Honestly, I think people think too much about the presidency. Elected officials come and go, it wasn’t all that long ago that Obama and even Bush was in the White House. But still change is good, hard to argue that Donald Trump’s presidency was anything but an abysmal failure.
We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.
There is "no evidence" the Nov. 3 election was compromised, committees within the Department of Homeland Security that worked on protecting U.S. voting systems affirmed Thursday. In a statement, they also called the 2020 election the "most secure in American history."
"When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary," members of committees, which include officials from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement.
"This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
Often I think partisans and the media turn elections into too much of a horse race, thinking that every little vote or action is significant and that any little thing that could change the outcome of a race is important. And while winning versus losing is important to the politician and staff themselves, to the American people and public policy over the long run not so much so. Elections occur every year, and power is divided into many different levels of government. One candidate or party in a closely divided country isn’t likely to have a long legacy.
Let’s say there is a theoretical race where candidate “A” gets 49% of the vote and candidate “B” gets 50% of the vote. Candidate “B” is the winner, whose ideas represent the majority of the electorate? Not really. When a race is that close you might as well flip a coin because either candidate in practice represents a majority of the electorate. Particularities like random error, minor mishaps or fraud, weather or even the location of polling sites or hours might define the winner. Chances are on a race so close the next election things might flip the other way.
Elections shouldn’t be seen a precise measurement of public opinion but more of an estimate of public sentiments.
A lot of people don’t vote and there are all kinds of rules and procedures that distort the outcome of elections. State, county and municipal lines rarely represent communities of interest – often instead they’re historical conglomerations that lead to certain voices not being heard. Legislative districts are subject to gerrymandering and little things like locations of polling places and absentee ballot rules can effect who votes and how much weight their vote gets.
That said, elections do work and do represent a significant amount of the public opinion even if the results aren’t always a strict numerical majority of public opinion. Elections force politicians back to the middle and to be responsive to the public’s interest. Even if a particular candidate or party might not win a certain election, their competive presence makes the winner more accountable to the public by putting fear into them that they may lose the next cycle around.
Was there enough voter fraud in 2020 to make a difference in the presidential election? Probably not, most of President Trump’s claims have been debunked by the media. But regardless, either candidate as winner represents a close approximation of contemporary public sentiment – the split was quite narrow, especially under the rules of the Electoral College which create further distortions in the process.
And if you don’t like the outcome of the election, thousands of local and county officials will be on the ballot next year and ultimately there will be state and federal elections in 2022 and 2024.
Not without cause, malignant narcissism is one of the most searched for topics on the internet in part because seemingly there are so many people that appear to have those toxic traits that negatively impact on us. These individuals are notorious because they destabilize our lives, make us feel insecure, undervalued, disparaged, or inconsequential, and as I noted in my book, Dangerous Personalities (Rodale/Penguin), they can victimize us emotionally, as well as physically, even financially. They come into our lives as family members, friends, lovers, spouses, colleagues at work, bosses, or worst as national leaders. Once they enter our orbit, no matter how distant, toxicity is what they have in common and they always leave a debris field of human suffering behind them.
I’m not a pollster, although I’m often misidentified as one on TV. I wanted to get that out of the way because while, in practice, our lives probably get easier in a year where the polls are spot-on, FiveThirtyEight’s mission is really to take the polls as they are — for better or worse — and understand the sources of error and uncertainty behind them. This is true for both the probabilistic forecasts that we build and the reporting that we do. We’re also interested in how polls are perceived by the media and the public and how that sometimes conflicts with the way we think polls should be viewed.
It's rare for American politicians to refuse to go gracefully, but some have tried it before before. Here's how it went down.