I’m offering a truce to the commentators who are currently upset with me and my fellow doubters. This is a doubter space. I will confine my comments on this subject to these diaries IF you don’t come in here and troll it.
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I’ve heard a lot of discussion of this Allan Lichtman fellow in recent weeks and I have to say, I’m not impressed with this man or his keys.
Allan compiled thirteen “keys” which he utilizes to analyze the state of the presidential race and predict who will win. He developed this system by analyzing data from 1860 to 1980. since then he has correctly predicted the results of all but two of thirteen elections since.
Here’s the thing for me- he’s just doing what the rest of us call making an educated guess.
He’s dressed it up in a catchy name and told everyone he put it together with the help of a geophysicist (oooh science-y). And correctly predicted 84% of recent elections. Which is a good record. A solid B.
Not to put too fine a point on it but, how hard is it to guess the results of an average election anyway?
I have my own system. I call it the “election goes to the cooler guy.” My system boils down to- side by side, which candidate would a very basic person think is cooler? It’s actually pretty accurate. I’ve been right most of the time since 2000. And I also failed the exact same two. Because who can decide which of the two candidates in each election was “cooler” in those. I have no fucking idea.
The funny thing about the 13 keys is that Lichtman later back tested it on previous elections and found that he was right most of the time. To which I think- I would hope so, the keys are based on the results of those elections.
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Eric Levitz at Vox had a good article:
The bar for Joe Biden should not be on the floor
The president of the United States proved himself capable of speaking in complete sentences during a press conference Thursday night.
This was notable because, before the presser, President Joe Biden’s competence at the most rudimentary aspects of public speaking had come into doubt. At both the first presidential debate in late June and his interview with ABC News last week, Biden repeatedly failed to produce coherent English on command.
In a perfectly rational world, the abysmal quality of Biden’s previous public performances should have raised the bar for him at Thursday’s press conference: If you just demonstrated that you’re a dreadful candidate at your worst, then winning your party’s confidence should require showing that you are an absolutely brilliant one at your best. Otherwise, why should your co-partisans tolerate your manifest unreliability?
This is the issue for me with the idea that having one good conversation with only a few flubs should be praised. Biden isn’t a guy who everyone basically likes and whose chances of winning are pretty good. You can’t claim that when his approval rating sucks and his polling is at best tied with Trump’s. Biden is a president that most Americans think is too old and is generally not inspiring. He can’t change that perception by just doing his usual thing. He has to do much better.