Most Republicans think Biden stole the election

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cillian-murphy-wat

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Okay, but you originally suggested people shouldn’t put any value in polling.

My point is that while the polls weren’t perfect, they actually weren’t that far off the money. And they do have value. Polls are a check against tyrants like Trump, who would otherwise say “People love me, I have amazing numbers”.

The problem is that people look at the polling average and see “Hey, Biden has an 8 point lead, he’s going to crush this” instead of realizing that it is based on a sample and therefore subject to error. Because of Trump’s electoral college advantage, a normal sized polling error could turn the election into a nail-biter and voila - that’s sort of what happened. Polls give us a sense of what the range of possible outcomes are and that helps to calibrate our expectations of electoral results. Without polls, there is much more room to sow suspicion about the results. Trump is going on about election fraud, but the result was well within the bounds one might expect based on the polling.

Misunderstanding that is mostly on individuals and media coverage of polls, not pollsters. That’s not to say there’s no room for polling to get better - pollsters are constantly trying to whittle down their margins of error, but there is only so much they can do.

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That is certainly possible. In vetting candidates, Biden could ask what their views would be on investigating or prosecuting Trump. Until Trump, however, my understanding is that AG’s valued their independence and wouldn’t take kindly to the President telling them who they could/could not prosecute. In Canada the Prime Minister suffered pretty significant political damage for pressuring the Justice Minister at the time to strike a non-prosecution deal with a major construction company (she pushed back against this interference).

It could also be left up to other jurisdictions - there is enough Trump criminality to go around. New York has like what, 3 pending prosecutions of Trump? I think there are good arguments both for and against prosecuting Trump, but I don’t think Biden should be the one making that decision. It sets an uncomfortable precedent either way, so best for it not to appear politically driven.

I also don’t think Biden should be making public statements throwing cold water on the idea. Biden should be saying that America has rule of law, that no one is above the law, and that who to investigate and prosecute is not the decision of the president.

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Um. No. They just got out the vote. Stop with the both sides nonsense.

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If you are a “strict constitutionalist,” and believe that only rich, white men should be allowed to vote, then yes, we did steal the election. Otherwise, hell no, there was no steal. There was a hell of a lot of resisting of voter suppression, which in their minds may amount to the same thing, though.

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