Sometimes you feel like a nut…

It’s your standard superweapon problem. Why put all the money and resources into a single massive weapon that can be destroyed when you could instead make a lot of smaller, more practical stuff for the same price? We don’t make battleship sized tanks, and not just because of the physics problems they’d have trying to move on land. Hell, we don’t make giant battleships for the sea any more either, and that’s the one place where there isn’t a physics problem.

What advantage is there to using a giant robot? What does it do that’s more effective than existing vehicles, drones, weapon platforms etc? Sure, it can walk over terrain that might be hard for some ground vehicles, but we already have shit that can fly. It could have multiple weapons to choose between if it uses them by hand, but we are still paying for those and could instead mount them on cheaper platforms and use them all at once. Other than style points, the only thing I can think of is the utility that comes from having giant hands to pick stuff up. Being a heavily armed combat crane is probably not worth the investment.

On the plus side, she could still have a future doing campaign commercials.

Right, I wasn’t saying this was a realistic scenario. Just saying that the minimum number of seats they would have to have is not necessarily the same as the number of votes.

Being older than dirt doesn’t seem to stop them from trying to get reelected.

Assuming no Republicans cross the aisle. That’s a fairly reasonable assumption today because the Republican party has been purged of anyone who would be willing to cross Trump.

But I suspect that assumption might not remain so valid if we were to see the kind of blue tsunami it would take to get anywhere near 2/3 of the Senate. Even if you only had 64 seats instead of 67, that still means almost every state went blue, including most of the deep red ones. Any politician with basic survival instincts is going to recognize that tying themselves to the lame duck president that has practically destroyed their party is not going to be a good long term strategy.

It’s not much more plausible a scenario than one where Dems win a full supermajority, but if it were to happen, I would be shocked if every single Republican chose to go down with the ship.

First of all, the headline focuses on Trump’s order but fails to inform people of the more important fact that a lawsuit has actually been filed.

Government attorneys filed a lawsuit Friday arguing that the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot would confuse voters who support the sitting senator, Daniel S. Sullivan, in the unusual matchup of two candidates with the same name up against a Democratic candidate.

Second, this has already been adjudicated, it’s a matter of state law, and the case isn’t ripe because they are suing over a hypothetical that has not happened yet.

But even if there weren’t all those other reasons to toss out the suit, the whole thing is nonsense anyway because Alaska has ranked choice voting. Anyone who is confused can pick both Daniel Sullivans. The only way it could possibly become an issue is if the two Dans come in first and second, which has effectively no chance of happening.

Chicago style with Canadian bacon and shrimp.

Numuhukumakiaki’aialunamor

At the extremes that’s going to be true. Elections where one candidate is viewed as being unbeatable tend to have lower turnout, while turnout is highest when races are highly competitive. Keep in mind though that there’s sort of a chicken and egg situation there. High levels of enthusiasm and therefore turnout also tend to make races more competitive, while safe seats are often the result of gerrymandering and other forms of political dysfunction that suppress voter turnout and political engagement in general.

But regardless of whether a race is competitive or virtually uncontested, you typically want to be the one that’s in the lead. People are more likely to support politicians they view as popular, for much the same reason that they are more likely to pay money for movies and books that can claim to be #1 somehow. The bandwagon effect can be a powerful thing.

And voter turnout is heavily dependent on enthusiasm, and it’s a lot easier to be enthusiastic when your side doesn’t look like it’s losing. And that’s just the voting, there’s also donations, volunteers, media coverage, etc. all of which can be significantly affected by how people perceive the race to be going.

The idea that good poll numbers are somehow bad for that candidate’s voter turnout is largely a product of the 2016 election. Right up to election day the polls almost all said Hillary would win. And then Trump won. There’s a number of reasons for that, but one of the ones that gets mentioned a lot is that Democrats stayed home because the polls all said they wouldn’t need to vote.

The context is very important though. Hillary was deeply unpopular even before the DNC helped her snatch the nomination away from Bernie Sanders. A lot of people would have preferred that Trump lose, but really, really didn’t want to vote for Hillary. Those people might have been more likely to hold their nose and vote for her if they weren’t under the impression that she was practically guaranteed to win.

More likely to have the opposite effect. Historically speaking, good poll numbers help a candidate and bad poll numbers hurt them. That’s why low quality partisan polls are always boosting their own side’s numbers and not the other guy. Republicans are already far less enthusiastic about voting in the mid terms this year. Telling them their side can’t win is only going to discourage them that much more.

Fox News is a shit hole run by lying sociopaths, but they do take their political polling seriously. It’s one of the few areas where they have any credibility at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been intentionally vague and overly cautious with their analysis of the data so that they can hide some of that potential blue wave in the big pile of toss up races. But you can only fudge things so much without looking incompetent, especially if they have to resort to more obvious methods of tipping the scales.

Honestly, the actual poll is barely even news at this point. A year and a half ago the conventional wisdom was that the Senate as safely red while the House was going to be tough fight. But for months now the House has been looking like a lost cause for the Republicans, and, especially in the last few weeks, the Senate is looking like an uphill battle for them too. What’s newsworthy here is that Fox is actually reporting it.

That’s more of an answering the door kind of outfit.

Misread it as thanks OJ, thought for a second that it was saying OJ Simpson had said that

Even better, it looks like they’re going to spend over $200 million to almost elect a criminal.