How do you peel an orange?

I hate the NPR Politics Podcast

What can be worse than political correspondents who act like they hate covering politics?

Democrats win ratings for third night in a row.

President Obama's prime time speech lifted the Democratic convention to its third straight night of ratings wins over the Republican convention last week -- and now the Trump campaign is exhorting supporters not to watch the Democrats' final night.

Overnight Nielsen ratings indicate that Wednesday night's DNC viewership was about 15% higher than last Wednesday night's coverage of the RNC.

Actual viewership totals will be released later in the day on Thursday. The results may fluctuate for a variety of reasons, including the length of the DNC proceedings: Obama's speech and Hillary Clinton's appearance on stage spilled into the typically lower-rated 11 p.m. hour.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/28/media/democratic-convention-ratings-day-three/index.html

Trump Is Driving Catholic Voters Toward Clinton

Donald Trump has held onto the support of evangelical Christians even as he has screwed up the name of a book of the Bible, said he doesn’t feel he needs forgiveness for anything, and struggled to answer the question that Jesus posed to Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” But, according to a recent report by Pew, Trump’s doing terribly with Catholic voters, particularly those who are regular churchgoers.

Catholics who attend Mass weekly have increased their support for the Democratic nominee by 22 percentage points relative to 2012. They support Hillary Clinton at about the same rate as fallen-away Catholics; even though among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, those who attend Mass less frequently are slightly more likely to be registered Democrats.

In fact, Trump has done more to drive weekly churchgoers to the Democrats than Clinton has done to attract them. Evangelicals and Catholics who attend church regularly and favor the Democratic nominee consider Clinton a less appealing choice than Obama was.

The share of weekly churchgoing evangelicals who support the Democratic nominee has remained nearly flat from June 2012 to June 2016, but their reasons have changed. Two-thirds of churchgoing evangelical Obama supporters described their vote as “for Obama” rather than “against Romney” but the proportions are exactly flipped for Clinton.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-driving-catholic-voters-toward-clinton/

538: Why Our Model Is Bullish On Trump, For Now

So which one is correct? That’s another tricky question. If you’re using loess regression for descriptive purposes — to illustrate how the polls have moved in the past — the more aggressive trend line is clearly better. It does a much better job of capturing movement in the polls — we had more than enough data to know that Clinton moved up in the polls from May to June, for instance. But if you’re using loess to make predictions — to anticipate where the polls are going to go next — there’s an argument for using a more conservative setting. That’s because short-term movement in the polls often reverses itself — a candidate gets a bad news cycle, and she drops a couple of percentage points, but she recovers them once the news moves along to another subject. The convention bounce is one example of this, in fact, since the bounces often reverse themselves after a few weeks.

We spent a lot of time on this issue when originally building our model in 2008 and then when revising it in 2012 and earlier this year, trying to figure out how aggressive these loess curves should be in order to maximize predictive accuracy. The short answer is that you want an aggressive setting — very aggressive, in fact — late in the campaign, and a more conservative one earlier on.1 Still, it’s certainly also possible to be too conservative, which could mean missing the considerable shift away from Clinton that began a few weeks ago in the polls, well ahead of the conventions.

Another tricky question is how to reconcile state polls with national polls. For example, there have been no polls of Pennsylvania over the past two weeks, during which time Clinton’s lead has evaporated in national polls (and often also in polls of other states, where we’ve gotten them). The FiveThirtyEight model uses what we call a trend-line adjustment to adjust those those old polls to catch up to the current trend. That’s why our polls-only forecast shows Pennsylvania as a tossup even though Trump has only led one poll there all year. Those older polls came from a time when Clinton led by 5 or 6 or 7 percentage points nationally, and they generally showed her up by about the same margin in Pennsylvania. Now that the national race is almost tied, it’s probably safe to assume that Pennsylvania is very close also. Some of the competing models don’t do this, and we think that’s probably a mistake, since it means their state-by-state forecasts will lag a few weeks behind, even when it’s obvious there’s been a big shift in the race.

Bottom line: Although there are other factors that matter around the margin, our models show better numbers for Trump mostly because they’re more aggressive about detecting trends in polling data. For the past couple of weeks — and this started before the conventions, so it’s not just a convention bounce — there’s been a strong trend away from Clinton and toward Trump. Although there’s always the risk of overreaction, this time our models were ahead of the curve in understanding the shift. But if Clinton rebounds next month, our models may be among the first to show that as well.


http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-why-our-model-is-bullish-on-trump-for-now/

'If the election were held today....'

MYTH: If the election were held today, Donald Trump could possibly win'

FACT: If the election were held today, Hillary would win because voters would NOW be laser-focused on the prospect of a Trump presidency.

THANK YOU!

I've spent three fucking decades telling fellow Democrats that showing up for their state and local elections is every bits as important as voting for President.

WTF happened to Tim's buzz cut?

That was his trademark.

DNC Beats RNC by Nearly 5 Million Viewers in Night 2 Final Numbers

From 10-11:15 p.m. — a timeframe that included headline speaker Bill Clinton’s nearly 50-minute speech extolling the virtues of official Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Fox Business Network drew an average audience of 24.7 million.

That number is slightly below the total for Night 2 of 2012’s DNC, which drew 25.12 million across those networks, minus Fox Business, but plus PBS and Current TV. It is, however, nearly 5 million more pairs of eyeballs than Night 2 of the 2016 RNC drew last Tuesday (19.75 million).

CNN, which garnered the biggest convention audience of the night, was once again up sharply from 2012’s draw, with 5.93 million total viewers from 10-11:15, and 2.05 million in the important-to-cable-news demographic of 25-54. In 2012, CNN drew 4.13 million total viewers from 10-11 p.m. and 1.54 million in the 25-54 demo.

MSNBC slipped behind second-place NBC with 3.83 million viewers and 1.17 million in the 25-54 demo, but remained ahead of ABC, CBS, and Fox News.

Fox News slipped to a not-unexpected last place in terms of DNC coverage, with 2.85 million total viewers and 634,000 in the 25-54 demo.


http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/democratic-national-convention-ratings-viewers-night-2-dnc-beats-rnc-1201824854/

Arrest Trump now!!!!

He has just called on a foreign state to commit further espionage.