vice to Ricky Martin to CSI: Miami, and has even earned that ultimate indication of pop culture aristocracy, its own Grand Theft Auto game.

Read more