"There is a strong sense by many in the Democrat Party - namely Barack Hussein Obama - that Kamala Harris is a Marxist fraud who cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone ‘better.’

Hmmmmmmmm…

My grandfather was an old-skool, wiry, dirt-farmer. He was unable to float above the surface in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

I aspire to be that compactly muscular.

My apologies, I wasn’t paying attention to user names, and I assumed you were the person that made the top level comment about polls being rigged. That’s entirely my fault.

Okay, and?

I’m not going to buy ammo from a vending machine, because I’m not interested in willingly submitting to their biometrics. But how is this really different from someone going to a gun store to buy a few boxes of ammunition, aside from being more convenient and more expensive? If you have to have your ID read by the machine, and it’s also using biometrics to make sure you match the ID, then where is the issue? Beyond, that is, someone’s opposition to firearms in general.

It is in fact a real question, because Trump has made significant inroads into that demographic. Given how tight the margins are, Dems need to be pulling in all of the black, male voters.

Anecdotally, I’ve known a handful of black men in my area that support Trump. All of them also smoke a ton of weed, so there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance there.

The way in which most polls are conducted is often biased towards older voters as they’re often phone calls.

People that follow this have discussed this at length. There are a number of polls that are done on-line (YouGov being one of the ones I know of off the top of my head), and those tend to be biased as well. The people conducting the polls understand the biases inherent in their polling, and reputable polling companies will do their best to correct for biases. Metapolling will aggregate and weight polls so that they can get a better understanding of how people both feel, and how they’re likely to act.

Again: this isn’t a “rigged” system. “Rigging” a system would be setting it up intentionally to function–or fail–in a specific way. Inherent biases that you’re trying to remove to the best of your ability isn’t “rigging” a poll.

And here’s a report from journalists that doesn’t profit from polling

Nate Cohn was, I believe, a pollster before he became a journalist. He’s a frequent contributor to fivethirtyeight (I think I was listening to him just a few minutes ago talking about Trump’s speech at the RNC). Him saying that they don’t know how issues polling connects to actual behavior–versus ““horse race” polling”–doesn’t say that the polls themselves are the problem. Rather, the problem is connecting those polls on issues with how people will actually vote. (I’ll have to find the rest of that newsletter, since it cuts off just as he’s getting really interesting.)

Fundamentally, you’re asking about issues polling, rather than which candidate a given person is likely

Kamala is pulling younger voters and votes of color out of the “undecided” bracket and away from third-party candidates.

This is going to be the real question. Can Harris pull in black men? They trend more conservative overall. Can she pull in gen Z people that are voting age? If she can get her performance up with those two groups, in PA, MI, and AZ, then she’ll likely win.

BTW - note that you talk about Biden as Biden, rather than Joe, but you refer to Harris as Kamela. This is a consistent problem with and for female politicians. Clinton get referred to as Hillary (when it is contextually clear that it’s not referring to Bill). Just something to think about.

Yes. But at the same time, Project 2025, and Trump’s Cheetoh-stained fingerprints all over it, are finally starting to get some popular attention, and that’s not a popular idea.

The polls aren’t “rigged”. Jesus. This is such a dumb narrative.

You know that when something is a 90% probability, that means that 10% of the time it’s not going to happen, right? The last, best poll gave Trump a 29% chance of winning, and he did win, because he outperformed in key swing states, even though he lost the popular vote by a wide margin. Then he lost both the popular vote in 2020–by a wide margin–and the key swing states.

I’ve been using a Merkur Futur for nearly a decade now. I need to buy new blades about once a year, maybe, and they cost about $20. Shaving soap lasts nearly as long as a pack of blades, and a shaving stone (alum salts, for closing pores back up after shaving) is a couple bucks and lasts years.

Picking the right blades can be a challenge. I’m lucky that super sharp blades work well on me.

In the other hand, the copays for emergency room visit after you slice half your face off add up very quickly.

My grandfather used a straight razor for years, and every time he ended up with sticking plaster somewhere on his face. It’s just so easy to get an angle wrong somewhere, and so fast to slice–and incredibly aggressive compared to almost all safety razors–that it’s not worth it for most people.

source

Okay, now apply the same standard to the offices of every single politician that worked as a trial attorney. My guess is that you’ll see exactly the same kind of high-pressure environments. Is it healthy? No. But should anyone be singling out a single person out of a political motivation if the problem is endemic to that kind of politician? Also no.

The National Review is a right-biased source. However, Business Insider, which is cited in the article, is a left biased source. While this story appears to be factually accurate, the presentation is intended to be partisan rather than purely informative.

I would be interested to compare Harris with any other elected officials in national office that have been prosecutors or trial attorneys. The legal profession in general tends to require outrageously long hours, and has a high burn-out rate, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that culture carried over with any national elected figure that had been in a similar office previously.

Hmmm. No link to their poll.

Look, I want to believe. But there’s not any indication of how this poll was conducted, and they don’t say who did it. Without more substance to it, I can’t give this any weight.

That’s not why Costco is doing it though. The crowd they’re catering to buys things in advance of when they need it, rather than just-in-time, and usually well before the actual seasons for thing.

Absolutely. If we didn’t have this feedback loop in our brains, humanity as a species would die out in a generation. Psychopathy is super-bad for species survival.

What you’re describing is textbook schizophrenia. You don’t have any specifics; everything is vague. You say as much in your question. This belief that you can see something that no one else can, and that everyone is part of a grand conspiracy, that’s classic paranoia.

Medication can relieve those fantastical fears.

If you really believe the things you’re saying, you need to check yourself into a hospital. The odds that this is rea–as opposed to being a delusion–are very, very low. Some of the things you’re talking about are mutually exclusive; for instance, Hell’s Angels don’t mix with Bloods, because Hell’s Angels is a white MC (or, has enough wildly racist members that no non-white person is likely to get patched in), and the Bloods are a black street gang. These are not groups that play together. Then you add in right wing militias, which have very nearly zero crossover with either of them. (And Freemasons? They’re just a fraternal order, not really any different than the Kiwanis Club.)

If your therapist didn’t believe you, and was trying to get you on medication, that’s a really, really strong indication that you need medication.

My spouse got to talk to the guy that owns the company that makes the World’s Best Cat Litter (it’s corn based, and edible; much more environmentally friendly than the bentonite clay that most cat litter uses). Apparently he used to show it at animal shows; he would have a box filled with corn-based cat litter, and he would have it filled with “cat turds” that were actually chocolate. He’d be demonstrating scooping the litter box for people, and would just pop one into his mouth.

He apparently stopped playing that prank after someone witnessing it threw up.