It does become a bit tone deaf at a certain point to say 'well it's a one outer on the river' or 'it's an inside straight on the river' - therefore 'if you think this is seismic you just don't understand probability'. Trump hit an Ace after being all in preflop with Ax vs KK last time out. That definitely happens. But this time he comes in with nothing near as strong as Ax and a massive amount of effort has gone into reworking predictive models to better understand state variations, the nature and composition of likely voters, how certain popular vote margins nationally don't take away electoral college outs as much as we expect etc, etc. So whatever Trump is drawing to, it isn't 2016 and we don't or shouldn't have 5 unknown cards that can help him get there.
If he does it again. Against much more overwhelming odds. With an actual political record. During a public health crisis which has created a weak economy. With the approval rates he holds. Then it truly is a massive repudiation of all that we thought we knew.
And this is not a good place or one we should want to be in. A candidate like Trump in a context like 2020 really shouldn't be re elected. And if he is to be re elected, we really should be able to predict it. Or, at least, we shouldn't deduce a <5% chance of it happening. We need to be able to predict things (and a political election is hardly the most complex thing to analyse and predict) and we need to have some public confidence in those predictions and we need enough people interacting with the system so that prediction is possible. This is all tightly coupled to the implications of a Trump presidency in terms of the policies it might pursue, etc. If he wins now and goes another four years the "post truth" #fakenews destabilisation of societal discourse will take us places we really don't want to go imo.
If he does it again. Against much more overwhelming odds. With an actual political record. During a public health crisis which has created a weak economy. With the approval rates he holds. Then it truly is a massive repudiation of all that we thought we knew.
And this is not a good place or one we should want to be in. A candidate like Trump in a context like 2020 really shouldn't be re elected. And if he is to be re elected, we really should be able to predict it. Or, at least, we shouldn't deduce a <5% chance of it happening. We need to be able to predict things (and a political election is hardly the most complex thing to analyse and predict) and we need to have some public confidence in those predictions and we need enough people interacting with the system so that prediction is possible. This is all tightly coupled to the implications of a Trump presidency in terms of the policies it might pursue, etc. If he wins now and goes another four years the "post truth" #fakenews destabilisation of societal discourse will take us places we really don't want to go imo.
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