Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

Some Hillary supporters recently captured on film.

 

And now the Trump campaign says "No, no, we aren't releasing medical records on Dr. Oz's TV show. Forget what we told you the other day."

 

Dick, the race is indeed closer than it was, oh, three weeks ago. That's undeniable. But that's all we know for sure. Any other assertions either need more evidence or are just trolling.

 

Can we leave the "T" word out of this one, at least?

It is perfectly reasonable to look at the momentum of the race and do some general projecting forward, based upon what seem to be the news events triggering them. She's in trouble.

 

I mean, some of you can just drive right over facts sitting in the middle of the road, can't you?

 

I apologize for the troll remark. But straight-line projection is the common flaw of the nitwit TV pundit. Events don't always run in the same direction. In fact, they almost never do.
PS: I submit that this election will be a trainwreck for the Nate Silver/data analysis/political science crowd because the data itself is so unreliable. It's pretty apparent that at this point poll results are determined by who is willing to answer the phone/waste time in an online survey, making them less than optimum measures of public opinion. I am positive the BernieBros are overrepresented in Internet polls, but of course I can't prove it. Just a suspicion. So until at least a month from now, we might do well to ignore the forecasts.

 

But there are plenty of examples of a candidate seizing the momentum and the race being over soon after. This isn't a convention bounce. It's mid-September. Carter never recovered from, "There you go again!" Romney never recovered after the "47 percent comment." McCain never recovered from the economic crisis and Palin's interviews. Sometimes, the line actually is straight.

 

"There you go again" happened in late October. Best research indicates "47 percent" affected at most one percent of the vote (See Nate Cohn yesterday in the Upshot. The fundamentals in Obama-McCain were wholly against the Republicans before the financial crisis, which just made them worse. You can't win when the incumbent President of your party has a less than 30 percent job approval rating.

 

Polls can also lag events.

There's been movement. That hasn't necessarily been picked up in the polls, depending on when their sample was taken.

Based on things like the LA Times poll and the Ohio poll, we can expect other polls to confirm this as they are released.

 

People said the same thing four years ago. And four years before that.

 

Silver himself said that in 2012, the race was always close but it was also always consistent -- Obama in front, and that the data this year has been very inconsistent, leading him to constantly express caution on his findings.