Early ballots count more, as everyone knows. That’s why I mailed mine shortly after it arrived. Here’s some good news. We all know Fivethirtyeight.com has never been wrong. Okay maybe once.
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This is just straight polling aggregation, from what I understand, not an actual election odds forecast. And that’s definitely a good thing, because 57% of people saying that they’re planning to vote a certain way usually means a far greater than 57% chance of that outcome occurring.
When Fivethirtyeight made their forecast in 2016 they gave Trump a greater than 1 in 4 chance of winning. The fact that he won doesn’t really mean their betting odds were wrong. If the less likely outcome in their predictions never occurred then that would means that they were being too conservative in their prediction confidence. If I say that there’s only a 1/6 chance of getting a 3 when rolling a single dice and then you happen to get a 3 on your first roll, that doesn’t mean I was wrong.
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Yes, if we’d had the 2016 election 4 times, Hillary would’ve won 3 of them. Regrettably for bookies, bettors and Americans, we only held the election once.
Wise-cracking aside, this is the problem with probabilistic statements about single events, which means as well that I shouldn’t take comfort from Silver’s poll-aggregation here either.
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I voted no on question 1, and wrote in Gavin Newsome for question 2. It would be fun to make history and have the person recalled immediately reelected into office.
Edit: I forgot to say that this recall is especially maddening to me, not only because we have a scheduled election only a year away, but the cost to run this farce is hundreds of millions of dollars.
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I was going to leave it blank, but then I thought why not give the Democratic college student a thrill and send him a vote?
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IANAL, but there may be a (legal?) case to be made that the recall is unconstitutional because the person “elected” to replace Newsom will have received less votes than the number of “No” votes for the recall.
So not voting for anyone bolsters this notion.
This is something that did not happen in the last gubernatorial recall.
Republicans: undermining majoritarian democracy since 2000.
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IIRC during the 2003 recall Gray Davis attempted to get his own name included on the list of recall candidates in a similar ploy but the courts ruled he’d be ineligible so that probably wouldn’t work for Newsom either.
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Yeah, the relevant section in the State Constitution is pretty clear on that, so I can’t fault the courts for the decision.
But what if Navin Gewsom were to run instead?
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Dave Grayvis. 
Never saw that one before.
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If you feel weird about leaving the second question blank, write in the current lieutenant governor’s name instead.
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Thanks. Yeah, not my first choice when he ran. But the supposed motivation for the recall is his handling of COVID which hasn’t been perfect but is definitely one of the better responses despite the structural difficulty of doing so in California.
Compared to Elder’s plan which is “fuck all y’all, die motherfuckers die” – excuse me, I mean “freedom”
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I feel bad about it now, but I decided to sit this one out, as a very long time absent from California voter. It just all seemed too local … I don’t usually vote about state things, only federal, out of respect for people who actually LIVE there and would have to live with the consequences of my votes.
We also have to live with the consequences of your not voting. Indecision is still a decision.
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Who is, though?
Still…
Better ‘the devil we know’ than one that is definitely MUCH stupider, more bigoted and has NO real experience.
Please miss me with your needless sarcasm; I have more enough of my own to last a lifetime, thanks.
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Dianne Feinstein is 88. If she has to step down for health reasons the Governor of California will singlehandedly determine whether or not the Republicans control the U.S. Senate. The outcome of this election has profound implications for the fate of the entire country.
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Eleni Kounalakis is NOT on the list of certified write-in candidates, so writing her name in would be the same as leaving the second part of the ballot blank.
Like it says in the linked articles and tweets, it doesn’t really matter what you do but if you feel weird about leaving that blank that seems like a better alternative than checking one of the other available “R” boxes.
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The poll aggregation is a much better indicator though than running monte carlo sims on poll aggregation and then using that to predict electoral votes.
Even then, I’d still argue that Fivethirtyeight didn’t miss in 2016 so much as it finally got called out on what it’s stats REALLY mean. None of their stats they showed were wrong, at all, in any way. They just implied things and people reading it sensibly drew the incorrect conclusion.
What I would like is to have the media not even report on who is winning the replacement vote until AFTER the Not-remove/remove vote has been tallied.
If the recall goes down, then IT DOES NOT MATTER who was getting the “plurality” of votes and their name deserves no amplification from this ridiculous waste of time and money.
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