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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • I don’t understand how “Biden is behind in every swing state” translates to this. I get that they’re taking the state of the economy, the fact that Biden is the incumbent, and other such factors into account, and in a sense that’s the correct thing to do. However, if the election were held now, Biden would probably lose, and by a larger margin than if, for example, the election had been held before the notorious debate. It takes a lot of twisting to make this bad news for Trump.







  • I suspect that the debate was an “emperor has no clothes on” moment for Democratic politicians. Everyone already knew that Biden is old but no one who thought that was a big problem wanted to be the first one to say so. (Why risk being sidelined for disloyalty to the party in the case where you speak out but then no one else does?) The debate was just the tipping point that made age an issue the politicians were willing to talk about, but voters don’t have the problem with being disloyal that politicians do so they had already taken Biden’s age into account in a way that politicians publicly hadn’t.

    With that said, these national polls are fun for people who watch the election like a sporting event but they’re a poor way to actually predict victory. How many electoral college votes each candidate will have is independent from his support in much of the country, where only a catastrophic event could possibly change a state’s electoral outcome. Meanwhile in swing states the small difference in polls like this appears to be magnified in Trump’s favor.



  • defense attorneys argued that Manhattan prosecutors had placed “highly prejudicial emphasis on official-acts evidence,” including Trump’s social media posts and witness testimony about Oval Office meetings

    It’s unclear to me why an official act cannot be used as evidence that a different unofficial act occurred. Let’s say candidate Trump shoots Bob on Fifth Avenue and then, after being elected, threatens to “kill Joe the way [he] killed Bob” during his State of the Union address. He can’t be held accountable for threatening to kill Joe, but he did just confess that he killed Bob while he wasn’t president. Why couldn’t this confession be used as evidence in his trial for killing Bob? Or, for that matter, in his trial for killing Joe if he went on to kill Joe after he was out of office?