Some More Polling Analysis and Hunter Biden

Here are some interesting points of late:

• The race, as predicted in the final stages, is tightening to some degree.
• Even with Rasmussen, who skew Republican big time, have Biden to win 319 Electoral College seats.
• Given that Trump won the three Rust Belt seats by less than 1% only, again Rasmussen has Biden winning Wisconsin by 8% (so a skewed poll giving Biden a 9% swing) and Ohio by 1%, another 9% swing.
• Early voting is heavily favouring Democrats, but this is two sides of a square since republican voters are always more likely to vote on the day. At most this just means that more Democratic voters will be unable to change their minds.
• Given this, all we can tell about voters is their registered party, but if there is a swing in registered GOP voters voting Dem, then you will not see this in the data yet as they will just look like “GOP [registered] voters”.
• A third of the total number of 2016 voters have already voted.
• Republicans, due to not halting their campaign (as Dems did for a month) and continuing door-to-door work, succeeded in registering more voters than the Dems over the last few months. That said, this is a drop in the ocean compared to mobilising already registered voters, which is what the Dems are focussing on.
• Biden and Kelly consistently lead in Arizona.
• Georgia is in play.
• SCOTUS made a ruling on Pennsylvania voting that should benefit democracy (and thus the Democrats).
• Obama slayed his speech. He destroyed Trump.
• Hunter Biden and Burisma. Let’s talk about that.

Watch the whole thing here (it’s worth it).

Burisma Discussed

This Vox article from yesterday does a good job of explaining things:

Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to refuse to divest from his business interests upon taking office. As a result, he reportedly took in at least $73 million from foreign sources during his first two years in office, creating an unprecedented tangle of conflicts of interest with countries like the Philippines, India, and Turkey that are home to Trump-branded buildings.

Meanwhile, Trump’s adult sons — who said before his inauguration that they’d stay out of politics to avoid conflicts of interest — serve as key political surrogates for their father while running the family business, which has benefited from Trump’s presidency both directly and indirectly.

Somehow, none of this has stopped the president or his family from making his closing reelection case about corruption. Not his, mind you, but the flimsily supported idea that Joe Biden committed crimes by letting Obama administration foreign policy be influenced by his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

Hunter Biden is back in the news following the New York Post’s October 14 piece about unverified emails found on a hard drive of dubious provenance. The story suggests emails found on the drive indicate that while Biden was vice president, his son used his connections to get the vice president to meet with an executive from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company Hunter served on the board of for $50,000 a month.

It’s not clear whether the meeting ever happened (the Biden campaign says no one-on-one time ever did). But the implication, conservatives say, is that the purported meeting led to Joe Biden abusing his office by pressuring the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating a company that was paying his son.

While it’s unclear what qualifications Hunter had for that gig beyond having Biden as a last name, the accusation that his role on Burisma’s board somehow compromised the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has been long debunked.

This is a carbon copy of Hillary’s emails.

For one, the prosecutor in question, Viktor Shokin, was widely regarded as corrupt, and his ouster in March 2016 had broad international support. As Parker Molloy recently wrote for Media Matters, “Biden’s role in carrying out that internationally supported action actually made it more likely that Burisma would face increased legal scrutiny, not less.” Secondly, while Shokin had investigated Burisma, his probe was reportedly dormant at the time Biden advocated for his ouster.

In short, there’s no there there. So it tracks that, according to reporting from the New York Times, Post staffers were unwilling to put their names on the October 14 piece. The article was ultimately co-bylined by Emma-Jo Morris, a former staffer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show who had never bylined a piece for the Post before, and Gabrielle Fonrouge, who reportedly “learned that her byline was on the story only after it was published.”

“Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings,” the Times wrote. “Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.”

As a result, Trump acolytes who have been pushing the Burisma story — including Rudy Giuliani — have already moved the goalposts from “Biden is guilty of wrongdoing” to “even if the premise of the Post story is false, the American people deserve to see the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

Now, I’m pretty sure Hunter Biden was cashing in on his name. But Joe Biden did nothing wrong here, and both are not even in the same league as Trump and his emolument-swathed family. The above article details some of Trump’s nefarious activities.

As an addendum, I argued with some Trumpistas today on Facebook. Complete waste of time. I’m going to be a bit harsh here: I really do think those fervent Trump voters, the really strong ones, have some kind of mental health issue. Anywho, the “conversation” was utterly pointless.

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