I think a lot of it is that he spends much more strategically and with lots of strings attached. He also does a lot of work to basically indoctrinate folks who aren’t big players and fund them until they are - JD Vance being a prime example. He’s basically developed into a cult leader for rich wannabes and ends up owning their asses.

Yeah, this post is misleading as he just gave the commencement address this year - yesterday in fact. Already received quite a bit of coverage and some outlets have not only articles but the full transcript: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-commencement-speech-full-transcript-2067064

Anyone not knowing that might see this and be confused as the date isn’t noted in the post.

Because he doesn’t actually believe any of this, it’s all performative. It’s all about creating a certain narrative that they can then exploit to keep the grift going.

Fascists can’t be argued with. They love when you get angry and yell at them. But they absolutely cannot stand to get laughed at. Go look up some quotes from Mel Brooks about why he thought it was important for the Hitler references in The Producers.

We should be doing a monthly nationally televised event where Trump, Musk, and the rest are ridiculed.

My ideal trifecta - fresh tomatoes, green olives, pepperoni

So less “town hall” and more “klan rally” - got it

Yep, had the same thought

Um…no… this is just gender-swapped RFK Jr (from her Wikipedia page):

A “both-and” approach (both prayer and medicine) to physical and mental health has been attributed to Williamson.[98] Williamson has said, “People who are prayed for get out of the emergency room faster,” and “people who have been diagnosed with a life-challenging illness, who attend spiritual support groups, live, on average, twice as long after diagnosis”.[11][99][100]

Williamson has stated her support for the necessity and value of vaccinations and antidepressants,[101][102] but has been criticized for her skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry’s influence in setting guidelines for how they are administered, citing her belief that their profit motive could result in harm to patients.[103][104][105]

She has also criticized overprescription of antidepressants,[97][106] questioning whether antidepressants play a role in suicide, saying that the prescriptive definition between sadness and clinical depression is “artificial”, and having called the process by which clinical depression is diagnosed “a scam”.[107][102]

I’ve been thinking about this and wondering what happens if he dies from natural causes in office. The GOP infighting would be tremendous and without the cult of personality to hold the administration together, I’m not sure what would happen. Vance doesn’t have what it takes, but with Peter Thiel backing him, it would essentially be a wackadoo billionaire being the power behind the throne.

I’d say yes, but he’s so much of a narcissist and so self-obsessed, I doubt it would’ve occurred to him. Especially as back then he was 90% tech bro and 10% weird idea guy. Those values, of course, have since fully flipped.

I think that’s sort of the point - if 2016 was our last “normal” election and early voting wasn’t prognosticative of election results then, there’s no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.

The point wasn’t about a “return to normal” or else he would be saying it was an indicator.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to reconcile what he’s saying with the video evidence.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

That would be “ornithological” :)

Weirdly antagonistic tone and not sure when Silver pissed in your Wheaties, but you obviously have a hang up about him. No desire to go tit for tat, other than to say he’s been more reliably accurate over time than anyone else when it comes to politics. It’s like baseball - if you lifetime hit for .300, everyone is going to know your name.

Also, the whole point of the article is that early voting patterns are not indicative of final results. That’s not polling analysis or data modeling, that’s just historical fact. I don’t think Silver is perfect, and he’s got problematic issues, but on this point he’s just pointing out the thing the media ignores because it gives them headlines galore for the last two weeks before the election.

2008

Silver’s final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, missing only the prediction for Indiana.

2010

His 2010 congressional mid-term predictions were not as accurate as those made in 2008, but were still within the reported confidence interval. Silver predicted a Republican pickup of 54 seats in the House of Representatives; the GOP won 63 seats. Of the 37 gubernatorial races, FiveThirtyEight correctly predicted the winner of 36.[71]

2012

At the conclusion of that day, when Mitt Romney had conceded to Barack Obama, Silver’s model had correctly predicted the winner of every one of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.[79][80] Silver, along with at least three[81] academic-based analysts—Drew Linzer,[82] Simon Jackman,[83] and Josh Putnam[84]—who also aggregated pollsfrom multiple pollsters—thus was not only broadly correct about the election outcome, but also specifically predicted the outcomes for the nine swing states.[85]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver

I’d list others but I doubt you’d read it anyway

He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything

What an odd take, and so orthogonal to what the article was about.

What the hell is this shit? Well, I guess rather than trying to link to Fox News, linking to where they get their bullshit talking points from is a choice.

Thanks! I’m not sure how much is patience and how much is just being resigned to the mods making the wrong decision on this one. I think the rule change is just punishing the community for their own past failings, but I don’t really see anyone being able to change their minds on this one. And being a mod - especially on /politics - is by definition a thankless and difficult job, so I do understand where they’re coming from in part. Unfortunately they seem to have learned all the wrong lessons.

Yeah, thanks! I saw it but unfortunately buried in work this week and last, so haven’t been very active lately. But I did just reply in that thread to counter some revisionist history from the mods. :)