Eric The Blue

Last golf of the year

Straightening up around the house, which I do twice a year whether it needs it or not, I found this golf scorecard mixed in with some unopened mail. On inspection, it shows my scores for what turned out to be my last round of the year, on an October Wednesday at Pheasant Acres Golf Course in Rogers, or Corcoran, or another of those amorphous northwestern exurbs. For me, an approximately typical day on the links: a disastrous front nine out of which I salvaged mediocrity by playing the last eight holes in five over par. 

Trying now to remember anything of interest, I recall that my second shot on the eleventh hole was really good—a 7- or maybe 8-iron to within about 10 feet of the hole. Missed the birdie putt, naturally. For some reason, I also remember the last hole. Long but crooked drive, way right. Trees prevented me from aiming my second at the green, but I could hit low, just to the left of a tree trunk, toward the very left front edge of the green. I did that pretty well and, since the pin was at the front of the green, I was probably only 15 yards from the hole. I chipped it close and one of my charitable partners who was already on the green knocked the ball back to me—appropriate, as there was probably about a 60 percent chance I'd have made the putt. A rock solid par on the card!

I can't remember a thing about the front 9. How did I manage to make a 7 on the sixth hole, a nondescript par 4 of no special difficulty?  Must have missed my putt for a 6 but the memory is gone. We sat outside afterwards, and I think I had whiskey, not beer, because it was a little chilly plus I like whiskey.

Sometimes, when I've played golf and had a couple, I like to imagine that the game had never been invented and some drinkers in their drunkenness were making it up. You have these sticks, some with mallets and others with blades at the end, and you grip the opposite end and whack this ball off the ground. It's about the size of a ping pong ball, but with a hard cover and wound tight so that it flies nice if you catch it right. Around a quarter of a mile away, there is a hole in the ground about twice as big as the ball. The object is to strike the ball into this distant hole using as few "hits" as possible. Various factors abet and hinder the goal. The sticks are specially designed, different ones for different distances. On your first "hit," you get to prop the ball up on a peg, so that you can really whack it with a "mallet stick"; after that, you can only strike the ball as it lies on the ground, for which the bladed sticks are designed, though you can't hit the ball as far with them. Once you start hitting, you can't touch the ball: you just have to keep striking it again and again from wherever the last strike caused it to come to rest. The area between the starting point and the hole is free of obstructions, just grass cut short, but, if you hit it crooked, there might be long grass, trees, water, or—I know this sounds odd but we've been drinking—sand pits off to the sides. Once you get close to the hole, however, there is a special kind of grass, cut very short, so that the ball rolls easily along it, though since the ground might be sloped you can't always aim right at the hole but have to judge how much the ball will curve after you start it rolling with the stick designed for use on the special grass.

Now you're on your third drink and the question arises: about how many times do you think you'd have to hit the ball to get it into this hole a quarter mile away? I think I'd say 20, maybe 30. I couldn't imagine 18 separate tests or trials: it would take more than a day. Maybe one thing I like about this exercise is that it makes me feel okay about averaging around 5, maybe 6 on the ones no closer than a quarter mile. Have to admit that the technology for the equipment, especially the sticks, is really very good and benefits me more than I'd imagine possible, even if others seem to derive even greater benefits. 

More oddities

I. The rural and small town versus metropolitan political chasm was vividly displayed in this year's presidential election result within my home state of Minnesota. We have 87 counties. Trump carried 74 of them. His cumulative margin in these 74 counties was 310,315 votes. Biden carried the state's biggest county, Hennepin, home to Minneapolis and most of its suburbs, by 322,047 votes. So Biden won Hennepin County by more than Trump won 74 counties combined.

I culled that factoid from this MPR article evaluating State Republican Chair Jennifer Carnahan's claim that Minnesota's result exhibits "extreme abnormalities and statistical variations from Minnesota's historic voter trends." If you're going to click on the link, do it before reading another word because, spoiler alert, she's full of it.

II. Team Trump's clown show gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, since for pure entertainment pleasure it's hard to top Rudy Giuliani shouting "Fraud!" in front of the entry to Four Seasons Total Landscaping next to the dildo shop at a mini-mall in North Philadelphia. More recently, of course, Rudy gave an encore performance while brown rivulets of Just For Men trickled down the creases of his jowls. This might have been on the same day that some other legal sharpies working overtime on behalf of Trump filed an affidavit alleging fraud in Michigan based on returns from Minnesota towns and townships. Who can possibly keep straight the postal abbreviations for all those M-states?  And who could have doubted that Detroit Lakes must be in Michigan? (Because, you know, Detroit.) These lawyers are sophisticated.

But it's odd how pyrotechnic incompetence tends to outshine very prosaic reasons to conclude that Trump's bumblers are gaslighting us. Compared to four years ago, Trump's margin in Kentucky shrank by 4 points, in Kansas by 6 points, in Alaska by 5 points, in South Dakota by 4 points, in Montana by 4 points, etc., etc. Meanwhile, Trump's deficit in Oregon increased by 5 points, in Maine by 7 points, in Virginia by 5 points, in New Hampshire by 7 points, in Colorado by 8 points, etc., etc. No one is questioning these "suspicious" outcomes, yet we are told that shifts toward the Democratic candidate in Michigan (3 points), Pennsylvania (2 points), Arizona (4 points), Georgia (5 points), and Wisconsin (2 points) must be attributed to massive fraud. LOL!

III. When one considers some of the specific complaints of Team Trump, oddness multiplies. In Michigan, for example, their attention is centered on Wayne County, in particular the city of Detroit, where Biden outpolled Trump by 227,865 votes. But Clinton beat Trump in Detroit by 227,189 votes. Massive fraud in Detroit, 2020? Really? Meanwhile, relatively populous parts of western Michigan, such as Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, swung hard against Trump: in 2016, he carried the county by 10,000 votes, but this year he lost it by 22,000. Why does Trump shout "Fraud!" concerning the result in a venue where there was no shift while alleging nothing about one where he incurred a 30,000-plus meltdown?--enough, on its own, to put the state in Biden's column, since in 2016 Trump carried Michigan by only about 11,000 votes.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with a calculation about whether his supporters might be more ready to believe a lie about Detroit than a lie about Grand Rapids.

IV. I'll admit that there are people I'm ready to believe the worst about, too—for example, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota. If her state were a country, it would have ranked second in the world for most new COVID cases per capita since October 1 (unless North Dakota were also a country, in which case Kristi's state takes the bronze). Yet the governor apparently has nothing better to do than go on Fox News to yammer about freedom, except for the days when she's posting to social media pictures of herself carrying a shotgun in a corn field. Here's an oddity: more people have died of COVID in South Dakota than in South Korea.

The population of South Dakota is 885,000. The population of South Korea, which has about half the area of South Dakota, is 51.7 million. South Korea and the United States reported their first COVID cases on the same day, January 20, 2020. 

TDS

 

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you"—I had always attributed this quip to a Woody Allen character, which isn't altogether wrong, but having googled it this morning I see that Allen apparently was appropriating a passage from the Joseph Heller novel Catch-22. It seems like the underlying principle might be expanded. Just because you can't sleep at night doesn't prove you got nothing to worry about. Speaking personally, what some people call my TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) doesn't prove the current occupant isn't worthy of contempt. He hasn't done anything since Election Day to make me recant. Ever since the guy he mocked for holing up in the basement beat him, Trump's been holed up in the White House with Twitter. (I know, an exaggeration: he's gone golfing a few times.) Meanwhile, the COVID body count is accruing at the rate of about three 9/11s per week. I guess it's never gotten warm enough for the plague to "lift, like a miracle." It's almost as if there was no Plan B to wishful thinking. He gives himself an A+ while admitting that, on account of the Fake News, some people fail to perceive his genius. But just because millions can see you've failed doesn't make you a success.

Trump appears so obsessed with having lost that he can't take obvious steps, like claiming credit for the good news about vaccines. Maybe the problem is that, if vaccines are about to save us, it makes even more sense to listen to people like Fauci, in order to avoid being the last soldier killed before the armistice is signed. But Trump, bored with the crisis, tweets his private grievances, especially the fantasy about how the election was stolen. By chance, the magnitude of his Electoral College loss matches almost exactly the magnitude of his Electoral College victory four years ago—on the morning after which Clinton conceded and Obama invited him to the White House to meet about the transition. His legal maneuverings are so pathetic as to obscure somewhat his intent, which is to remain in office by disenfranchising voters and overturning the election result. I think it was just yesterday, maybe the day before, that the following exchange occurred in a Pennsylvania courtroom:

RUDY GIULIANI: In the plaintiffs' counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity. I'm not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE MATTHEW BRANN: It means you can't.

GIULIANI: Big words, your honor.

Just because Giuliani is as incompetent as his client doesn't prove the country hasn't been driven off a cliff. 

Post game analysis

I'm reading David Copperfield like its first readers did, in installments, only in my case the delay is caused not by a publishing schedule but by an intervening event—the election, the wherefores and whys of the result consuming my attention as if it were a season's worth of Twins games. This morning I came across the above map in The New York Times. As the legend indicates, it shows, at the precinct level, the shift in Georgia's presidential vote from 2016 to 2020. The most immediately striking aspect of the map is the wide blue ring around the south-central part of the Atlanta metro, where the city's African-American population is concentrated. Biden made no gains in the "doughnut hole"—these precincts are so overwhelmingly Democratic that there was hardly any upside for him. He could have hoped to boost turnout in this area, and in fact he did, but not by as much as the state's overall turnout was up. The result was that African-Americans made a smaller part of the Georgia electorate, and, if anything, Trump won a bigger share of their votes: the doughnut hole is mostly whitish pink, not light blue.

But Trump suffered a meltdown in Atlanta's sprawling, populous suburbs. I don't think race plays much of a part in the formation of the doughnut. Some Trumpists have hinted darkly at "voting irregularities" in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta, but Biden did no better in these urban centers than Hillary Clinton had four years ago. He might have done a little worse. In Georgia, the suburban ring around Atlanta was the difference maker. For example, in Gwinnett County, in the northeastern part of the blue ring, Biden won by 58-40 compared to Clinton's 50-44. The biggest county in the northwest of the doughnut is Cobb, which went for Clinton by 50-46: Biden carried it by 56-42. The statewide impact of these large swings in suburban counties was augmented by growing populations and high turnouts. In Gwinnett County, the Democratic nominee's raw vote margin went from 19,000 to 75,000; in Cobb County, from 9000 to 56,000. 

It's not black and brown voters who are mainly responsible for supplying these margins. You can get an idea who they are by zooming out from Georgia. Sean Trende, an elections analyst at RealClearPolitics, posted to Twitter today a list of the 50 states ranked by the percentage of eligible voters who are white with a college degree. "Can you spot the pattern?" Trende asked. Well, in the top quintile, #1 Maryland through #10 New Mexico, Biden went 10-for-10. In the next quintile, Illinois through Arizona, he went 8-for-10, the exceptions being Texas (12) and Utah (19). Biden only won 25 states, so he was 7-for-30 in the bottom three quintiles. That's a lot of correlation!

It's sort of comical to contemplate Republicans reflexively blaming a presidential election loss on the cheating inner-city blacks & browns. They think they have an Atlanta-Philadelphia-Detroit-Minneapolis problem, and they're not all wrong about that, but what's really dimmed their prospects now is a Marietta-Upper Darby Township-Bloomfield Hills-Minnetonka problem. 

The presidential race: not that close, but very close

I think some of my like-minded fellows, perhaps eager to dump on Trump, have been overstating the magnitude of Biden's victory in the presidential race. For example, one claim in wide circulation holds that "not since FDR defeated Hoover in 1932 has a challenger received a higher percentage of the national vote than Biden." Unless I'm overlooking something, this is a true fact, not an alternate one, but it also elides other relevant facts, such as that since 1932 only three incumbents seeking another term have been defeated. These were Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and Geo H W Bush in 1992, the victors being Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, respectively. Perhaps the rarity of an incumbent losing might be adduced to add to Trump's humiliation, but in two of those three other instances there was an independent third party candidate who pulled a significant percentage of the vote: Ohio congressman John Anderson got about 7% of all votes cast in 1980, and Texas businessman Ross Perot got close to 20% of the vote in 1992. It was these relatively successful third-party candidacies that held Reagan's share of the vote (50.7%) and Clinton's (43.0%) below Biden's share, which currently stands at 50.9%. The Reagan and Clinton victories were both somewhat wider than Biden's in terms of percentage margin over their nearest rival. 

Another thing one hears is that in 2016 Trump won the presidency by less than 78,000 votes across three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and that this year Biden won those states by well over 230,000. This is another true fact. The problem is that the comparison isn't parallel. Trump's three narrowest victories in the named states boosted his electoral vote count from 260 to 306. Biden's three narrowest victories are going to be in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (not Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), and those wins lifted his electoral vote tally from 269 to 306. So both Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 crossed the 270 finish line with their third narrowest victory, then settled at 306 by adding their second narrowest and narrowest wins. But while Trump's margin was just under 78,000 in his three states, Biden's looks as if it's going to be under 50,000 in his. Biden won the Electoral College by less than Trump did.

Another true statement about the election, one that I think isn't in any respect misleading, would be that Trump, though he is going to lose the popular vote by at least 51-47 percent, in the range of 6 to 7 million ballots, came within a shallow breath of "winning" the election. Or try another formulation, also true. Trump, to get 306 electoral votes in 2016, had only to come within 3 million of his opponent. In 2020, Biden did 9 million better than that—he's going to win by at least 6 million instead of lose by 3 million—and also got 306 electoral votes. The Washington Post draws the necessary conclusion. 

Fiddling, burning

700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 14, 2020

Not a parody account. 

Meanwhile, in other news, a Utah hospital reports that it has turned away a group of COVID skeptics trying to enter the ICU with video cameras for the purpose of proving that reports of sick people filling all the beds are fake news. They should take their cameras on down the road to El Paso, where props for the fake news include ten mobile morgues traveling between hospitals and funeral parlors. 

Black mood being brightened a bit by the sound of my kids and the neighbor girl shouting at each other in English accents as they play Harry Potter upstairs. 

Oddities

Clicking around on the New York Times election map, I stumbled on this result, from Los Angeles County:

Biden     2,947,568

Trump    1,107,090

In terms of percent, this was 71.2 to 26.7, a familiar story about a Democratic landslide in a major metropolitan area. But more than a million votes for Trump! He currently has around 72.4 million in the whole country, so that's more than 1 percent of his total out of a single county in which he got about one vote out of every four.

I have a kind of grudging respect for the Trump voter in LA County. The Electoral College makes their ballot worthless. They know there's no way Trump is going to win California's electoral votes. If they cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes; and, if they don't cast a ballot, Biden wins 55 electoral votes. It's impossible for them to help Trump win. They know this beforehand. At the presidential level, they are as a practical matter disenfranchised. Yet they vote anyway. Of course, the ones who don't vote aren't reflected in the tally. I wonder how many of them there are.

I had the idea to click around some more to see how many states Trump won with fewer votes than he got in LA County. I think the answer is 14. They are, in no particular order: Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Alaska. In all these states, a vote for Trump helped him win a packet of electoral votes—a total of 65 of them, which is 10 more than California has, even though California's population is roughly half again as great as that of these 14 states combined.  Since you don't get any electoral votes for losing a county, more than a million Trump votes in LA County were lost in the Electoral College shuffle. Of course, in other venues the vote massacre cuts in the other direction. In the recent past, more Democratic votes have been wiped out. This year, for example, Biden, whose advantage in the national vote is 5.3 million and growing, prevailed in the Electoral College only because he won three states—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—by a total of fewer than 50,000 ballots. 

The Georgia run-offs, which will determine control of the Senate, are going to consume attention between now and January 5. In the new Senate, there will be 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and two seats yet to be determined from Georgia. Of the 48 Democrats, two will be from California. The residents of LA County will share those two senators with around 30 million other Californians. Of the 50 Republican senators, 27 will be from the 14 states identified above. The lone Democrat from those states will be Montana's Jon Tester. Leaving Georgia out of it, 21 states will be represented by two Democrats, 22 others will be represented by two Republicans, and six will have one senator from each party. The population of the 21 states represented by two Democrats is about 157 million. The population of the 22 states represented by two Republicans is about 126 million. Assuming a Republican wins at least one of the Georgia runoffs, we will be told, for example when climate change legislation is blocked in the Senate or Biden nominates a new justice to the Supreme Court, that "the American people" wanted Republicans to control the Senate. But it won't be true. The Democratic minority will represent many millions more Americans than the Republican majority. 

 

Fraud?

Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016

This is what Trump always does when he loses. The identity of his opponent is irrelevant. It's just a reflex, like the one that causes you to gag.

I've been reading up on some of the election fraud allegations, with an eye toward debunking them. The problem is that the allegations tend to be so sketchy that they do not really permit a non-sketchy rebuttal. For example, the referent of pronouns is always unknown: who is the corrupt and cheating "they"? Presumably, sinister operatives loyal to the Democratic party who possess unlimited subtle skills which they nevertheless chose not to exercise in races for the Senate, House of Representatives, and state legislatures. As is often the case, it's pretty easy to discern a racial undertone to some of the complaints—for example, vague references to "what's happening in Detroit and Philadelphia." Since we aren't told exactly what's happening, let's check the results. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton carried Detroit's county by 66.4 to 29.3 percent; Biden's margin in the county is 68.0 to 30.6 percent. Hillary Clinton carried Philadelphia's county by 82.3 to 15.3 percent; Biden is winning the county by 80.9 to 18.1 percent. 

The obvious conclusion is that the 2016 election in these venues was fair but that this year there was "massive fraud." 

I'll mention another tactic that involves a kind of dangling, unspecific accusation that seems intended to foster suspicion and distrust. By this technique, the alleger of fraud adopts a pose of requisite skepticism regarding the high rates of voter turnout in the crucial Great Lakes states won by Biden. For example:

Wisconsin has 3,684,726 active registered voters.

They counted 3,288,771 votes.

That's, um, a bit unbelievable.

89% turnout? Ok sure. 🙄

— HARLAN Z. HILL 🇺🇸 (@Harlan) November 4, 2020

If 89 percent turnout seems high, that is because "voter turnout" is usually defined as votes cast divided by eligible voters. This fellow is redefining it as votes cast divided by registered voters. Fine, but if that's the way you want to do it, then "89 percent turnout" isn't unusual, since—believe it or not!—registered voters are very much more likely to vote than people who aren't registered. Moreover, the distortion is amplified by the fact that Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration and these ballots are included in his numerator (votes cast) but not his denominator (which is the number of registered voters in Wisconsin at sunrise on election day). Just a fundamentally dishonest apples-to-oranges "analysis."

Hill, a Republican political consultant who was fired by Fox News after tweeting that Kamala Harris is an "insufferable lying bitch," purports to show that there must have been voter fraud in Wisconsin. Alas, it's simply a case of him being a lying hack—unless he's fooled by his own crapola, in which case he's a dope.