RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-gov-tim-walz-covid-lockdown-fanatic

Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.

Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.

How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.

Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.

Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.

But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.

But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.

https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/16/the-polls-have-shifted-toward-harris-is-it-real-or-something-else/

Last week’s New York Times/Siena College polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading in three swing states led some Republicans and Democrats to ask the same question: Is this real?

At the center of this question is whether the Times/Siena polls have enough voters who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020. The Trump campaign released a memo arguing that our polls would have actually showed a Trump lead if we had weighted the results properly.

The Trump campaign’s critique focused on something pollsters refer to as “recalled vote.” In the polls of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, respondents recalled backing President Biden over Mr. Trump by six points, 52 percent to 46 percent, even though Mr. Biden actually won these three states by an average of about 1.5 points. The Trump campaign used this data point to say Mr. Trump would have led if the poll had the “right” number of Trump 2020 supporters.

This isn’t an absurd argument. In recent years, many pollsters have embraced recalled vote in exactly the way the Trump campaign describes: as an accurate measure of how people voted in the last election, which can then be used to evaluate the partisan balance of the sample. As an idea, it makes logical sense.

But over the longer run, recalled vote hasn’t usually been very reliable. Oddly enough, this is one of the first things I remember learning when I started getting interested in polling methodology in the fall of 2004. Back then, it was George W. Bush who led the polls, and it was the Democrats trying to prove that the polls were skewed. Among other things, they argued the polls had too many Bush ’00 voters, based on recalled vote.

A CBS News/Times poll at the time, for instance, found Mr. Bush and John Kerry tied, but Bush ’00 voters outnumbered Al Gore ’00 voters by six points. Mr. Gore won the popular vote in 2000; if the poll had the “right” number of Gore supporters, Democrats thought, Mr. Kerry would have led — perhaps by a lot. Plausible, right?

Needless to say, the polls leading up to Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election were not badly underestimating Mr. Kerry, as the recalled vote implied. This is not an isolated occurrence: Asking how people voted in the last election has been unreliable dating all the way to the earliest polls.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20867/borderline-election

In this presidential election year, it is time to do the math.

Not the traditional math of counting electors, calculating swing states voters, or debating polling data. No. It’s time to do the math regarding the profound and stunning increase in the number of new citizens who will be eligible to vote in this year’s exercise in democracy.

According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) the fiscal year 2022 saw one million new citizens sworn in, citing it as the highest number of naturalizations in nearly 15 years. The government agency says this number reflects the Biden Administration’s effort to address the backlog of applications that had grown during the COVID pandemic.

The FY 2023 statistics saw 878,500 new citizens participate in naturalization ceremonies that make them eligible to vote. By doing the math, we find that naturalizations in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 made up nearly a quarter of all naturalizations over the past decade.

It is as if Washington seeks to consciously create a demographic sea change as to who will now be able to go to the polls in 2024.

There is a Pew study breakdown of where these new voters are coming from.

Their report reveals that Mexico is the top country of birth for U.S. immigrants. It states that in 2022, over 10 million immigrants living in the U.S. were born there, or 23% of all immigrants. India, with the second-largest share, was far behind at 6%, followed by China came at five percent, the Philippines at four percent, and the Latin American nation of El Salvador stood at three percent.

What these various numbers mean is that the nation’s electoral base has changed over the last four years, either through a deliberate political calculation or by happenstance. For those of us who don’t believe in coincidences, it potentially represents a subtle, even unscrupulous, strategy to change the outcome on Election Day.