Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has dug in on his claim Haitians in an Ohio community are abducting and eating pets, even as the state’s GOP governor and other officials insist there is no evidence of such behavior.
But the salacious claim was easily debunked.
“The Vance campaign provided the Wall Street Journal with a police report to prove their claims about cat-eating Haitians in Springfield. The WSJ spoke to the woman who filed it, who said she later found her cat alive and well in her basement. She also apologized to her Haitian neighbors.” Justin Baragona posted to X with a link to a story in The Wall Street Journal.
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As I recall, in terms of the electoral college, neither Biden nor Harris have, at any point, been projected to beat Trump. It’s not “becoming” scary, it’s been scary for quite some time.
There’s no one single model doing projections.
Five Thirty Eight’s, which is one prominent one, has favored Harris somewhat for a while.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
Nate Silver – who started Five Thirty Eight and is now off doing his own thing and runs a fork of the model that Five Thirty Eight used to run – had them, last I looked, had Harris and Trump at about about even chances.
Both Silver’s model and Five Thirty Eight’s model agreed that the debate improved Harris’s chances.
Five-thirty-eight is a joke. Who did Five-thirty-eight project to win in 2016? Yeah.
Who did professor Allan Lichtman predict to win in 2016? The winner! He uses a strange science technique that have retrospectively lined up with presidential winners since 1860. He has an impressive tract record of ten successful predictions - note he predicted Gore in 2000 but there is very persuasive evidence that Gore actually did win had the vote counts been honestly counted. Hence the Brooks Brothers riot that threw the election to the Supreme Court.
Republicans are now positioning for that to happen again in 2024.
This is the ignorant “I don’t understand statistics” take. If Nate Silver had given Clinton a 100% chance to win, then maybe you’d have some sort of point. But, in fact, the 538 projection gave Trump a much higher chance than most of the major election models, to the point that I remember Nate having to defend himself against angry people on Twitter over and over. He wrote an article ahead of the election pointing out that if an outcome has a 30% chance of happening, not only is it possible, but in fact you expect it to happen 3 in 10 times. I was very nervous on Election Day 2016 specifically because I had been closely following 538 projections.