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This is the Democratic Party.

This is an ominous sign for Biden. I know it’s the first of March but Biden down by 15 points in Iowa likely means he’s also underwater in Wisconsin and Michigan as well.


In the precincts that matter, he is down 30 percent or more. Its a blood bath. But its early.
 
My experience is similar to Huffy. Finding young people with a work ethic and drive has been extremely difficult. Hell…just getting them to show up for work is a challenge at times. Had a young lady last month who had been with me two weeks ask for a couple of mental health days. I explained to her that’s what we call Saturday and Sunday. She quickly decided this wasn’t for her. There are exceptions and they are very valuable due to their energy and innovations they bring to the table. I need to figure out how to weed those people out who really don’t want to work and/or lack self motivation better during the interview process.
Im not sure you can. The same demographic trends that are driving up your profits from inflated home sale prices are also pricing out your millennial employees who would otherwise be busting their butt to get a down payment. If you are a B- student in 1988 you felt like you had a chance. Today, those same B- students at 26 have seen buying power adjusted wages stagnate, despite what Baghdad Bob says at the White House, durable goods prices go up at rates higher than wholesale inflation, and housing that even their grandparents can't afford. So they feel no real motivation to go the extra mile to help their employer if there's no reasonable expectation they will profit in the end. Then they go home at the end of the day and doom scroll endless stories of the jerk in high school living in a mansion from crypto, the cheerleader from their home room class living as a stay at home mom in a million dollar house, then switch over to news stories about Biden screwing up loan forgiveness, followed by scanning a Reddit thread on how to torture your boss into giving you a raise or do nothing until they fire you. After they eat a gummy or vape some cannabis to induce sleep after they have force fed themselves some added anxiety and drank 6 cups of coffee that day, they show up in your business the next day having slept ten hours, arriving exhausted and depressed and wonder how little they can work and still have you like them and pay them enough to have the disposable income their parents and the government gave them in college. With the same hours and accountability.

I owned a consulting firm briefly that was advising a government contractor on security issues. They had tremendous trouble with document review from lawyers right out of law school. They would do the work, but it was spotty. You didn't need a law degree, but it was helpful and a good way to get started if you were coming out of a lower tiered law school. It was a work at home gig with one day in the office working in either a group space or private offices they called "hotel" spaces depending upon their social preferences. Pay was comparable to starting at a small law firm in the area, about $75,000 without state income tax. Retirement was a 5% match and health insurance and vision was included. These kids were making enough to consider themselves well paid compared to others coming out of their law schools. This was a medium sized town in the middle of the country. Most of their parents grew up as farmers, shop keepers, and laborers. Passing the bar was a generational boost for most the kids I talked to.

We set up an auditing system for them that was both automated and had a human component. Productivity fell even further, despite raises.

We brought in a separate entity to compare performance that was working on private sector matters but with the same work flow. We offered those workers the opportunity to meet production goals at the same compensation, but also log in after hours through a different portal and complete tasks at the rate of $100 per batch. Some batches took 10 minutes, some took several hours. You wouldn't know until you committed to do the project and if you opened it, you owned it to completion. After we had a baseline to see their participation and performance, we told them going forward that their after hours batch work would be compared to their co-workers and the winner would receive a round trip ticket first class anywhere in the world for the person who completed the most work of these "batch" jobs, which was really the backlog of what the government contractor law school graduates hadn't been able to complete timely or accurately. Not only did after hours participation rate go up, the productivity rate and precision rate went up remarkably compared to the law school grads.

None of those workers went to law school. Most were retired school teachers, a few musicians/actors/waiters, and others looking for summer jobs using their advanced non legal degrees. They basically solved the backlog problem in several months and the $10,000 plane ticket was a bargain bonus.

It was clear in the end that the law school grads felt their skills weren't being compensated high enough and felt they were entitled to more because "they went to law school." But they were incapable of producing any product that merited the pay they believed they were earning. When they were not getting it, they simply coasted through the job feeling trapped. The workers making extra cash during the summer or who felt in control of their ability to earn additional sums at their convenience were empowered. A significant portion of the younger labor force imo fits into the former and not into the latter.

So my sense is you will continue to endure what you have observed until you agree to give unskilled and under motivated employees more of your profits while they take none of the risks. That is what the internet is teaching these days.

And in case you are wondering, the contractor gave most of the law students two weeks pay after our pilot program brought the project back up to speed.
 
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In the precincts that matter, he is down 30 percent or more. Its a blood bath. But its early.
My plan from is to go laughing into oblivion. The world makes little sense anymore. I’m just along for the ride. The magnitude of this mistake by the American voting populous will be incalculable.

If we have another election in 2028…. I’m sure there will be another Democrat to come in and clean up the Republicans’ mess…. ”Read my Lips no new taxes”…..”Mission accomplished”…..”It’s just the flu”
 
My plan from is to go laughing into oblivion. The world makes little sense anymore. I’m just along for the ride. The magnitude of this mistake by the American voting populous will be incalculable.

If we have another election in 2028…. I’m sure there will be another Democrat to come in and clean up the Republicans’ mess…. ”Read my Lips no new taxes”…..”Mission accomplished”…..”It’s just the flu”
"no new taxes" -- definitely not a quote by any democrat
"it's just the flu". -- we didn't know the full impact until March or April,, and are still getting conflicting stats.
 
if you break a plate worth $100.00, and then glue it back together.
Is it still worth $100.00?
If you glue it back with gold, you can call it Kintsugi. Then it will be art and worth a lot more.
 
I know it won't be remembered in 3 months, but that was a pretty decent speech last night. I'm not particularly loving the clown show that the theatrics around the speech is devolving into though. There need to be some rules of decorum agreed to by both sides.

No 4 more years chants.... no baseball caps...... no outbursts from the audience at the podium....
 
He did OK.

Even my cousin who voted for Trump twice but was disgusted by his post election antics thought Biden did OK.

My take is that his mental acuity is a bit less than a year ago, but better than I expected. He is still much less dangerous to America than Trump.

That's our standard now it seems.
 
Biden and the Democrats have dug up to old chant "the Republicans give tax breaks to the rich and tax cheaters"

the tax code is full of loopholes enacted with the help of democrat congressmen: ie. HRC, Biden. shiff, schumer, Pelosi, aoc, Warren. sanders. waters, ...
 
Biden and the Democrats have dug up to old chant "the Republicans give tax breaks to the rich and tax cheaters"

the tax code is full of loopholes enacted with the help of democrat congressmen: ie. HRC, Biden. shiff, schumer, Pelosi, aoc, Warren. sanders. waters, ...
God you are so blind.
 
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Such a pinnacle of accurate polling.
Attack the pollster because you don’t like the hypocrisy of your fellow Dems huh. Rasmussen has actually overstated Dem support over the last 8 years Hardly a conservative bias pollster.
 
Attack the pollster because you don’t like the hypocrisy of your fellow Dems huh. Rasmussen has actually overstated Dem support over the last 8 years Hardly a conservative bias pollster.
They’re a very conservative biased pollster lol,

And as far as the poll goes…. It’s the equivalent of someone calling you and saying “Don’t think about elephants”

“Now, what are you thinking about?“
 
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The pollster’s history says you are wrong. At least over the past 8 years. Significant liberal bias in their polls
The Center for Public Integrity listed "Scott Rasmussen Inc" as a paid consultant for the 2004 George W. Bush campaign.[96] The Washington Post reported that the 2004 Bush re-election campaign had used a feature on the Rasmussen Reports website that allowed customers to program their own polls, and that Rasmussen asserted that he had not written any of the questions nor assisted Republicans.[97]

In 2009 Time magazine described Rasmussen Reports as a "conservative-leaning polling group".[98] John Zogby said in 2010 that Scott Rasmussen had a "conservative constituency".[99] In 2012 The Washington Post called Rasmussen a "polarizing pollster".[100]

Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls.[101][102] Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll;[103] the commentators in question allege that the questions Rasmussen ask in polls are skewed in order to favor a specific response. For instance, when Rasmussen polled whether Republican voters thought Rush Limbaugh was the leader of their party, the specific question they asked was: "Agree or Disagree: 'Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party—he says jump and they say how high.'"[102]

Talking Points Memo has questioned the methodology of Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index, which takes into account only those who "strongly" approve or disapprove of the President's job performance. TPM noted that this inherently skews negative, and reported that multiple polling experts were critical of the concept.[52] A New York Times article says Rasmussen Reports research has a "record of relying on dubious sampling and weighting techniques".[104] Rasmussen has also been criticized for only polling Likely Voters which, according to Politico, "potentially weeds out younger and minority voters".[105]

A 2017 article by Chris Cillizza for CNN raised doubts about Rasmussen's accuracy, drawing attention specifically to potential sampling biases such as the exclusion of calls to cell phones (which, Cillizza argued, tended to exclude younger voters), and also more generally to a lack of methodological disclosure. Cillizza did, however, note in the same piece that Rasmussen was one of the more accurate polling organizations during the 2016 United States presidential election.[106]

A December 2018 article by political writer and analyst Harry Enten called Rasmussen the least accurate pollster in the 2018 midterm elections after stating Rasmussen had projected the Republicans to come ahead nationally by one point, while at the time Democrats were actually winning the national House vote by 8.6 points—an error of nearly 10 points.[107]

The Associated Press has also addressed Rasmussen's methodology. In 2018, AP journalists noted that Rasmussen's telephone methodology systematically omits adults, many of them young people, without landlines. The AP also noted that Rasmussen does not provide details regarding its online-panel methodology.[108]

In an article for The Hill titled "Rasmussen Research has a pro-GOP bias", panelist discussed Rasmussen's practice of adjusting results by party identification. In addition to providing professional criticism from Ipsos, the article cited methodological concerns from Frank Newport of Gallup.[2]
 
The Center for Public Integrity listed "Scott Rasmussen Inc" as a paid consultant for the 2004 George W. Bush campaign.[96] The Washington Post reported that the 2004 Bush re-election campaign had used a feature on the Rasmussen Reports website that allowed customers to program their own polls, and that Rasmussen asserted that he had not written any of the questions nor assisted Republicans.[97]

In 2009 Time magazine described Rasmussen Reports as a "conservative-leaning polling group".[98] John Zogby said in 2010 that Scott Rasmussen had a "conservative constituency".[99] In 2012 The Washington Post called Rasmussen a "polarizing pollster".[100]

Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls.[101][102] Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll;[103] the commentators in question allege that the questions Rasmussen ask in polls are skewed in order to favor a specific response. For instance, when Rasmussen polled whether Republican voters thought Rush Limbaugh was the leader of their party, the specific question they asked was: "Agree or Disagree: 'Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party—he says jump and they say how high.'"[102]

Talking Points Memo has questioned the methodology of Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index, which takes into account only those who "strongly" approve or disapprove of the President's job performance. TPM noted that this inherently skews negative, and reported that multiple polling experts were critical of the concept.[52] A New York Times article says Rasmussen Reports research has a "record of relying on dubious sampling and weighting techniques".[104] Rasmussen has also been criticized for only polling Likely Voters which, according to Politico, "potentially weeds out younger and minority voters".[105]

A 2017 article by Chris Cillizza for CNN raised doubts about Rasmussen's accuracy, drawing attention specifically to potential sampling biases such as the exclusion of calls to cell phones (which, Cillizza argued, tended to exclude younger voters), and also more generally to a lack of methodological disclosure. Cillizza did, however, note in the same piece that Rasmussen was one of the more accurate polling organizations during the 2016 United States presidential election.[106]

A December 2018 article by political writer and analyst Harry Enten called Rasmussen the least accurate pollster in the 2018 midterm elections after stating Rasmussen had projected the Republicans to come ahead nationally by one point, while at the time Democrats were actually winning the national House vote by 8.6 points—an error of nearly 10 points.[107]

The Associated Press has also addressed Rasmussen's methodology. In 2018, AP journalists noted that Rasmussen's telephone methodology systematically omits adults, many of them young people, without landlines. The AP also noted that Rasmussen does not provide details regarding its online-panel methodology.[108]

In an article for The Hill titled "Rasmussen Research has a pro-GOP bias", panelist discussed Rasmussen's practice of adjusting results by party identification. In addition to providing professional criticism from Ipsos, the article cited methodological concerns from Frank Newport of Gallup.[2]
Almost like you didn’t even look at his polling results since 2014 or are simply choosing to ignore the same. Fact is he has one of the most liberal bias results of any pollster out there over that time period. Weird to ignore the actual polling results when analyzing a pollster but ok. Guess it makes one feel better about hypocrisy.
 
I think the more relevant question would be, assuming you are correct that Rasmussen is biased, is why a for profit entity would spend considerable funds measuring public sentiment on something you say is unfounded. Even if the polling breaks within a larger margin of error (or only reports selected results or skews the results through methodology as my clip above highlights), there still has to be sufficient public interest in the story to justify running the poll for clicks.

Indeed, The Atlantic, not exactly a repository of Fox News propaganda, also believes the story is news worthy ..

And finally, the most relevant question might be whether a Democratic Senator this time objects to the certification. In 2000 and 2016, House members disrupted the proceedings, with Maxine Waters being warned by Senate security that further disruptions would result in her arrest, but ultimately they were unsuccessful because no Senator would support them. They may get a single vote this time around. Perhaps something the US Supreme Court thought long and hard about with its opinion. And maybe also the reason the Left spin machine immediately began to try and unravel the idea going back hundreds of years that a per curiam opinion is unanimous. Im interested to see if they start to fundraise off of it in advance of the election if Trump stays on the ticket.

 
They’re a very conservative biased pollster lol,

And as far as the poll goes…. It’s the equivalent of someone calling you and saying “Don’t think about elephants”

“Now, what are you thinking about?“
Im a Republican, I only think about elephants.
 
Basically Rasmussen once had a relationship with Bush so his polling must have a conservative bias per the left. Oh…and please ignore his actual polling numbers and the liberal bias found in the same.
 
Basically Rasmussen once had a relationship with Bush so his polling must have a conservative bias per the left. Oh…and please ignore his actual polling numbers and the liberal bias found in the same.
I am trying to understand why a campaign would want bad or biased polling data.
 
Basically Rasmussen once had a relationship with Bush so his polling must have a conservative bias per the left. Oh…and please ignore his actual polling numbers and the liberal bias found in the same.
He got a lot right during the Trump years is his major sin. What Aston is driving at, I think, is that Rasmussen Reports is a company founded by Scott, but he left. He knows a bit about how to aggregate public opinion. He and his Dad founded a little known company called ESPN. He has his own bi-partisan shop now.

His old company has taken on some polling projects with a partisan bent, which has the elites all twisted even though everyone who has done this for more than one cycle knows both sides do it.

The data is all over the place because of the piecemeal nature of their projects. They have had some very accurate polls. Scary accurate. They have had some duds. They all do. Its why people do the polls that matter in house so you get the sample that's important, not what clicks.

Last I heard ABC was trying to shut them out of the 538 aggregate. I dont what happened with that, but that has happened to dozens of other firms, again on both sides.
 
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I am trying to understand why a campaign would want bad or biased polling data.
Some times its not about what people actually think. You are trying to drive narratives into the media to get what is called earned media coverage. Free discourse on issues that will benefit your turnout or fundraising. Using an example we recently talked about. If you are heavily funding a tight Senate race, you are looking at maximizing coverage while always being worried that your paid ads will be depelting your war chest, amongst other concerns. You dont care if the poll is rock solid accurate or not, you just want the poll in the news so Joe Scarborough talks about it for free every weekday morning for a month. Trump was brilliant at doing this. The guys that came up with the Defense of Marriage Act debate were equality brilliant, if you admire that sort of thing. You do a completely different kind of polling with totally different methodology if you are trying to predict election results. What voters are thinking about, what they react to, and how they vote are all different things with different polls. Some are very closely guarded for strategy reasons, even senior campaign folks dont have access to it. Others are custom built for a vendor to produce for you to look independent, but you have a social media, TV, email and ground game operations/direct mail element all loaded up to respond and capitalize on it. What aston is complaining about is situations where an issue poll is (sometimes intentionally) floated to try and distort public perceptions about a public issue. Its one thing to float an issue poll saying a lot of Republicans are concerned about gay marriage (even though a majority of Republicans at the time had no objections or no opinion) and its another to run a poll or two where you are highly compensated to suggest to the public that a majority of people in a state think an election is rigged when its really just a carefully crafted sample to generate that headline. What aston doesn't concede, and should, is that both sides do it generally, and have done it on the legitimacy of elections, albeit in different states in different elections.

Apart from campaign polling, Im just talking about single issue polling, here's how the scam typically goes. And Im overly simplifying here in the interest of space and making light of it intentionally for entertainment purposes. And this applies to nearly every hot button topic you see covered on both MSNBC and Fox News. They both do it and they are all friends. Never forget that Rachel Maddow takes some of her vacations with the NRA crowd.

So somebody that is out of power and running out of money finds a donor to seed them. They take a few thousand dollars to buy a poll. They use that poll to gauge voter interest and direct mail response. If it is favorable they go back to the donor asking for more money and usually a few others. Donate to us to find more donors is the line. Then they pour that money into a different entity that goes out and actually directly solicits the public. Let's say we are talking about voter intimidation/election integrity. Both sides do this in slightly different forms. They send out solicitations in various forms looking for an expected return. If they dont get it, The effort ends and every one gets paid at least something. If it hits expectations and subsequent polling from known contributors suggest even further donations, they take that money and carve it up amongst compensation, overhead, funding the next campaign, funding a different issue, and then a small amount of it actually goes into funding finding evidence of voter fraud, civil rights violations, etc. So lets say you raise peanuts, $500,000. You break off $100,000 and give it to some kid a few years out of law school, probably a politically ambitious lawyer, usually a bored/burnt out former prosecutor who will do what you tell them because they are broke, and tell them "Go find me voter fraud." So they go out and organize volunteers to comb through public records and find evidence that may or may not prove that Grandpa voted in California at his home and at his holiday place in AZ. You bundle up those successes and pass it around to your friends running the same type of issue oriented operation and raise even more off of it. So your $10,000 poll made you $500,000, you spent $200,000 on the effort, you pocket your profits and use the rest to raise more money and raise more public awareness through press coverage and subsequent polling, and the cycle starts over again.

That type of polling is totally different than the polling you perform to determine whether Democrats on one side of the street in Scarsdale are going to take time off to go vote or not this cycle compared to Democrats and some Republicans literally on the other side of the street and in the next county over. And why the models say if the numbers stay below a certain threshold, you had better have turnout to compensate in the following other states. Or whether veterans in OH are responding to your candidates remarks last night on CBS News about VA reform and if that differs with veterans in Florida. The former polling method on projected voter behavior has to be rock solid airtight to the moon accurate and the good ones usually are. Or they end up running telemarketing firms or an unlicensed foreign agent wandering around DC looking for people to talk to for gray money. And those polls are totally different from exit polling gauging how voters actually voted and projecting returns which has a completely different methodology/controls. You can be a little wrong on exit polls and voter reaction polls a lot more and still stay employed by the news services, etc.

Every Congressman depends upon the money raised in this fashion. Most aren't really debating issues. They are pushing fund raising narratives or keeping funding sources open for donors. So whether we ban abortion or dont, dont miss the overall. There are very few true believers in this system and they tend to cause the most problems and their involvement tends to lead to the most unproductive solutions.

Always follow the money.
 
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Look at what we’re currently adding to the national debt with no ongoing crisis. There’s an argument for large deficits in times of crisis. There is zero reason for us to be running these kind of numbers in 2023 and 2024. This is not sustainable.

 
Last time we had a surplus Clinton was Prez right?
Yes, but overall spending was only reduced by .4% GDP during his terms. Massive spending relative to GDP is driving some of these numbers in the graph above.

Clinton had a surplus because he made deep military cuts, raised taxes, and most of all, the creation of the internet realized tremendous efficiencies unseen before his term and spurned the number one driver of tax revenue: small business job growth.

So it wasn’t that Congress was disciplined or the President proposed a budget that was fiscally responsible, they went to war on signature issues like middle class tax cuts tied to capital gains cuts and welfare “reform.” And in the end, every one pretty much spent what they wanted. It’s just that they could because we had a peace dividend thanks to the military spending in the 80’s and suddenly out of nowhere a once every 500 years invention radically changed how we do business and tax revenue went up.

Both sides take credit for that surplus but the reality is in happened in spite of them,
 
I believe we had a surplus for a year. Then the tech bubble burst and everything went to hell.
Not to mention eight years of pulling out of Somalia, ignoring attacks on America abroad, a woefully under qualified Attorney General giving terrible advice to the DOJ and IC about cooperation on intelligence gathering together with a general disdain for world affairs that didn’t enrich his friends, led to the 9/11 attacks and massive spending from 2001 to 2008 that nobody could have predicted.
 
Not to mention eight years of pulling out of Somalia, ignoring attacks on America abroad, a woefully under qualified Attorney General giving terrible advice to the DOJ and IC about cooperation on intelligence gathering together with a general disdain for world affairs that didn’t enrich his friends, led to the 9/11 attacks and massive spending from 2001 to 2008 that nobody could have predicted.
Plus Bush cut taxes knowing it would push us back to deficit spending.
 
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