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sigy | 1 year ago

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lostlogin|1 year ago

> It's hard to think that he doesn't know how lop-sided this election is, so the naive notion of "neutral" should not be applied to his behavior.

I’m not American or in the US, so please keep that in mind when I ask, ‘what’s lopsided?’

sigy|1 year ago

I should have been more specific. I meant lopsided as in the character of the two candidates. I posit that any decent, moderately educated citizen should be able to see this clearly, but therein lies the issue.

zahlman|1 year ago

Kamala Harris currently has a popular vote advantage on the order of 51-49, but in the American system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...) effectively only the "swing states" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_state) matter.

One of the best respected analysts in the business, Nate Silver, currently has Trump at a 53% probability of winning (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/), in a system designed to magnify the effect of small changes near the halfway point (historically, getting about 65% of the popular vote would net you a landslide worth approximately every seat in legislature - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/11/bidens-vi...). Silver's model can pick Trump as a slight favourite despite being behind in the popular vote, again because of the nature of the system. In particular, each state gets an extra constant two votes on top of the ones apportioned by population, favouring rural areas which currently prefer the Republican party.

The same analyst, BTW, gave Trump a ~30% chance of winning, shortly before the election, in 2016 (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/). This was notably higher than the probability ascribed by pretty much anyone else with any authority or respect in the matter.