to make known the extent to which Russia was involved in support of Trump to fuck with the election. Instead he threatened to call it all politics, which he knew was not true.
He is as traitorous a US Senator as there has ever been.

If Jill Stein hadn't run, and on.........

But, how much money, time and effort would it have taken to flip less than 50,000 votes across three traditionally Democratic leaning states? A three-stop visit to each state and some radio and TV ads would have done it.

Makes sense to me. They are saying that Harris will win all the battlegrounds and they have good reasons to believe it. State by state breakdown, not based on polls but based on history.

A great deal of the assumptions being made both by the media and by the pollsters is that 2024 will be 2020 redux. This was a reasonable assumption until the end of July - after all, it was a rematch between two old men, both of whom were somewhat damaged politically, and of course, Biden being the older of the two was ripe for the "He's too old" narrative. The pollsters built their models on Biden vs. Trump 2020.

Biden stepping down as candidate after a masterful handing off of the torch to Harris completely wrecked those forecasts and models and changed the dynamics completely. Harris is a protege of Biden, but she is not Biden, meaning that she's that rare bird - politician with little baggage but a lot of name recognition. This was Trump in 2016. Harris is barely 60, compared to Trump's nearly 78. She is an engaging liberal woman of color to his frankly Nazi-adjacent vitriol. Finally, in 2020, the country was still reeling from Covid and political unrest , and the economy was fragile.

I think people are tired of Trump, not just as a president but as a person. They distrust the media, and they see him as a media creation. Those convictions carry a lot more weight than I think anyone in the MSM wants to admit, and Harris has done a good job of painting herself as the prosecutor vs. the convict. I also think that the reputable pollsters are picking up on this, and are beginning to recognize that they will lose a lot of legitimacy if they do skew the numbers too heavily, especially if Harris wins.

Biden eked out a win in Georgia in 2020, along with two senate candidates. Then those senate candidates turned around and won a runoff weeks later. Then one of them, Rafael Warnock, won re-election when his two year term was up. That says a lot of work was done, and there's a system and a network in the state for doing it. And guess what? Harris is using that same system and network, and has, obviously, added to it. She's linking up with a strong Democrat in Arizona also using the network there that elected Biden and then swept the statewide offices in 2022.

You can't do much about gerrymandered districts. But in addition to Georgia and Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania all have Democrats in every statewide office, won by strong support within the last election cycles. Clinton didn't have that in 2016. Biden didn't have it anywhere in 2020 except PA and MI. Harris is linked with the networks, using them, and using the politicians who won those races as surrogates.

Even without adjusting their models since Biden stepped out, Harris has surged in the polls. That's what makes me think she's further ahead than they are indicating. All of the surrogates running for office seem to have double digit leads in the same polls. Do they think that many people will split tickets with the top of the ticket getting fewer votes? That never happens.

The polls will "rescue" themselves a couple of weeks before the election with more accurate numbers. And then they will remove data from their sites, write stories about how right they were, along with their supporting news media, so that next election, we can still have people insist that the polls got it right when they weren't even close.