1) FL absentees, early voting:

*Dems as expected ("souls to the polls Sunday") had a good day and FINALLY take the early walk-in vote lead by 6,100 votes.

Rs total: 1,151,593
Ds total: 1,092,547

Rs +59,046 combined lead. This is very good for this point in the campaign.

1) Voting in Cuyahoga County (OH's Manhattan for its blueishness) has dramatically increased.

2) Bad news right?

3) Er, no. "And increases are coming from Republicans and unaffiliated voters."

4) Now, we have to watch unaffiliated voters, but my OH guys--"The Accountant" and "Ohio Wan" developed a statistical model in 2016 that appears to be holding for assessing how Us will vote.

5) It's not bad for us at all.

6) So, here are the raw numbers:

Eighteen days out in 2018:
D 68,760 (44 %)
R 39,080 (25%)
Us 48,206 (30 %)
Total 156,251

2014:
D 75,675 (55 %)
Rs 33,964 (25 %)
•Us 26,854 (19 5)
Total 137,053

"Republicans appear energized" due to the Kavanaugh

1) Last night I said we have 12 data points (AZ statewide, FL statewide +4 specific counties, IA + 2 counties, OH 2 counties, and NC).

Every single one was showing GOP turnout higher than midterm levels of 2014 and all but one (a county) showing turnout above 2016.

2) If I recall all the data correctly, D turnout/performance was below that of 2016 and, in the case of IA, below that of 2014.

3) Now we have two more data points to add: news out of WY that a net of 10k switched from D/other to R in last six months & turnout #s in Knox Co. TN

3) Out of 12 MEASURABLE data points--not polls which are opinions of what people "might" do in the future---every single one is favors the Rs.

4) I'll admit, I got a tad depressed for a minute yesterday when the latest Siena/NYT polls came out . . . before I was reminded . . .

4) . . they were making 60,000 calls to reach a mere 300 respondents.

SIXTY THOUSAND!

5) Who do you think is NOT responding?

Conservatives, Republicans, people with families & jobs.

6) That means these NYT polls are utterly worthless with a margin of error of 20% or more

7) So once again, we have real world data about what has ALREADY HAPPENED, stuff we can count . . .

and unreliable polls of the opinions of people who won't even vote about what they might do if it doesn't rain or if they don't have a hangnail that day.

1) Gonna offer a hypothesis. This is NOT a prediction quite yet.

2) In the last couple of days the DNCC went back into IA1 (Blum) and VA10 (Comstock) and began placing ads again.

3) These were races they thought they had won in mid-summer. Barbara Comstock was the . . .

3) contd . . epitome of the endangered R who would lose her seat in the fall. She of course still might.

4) But this race was supposed to be over weeks ago. The fact that the DNCC is now having to fight for this territory tells me something.

5) I think the DemoKKKrat strategists can actually read. Moreover, I think they can read absentee/early voting #s as well as we can.

6) Which means they see they are getting buried. Even in NV, the only state of six where they have a tiny lead, I'm told that . . .

6) contd . . when the rural counties come in, Ds will be a shocking 41,000 short of their 2016 numbers (when Trump only lost by 27,000).

7) What does it mean they are now having to retake the "cities" they supposedly held? It probably means they never held them at all.

8) Their "leads" were always based almost entirely on polls.

9) But I think it means something more. I think the DNC is . . .

SCARED. TO. DEATH.

1) 538 walks it back:
Right now, in fact, the polls are not showing a Democratic turnout advantage. Instead, based on a comparison of likely-voter and registered-voter polls, they’re projecting roughly equal turnout between the parties,

2) with Republicans’ demographic advantages (older, whiter voters typically vote at higher rates at the midterms) counteracting Democrats’ seemingly higher enthusiasm.”

3) Give little Natey a week and he'll see what we see: An R turnout advantage.

1) Where we are: This is much, much bigger than a fraudulent election (it was) or rampant gubment tyrannical China Virus abuse (it is).

2) What we are facing has been building for a good 30 years.

3) I date it back to the GOP failure to defeat Clinton in the gubment shutdown.

4) If you went to public school, that would be the 1995 budget battle.

5) The brand new GOP Congress, with plenty of public support, failed to rein in a Clinton bloated budget.

6) It wasn't the numbers. Compared to today's deficits & debts, this was pocket change. Rather, this was the first time since the Cold War, which was a legit excuse for constant deficit spending, that Congress failed to do its MAIN constitutional duty--oversee spending.

7) No, this isn't a thread about deficits or debt. At present, I don't think those pose the biggest challenge to us, or even probably one of the top five.

8) Rather, this is about a deadly disease that hit DC & the patient refused to take any medicine for it.

9) The disease was the failure to address the major problems of the day, whether it was deficits, Islamic terrorism, the banking crisis, or trade.

10) Vote fraud & this frankenstein of an election is only the latest SYMPTOM of this much larger disease.

1. Juan O’Savin for verifying this. “Plane crashes are targeted kills.”

Here is a brief summary for those who may not be familiar with Kennedy History:

Met a Brazilian-American Lyft driver from San Diego who passionately attacked the racism of Republicans, then switched to passionately defending Bolsonaro.

If I were Thomas Friedman, I could tell you what this means.

Met a Haitian-American in a restaurant who said he'd always vote for Democrats because of the immigration issue, but that he has conservative beliefs too. "I don't want to pay for someone's abortion!", he declared.

Met a Latino Lyft driver from San Jose who said that while he was liberal, California was getting too liberal for him and he was considering moving to San Antonio.

Again, not being Tom Friedman, I am unable to offer any commentary on the political and policy implications of these conversations.

I guess my only thought is that political opinions are pretty complex and multidimensional, out there in the real world.

(end)

1) Looks like Trump KNEW what the coup plotters were plotting on the 6th, so he arrived an hour late to the stage, and talked longer than he intended, before he asked MAGA to walk peacefully down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.

He also didn't walk WITH them as he promised.

Andy Ngo thinks Antifa are on a level with the Nazis in terms of wanton violence. Furthermore, he says that 'even the Nazis knew to cover their tracks' and that we didn't know about the Holocaust until afterwards.

Wrong, and offensive on almost every level.

Violence had been building for years prior to the Nazis assuming power, and much of it was instigated by the SA.

In 1932 for example, 105 people died in clashes between SA and opposing groups in Prussia alone - that's one region.

SA activity - marching through 'red' neighbourhoods and fighting those who opposed them was a deliberate strategy. The spectacle of violence and the implied 'restoral of order' was the point.

Just think of how Horst Wessel was remembered following his death in 1930. He was turned into a martyr who fell 'bravely in battle' against the Bolsheviks. Violence was inherent to the message - a clash between forces for the future of Germany.

During his time as SA leader in Berlin, Goebbels worked on a strategy of provocation that almost always ended in violence, a form of trolling that would always provide the opportunity for a brawl and the implication that a menace had been dealt with.