Musings on comics, mathematics, elections and anything else I can think of.
Author: Dr. K
I'm a Mathematics Professor interested in Mathematics Education and Voting Theory. I've been a science fiction buff and comic collector nearly as long as I can remember. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to teach courses about such things.
The 2nd half of “Caretaker” starts with a log entry as the 2 ships enter a debris field. We meet Neelix. He exudes a real used car salesman vibe but knows stuff and will work for water. I laugh every time I see Neelix greet Tuvok.
Origin stories, like this one, can drag on, with introductions & statements of the obvious superseding the story. Still, I laugh when I realize the Ocampa live in a mall and that they brought Harry and B’Elanna to the food court. Are they building a climate change metaphor?
“Good to meet you!”
Tuvok, right out of the gate is the funny one.
Sigh. The Kazon. I don’t like the Kazon. Kes makes little impression at first, but it’s better when she starts playing Jiminy Cricket for Neelix. We learn the Ocampa are in decline due to over-dependence on the Caretaker.
Kes acts like the leader the Ocampa needs. Tuvok does the Spock thing and explains everything to the audience. Then it becomes a mad dash to leave the planet, with Janeway and Chakotay standing on what looks like the bridge that killed Kirk. The exchange between Paris and Chakotay on the bridge is kind of amusing but crosses a bit of a line. They still manage to defeat the killer bridge!
This show needs more Picardo. His mobile emitter can’t get here soon enough. The ship already looks pristine despite getting trashed on its way to the Delta Quadrant.
The Kazon are simplistic idiots, setting an unfortunate precedent for the show. We weakly cycle back to the climate issue with the obvious. The Caretaker’s tech destroyed the Ocampa’s environment. The language we use to discuss these issues has changed in 30 years.
Harry and B’Elanna go to the food court.
The Caretaker is abducting people and trying to procreate with them. We have new terminology for that too. Part 2 isn’t as strong as Part 1, leaving important issues on the table. Everything comes together too conveniently in the end.
Still, it’s a decent episode that does what it needs to do to set up the show. The whole of “Caretaker” is much better than this installment on its own.
It’s the thirtieth anniversary of Voyager this week and that seems like as good of a reason as any to get back to this project. Also, the election is over and it’s good for my mental health to occupy my brain with some things that are neither politics nor work.
If you don’t recall how this works, here’s my introductory post. The other posts are here. I’m going to try BlueSky for the initial watches even though their iPad app is frustrating. Those will be back soon.
Incidentally, if you want to watch “Caretaker” as a two-part story it’s available that way on PlutoTV.
With Season 4 complete, we go back to Season 1. We’ll be alternating seasons until the end of the series. I have clear memories of the premiere. I was psyched for a new ship-board Trek series, watched the episode twice (taped on VHS… my god!), and dug for more info. If this were today rather than 30 years ago, I would have been clamoring for a podcast to extend the adventure.
On to the episode. Good lord! The opening text is way too Star Wars for me. But that’s followed by a strong opening that reminds me of “Balance of Terror,” an engaging space battle that does not depend on SFX. The drama is inside the ship. The intros for Paris and Janeway are good but clunky. Too bad McNeill isn’t “Nick Locarno” here.
Morn!
Voyager’s original pilot and first officer.
Quark is in excellent form for his cameo. It gives Tom and Harry a “meet cute.” It’s striking how many of the characters we meet are merely plot fodder. Pilot, doctor, first officer, and security guy. Makes me wonder how things might have played out differently. Bam! We’re in the Delta Quadrant! It’s funny, the survivors barely seem to have encountered a strong wind.
We meet the Doctor in sickbay. I don’t care if it makes no sense for a hologram to show emotions, Picardo is hilarious!
Moving to the array is abrupt. A cute (holographic) girl greets Harry, leaving him fazed & typifying his character.
The farm setting doesn’t work even though it’s not supposed to. It’s better once the villagers are brandishing pitchforks. Abrupt transitions to the crew on examination tables and then to awakening on Voyager neatly create a sense of disorientation. Hey! Security Guy lives!
Our first look at the caretaker.
Things move fast. Harry and B’Elanna are missing, so the two ships team up. It’s nice that it doesn’t go smoothly. Tim Russ is a bit too low-key for Tuvok so far.
Ugh. Melancholy banjo music.
“Minor Bipedal species.” Lol. The caretaker guy is excellent at being cryptic.
Torres tries to beat the hell out of a door, and we’ve typified another character. And there’s a nice scene establishing Janeway and Tuvok’s dynamic. Vulcans don’t worry, but they miss each other? How’s that again? We end on Janeway promising to get the crew home. This is an excellent start.
“We the People… Do Ordain and Establish this Podcast.”
As we rejoin our heroes The USS Enterprise, trailer firmly attached by tractor beam, is approaching planet Omega 4. There they find the derelict USS Exeter in orbit. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Galloway beam over to the Exeter where the entire crew has mysteriously been turned into common rock salt, just like you can buy from any neighborhood hardware store.
No, wait. I’m confused. That’s the “Omega Glory,” S2E23 of Star Trek. I swear, sometimes these Star Trek references just write themselves.
Anyway, the beginning of the episode is actually pretty good, but the ending is very, very dumb. So dumb that it lands it in the “So bad you have to see it to believe it” category. Unfortunately for the episode, people only seem to remember that ending.
To Asimov’s credit, we know that he did not like that ending, Strangely he didn’t like it even some 15 years or so before the episode aired. How does that work? I guess you’ll have to listen to our episode.
Meanwhile, being of a certain age myself, I can’t seem to get this little earworm out of my head.
Let’s all sing along! “Ee Plannista, enor durtofo amo orper fectyoo nion…” Everybody!!
And now we settle in for the second part of the Good Doctor’s second novel! Join us as we dust The Stars, Like Dust— with commentary like powdered sugar on a doughnut! Let’s chat about chapters nine through fourteen!
“The Podcast Was Located in a Little Niche Just Outside the Cabin”
If this novel was feeling a little non-Asenion for your tastes, this installment might be for you! If you love Golan Treveze or the version of Hari Seldon who inhabits the Foundation Prequels, you’ll like Biron Ferrill better as this installment goes forward! If you think that there is a bit too much buckling and swashing in the first section, there is a bit of action where Biron overpowers a guard, tying him up with a pair of pantyhose. But once Gil and Artemisia help steal a space ship things settle down to storytelling and discussing galactic goings on as opposed to any actual going or actually doing anything story-inspiring. Plus, it’s something that passes for a plot twist!
So, let’s go! Help us bust the stars like dust with the vacuum of space!
Here we are at Election Day. It’s been a long road. At some point along the way I thought I’d be doing one of these every night as the election got close. Unfortunately, that ran straight into my need to make a living. But here’s one final probabilistic analysis as the campaign draws to a close.
The Traditional Version
Let’s remind ourselves how these work. I took data for electoral-vote.com either averaging the polls from the last fifteen days or taking the single latest poll if there are no polls in the last 15 days.
We ran 40,000 simulated elections and tallied the results. We ended up with almost 73% of victories going toward Kamala Harris. Running all the states it looks like Harris has at least a 70% chance of winning with less than a 30% probability. I’ve talked about why that is likely an overestimate of Harris’s chances.
That’s why we started running a second simulation.
In our swings-only projection we give every state that is not a swing state to either the Democratic or Republican candidate. That means Harris starts at 226 electoral votes and Trump builds from 213. That’s a slight advantage for Harris.
These simulations give us a 59% probability of a Kamala Harris victory and about a 40% chance of winning for Donald Trump. That’s close but not so close as projected by other sites. It’s going to be a long night but Harris has an edge.
It’s 12:12 AM on election day and I may as well get this thing started. I’ll be adding stuff throughout the day and I’ll be live blogging the results come 7 PM on the East Coast.
My second priority is to get some sleep. That’s in a few minutes but right now I’m watching Dixville Notch New Hampshire cast the first ballots of the 2024 General election.
Is a nice start to the day, a display of pure democracy. The results are in and we have a 3 to 3 tie in Dixville Notch. I’ve been hoping this thing wouldn’t turn out to be as close as everyone seems to think. With luck this won’t be a harbinger of electoral tight ropes yet to come.
I’ll be adding a lot of stuff during the day. The featured image is an electoral map from my final probabilistic look at the election. That might be job number one when I get up. That or my final prediction.
In the meantime, you might be interested in my last probabilistic look at the election. That was a part of Dr. Steve Coleman‘s 37th political pundit night on October 24 th. That’s the video just below and I start at about 5:45 in.
More in the morning.
It’s 7:23 am! Good Morning.
I think I’ll start with my best guess on where the US Senate is going to land. First though, a quick commercial.
I’m mostly looking at the data on electoralvote.com. I’ve been following that site since 2004 and this year they are, IMO, the best source of well considered, clear minded, daily updates on the election.
That link is supposed to update; you can get their current results by clicking the link.
Senate Projection
They currently have the Senate at 48 Democrats and 52 Republicans. I think it’s likely two of the four races that they rate as barely Republican will fall back to the Democratic side. That makes my prediction 50-50 with the winner of the vice presidency deciding Senate control.
There are a couple reasons for that. There are abortion referendums on the ballot in 10 states and since the Dobbs decision those have driven turnout that strongly favors the Democrats. Two of the four are well-regarded incumbents who have demonstrated their ability to win in Ohio and Montana. It also seems like Elon Musk is too inexperienced to be running GOTV efforts.
I’d like to be able to predict that Josh Hawley and Rick Scott will lose this time out but I think their states are too red for that.
Still, if there is an undetected blue wave 54 seats for the Democrats seems not impossibly insane. 
Presidential Projection
Well, now it’s 2:19 PM. The stupid day job, which I’m normally quite happy with keeps getting in the way of my geeking out on election stuff today. But after mulling it over in between all the other stuff, I’m ready to call this. At the macro level, I’m predicting Harris will win. She isn’t just leading in the probabilistic analysis that I have published today, but I think the buzz is good. She ended the campaign on a positive note and a professional one. In the meantime, there’s been even more weirdness than usual in the Trump campaign, and although that never seems to make much of a difference, I suspect this time will be a bit different.
The micro level is a bit more nuanced. I’m a bit gun shy after 2020. The Saturday before the election a Trump campaign caravan, which may have just been a bunch of his civilian supporters ran a Biden campaign bus off the road. I was pretty shaken by that and I thought when news went around, there would be a big swing in Biden‘s direction. It never materialized, so my “official” projection was way off.
My gut says that given the salience of women’s issues, the abortion issue, and the collective desire of the polling community to not underestimate Trump support this time plus a bunch of other things could have this swinging dramatically in Harris’s direction. But I’m not seeing that in the numbers. What I have seen is this particular configuration cropping up time and time again across my analysis and a bunch of other people’s analyses. Plus, even though the margins are small Harris has been consistently ahead for a week or more in the rustbelt states in Nevada.
That leads me to this projection 276 for Harris 262 for Trump. It wouldn’t surprise me if every swing state tilted in Harris’s direction or even if every swing state tilted together in one direction or the other. Based on the numbers, though this is my best guess.
2:56 PM
Here’s some interesting contacts to the Dixville notch numbers. At a first glance 3 to 3 look like looks like it portends a close election. Here are some context, though. These voters were four Republicans and two independents. all six of them voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary.
If the Haley voters split 50-50 between Harris and Trump, Donald Trump is toast.
7:24 PM
I got home and had dinner, and now I’m diving in. No real surprises so far except that it took 6 minutes to call Indiana for Trump. So, Kentucky and Indiana are called for Trump, and Vermont for Harris.
I’m looking forward to the live blog from electoral-vote.com.
7:28 pm.
Two minutes to closings at North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Bernie Sanders is reelected in Vermont! Yay!
10 seconds.
I keep saying this: “Too Early to Call” is not a call. West Virginia is called for Trump. Jim Justice picked up the senate seat in WV. Also, we’ve been to the Moon.
7:45 PM
There has been a spate of bomb threats at polling locations in DeKalb County, GA. Biden won DeKalb in 2020 with 83% of the vote. Someone is scared.
7:57 PM
The polls close in sixteen states in mere minutes. It’s usually like this; there are always some red states that are called early. It will be nice to see Harris get some points on the board.
8:00 PM
Florida is called Trump. Not surprising but having grown up there it still makes me sad. So many states.
Here’s where we are from the NYTimes,
It looks like Harris is underperforming Biden in Georgia.
Harris is running up a big lead in Pennsylvania because this time, the mail ballots are being counted first. It makes me think a quote that’s attributed to LBJ, “Always count your votes last.”
Georgia and North Carolina seem to be on the ball counting the votes this time.
8:57 PM
In three minutes all but eight states will have closed their polls. We have closings from Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
Four or five calls for Trump, including Texas. Not even New York called for Harris. The democrats usually get off to a slow start in Electoral Votes but this is getting ridiculous.
Some of the signs of Harris underperforming and Trump overperforming in Georgia seem to be replicated in North Carolina. There are good signs in the urban areas but those could get swapped by the same-day votes.
9:24 PM
SarahMcBride is elected to Congress from Delaware. She will be the first openly transgender member of congress.
9:29 PM
New York called for Harris. Finally.
9:49 PM
A bunch of races and states that NBC had as “too early to call” have been recharacterized as “too close to call.” That is every Presidential and Senate race in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
There is reporting that there are long lines at college campuses in all the rust belt states. That’s a positive sign. There is also some good signs for Harris in suburbs in Georgia.
There are still people voting in Nevada who have a three hour wait. That means there will be no data out of Nevada until at least 2 AM.
11:18 PM
Moreno is projected to be the winner of the Senate Seat in Ohio. That’s a huge loss. Brown was an outstanding Senator. Still, that means that the Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate next year.
I’m hearing second hand reports from the Harris campaign. I’m afraid it sound’s like whistling through a graveyard. I want to be wrong here.
They just called Connecticut for Harris. The mere fact that that took hours is a bad sign. Kornacki is talking Trump making big gains in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. Those are safe blue states but these are not good signs.
11:35 PM
I want some analysis about the effects of the coordinated series of bomb threats that we saw throughout the country. Polling places were cleared; there was a chilling effect on the voters affected. Could this have swung a state or two? Were the precincts targeted at random were the calls targeted at Democratic leaning locations? I have a lot of questions.
11:40 PM
North Carolina is called for Trump. I expected it but I was hoping it would turn out otherwise.
12:12 AM
Let’s check in on the state of the race.
12:26 AM
I’m probably going to hang this up for this evening. Pennsylvania isn’t looking good (well, not just Pennsylvania). The talking heads on the teevee sound like they’re already doing an autopsy.
Has Donald Trump declared victory yet? That’s a weird amount of discipline for that gentleman.
I’ll jump back on if anything significant happens assuming I’m still awake. I may not sleep for four years.
12:35 PM
And just as I write that the call Georgia for Trump. Harris still has a path to victory but it’s frighteningly narrow. There are also a number of states that should not have been swing states that remain to be called.
They’ve called the Senate races in Nebraska (no, the other one) and Utah for Republicans Deb Fischer and John Curtis. That clinches Senate control for the Republicans.
The Harris campaign co-chair just gave a lackluster address and told Harris’s supporters to go home for the evening but that she will address the nation tomorrow. Donald Trump is leading in four of the remaining swing states.
New Mexico has finally been called for Harris and they called Virginia when I wasn’t looking.
1:00
All the polls are closed as voting wraps up in Alaska.
Having a day job can be a drag, I promised myself that I would keep up with these but, as usually happens that intention was trampled by the sheer amount of work generated by the college and my classes. If I publish these as much as I’d like as the election draws nearer, most updates will need to look more like this.
Any commentary I would offer would be stale, but here is the map (in the featured image), the shifts, and the results for the 30 September Data.
You can get a better look at the featured image on the blog.
Shifts:
State
Change
New Mexico
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
State
Change
Nebraska 2nd
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Michigan
Barely Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Nevada
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
Results
It’s reasonable to characterize this as roughly 3 to 1 in Harris’s favor.
Last Words
These probabilities are still mostly driven by Harris’s advantage in the Dark Blue vs. Dark Red categories. Florida and Oregon are also probably shifting back and forth more than is reasonable.
Let’s get right to it. This is the first time since 14 August that one of the candidates had led in a victorious number of electoral votes.
The State of the Race
It’s been another crazy week.
It turns out that the happening at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach wasn’t random passersby engaging in gunplay. There was someone with an AK-47 at the edge of the golf course as Trump approached the fifth hole. The only gunfire though came from the Secret Service. The perpetrator was quickly apprehended. This is certainly an incident, but lots of folks are stopping short of calling it an “assassination attempt.”
Most of the polls this week have been very helpful for Vice President Harris. In fact, of the 12 polls that showed up on electoral-vote.com on Thursday, Donald Trump only led in one. There was a tied result in Pennsylvania, and the rest favored Harris. We could be seeing a debate bump finally taking hold.
In light of this, we notice that there has been a spate of anti-democratic stories this week. The Georgia elections board has mandated that ballot be counted by hand. That will grind the process to a halt and create chaos. In Ohio, the Secretary of State has written a very misleading description of an anti-gerrymandering amendment that will be up for a vote. And Senator Lindsay Graham has gone to Nebraska in hopes of convincing their legislature to switch the way, they allocate electoral votes to a winner-take-all system. Part of running a free and fair election involves not changing the rules late in the game, making this Nebraska thing seem like dirty pool. There’s more that I’ll leave you to hunt down.
Results:
As always we ran 40,000 simulations of the election as though it were being held today based on this week’s polling data from electoral-vote.com. Harris won 75% of these simulations, Trump won 24% and the remaining 1% were tied. In other words, it looks like the odds of Harris winning the election are at 3 to 1.
You can understand why Lindsay Graham went to Nebraska. If this map is correct, even if Donald Trump were to win every state marked as a tossup Harris would win 270 to 268. Changing how Nebraska allocates its electoral votes turns it into a 269 to 269 tie.
Probably not though because Harris is slightly ahead in Nevada and North Carolina. If we add in how the tossup states lean, this becomes a victory for Harris 292 to 246 EV.
That’s not a great way of looking at it though because in addition to the tossup states, the light blue and light red states are all close to or inside the margin of error. That excludes Oregon. We only have one poll from Oregon and it’s not as light blue as it seems.
The optimum way of looking at this might be Harris: 226, Trump: 189. Harris’s 3 to 1 odds notwithstanding this could still go either way.
Trends:
Digging in state-by-state, we can see that the bulk of the shifts this week are good news for Vice-President Harris. Let’s start with the states that have a redshift.
State
Change
Indiana
Leaning Republican to Strongly Republican
Maine 2nd
Leaning Democratic to Leaning Republican
Maine
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Virginia
Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Like Colorado and Arkansas last week, the shift in Indiana doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know. Last week’s result was based on one that was months old and just didn’t capture how red Indiana really is.
The shift in Maine’s second district is a big one, but it puts the Maine 2nd more or less back where it had been before the previous poll. That’s not really a surprise. Because of the change in the Maine 2nd, Maine as a whole seems a little less blue. Virginia’s shift is a small one right at the borderline between those two categories.
State
Change
Iowa
Strongly Republican to Leaning Republican
Florida
Leaning Democratic to Barely Republican
Pennsylvania
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
New Hampshire
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
New Mexico
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Rhode Island
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Looking at these states with a blue shift the one non-story here is Pennsylvania. That’s just a happy little dance within the margin of error.
Iowa though was a surprise. Donald Trump had an 18 point lead that shrunk to meager four points. The race in Florida, meanwhile has looked like it’s been tightening for a while. Perhaps it really is.
New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Rhode Island all could be the same story as Indiana. All of the states though have been polled multiple times; New Hampshire and New Mexico were looking downright swingy for a while. If these three are legitimately safely blue that frees up some resources that could be better used in, to pick a couple of states at random, Iowa and Florida.
Last Words
As much as I would rather continue to pontificate here, there is unfortunately other work I need to get to. We’ll check in again next week and see if these trends continue.
Let’s dig into the Great and Glorious Az’s second novel! Join us for The Stars, Like Dust—! In this episode, we sift through chapters one through eight.
“The Podcast Murmured to itself Gently”
The Stars, Like Dust is book #003 in the Asimov canon. That’s a little misleading. Book #002 I, Robot is a fix-up; most of it had been written years before. This was the second time the Good Doctor sat down to write a book and he intended to write a Novel with a capital “N.” He wasn’t having a good time of it. Walter Bradbury, Asimov’s editor, had liked Pebble in the Sky and wanted a follow-up but he also wanted an outline and a couple of sample chapters. Bradbury rejected the first two proposals. John Jenkins of AsimovReviews.net put it this way.
…now that he was a Novelist, Asimov was thinking he needed to write like one and was getting carried away. Rather than his sticking to his usual sparse prose, he was getting distinctly florid, and he needed to tone things down.
That’s what comes from trying to write a Novel with a capital “N” I suppose. To make matters worse, when Galaxy Science Fiction bought the right to serialize the novel Horace Gold insisted on a subplot that Asimov really didn’t care for.
But now it was time to sit down and write, which is what our good friend Isaac does best. Join us to see how the book turned out! This reading coincides with the installment published in the January 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction under the title Tyrann.
This is my first update on my new schedule. I downloaded the data from ElectoralVote.com yesterday, the 14th, at around noon and I’m processing it today on Sunday. With luck, I’ll have this out tonight.
The State of the Race
It’s been a bizarre 10 days! Monday seems like a lifetime ago. It was on Monday when I clicked on a “Cats for Trump” hashtag on Twitter or whatever the hell it’s called now. It struck me as pitiful. It seemed like Trump’s people were out of ideas and were trying anything to move the needle or slow Harris’s momentum.
Tuesday was the debate. It was a solid and clean win for Harris. We got the Trump we saw in the first debate and his furious firehose of falsehoods. That should have been disqualifying then, but we and the media were too busy realizing that President Biden is an octogenarian. In the second round, we got more of the same from Donald Trump with the added bonus that Kamala Harris was really able to piss him off. That led to some crazy, incoherent rants. It turns out it’s pretty easy to push that guy’s buttons as Vladimir Putin and a bunch of others figured out long ago. The only people I saw arguing that Donald Trump won the debate were on right-wing websites where they probably didn’t have the option of saying anything else.
Unfortunately, there are so few undecided voters at this point that the debate didn’t move the needle immediately. As things get played over and over over on the teevee machine some stuff will reach critical mass and start to sink in. A debate bump does not need to be instantaneous.
Oh. Also, the debate and a crudely made AI likeness inspired Taylor Swift to finally endorse Kamala Harris. Trump responded by saying that he hates her while making a knockoff of one of her concert T-shirts. This will eventually be hilarious, but not for Trump.
The latest news is that there was gunfire this afternoon near Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach. I knew that neighborhood or did 20 years ago. It’s fine, but gunfire isn’t all that surprising. The Trump campaign tried to color this as a second assassination attempt. I guess we’ll see.
Results:
We ran our usual 40,000 simulations of the election. If the election were today it looks like Harris would win about seven out of 10 times. Trump’s chances are close to three out of 10 and as usual we’re seeing about one percent of the results turn out to be ties.
That seems to track. Harris’s collection of “safe” votes is growing and is nearly twice as large as Trump’s. That’s a big driver of the probability. Make no mistake, there are enough toss-up votes that this thing could go either way.
Trends:
We can go back to tracking the individual changes because we’re on our second week of taking polls back 15 days. We have apples-to-apples comparisons. I’ve split the shifts into the moves toward the left and the moves toward the right.
Colorado and Arkansas don’t really show us any recent changes. Those states have probably been in the strong columns for months. It’s just that they haven’t been polled in a long time. We’ll see the same thing when we finally get new polls from Oregon and Indiana.
State
Change
Colorado
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Virginia
Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Michigan
Toss Up to Barely Democratic
Ohio
Strongly Republican to Leaning Republican
Michigan and Wisconsin don’t tell us too much either. These are small shifts on the edges of the categories. Light blue, light red, and taupe are all mostly inside the margin of error.
State
Change
Wisconsin
Leaning Democratic to Barely Democratic
Arkansas
Leaning Republican to Strongly Republican
Virginia and Ohio on the other hand are pretty big shifts and are mostly in Harris’s direction. Ohio doesn’t look likely to turn blue, but if it shifts into a place where it’s competitive and Virginia settles into being safely blue that could inspire a potentially game-changing shift of resources.
Last Words
Kamala Harris having a seven out of 10 chance of winning the election if it were held today seems pretty reasonable at this point. Nate Silver this week has those probabilities almost exactly backward, with Trump having about a seven out of 10 chance of winning. On the other hand, I spent some time this afternoon listening to Christopher Bouzy on Spoutible, revealing his new electoral map. That one seems wildly optimistic in Harris’s direction.
But both of those guys are trying, something more robust than a polls-only estimate. They’re trying to factor in other information, which is more subjective. That might explain why these two projections differ so strongly. The two approaches should theoretically converge as we get closer to election day. In the meantime, I should take a dive into their reasoning to see if I can assess it. Right now I’m comfortable being in the middle.
Comics, the Universe, and Everything 