But Don't Let Up

For just another 23 days, it's gotta be all gas and no brakes.

Don't forget: A big part of Trump's plan is to set the expectation that he's ahead - so when Harris wins (if she wins - fuck me, she's gotta win), he can kick it up a few notches and hit the usual bullshit about "It was rigged! They cheated! The brown people knifed us in the back!"

Harris vs. Trump analyst tells panicky Dems: GOP is creating fake polls

‘Desperate, unhinged, Trumpian’

As polls seem to indicate that former president Donald Trump has momentum in some swing states with 24 days remaining until the Nov. 5 presidential election, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg says: Don’t buy it.


About a month ago, Rosenberg predicted that a slew of polls by Republican organizations would flood the zone, showing Trump leading — and, like clockwork, it has happened.

The purpose is two-fold, Rosenberg said: To excite Trump’s base and discourage Vice President Kamala Harris’ supporters, while also providing Trump with ammunition to say the election was rigged if he loses.

In a tweet thread, Rosenberg explained:

“Of last 15 general election polls released in PA, 12 have right/GOP affiliations. Their campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning — when he isn’t — escalated in last few days.

“I urge journalists and researchers to dive into FiveThirtyEight and see how the red wave pollsters have flooded the zone again. MT, PA, NC were initial targets but now it’s all 7 battleground states.

“This 2024 red wave op is much larger and involves many more actors and polls than the red wave campaign in 2022. It also involves new players — Polymarket, Elon — and feels far more desperate, frenetic, unhinged. Trumpian.”

Rosenberg pointed to a New York Times autopsy on the 2022 midterm elections: “The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative.”

Rosenberg also referred to a recent New York Times report — “Elon Musk is going all-in to elect Trump” — that shows coordination between Twitter/X owner Elon Musk and the Trump campaign.

Musk shut down a Twitter/X account that published hacked materials from the Trump campaign. And according to the New York Times, Musk and his team have set up a war room in Pittsburgh to strategize with a team of lawyers and public-relations professionals to help Trump win.

On Thursday, American Muckrakers posted about emails it received detailing how the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports, which claims to be nonpartisan, shared polling results with Trump advisers and campaign officials like Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, and John McLaughlin.

“More than 25 organizations are now involved in red wave 2024,” Rosenberg tweeted. “Last week, they dropped 27 polls. This week it’s more. Ferocity of effort to make it look like Trump is winning clearly means they don’t think he is.”

That's A Little Better

Just a little.

I don't think a politician should have a fan base. It helps when people believe they can be more or less confident that a politician can do the job, and that they line up with him ideologically - again, more or less. But we can't walk around expecting "our guy" to do exactly what we want him to do. And we sure as hell shouldn't be following that politician with any level of blind loyalty.

We have to do some growing up when it comes to how we think about politics and the politicians who're asking us for our votes. We seem to be too willing to accept an all-or-nothing proposition - like if the candidate isn't 100% in step with us on every issue every time, we're going to plop ourselves down in the corner and pout.

And we have to understand that there are things going on - aspects of the decision making process - that we don't get to know about.

So anyway, I've bitched about 'the polling' for a while, and I get the feeling that maybe the pollsters are starting to get hip to their own shortcomings, recognizing they may be just a tiny bit out of touch, because their methods are just a tiny bit outdated, and their questions are too often so generalized as to be meaningless - and don't get me started on why there's never a fucking followup question.

eg:

OK, so you're dissatisfied with Biden's performance - why?

a. he's doing the wrong things 

b. he's doing the right things, but I want him to do more

Donald Trump Stung as New Poll Shows How Unpopular He Is

Donald Trump continues to have a low favorability score among Americans, new polling shows, despite being the likely Republican nominee after winning the lion's share of primaries and seeing off his only remaining rival.

An ABC News/Ipsos survey of 536 U.S. adults, conducted between March 8-9, found that 29 percent have a favorable view of the former president compared to 59 percent who view him unfavorably.

It came after Trump secured all but one of the primaries on Super Tuesday—giving him 1,075 out of 1,215 delegates he needs to become the presumptive Republican nominee—which prompted former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley to drop out of the race to leave him unopposed. Primaries being held on Tuesday could push Trump over the line.

Own a home? You might be upper classREAD MOREOwn a home? You might be upper class
Trump's popularity has remained largely unchanged since last summer. In similar polls conducted last year, which have a margin of error of 4.5 percent either way, he has hovered around a 30 percent favorability rating.

That rating dipped to 25 percent—with 61 percent viewing him unfavorably—at the start of April last year, immediately after he became the first president in U.S. history to be indicted with criminal charges, which he denies, in New York.

Newsweek approached the Trump campaign via email for comment on Monday.

The same ABC/Ipsos poll found that President Joe Biden, who is on course to be renominated by the Democratic Party, is also viewed as similarly unpopular, though his unfavorability rating is slightly lower.

Some 33 percent viewed the incumbent favorably to 54 percent who viewed him unfavorably. In November, a similar poll put his unfavorability rating at 50 percent with his favorability unchanged, while in prior polls the two ratings have modulated around the same numbers.

Neither candidate is viewed as more popular than unpopular, recent polling has consistently shown, with more people disapproving of both than approving. Analysts have said that both will struggle to entice voters to turn out for the election due to their disenchantment with the choice of candidates.

The latest ABC/Ipsos poll found that 36 percent thought Trump was trusted to do a better job as president to 33 percent who thought Joe Biden would—but 30 percent thought neither would.

The two candidates have been running neck and neck in national polls, with just a few percentage points separating them.

Trump may suffer from becoming the first former president to now face four criminal trials—which he claims are politically motivated—which are due to take place while he is campaigning for the 2024 election. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

At the same time, Biden, already the oldest serving president in U.S. history at 81, has faced concerns about his age and mental acuity over a number of public gaffes, which Republicans have used to imply Biden is unfit to continue as president for another term.

If re-elected, he would be 86 by the end of his second term. But the president has brushed off queries about his physical and mental health, telling a news conference in February that his "memory is fine" and "I know what the hell I'm doing."

Recent polling also shows that nearly half of U.S. adults think Trump, 77, is too old to serve another term, and the former president has also faced questions about his mental agility.

Biden has been criticized for his approach to undocumented immigration into the U.S. and the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Around two thirds of voters disapproved of his handling of immigration and the Middle Eastern conflict, the ABC/Ipsos poll found.

Some of this dissent has come from Democrats who have threatened not to vote for the president over the situation in Gaza. However, political scientists have suggested Biden's base will hold their nose over the issue when faced with the prospect of a Trump victory.

Told Ya

Occam's Razor tells us our first consideration should be the obvious:

There's something wrong 

with the fucking polling.

More Trump-Haley Polling Errors

Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.

Some people I’m seeing are ascribing that to a huge amount of strategic voting by independents and Biden-supporting Dems. So it’s interesting but doesn’t mean anything. I’m not sure I totally buy that. I’m not quite sure what it means. But I don’t think I buy that it means nothing. The number of people who are willing to strategic vote is never very high. It’s hard enough to get people to vote at all, let alone vote to make a point for election observers or to own the other parties frontrunners. If that’s what it is I would say that it suggests a truly extreme amount of mobilization on the anti-Trump side.

I suspect a lot of these are either conservative-leaning independents who are voting for Haley but won’t vote for Trump in the general and true independents (move back and forth between parties) and are making a statement. Neither side can win with only its own registered partisans. You need a lot of independents. I’m going to wait until all the numbers are in to decide just what I make of this. But the mix of significant anti-Trump vote and in many cases big polling errors just don’t square with writing it off.

It's Crazy

Wanna know how fucked up the polling is? - and how it got fucked up?

Republicans.

Or more accurately, Republican fuckery, plus Press Poodles who refuse to do their fucking job.

What do we hear? "Crime is rampant!!!!"

Bullshit.

It's bullshit now, the same as it was bullshit back in 2017 when Trump did that god-awful American Carnage crap at his inauguration.

"Well now, that was some pretty weird shit." --George W Bush 

Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong.

Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up. It actually fell in 2023. An expert blames a familiar culprit for the mistaken impression.

Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.

A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.

The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.

NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO

Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded, Asher found, and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.

Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.

“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”

The FBI’s quarterly numbers cover about 78% of the U.S. population and don’t give as full a picture as the more comprehensive annual report the FBI puts out once a year. But Asher said the quarterly reports in the past have hewed fairly close to the annual ones.

The most recent annual report, released in October, covered 94% of the country and found that violent crime in 2022 fell back to pre-pandemic levels, with murder dropping 6.1%.

Asher maintains a separate database of murder in big cities which found that murder is down 12.7 percent this year, after rising during the pandemic.

Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966, Asher found, while Baltimore and St Louis are on track to post the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. A few cities, including Memphis and Washington DC, are still seeing increases in their murder rates, but they are outliers.

FBI data doesn’t have a separate category for retail theft. It falls under “larceny,” which declined overall last year, according to the latest numbers. Retail theft is widely believed to have skyrocketed in some cities, and the industry says it is at “unprecedented” levels. But the data doesn’t necessarily support that thesis.

FBI numbers are not the only measure of crime. The annual Justice Department survey of criminal victimization in 2022 found that a lot of crime goes unreported, and that more people reported being victims of violent crime in 2022 than in 2021. But Asher has documented questions about that survey’s methodology.

So why are Americans’ perceptions about crime so different from the apparent reality? Asher believes there is a measure of partisanship at work — Republicans are more ready to believe crime is increasing while Democrats hold the White House — but he largely chalks it up to media consumption.

“My neighbors never post on NextDoor how many thousands of packages they successfully receive,” he wrote recently. “Only video of the one that randomly got swiped.”

Asher and other analysts say the natural tendency of the news media to highlight disturbing crime stories — and the tendency of those stories to go viral on social media — presents a false but persuasive picture.

Videos of flash mobs on shop lifting sprees or carjackings in broad day light are more ubiquitous, even if those crimes are not.

“These outlier incidents become the glue people rely on when guesstimating whether crime is up or down,” he wrote.

Press Poodles

There's something wrong with the polling.

And there's something wrong with the Press Poodles who simply can't get it thru their vacuum-packed skulls that there's something wrong with the fuckin' polling.

I'm not saying Biden's great and everybody loves him. But I am saying that something is not as it seems.

The polls keep getting worse for Biden

6 days ago — Biden's poll numbers have gotten worse. President Joe Biden's polled vote share in head-to-head match-ups with former President Donald Trump, selected polls.

Why are Biden polls so bad? Here are 3 leading theories.

4 days ago — ... election years. Polls pitting Biden against Trump also look grim for the president right now. RealClearPolitics' polling averages currently show Biden ...

Biden's polling is in more dangerous territory than Obama's

4 days ago — President Biden, at the White House, delivers remarks on the supply chain at 2:00 pm ET… Nikki Haley campaigns in South Carolina… And here's one way Donald ...

What can Democrats do about Joe Biden and his awful poll numbers?

5 days ago — The question now facing Democrats regarding the 2024 election is whether, in the face of Joe Biden's unsightly polling, they're panicking too much or ...

Why is Biden losing support from people of color?

18 hours ago — President Joe Biden is struggling in the polls one year before voters will decide whether to give him a second term in the Oval Office.

• Maybe we could look at the constant propagandizing of the Wacky World of Wingnutopia
• Maybe there's a shitload of disinformation from hostile foreign governments flooding social media
• Maybe the Press poodles are too used to just "reporting" without digging into what might actually be going on

Let’s Stop Treating Polls as Actual News Events

The stakes of 2024 are too important for the media to obsess over every “snapshot” of the electorate.

Pick up a newspaper, turn on cable news, click on Drudge or listen to a podcast and you will encounter multiple stories on polls. Did you know that Joe Biden is polling poorly? Did you know Americans are deeply unhappy with the economy despite its metrics being very good? Did you know that Biden’s weakness among young voters should be taken seriously?

Everywhere you look there are polls, and these polls provide fodder for stories, which then fuel news cycles and shape narratives around the 2024 election, such as how Biden should drop out because of his age. “Voters think Biden’s too old,” says contrarian comedian Bill Maher, and indeed, there are polls, like one from The Wall Street Journal, in which voters are asked if Biden, 81—along with Donald Trump, 77—is “too old to run.” The poll, in which 73% of voters consider Biden too old, was cited in a separate Journal story asking, “Is Biden Too Old to Run Again?”

Of course, polls can be upended when voters actually go to the polls. Reuters gave Hillary Clinton about a 90% chance of winning on Election Day 2016, while the Huffington Post told us that Trump had “essentially no path to an Electoral College victory.” Everyone knows what happened next.

And yet recent 2024 polls, which serve, at best, as snapshots of the electorate a year out, become news events unto themselves, generating reams of coverage and endless commentary. They’re not actually breaking news events, like, say, a train derailment, even if treated as such. They’re more creations of a media industrial complex that longs for easy data points, for things that feel like facts but are actually imprecise measuring mechanisms.

For every piece that is directly about polling, like one from Politico proclaiming “the polls keep getting worse for Biden,” there are others based on the suppositions gleaned from poll results, such The Washington Post examining “Trump’s improved image.” Even pieces downplaying some headline-grabbing polls as the “wrong” ones, may seize on others to make a point.

“The odd thing about media polls is that they are reported as a newsworthy event, but this kind of event ‘happens’ only when a newsroom decides it’s time for one—and when it has the money,” NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote in an email.

Polls may fall into the category of pseudo-events, a term coined in 1962 by Daniel J. Boorstin and defined as something that “planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.” Just like polls, a pseudo-event’s “relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous.” (This idea was recently discussed by on John Dickerson on Slate’s Political Gabfest episode on polling episode). In this way, a poll may be more like a press conference, something that is created to shape a narrative.

There are other problems with polls, according to Margaret Sullivan, the media critic and recently named executive director of Columbia University’s journalism ethics center. “Polls are, by definition, horse race coverage, which focused on who’s up or down, not substance, ignoring what Jay Rosen calls ‘the stakes,’” she told me. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say never write a poll story but, in general, journalists are bad at predictions and should do some more meaningful reporting instead.”

Rosen has been out front this presidential election cycle with an “organizing principle” for journalists: “Not the odds, but the stakes.” The focus, he argues, should be “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy.” Placing too much emphasis on polls can shift the political conversation from critical reporting about what’s happening—such as the impact of Biden’s administration’s policies or Trump’s authoritarian plans for a second term—to predictions about what may happen a year later.

G. Elliott Morris, editorial director of data analytics for ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight, noted in an email how “pollsters like to market their work as ‘snapshots in time’—quick, one-off readings of the public’s attitudes that get less accurate the further you get from that moment in time. That means that polls of the 2024 election are of very little utility this far ahead—roughly of zero predictive value, historically speaking, though there’s reasons to believe they’re more predictive now with higher levels of polarization.”

“But they’re also subject to a lot of measurement error,” Morris continued. “Only about one out of every 100 people a pollster calls picks up the phone. Those respondents can be really weird, politically speaking, and are also prone to overreacting to the news cycle. This means we need to be even more careful when reading into a single poll’s results.”

Even if the intention of conducting a poll is to capture the views and sentiments of voters, the outsized coverage of it may distort the picture of what’s going on. As Boorstin wrote, “The shadow has become the substance…. By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.”

PS) Biden's ahead by 2 points nationally, and he's up by healthy margins in some very important cross tabs.

• 52% to 25% with voters aged 18 to 29
• 50% to 39% with voters aged 30 to 44

Time to start relentlessly slamming the Press Poodles at every opportunity on this shit.

Today's Beau

Polling has become wish-casting - where it's not about testing the results of a given policy, but shaping opinion about that policy.

We have to smarten up as consumers of information.

Stop accepting what's popular, and start demanding what's true.

About The Polling

I've spent years bitching about how it seems like there must be something very wrong with the polling.

And while I think I have legitimate complaints about the incredibly stoopid way some of the questions are phrased, and the lack of followup questions that tease out what the respondents' answers really mean, I think I should be more assertively including the Press Poodles as a bigger part of the problem than I've done previously, because guess who pays for most of it.

Adage: A good marketing team knows their job security is often predicated on their ability to prove whatever foregone conclusion upper management cares to make.

The marketeers go out and poll the customers and the prospects, and golly gosh, look at that - everybody agrees that once again, our illustrious leaders are right about everything.

News outfits need to keep ad revenues up, so they're always going to believe they need to be sure not to turn off "half their audience" (because they've swallowed their own bullshit about a "deeply divided America"), and to appeal to any stragglers and undecideds who may be casting about for somebody to vote for. After all, buying dick pills and panty liners is a non-partisan down-the-middle kinda thing.

So they look at the polls - most of which have been financed by themselves, and their colleagues, and their competitors - and again, holy crap, look at how the polling confirms exactly what we need the polling to confirm.

I admit that's a bit cynical, but please tell me how I can be more positive and optimistic when I know that upwards of 85% of us are in favor of better gun laws, and reproductive choice, and cultural inclusion, and consumer finance protection, and taxing the mega-rich, and action on the climate problems, and labor-friendly laws, and and and - but somehow, the Press Poodles keep finding ways to report it out as a "close race between two equally contentious political rivals". 

Opinion

I don’t write about polls. You shouldn’t bother with them, either.

You might have noticed that I studiously have avoided dissecting the avalanche of 2024 polls. I don’t plan on deviating from this approach — at least not until mid-2024. And you should consider ignoring the nonstop flood of polling and the rickety analysis dependent on it. Here are five reasons we should all go on a poll-free political diet for at least six months:

First, the polling field is broken. Or, if you listen to pollsters’ complaints, it is consistently misapplied and misinterpreted. Polls didn’t come within shouting distance of the right result in either 2016 or 2020. And they misled voters about the fictitious red wave in 2022. Whatever the reasons — call blocking, excessive hang-ups, incorrect modeling of likely voters — even polls taken much closer to elections have consistently turned out to be far off base. The fixation on low-cost, horse-race coverage might satisfy the political media’s desire to project insider expertise or to appear neutral (hey, it’s the voters who say these things!), but there is no excuse to recycle highly suspect information from sources known to be flawed.

Second, voters tell us utterly contradictory things. Around 60 percent tell pollsters that four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump should drop out. But then nearly half say they’ll vote for him. Which is it? There is a hefty amount of research that what voters say they want doesn’t align with how they vote. Whether it is gas prices or the war in Ukraine or the candidates themselves, respondents often give contradictory answers, suggesting they either don’t understand the question, don’t really know what they think or respond based on tribal loyalty.

Third, even if you think polling is somewhat reliable, there’s no evidence that polling more than a year (or even eight months) before a presidential election is accurate. Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg (one of the few to debunk the red wave in advance of the 2022 midterms) recently wrote: “At the end of the day polling is only a snapshot into a moment, and cannot predict anything. Things change all the time in politics — change is the constant.”

Obviously, there is much that has yet to happen with regard to the economy, Trump’s indictments, the war in Ukraine and more. (And how people imagine they will react is a far cry from how they actually respond.) At this stage, we know little about voter intensity and turnout. So what is the point of filling newscasts and newspapers with what amounts to white noise?

Fourth, polling seems designed to make a point. Asking voters whether they want an imaginary, younger Democratic candidate when the only candidate who will get the nomination is Joe Biden is effectively asking people to underscore the point that the president is old. (Oddly, Republicans aren’t often asked whether they’d rather have someone not accused of 91 crimes.) It tells us nothing about what voters will do when presented with a choice between an 80-year-old, sane and accomplished incumbent running against an only slightly younger, unhinged, accused felon. (Apparently, because Trump has an indictment problem, “balance” means treating age as an equal liability for Biden.)

The most important reason, however, to minimize attention to polling has to do with the mission and credibility of journalism at a critical time in our democracy. What voters know might be wrong — objectively wrong. They tell pollsters we are in a recession. They tell us Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures. These beliefs are unsupported by evidence. This surely indicates that the media could try harder to explain what is going on. (Maybe more reporting on the changes happening around the country would be in order.)

Certainly, respectable media outlets cannot control where voters get their information, but evidence of such widespread confusion and ignorance indicates that we have a deficit of accurate, reliable information in the electorate. If the truth is getting lost in the shuffle, maybe parroting Republicans’ false claims (for the sake of “balance”) or fixating on polls is counterproductive.

Polling obsession might feed the desire, as media critic Jay Rosen said, to turn politics into “a savvy analysis of who was up, who was down, who’s winning or likely to win, the horse race, the spin, the strategy — all of that,” but it does not provide information with which voters can seriously, critically evaluate what is going on and what is at issue in the election. (Rosen expounded on this issue at length in a recent interview on my weekly podcast.) Surely, more time could be spent providing voters with a basic understanding of the charges, the court process and the implications of electing an indicted candidate.

When the stakes are so high, and the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, continuing to gamify politics with meaningless polls does little to improve journalists’ reputation or inform voters. As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch aptly put it: “The news media needs to stop with the horse race coverage of this modern-day March on Rome, stop digging incessantly for proof that both sides are guilty of the same sins, and stop thinking that a war for the imperiled survival of the American Experiment is some kind of inexplicable ‘tribalism.’ ”

We all would do far better to apply our energy to stemming the tide of disinformation and facing hard truths about a MAGA movement that manages to bamboozle millions of Americans — and remains the greatest domestic threat to democracy we’ve seen.

About Guns

Guns have quite a lot to do with gun violence, but we're having trouble getting enough people to accept that very obvious premise in a strong enough way to countervail the very loud ammosexual minority that, apparently, needs us to keep shooting each other (?)

I do get that there are plenty of unscrupulous assholes out there who just want to turn a buck, and are willing to rationalize anything to keep that revenue stream flowing.

And I get that some people are so bought in to their favorite brand of gun-friendly political marketing (aka: propaganda) that they'll have to be completely deprogrammed to pull them up from the depths.

But even though the true ammosexuals are diehard devotees, they are a minority and their numbers are dwindling - ever so slightly, but still - dwindling.

Over the last 50 years, the number of Americans who own guns has shown a slight net decrease, even as the number of guns sold has been going gang-busters.

Fun With Numbers ("innumeracy" is a thing)

• There are about 334 million people in the US, and almost 400 million guns 
• 20 - 30% of Americans own 1 or more guns, while most Americans believe the percentage of Americans owning guns is 45 - 55%

We do better when we know what the truth is (more or less), and what the lies are (more or less).

Opinion
6 solutions to gun violence that could work

For far too long, those who oppose gun reforms have said that nothing can be done to stem the violence.

Those claims are demonstrably wrong. Research on gun violence is notoriously underfunded, but the data we do have shows that well-designed gun laws informed by science can save lives.

1 Ban weapons of war

The Las Vegas massacre. The killing spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo. The Virginia Tech slaughter. The massacre at a Walmart in El Paso.

These are the five highest-casualty (deaths and injuries combined) mass shootings in modern American history. And what did they all have in common? Semiautomatic weapons that allowed the shooter to fire rounds into crowds without reloading.

Based on the evidence we have, banning these weapons probably won’t do too much to curb overall gun deaths. We know this because in 1994, Congress passed legislation to outlaw the sale of certain types of semiautomatic guns and large-capacity magazines, and the effect was unimpressive. Gun homicide rates declined during the ban, but they also continued to fall after the ban expired in 2004. One federally funded study of the ban found that the effect on violence was insignificant, partly because it was full of loopholes.

But banning so-called assault weapons was never meant to reduce overall gun deaths. It was meant to make America’s frustratingly common mass shootings less deadly — even if these horrific events represent a small portion of gun violence.

And, in fact, mass shooting casualties dipped during the ban, although a review of studies by the Rand Corporation found the role the ban played in the dip to be inconclusive.

Here’s what is certain from the research: Semiautomatic weapons and weapons with high-capacity magazines are more dangerous than other weapons. One study on handgun attacks in New Jersey in the 1990s showed that gunfire incidents involving semiautomatic weapons wounded 15 percent more people than shootings with other weapons. A more recent study from Minneapolis found that shootings with more than 10 shots fired accounted for between 20 and 28 percent of gun victims in the city.

So how do we keep such dangerous weapons from being used in crimes? A ban on assault weapons might help, as data from a few cities during the 1994 ban suggest:

But experts say focusing on reducing large-capacity magazines might be more effective. Simply put, gunmen are less deadly when they have to reload.

Such a ban might take time to have an effect, as a 2003 Post investigation showed. But it would be worth it. Alarmingly, crime data suggests that crimes committed with high-powered weapons have been on the rise since the 1994 ban ended.

Again, mass shootings account for a small fraction of gun deaths, so any ban on these weapons and magazines would result in marginal improvements, at best. But even if this step reduced shootings by 1 percent — far less than what the Minneapolis study suggests — that would mean 650 fewer people shot a year. Isn’t that worth it?

2 Keep guns away from kids

Occasionally, gun-reform advocates call for raising the federal age limit for purchasing semiautomatic weapons to 21, as is already required for handguns. But why stop there? Why not raise the age for all guns, including non-automatic rifles and shotguns?

This could make a real difference because young people are far more likely to commit homicide than older cohorts. One survey of prison inmates looked at those convicted of using a legally owned gun to commit a crime and found that a minimum age requirement of 21 would have prohibited gun possession in 17 percent of cases.

Of course, keeping guns out of the hands of young shooters would be difficult, because it’s so easy for people to obtain guns illegally. But age limits in general have proved to be effective in limiting bad behavior, so it’s worth trying.

There’s another reform that could be even more effective at keeping guns from kids: requiring gun owners to securely store firearms in a locked container or with a tamper-resistant mechanical lock.

Nearly 4.6 million minors in the United States live in homes where firearms are loaded and easy to access. One analysis from the federal government shows that 76 percent of school shooters obtain a gun from their homes or the homes of relatives. The same is true for more than 80 percent of teens who take their own lives with a firearm.

Safe-storage laws can help, especially with suicides. In Massachusetts, which has the strictest storage laws in the country, guns are used in just 12 percent of youth suicides, compared with 43 percent nationally. The suicide death rate among youth in the state is nearly half the national average.

In fact, states requiring locks on handguns in at least some circumstances have 25 percent fewer suicides per capita and 48 percent fewer firearm suicides per capita than states without such laws.

Meanwhile, another safety innovation is being developed: smart guns. These are guns that use fingerprint recognition and other means so that only their owners can fire them. The technology is still relatively new, but it’s promising. One small study found that over seven years, 37 percent of gun deaths could have been prevented by smart guns. Lawmakers could encourage their use by incorporating them into laws regulating safe storage.

3 Stop the flow of guns

A general rule: The more guns there are, the more gun deaths there will be. It holds across countries (note how much the United States stands out):

And across states. One 2013 study from Boston University found that for every percentage point increase in gun ownership at the state level, there was a 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.

So how do we reduce the steady flow of guns? Three ideas:

Institute a buyback program

In the 1990s, Australia spent $500 million to buy back almost 600,000 guns. Harvard University researchers found that the gun homicide rate dropped 42 percent in the seven years following the law and the gun suicide rate fell 58 percent.

An Australian study found that for every 3,500 guns withdrawn per 100,000 people, the country saw a 74 percent drop in gun suicides and a reduction in mass shootings. That doesn’t prove causation. But the likelihood the drop in mass shootings was due to chance? Roughly 1 in 20,000, according to a 2018 paper.

Of course, the United States is different from Australia. The Australian buyback was mandatory, which would probably run into constitutional problems here. Plus, we have way more guns per capita, so the United States would have to spend exponentially more to make a significant difference.

Still, given Australia’s experience, it’s worth at least experimentation. Perhaps the government can use buyback programs to target specific kinds of weapons, such as semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines.

Limit the number of guns people can buy at one time

Federal gun enforcers have long warned that state laws allowing bulk purchases of guns enable crime. Older studies from what is now called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show that as many as 1 in 5 handguns recovered in a crime were originally purchased as part of a sale in which multiple guns were purchased.

To combat this behavior, some states have instituted “one handgun a month” policies, as Virginia did in 1993. At the time, Virginia was the top supplier of guns seized in the Northeast; three years later, the state dropped to eighth place. The law also led to a 35 percent reduction in guns recovered anywhere in the United States that were traced back to Virginia.

Such a policy isn’t going to solve gun trafficking. The Virginia law didn’t prevent “straw purchases” in which traffickers pay people to buy guns legally so they can be sold elsewhere. But experts say one-gun-a-month laws make it more costly for criminals to traffic guns. And given the success in the past, such policies are worth promoting.

Hold gun dealers accountable

Research has shown that in some cities, guns used to commit crimes often come from a small set of gun dealers. So how do we stop the flow of those guns? Hold dealers accountable.

In 1999, the federal government published a report identifying gun shops connected with crime guns, including a single dealer in Milwaukee that was linked to a majority of the guns used in the city’s crimes. In response to negative publicity, that dealer changed its sales practices. Afterward, the city saw a 76 percent reduction in the flow of new guns from that shop to criminals and a 44 percent reduction in new crime guns overall. But in 2003, Congress passed a law prohibiting the government from publishing such data, after which the rate of new gun sales from that dealer to criminals shot up 200 percent.

Studies show that regulation of licensed dealers — such as record-keeping requirements or inspection mandates — can also reduce interstate trafficking. So can litigation against gun dealers that allow their guns to enter criminal markets. One sting operation conducted by New York City reduced the probability of guns from the targeted dealers ending up in the hands of criminals by 84 percent.

4 Strengthen background checks

Federal law requires background checks to obtain a gun, but those checks are extremely porous.

Under federal law, only licensed gun dealers have to perform these checks; private individuals and many online retailers don’t. It’s hard to pin down exactly how many guns are legally acquired without a background check, but some surveys put it upward of 22 percent.

Some states go beyond federal law and require background checks for all gun sales. But since it’s so easy for guns to travel across state lines, it’s hard to judge the effectiveness of these policies on gun deaths.

Still, there’s evidence that such expanded background checks can help limit the flow of guns into illegal markets. We also know that most gun offenders obtain their weapons through unlicensed sellers. One survey of state prison inmates convicted of offenses committed with guns in 13 states found that only 13 percent obtained their guns from a seller that had to conduct a background check. Nearly all those who were supposed to be prohibited from possessing a firearm got theirs from suppliers that didn’t have to conduct a background check. Closing that loophole federally might help.

What else can we do to strengthen background checks? Four possibilities:

Close the “Charleston Loophole”

Most gun background checks are instant. But some — around 9 percent — take more time, and federal law says if a check takes more than three business days, the sale can proceed. As a result, thousands of people who are not supposed have access to guns ended up getting them, as the Government Accountability Office reported.

Among the people who benefited from this loophole? Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Ending this practice would save lives.

Close the “Boyfriend Gap”

An estimated 70 women each month are killed with guns by spouses or dating partners, according to a 2019 analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by Everytown for Gun Safety.

Federal law prevents anyone with domestic violence misdemeanors from having a gun, but that law is defined narrowly and doesn’t include all domestic violence perpetrators — for example, boyfriends. More specifically, the law doesn’t keep guns from abusers who are not married, do not live with their partner or do not share a child with them.

Some states have expanded on federal law — and it works. One study found that rates of domestic-violence-related homicide decline 7 percent after a state passes such laws.

Implement waiting periods

The evidence that waiting periods to acquire guns reduce violent crime is limited. But there’s more evidence that they prevent suicides.

Research shows that people who buy handguns are at higher risk of suicide within a week of the purchase, and that waiting periods can keep them from using guns to harm themselves. In fact, one study found that when South Dakota repealed its 48-hour waiting period in 2012, suicides jumped 7.6 percent in the following year.

Improve reporting on mental health

Mental illness is associated with a relatively small portion (around 5 percent) of gun homicides. Federal law already prohibits anyone committed to a mental-health facility or deemed dangerous or lacking all mental capacities through a legal proceeding from having a gun.

But mental-health records are notoriously spotty. There’s limited evidence that improved reporting at the state level might reduce violent crimes. Connecticut started reporting mental-health data to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in 2007, and one study found that violent crimes committed by people with mental illness there significantly decreased.

We can also make it easier for family members to seek court orders to disarm relatives who might do harm to themselves. In Connecticut, which has allowed this since 1999, one study estimated that the law averted 72 suicide attempts through 2013 from being fatal.

5 Strengthen red-flag laws

As much as strengthened background checks might prevent someone from purchasing new firearms, the problem remains that many guns are already in the hands of people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

How to address that? One solution: red-flag laws.

Such laws, which have repeatedly been held constitutional, allow people to petition a court to temporarily confiscate firearms from people who pose a threat to themselves or others. And they work.

California has one of the most expansive red-flag laws in the country, allowing anyone to petition for a court order to take guns from a high-risk individual. There is concrete data to show it is effective: One case study from 2019 found that the law averted at least 21 potential mass shootings, based on credible threats.

And it’s not just mass shootings. Studies have consistently found that these laws help avert suicides. One study from Indiana found that for every 10 to 20 gun-removal orders, one suicide was averted. Another study found Indiana saw a 7.5 percent reduction in its firearm suicides rate in the 10 years after its red-flag law became took effect. Connecticut, in the same study, saw its rate fall 14 percent.

These laws won’t catch every mass shooter or prevent every suicide. They are fundamentally limited by how many people know to use them. But implemented properly, they could do some real good. A 2019 analysis from the U.S. Secret Service found that in 77 percent of school shootings, at least one person knew of the perpetrator’s troubling behavior before the attack.

6 Treat guns like we treat cars

Consider two data points: first in Connecticut, then in Missouri.

In Connecticut, state lawmakers required people to get a license and safety training for a gun, just as we do for cars. In the decade after, it saw a drop in both gun homicides and suicides — at faster rates than other states without similar laws. And at the same time, Connecticut saw no significant drop in homicides not related to guns.

In Missouri, the state legislature repealed its licensing requirements in 2007.

A study found that the law change was associated with an additional 55 to 63 homicides in each of the five years following the repeal — even as homicides committed without guns dropped.

In both cases, it’s hard to prove a connection. But these experiences do strongly suggest something we learned in our decades-long efforts to reduce vehicle-related deaths: Regulation saves lives.

It can also deter crime. Research from the advocacy group Mayors Against Illegal Guns has found that guns sold in states with licensing laws — which are sometimes paired with mandatory registration of guns with local police — end up being exported for criminal activity at one-third the rate of states without the laws.

Why? Because it’s much harder to feed guns into illegal markets if police can trace them to their legal gun owners. After Missouri repealed its licensing laws, police in Iowa and Illinois started reporting an increase in Missouri guns showing up at crime scenes.

None of these reforms alone will stop our gun epidemic. But together, they can make a serious impact that will save lives. The only thing stopping that from happening is a lack of political will.

Their Crystal's On The Fritz

Crystal-gazing.

Finger on the pulse.

Finger in the wind.

Finger down my throat. 

Jennifer Rubin, polling the pollsters. Or trolling them - trolling the trollsters?

(pay wall)

Opinion
4 reasons to be skeptical about election polling

Pollsters should worry that their profession might soon be regarded as more like astrology than political science.

Reasons to take polls with a large grain of salt abound. First, the nagging sense that pollsters are “missing” MAGA voters remains, as was the case during both the 2016 and 2020 elections. In both cycles, pollsters essentially got the Democratic share of the vote right but missed many voters who supported Donald Trump.

Some have suggested that Trump voters are less likely to talk honestly with pollsters than Democratic voters are. Plus, pollsters get responses from only a tiny fraction of calls they place, so voters with the luxury of time and deep interest in politics skew the results.

In 2020, polls gave a false sense of security for many House and Senate Democratic candidates. But that polling failure did not occur in 2018, when Trump was not on the ballot. So is the worry of missing Republican voters valid this time around? It’s a source of serious debate.

A second reason for caution: Some pollsters have reacted to their previous errors by overweighting survey results in the opposite direction. It’s unlikely that Republicans have made up their deficit among women, for example, despite what some polls show. Similarly, it’s unlikely that younger voters will show up as a fraction of their proportion in the 2018 or 2020 elections. Polls that show otherwise might be an indication that pollsters have overcompensated.

Third, as early voting becomes increasingly popular, no one knows whether this behavior will affect voting outcomes or whether the past profile of early voters (heavily Democratic) will hold up. There is no doubt that early voting has become easier and more familiar for millions of voters, as the Center for Election Innovation and Research points out in a recent report. David Becker, who leads the center, tells me that “35 states offer every voter the choice to vote early or by mail, and another 11 offer early voting to all voters (requiring an excuse to vote by mail).” While Republicans have certainly tried to restrict voting, he said, doing so might be hard when almost every voter “will still find voting to be familiar, convenient and safe.”

So far, early voting is slightly ahead of the 2018 rate and about 37 percent of 2020’s rate. The Democratic percentage of early voting is higher than it was in 2018 and 2020, but it’s unclear whether this means Democratic turnout as a whole will keep pace.

Finally, Republican pollsters are flooding the zone with partisan polls, which polling averages pick up. Naturally, that means mainstream media outlets are seeing these numbers and concluding that Republicans are gaining steam. But are they?

Tom Bonier, a Democratic strategist and head of the progressive data firm TargetSmart, noted the phenomenon in a recent tweet thread. He argues, for example, that one GOP poll showing Mehmet Oz, Republicans’ Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, up by three points likely underestimated young voters, but “many media outlets reported that Oz had surged into the lead.”

Similarly, in Georgia’s Senate race, Republican nominee Herschel Walker has the edge according to media outlets, despite reports that he paid for abortions previously (which Walker denies). But media reports are likely skewed by the large number of GOP-associated firms with polls showing the Republican ahead. Democratic operative Simon Rosenberg tweets: “A polling aggregator of only independent polls has the election 3.3 pts more Dem than” the RealClearPolitics average.

Perhaps the common media take that Republicans are “surging” is misleading. After all, while the New York Times’s election pundits have argued that Republicans are gaining ground, its own polling shows Democrats leading in three of four critical House races and a batch of Senate races (including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona). So which is right? The analysis, the polling or neither?

The bottom line is threefold: First, polling is far less predictive than media outlets often portray it to be, largely because we do not know who will turn out. CBS News has wisely provided a range of polling results depending on different turnout models. That seems far more honest and informative.

Second, much of the horserace coverage reliant on polling is crowding out substantive coverage of the races. Outlets should adjust accordingly.

Third, we’ll find out the winner only after the votes are counted (shocking!). But even that won’t tell us whether the polls were “right,” or whether they contributed to a false narrative that drove results.

In the end, the only sane approach to understanding the election is to ignore all the polling noise and focus on what really matters: turning out to vote.

All I want for Christmas is a chance to tell Nate Silver to shove a pinecone up his ass.

(And don't kid yourself, these GOP asshats are going to drag this shit out for quite a while. We'll be lucky to get most of it done by Christmas.)

On Polling

Brief Tho't:

When pollsters report that the number of Republicans supporting the stoopid notion that Trump actually won in 2020 is going up, I think we need to keep this one math-y thing in mind:

1. If there are 100 people in the GOP, and 60% of them are on board with Trump's 2020 bullshit, that's 60 people.
2. If the party shrinks to 70 people, but now 75% of them support Trump's bullshit story, that's 53 people.

I've thought there's been something wrong with the polling for quite a while. And I'm not saying that's it, and it can't be anything else.

I just think it's gotta be something, and maybe it starts with something so simple even a dolt like me can understand it.

Classic America

Showing what has to be in the top 5 examples of Americans' strangle-hold on the overly obvious is this headline at Brookings:

The American people’s message to President Biden about Ukraine—get tougher but don’t risk war with Russia

The latest survey of public opinion about the conflict in Ukraine presents a paradox. On the one hand, Americans say that they want President Biden to get tougher with Russia. On the other hand, their views about specific policies precisely track with the administration’s stance. Americans want the administration to do what the administration is already doing, and they do not want the administration to take the additional steps that it has already rejected.

For example, more than six in ten Americans favor imposing sanctions on Russia, providing financial aid to Ukraine, and sending weapons to Ukrainian forces. And by 52 to 19%, they support sending more American troops to bolster the defense of our NATO allies.

But Americans draw a bright line between these measures and policies that risk a direct confrontation between the United States and Russia. Just 33% support sending American troops to “help” the Ukrainians, and only 16% want our troops to be fighting by their side. By a margin of 21 to 52%, they reject shooting down Russia planes, and consistent with this stance, they oppose enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace.

Americans are also leery of non-military measures such as launching cyber attacks against Russia, presumably because they fear Russian retaliation against our information infrastructure, and flatly reject efforts to foment a coup against Vladimir Putin.

Americans are willing to confront the Russians diplomatically, however, and they reject the steps some have urged as ways of mollifying the Russians and ending their invasion of Ukraine. Only one in five Americans think that the US should promise Russia that Ukraine will never join NATO; just 14% say that we should roll back our troop deployments in Eastern Europe. And in a near-unanimous rejection of a Russian “sphere of influence,” only 8% think that Russia should be allowed to exert more power over the now-independent states of the former Soviet Union.

So, yeah Joe - keep doing everything you're doing, and keep on not doing everything you're not doing - and we'll keep believing we know everything there is to know, and that you're not doing what you should be doing, and that you are doing what you shouldn't be doing, because we watch the Press Poodles shit all over you for an hour or so every night.

Wacky Numbers

I've seen this float by on more than a few occasions lately:

After One Full Month of Unhinged and Violent Anti-ICE Protests -- Trump's Approval Jumps 10 Points With HISPANICS! from r/Conservative

Latin Rebels asked Zogby about their numbers and got some interesting insight.

143 LatinX respondents - not exactly a representative sample.

And a 10% increase is not the same as a 10-point increase, so chill your tits.

Go to school, "conservatives".

Today's Chart

From Pew Research:

Events unique to the history of individual countries cannot be ignored when considering why publics are more positive or negative about how the present compares with 50 years ago. However, our analysis also indicates that views of the current economy are a strong indicator of whether people say life for people like them is better today than it was 50 years ago, even when controlling for the demographic factors of income, education, gender and age. Indeed, across the countries analyzed, people with positive views of the current economy are 30 percentage points more likely than those with negative views to say life has improved for people like them.1

In general, countries that are more upbeat about their national economy are more likely to say life today is better compared with the past. For example, in Vietnam, where 91% say economic conditions are good, a corresponding 88% say life is better for people like them compared with 50 years ago. And in Venezuela, where only 20% say conditions are good, 10% say life is better for people like them. Overall, the correlation between economic assessments and views of the past is quite strong (+0.68).

I got ridiculously lucky, but almost 50 years ago, my high school diploma was enough to start me on a 40-year trip thru a career that put me in the top 3% of income-earners.

My kids will probably never know such things firsthand.

I don't know how to fix it. And there's never a guarantee that it can be fixed. But the one thing that will never fix it is allowing government to remain in the hands of people who are determined to keep us from even trying to fix it.

America 8th!

Well now - that don't scan for shit, does it?

The Hill:

A Gallup poll recently found that global approval of U.S. leadership sank to its lowest point in nearly two decades during President Trump’s first year in office.

The U.S. has also dropped significantly in the U.S. News rankings of trustworthiness and political stability. The greatest U.S. decline was in rankings of countries having open travel policies, likely related to Trump’s attempts to block visitors to the U.S. via the travel ban.

Polling

CNN POLL: 

Presidential Approval Rating, December of First Year

86% - Bush, 2001

77% - Kennedy, 1961

71% - Bush, 1989

69% - Eisenhower, 1953

59% - Nixon, 1969

57% - Carter, 1977

54% - Obama, 2009

54% - Clinton, 1993

49% - Reagan, 1981

35% - Trump, 2017