By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Dear Black students,
The last seven months have presented you with a whirlwind of challenges that undoubtedly disrupted your schooling: The coronavirus pandemic, police killings of unarmed Black people, uprisings for racial justice, Western wildfires and a contentious presidential election in which efforts to disenfranchise voters in Black-majority cities have been bold and deliberate. You have to make sense of misinformation campaigns by politicians who think saying “fake news” will make their lies go away.
With all the distractions and attacks, it may sometimes be difficult to recall our legacy. For generations, we have fought for freedom and freedom’s antecedent, a quality education. Always, the upholders of white supremacy have tried to control us by obstructing our path to the schoolhouse through law, propaganda and duplicity. Now, they are doing it again.

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Posted on November 30, 2020

By Wikipedia

The first person to earn a third term as governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes reduced the state debt and re-established the Board of Charities. His success immediately elevated him to the top ranks of Republican politicians under consideration for the presidency in 1876.
The Ohio delegation to the 1876 Republican National Convention was united behind him, and Senator John Sherman did all in his power to get Hayes the nomination.
In June 1876, the convention assembled with James G. Blaine of Maine as the favorite. Blaine started with a significant lead in the delegate count, but could not muster a majority. As he failed to gain votes, the delegates looked elsewhere for a nominee and settled on Hayes on the seventh ballot.
The convention selected Representative William A. Wheeler from New York for vice president, a man about whom Hayes had recently asked, “I am ashamed to say: Who is Wheeler?”

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Posted on November 22, 2020

By Stephen Engelberg/ProPublica

One reason we love the news business is that things seldom turn out as expected. In the 2020 elections, the voting process went surprisingly smoothly, with record numbers of Americans casting their ballots in new ways. The big failure of 2020, it turned out, was the political polling, which was so wrong in so many places that some people are now arguing that it’s time to spend a lot less effort trying to divine how people will vote.
That argument misses the point. Polls have their uses, particularly when they are used to assess broad questions about what’s on voters’ minds or which issues resonated the most. They seem much less reliable in predicting the future, and that’s okay. It means that we have to treat politics more like other subjects, in which we draw on data, interviews and our past experiences to shape coverage. The rise of the pollster as seer of all matters political is a relatively recent development, a corrective to an era when the “boys on the bus” covered politics largely by anecdote and gut instincts.

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Posted on November 11, 2020

By Nick Shreders

It just seemed that way – just like we warned you it would.
For one thing, most of the swing states counted Election Day votes first, which overwhelmingly skewed Republican. Now imagine a scenario in which every state preprocessed the early, mail-in votes like Florida did – the race would’ve been called before midnight.
Indeed, it appears that the final electoral vote total will be 306 to 232, the exact same totals in 2016. No one said that election was close then because the vast majority of votes were counted by midnight instead of in a days-long, drawn-out process that created the illusion that the margins were alternately shrinking and expanding in the states that mattered. It was a false drama, abetted by a media afraid to just come out and say what was readily apparent.
The reality is that many of us didn’t get it as wrong as a lot of folks seem to think. Let’s take a look by reviewing my pre-election analysis point by point.

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Posted on November 10, 2020

By David Rutter

This is not exactly Reagan’s “Morning in America,” but then, neither was Reagan’s “Morning in America” real either.
Stash the marketing fakery.
Breathe, America.
It’s going to be OK.

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Posted on November 6, 2020

By Steve Rhodes

Culled from a variety of sources.
* Donald Trump won 43% of the vote in Illinois. About 2.3 million people. They knew exactly what they were doing. Grapple with it.
Assignment Desk: Interview all 2.3 million!
* Biden won Illinois with 55% of the vote – about 2.95 million people.
* Others:
Jo Jorgenson, Libertarian Party: 1.1%, 58,000.
Howie Hawkins, Green Party: .5%, 26,000.
Brian Carroll, American Solidarity Party: .2%, 8.000.
Gloria La Riva, Party for Socialism and Liberation: .1%, 6,900.
Kanye West was not on the ballot – though write-in candidates got 5,269 votes (.1%).
To repeat: 43% of Illinois voters chose Trump.

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Posted on November 6, 2020

By The Beachwood Bookmaking Bureau

For entertainment purposes only. And office pools. Updated as events warrant.

The chance that . . .

Trump wins popular vote: 1%. And that’s even if Putin holds back the river wards until he learns how many votes he needs. 11/4 UPDATE: Still true.

Trump wins Electoral College: 48%. Draws another inside straight in the swing states but loses by margin of dead voters who attended his rallies and got COVID. 11/4 UPDATE: Still true.

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Posted on November 3, 2020

By Nick Shreders

I’m not one bit worried.
I’m Dr. Nick and I’ll be your election week Valium.
I’ve spent countless hours looking at all of the psephologists and heavily invested in the prediction markets and they tell me better than a flawed Des Moines Register poll and a big (stranded) crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania this weekend that those fervently desiring to turn Trump out shouldn’t be spooked that we’re about to see 2016 all over again.
Here’s why.

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Posted on November 2, 2020