Interesting, intelligent and intriguing perspectives. Whatever the scenario, even the unpredicted black swan event, I think I may now look forward to the civil unrest. At some point this giant festering pimple has to pop, or sepsis will set in everywhere. Better to treat it, than to keep covering it up with clown make up.
> "Biden could be replaced by DNC back room deals, probably by Newsom. The chances of this shrink with every passing day, but Biden’s mental health shrinks as well, so let’s throw 25% at this chance for the time being."
I dunno. I feel like the chances of his being replaced are higher, and I think they're going to break out the rock star power fandom vote by picking Michelle Obama, if she's dumb enough to take the job. Which she may well not be.
Newsom... Ugh. I dunno. I feel like everyone knows he's a terrible leader already. Which might not stop him from beating Trump, but I dunno if he could take on Haley. Who, if Trump is out, is likely the candidate no matter how much I despise that possibility.
Haley versus Newsom is full on "Alien versus Predator" vibes again. No matter who wins, we lose.
A friend of mine makes a case that Biden will make an excuse and back out after the last of the primaries and before the convention. This is what what the Dem leaders want because:
1. The don't want 4 yrs of Biden's dementia getting worse fast but he's still alive.
2. They would control the convention and pick whomever they want to be the nominee. An acceptable Uniparty centrist. Someone they the Dem leaders control and whom they think can beat Trump.
3. The Uniparty Never-Trump RINOs would also be on board with this.
I'm led to believe they literally *can't* "pick whoever they want at the convention" because the delegates are bound to pick whoever their state picked. If the run this, I think it will be either after the convention (hot swapping in whatever VP Biden is with) or after the election itself.
Honestly this strikes me as super implausible because the electorate just wouldn't accept it. It would make more sense to try to win with Biden and then replace him with his VP, or just deal with him being senile and demented. It's worked out OK for them so far. Of course the next election will be a wipeout but that's usually how it goes anyways.
I think this is a good analysis, but if I were to discuss it with say police chiefs (or really anyone who wasn't a giant stats nerd) I would be sure to point out and make absolutely clear that these are expected values from right this second, and as soon as primary season starts getting solidified those numbers are going to jump around a lot. In other words, once we know Trump is the Republican nominee, the probability of left wing riots if he wins goes up a lot. A lot of the expected value is discounted by not knowing now who will be the nominees, but once we are in 'given these guys are the nominees" territory those numbers increase, by around 30% in the Trump case.
The reason I would stress all that is that by the time we do know, it might be a little late to start preparing against the problems. If I were a police chief in a fairly blue area... well ok I wouldn't give a damn because my political superiors would probably be telling me not to, but if it was me and I somehow had snuck in and wanted to do what was right... I would be preparing now under the assumption that Trump was on the ticket and would win.
I think maybe you are over-estimating the probability of assassination while not considering how one of the candidates getting killed would affect the probabilities downstream. If, for example, Trump gets shot, then his replacement nominee loses, it would need to be the most absolutely above board, clearly perfect election ever recorded by humans. Otherwise, what could those on right think other than "See, if we nominate who they don't like, they just kill them and cheat in the election anyway. Democracy is dead, and so is the Union!" (The lawfare angle might achieve that as well, but assassination definitely will, or 90% will I think.)
Likewise, if Biden gets killed the only way it doesn't likely result in violence is if he is if his replacement wins. I agree that Biden isn't all that popular personally, but that kind of crisis is just too ripe to let slide.
Personally, I think the probability of assassination is rather lower than 10%, probably closer to 1, so I would be tempted to just take it out of the estimates over all and not have to worry about the down steam effects at all. Left in, I think one would have to consider two different decision trees at least, and probably like six, based on WHY Trump or Biden isn't on the ticket. Trump not being on the ballot because he (has a heart attack/retires/doesn't get votes) is a different case from (get legally barred) and a VERY different case from (catches a bullet). I suspect Biden's case set is similar, but maybe the individual outcomes are closer because as you say Biden is himself less popular, so if the DNC finds a way to legally oust him (mentally unsound votes the cabinet) there will be no real blowback.
I think your assassinations probability is way too high. The first three presidents that got whacked had virtually no protection (Lincoln had one bodyguard). IMO, only JFK counts (2.2, not 8.7%).
Neither Biden nor Trump is going to get shot. More likely, is one of the Conservative Supremes getting taken out. I don't think anyone can set odds on something like this. Remember, at the end of the day, all lawfare will be decided by the High Court.
Either way, your analysis applies to the nation as a whole. The comparison events, namely hurricanes, are local. Here in NYC (where we have daily "civil disobedience") my gut feel is that the odds of Cat 4 or 5 Mostly Peaceful Riots is 100% in the event of a Trump win.
I think most people on the Left would disagree with your assessment of the Jan. 6 "Insurrection" clocking in at a 3 or your assessing the "mostly peaceful" Floyd protests at 100. The Left tends to be driven by emotion combined with partisan "truths," not mathematical analysis!
I'm guessing that Biden/Harris will be replaced at the last minute, with little time for vetting of the new candidates. The Democrats have a very highly developed election machine advantage. The Republicans do not. It leads me think that the Democrats will win in any case. In this scenario, there will be little to no violence.
I think they're going to swap Harris out for someone else at the convention, possibly even run Biden, and then have him step down for whoever they swap Harris for after the election. Possibly before.
Definitely agree that Democrats are more likely to riot.
What do you think the odds are on Trump saying the election was stolen, yet again? Maybe he wouldn't be able to plan as well, this time, if he's not in power already?
If you think it's 49% odds against a Trump vs Biden rematch, then I would gladly bet some money against that.
I'm not sure to be honest. My gut tells me that if Trump wins this time around it's going to be by noticeable margins, and if he loses it's going to be by noticeable margins as well. My gut tells me that if he has any gripe it's going to be that legal means were used to keep him off ballot and that those were used to steal the election in plain sight, while the blues will say they were simply following the law of whatever those legal means happen to be.
But HWFO media analysis theory states that in a currency of clicks, the most controversial thing gets elevated, and controversy is 50/50, which causes elections to trend towards 50/50 outcomes over time. So my gut saying that the outcome should be obvious doesn't really align with the math we like to point to.
Glancing at older election results, you have blow-out presidential victories in the 60's, 70's, and 80's with double digit margins. Bill Clinton exceeded 8% and Obama 7%.
I don't think there's any rule of nature saying that it has to be 50/50.
I think you're suggesting enhanced memetic competition could have brought it there?
But I might also suggest the candidates just suck, and have since 2016.
When both candidates are bad, you just vote against the other team. When one is good, you get some crossover appeal or a swing among independents.
There are some polls showing that Haley would beat Biden much more easily than Trump. Note the crosstabs here:
I'm also not sure that's a consistent polling effect, I've also seen a few saying that Haley and Biden would be more even than that. But it sounds intuitively plausible -- I would certainly have to look at both candidates in that race before choosing, whereas Trump is just a guaranteed no for me.
Perhaps there is some element by which social media drives the parties towards picking bad candidates? Social media might have helped build Trump's cult-like appeal to the point where no one else can compete. The problem is less obvious on the left, it's more just that everyone thinks Biden is too old but he won't step aside, and perhaps he can't step aside because wokeness lead him to pick a suboptimal VP.
I don't think polls are trustworthy this far out, or likely ever. What I've suggested is that as the media engine of freakoutery fine tunes our consumption towards 50/50 split issues, the voting will tend to asymptote towards 50/50 splits as well. So this is a new effect, in my opinion, that has resulted from how the pay per click media business model intersects with social media sharing.
I should really do some graphs to test the theory, to be honest. It seems intuitively correct to me but I should have taken the time to confirm it by now.
Maybe. But voting is nowhere near 50/50 at a local/state level, it's only 50/50 on a nationwide aggregate.
I can see the case where parties strategically shift their messaging to get it to the 50/50 point, nationally. But I'm not sure that would just be an emergent property of people fighting about controversial issues on Twitter.
Maybe. It's an interesting theory. My theory is that a charismatic Democrat like Obama would beat Trump by a wide margin. And any reasonable, moderate Republican would beat Biden. Unfortunately, that's a hard theory to test, since we're probably stuck with those 2.
I think the Democrats will riot regardless of the election outcome, much in the same way that college students burn and break things even after a team victory.
A little bit, yes. There was some minor destruction after Biden won in 2020, but it was over in a day or two. I tend to think it would have lasted a lot longer had Trump won narrowly.
Two thoughts. 1. Another scenario - Trump is the Republican nominee, but even without a conviction for insurrection, one or more blue states refuses to put him on the ballot. Or Trump is on the ballot everywhere, but the suspicion of election fraud is deeper than in 2020. Given all that has happened so far, I rate the first idea as a non-zero probability, and the second as a near certainty. Either will definitely change the odds of, and nature of, civil unrest. 2. Your MPS20 definition includes arrests, but not convictions. Is that because out of the 14,000 arrests there were essentially zero convictions? I don’t remember any trials, much less convictions, so I believe that correlation is either absolutely true or essentially correct.
If BLM, ANTIFA, and other leftist groups continue to riot without fear of prison time, at some point those to the right of center (and especially those well right of center) will react violently. I also realize that statement is about as controversial as saying that water is wet. My view of the most likely division within the country - one third leftist activists/rioters or sympathizers, one third right wing activists or sympathizers, and one third that is too afraid to take a stand, but will go along with whatever plays out. That was the case in the American Revolution and appears to be the human condition.
I think your "one third rioters" assumption is probably much too high. If we just went based on BLM Floyd participation, and presumed that an equal number of like minded individuals existed on the right, that would still "only" (?) total to 40 million protesters, 20 mil for each side. That's more like 6%/6%/88%.
Now 12% of people killing each other will definitely wreck it for the other 88%, but I don't think that those 6%ers are all ready to throw lead, either.
Please note that I included sympathizers in the left wing of the country. My apologizes to all for not explaining my thought process further than I did. A figure of one third is less than the 40-odd percent the Democrats always seem to get in any national election regardless of the candidates. My thought is that there will always be people who would not riot themselves, but would be inclined to look the other way rather than report a person to the police, and in exigent circumstances offer sanctuary. We also have the current slide toward polarization, which will move some of the center-left toward the sympathizer category. Thus, about one third of the population.
Background: mine includes a heavy dip into the world of statistics, so I know that good data s hard to come by when social or political topics are on the table. Post-Jan 6 Congressional Committee investigations and release of thousands of hours of federal CCTV video have shown that the FBI and s just as willing to be agent provocateurs inside conservative groups as they were in leftist groups of the 1960-70s. Add that to zealous federal prosecutors and trials in overwhelmingly Democrat cities in the 21st century, and you are almost guaranteed to get convictions. I feel an obligation to point out that the only deadly weapons wielded on January 6th were in the hands of federal LEOs. And that the newly elected VP was strangely NOT in the Capitol building performing her obligation to verify the election outcome, but was in the DNC headquarters building, where a fake bomb had been planted by a person or persons unknown in full view of a CCTV camera with a clear view of the area. In short, the American people have been feed crap and told to take it. Not a good recipe for our future.
I think there will be more rioting than that if Trump wins. The people denigrating anyone who dared question the "free and fair election" of 2020 are going to come out in droves to riot should they not get the "free and fair election" results they want. I don't have anything to back this up, just a hunch.
It may be because I am currently reading a history of Reconstruction but I am more concerned about violence and threats thereof before or during the election than afterwards. It is pretty easy to identify areas with a strong predilection for one party or the other and target those. Campaign offices typically have big signs on them. Depressing turnout in this way can have a big impact both on the outcome and the legitimacy of the election.
"The Floyd Riots were about one third of a 9-11 event."
I think the Floyd riots (_approximately_ 100, perhaps a bit more, per original HWFO definition) were somewhere around 3 percent of a 9-11 event, not one third. I haven't checked your 3431 aka 34 Floyds number for 9-11 (from the 2022 post) in detail, but taking it for granted, what is an order of magnitude when there is a political point to be made?
I did look at the previous article, and I think your rating 9-11 as being 34 Floyds is defensible, although I'd probably put it quite higher (I'd put more weight on deaths, by which 9-11 was more than 140 Floyds, using the standard 2977 for the count of 9-11 victims and the value you used of 20 deaths attributable to the mostly peaceful protests of 2020). Apologies for being unclear that *of course* I read the article - I thought your comparison of various natural disasters to the mostly peaceful protests was quite good (BTW, I was living in the city of LA for the King riots, though fairly far from ground zero - if you know LA's geography, Mar Vista: the nearest burning was about a mile away from me).
I continue to object to your calling the Mostly Peaceful Protests aka Floyd Riots "about one third of a 9-11 event." Change "one third" to "one thirtieth" and that would fit into normal stretching. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
Interesting, intelligent and intriguing perspectives. Whatever the scenario, even the unpredicted black swan event, I think I may now look forward to the civil unrest. At some point this giant festering pimple has to pop, or sepsis will set in everywhere. Better to treat it, than to keep covering it up with clown make up.
> "Biden could be replaced by DNC back room deals, probably by Newsom. The chances of this shrink with every passing day, but Biden’s mental health shrinks as well, so let’s throw 25% at this chance for the time being."
I dunno. I feel like the chances of his being replaced are higher, and I think they're going to break out the rock star power fandom vote by picking Michelle Obama, if she's dumb enough to take the job. Which she may well not be.
Newsom... Ugh. I dunno. I feel like everyone knows he's a terrible leader already. Which might not stop him from beating Trump, but I dunno if he could take on Haley. Who, if Trump is out, is likely the candidate no matter how much I despise that possibility.
Haley versus Newsom is full on "Alien versus Predator" vibes again. No matter who wins, we lose.
A friend of mine makes a case that Biden will make an excuse and back out after the last of the primaries and before the convention. This is what what the Dem leaders want because:
1. The don't want 4 yrs of Biden's dementia getting worse fast but he's still alive.
2. They would control the convention and pick whomever they want to be the nominee. An acceptable Uniparty centrist. Someone they the Dem leaders control and whom they think can beat Trump.
3. The Uniparty Never-Trump RINOs would also be on board with this.
Dang, this comment aged really well
I'm led to believe they literally *can't* "pick whoever they want at the convention" because the delegates are bound to pick whoever their state picked. If the run this, I think it will be either after the convention (hot swapping in whatever VP Biden is with) or after the election itself.
Honestly this strikes me as super implausible because the electorate just wouldn't accept it. It would make more sense to try to win with Biden and then replace him with his VP, or just deal with him being senile and demented. It's worked out OK for them so far. Of course the next election will be a wipeout but that's usually how it goes anyways.
I think this is a good analysis, but if I were to discuss it with say police chiefs (or really anyone who wasn't a giant stats nerd) I would be sure to point out and make absolutely clear that these are expected values from right this second, and as soon as primary season starts getting solidified those numbers are going to jump around a lot. In other words, once we know Trump is the Republican nominee, the probability of left wing riots if he wins goes up a lot. A lot of the expected value is discounted by not knowing now who will be the nominees, but once we are in 'given these guys are the nominees" territory those numbers increase, by around 30% in the Trump case.
The reason I would stress all that is that by the time we do know, it might be a little late to start preparing against the problems. If I were a police chief in a fairly blue area... well ok I wouldn't give a damn because my political superiors would probably be telling me not to, but if it was me and I somehow had snuck in and wanted to do what was right... I would be preparing now under the assumption that Trump was on the ticket and would win.
I think maybe you are over-estimating the probability of assassination while not considering how one of the candidates getting killed would affect the probabilities downstream. If, for example, Trump gets shot, then his replacement nominee loses, it would need to be the most absolutely above board, clearly perfect election ever recorded by humans. Otherwise, what could those on right think other than "See, if we nominate who they don't like, they just kill them and cheat in the election anyway. Democracy is dead, and so is the Union!" (The lawfare angle might achieve that as well, but assassination definitely will, or 90% will I think.)
Likewise, if Biden gets killed the only way it doesn't likely result in violence is if he is if his replacement wins. I agree that Biden isn't all that popular personally, but that kind of crisis is just too ripe to let slide.
Personally, I think the probability of assassination is rather lower than 10%, probably closer to 1, so I would be tempted to just take it out of the estimates over all and not have to worry about the down steam effects at all. Left in, I think one would have to consider two different decision trees at least, and probably like six, based on WHY Trump or Biden isn't on the ticket. Trump not being on the ballot because he (has a heart attack/retires/doesn't get votes) is a different case from (get legally barred) and a VERY different case from (catches a bullet). I suspect Biden's case set is similar, but maybe the individual outcomes are closer because as you say Biden is himself less popular, so if the DNC finds a way to legally oust him (mentally unsound votes the cabinet) there will be no real blowback.
I think your assassinations probability is way too high. The first three presidents that got whacked had virtually no protection (Lincoln had one bodyguard). IMO, only JFK counts (2.2, not 8.7%).
Neither Biden nor Trump is going to get shot. More likely, is one of the Conservative Supremes getting taken out. I don't think anyone can set odds on something like this. Remember, at the end of the day, all lawfare will be decided by the High Court.
Either way, your analysis applies to the nation as a whole. The comparison events, namely hurricanes, are local. Here in NYC (where we have daily "civil disobedience") my gut feel is that the odds of Cat 4 or 5 Mostly Peaceful Riots is 100% in the event of a Trump win.
I think most people on the Left would disagree with your assessment of the Jan. 6 "Insurrection" clocking in at a 3 or your assessing the "mostly peaceful" Floyd protests at 100. The Left tends to be driven by emotion combined with partisan "truths," not mathematical analysis!
I'm guessing that Biden/Harris will be replaced at the last minute, with little time for vetting of the new candidates. The Democrats have a very highly developed election machine advantage. The Republicans do not. It leads me think that the Democrats will win in any case. In this scenario, there will be little to no violence.
I think they're going to swap Harris out for someone else at the convention, possibly even run Biden, and then have him step down for whoever they swap Harris for after the election. Possibly before.
Agree, that is another possibility.
Now, all we need to factor in is reserve currency collapse and dollar devaluation percentages for each outcome.
Because IMO that's the Big Show, everything else is a sideshow.
What are the odds that the whole system burns up. Niro style.🤞🏻
Definitely agree that Democrats are more likely to riot.
What do you think the odds are on Trump saying the election was stolen, yet again? Maybe he wouldn't be able to plan as well, this time, if he's not in power already?
If you think it's 49% odds against a Trump vs Biden rematch, then I would gladly bet some money against that.
I'm not sure to be honest. My gut tells me that if Trump wins this time around it's going to be by noticeable margins, and if he loses it's going to be by noticeable margins as well. My gut tells me that if he has any gripe it's going to be that legal means were used to keep him off ballot and that those were used to steal the election in plain sight, while the blues will say they were simply following the law of whatever those legal means happen to be.
But HWFO media analysis theory states that in a currency of clicks, the most controversial thing gets elevated, and controversy is 50/50, which causes elections to trend towards 50/50 outcomes over time. So my gut saying that the outcome should be obvious doesn't really align with the math we like to point to.
So who knows.
Glancing at older election results, you have blow-out presidential victories in the 60's, 70's, and 80's with double digit margins. Bill Clinton exceeded 8% and Obama 7%.
I don't think there's any rule of nature saying that it has to be 50/50.
I think you're suggesting enhanced memetic competition could have brought it there?
But I might also suggest the candidates just suck, and have since 2016.
When both candidates are bad, you just vote against the other team. When one is good, you get some crossover appeal or a swing among independents.
There are some polls showing that Haley would beat Biden much more easily than Trump. Note the crosstabs here:
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1755381048857555026
I'm also not sure that's a consistent polling effect, I've also seen a few saying that Haley and Biden would be more even than that. But it sounds intuitively plausible -- I would certainly have to look at both candidates in that race before choosing, whereas Trump is just a guaranteed no for me.
Perhaps there is some element by which social media drives the parties towards picking bad candidates? Social media might have helped build Trump's cult-like appeal to the point where no one else can compete. The problem is less obvious on the left, it's more just that everyone thinks Biden is too old but he won't step aside, and perhaps he can't step aside because wokeness lead him to pick a suboptimal VP.
I don't think polls are trustworthy this far out, or likely ever. What I've suggested is that as the media engine of freakoutery fine tunes our consumption towards 50/50 split issues, the voting will tend to asymptote towards 50/50 splits as well. So this is a new effect, in my opinion, that has resulted from how the pay per click media business model intersects with social media sharing.
I should really do some graphs to test the theory, to be honest. It seems intuitively correct to me but I should have taken the time to confirm it by now.
Maybe. But voting is nowhere near 50/50 at a local/state level, it's only 50/50 on a nationwide aggregate.
I can see the case where parties strategically shift their messaging to get it to the 50/50 point, nationally. But I'm not sure that would just be an emergent property of people fighting about controversial issues on Twitter.
The freakoutery engine works on a national scale.
Maybe. It's an interesting theory. My theory is that a charismatic Democrat like Obama would beat Trump by a wide margin. And any reasonable, moderate Republican would beat Biden. Unfortunately, that's a hard theory to test, since we're probably stuck with those 2.
I think the Democrats will riot regardless of the election outcome, much in the same way that college students burn and break things even after a team victory.
A little bit, yes. There was some minor destruction after Biden won in 2020, but it was over in a day or two. I tend to think it would have lasted a lot longer had Trump won narrowly.
Two thoughts. 1. Another scenario - Trump is the Republican nominee, but even without a conviction for insurrection, one or more blue states refuses to put him on the ballot. Or Trump is on the ballot everywhere, but the suspicion of election fraud is deeper than in 2020. Given all that has happened so far, I rate the first idea as a non-zero probability, and the second as a near certainty. Either will definitely change the odds of, and nature of, civil unrest. 2. Your MPS20 definition includes arrests, but not convictions. Is that because out of the 14,000 arrests there were essentially zero convictions? I don’t remember any trials, much less convictions, so I believe that correlation is either absolutely true or essentially correct.
If BLM, ANTIFA, and other leftist groups continue to riot without fear of prison time, at some point those to the right of center (and especially those well right of center) will react violently. I also realize that statement is about as controversial as saying that water is wet. My view of the most likely division within the country - one third leftist activists/rioters or sympathizers, one third right wing activists or sympathizers, and one third that is too afraid to take a stand, but will go along with whatever plays out. That was the case in the American Revolution and appears to be the human condition.
I think your "one third rioters" assumption is probably much too high. If we just went based on BLM Floyd participation, and presumed that an equal number of like minded individuals existed on the right, that would still "only" (?) total to 40 million protesters, 20 mil for each side. That's more like 6%/6%/88%.
Now 12% of people killing each other will definitely wreck it for the other 88%, but I don't think that those 6%ers are all ready to throw lead, either.
Please note that I included sympathizers in the left wing of the country. My apologizes to all for not explaining my thought process further than I did. A figure of one third is less than the 40-odd percent the Democrats always seem to get in any national election regardless of the candidates. My thought is that there will always be people who would not riot themselves, but would be inclined to look the other way rather than report a person to the police, and in exigent circumstances offer sanctuary. We also have the current slide toward polarization, which will move some of the center-left toward the sympathizer category. Thus, about one third of the population.
Protesters on the right have a counter example though with January 6th.
So far, at more than 3 years in, there have been 1266 arrests, 1272 people charged, and 779 people sentenced (64% of which received prison time).
Is this likely to embolden those right of center? I have my doubts.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories
Background: mine includes a heavy dip into the world of statistics, so I know that good data s hard to come by when social or political topics are on the table. Post-Jan 6 Congressional Committee investigations and release of thousands of hours of federal CCTV video have shown that the FBI and s just as willing to be agent provocateurs inside conservative groups as they were in leftist groups of the 1960-70s. Add that to zealous federal prosecutors and trials in overwhelmingly Democrat cities in the 21st century, and you are almost guaranteed to get convictions. I feel an obligation to point out that the only deadly weapons wielded on January 6th were in the hands of federal LEOs. And that the newly elected VP was strangely NOT in the Capitol building performing her obligation to verify the election outcome, but was in the DNC headquarters building, where a fake bomb had been planted by a person or persons unknown in full view of a CCTV camera with a clear view of the area. In short, the American people have been feed crap and told to take it. Not a good recipe for our future.
No need to re-run any analysis but does your model consider the increased rate of gun ownership among the population?
Nope, because anyone who wants to kill someone with a gun could find a gun, both before and after the 2020 spike.
That answers my question! Thank you.
I think there will be more rioting than that if Trump wins. The people denigrating anyone who dared question the "free and fair election" of 2020 are going to come out in droves to riot should they not get the "free and fair election" results they want. I don't have anything to back this up, just a hunch.
It may be because I am currently reading a history of Reconstruction but I am more concerned about violence and threats thereof before or during the election than afterwards. It is pretty easy to identify areas with a strong predilection for one party or the other and target those. Campaign offices typically have big signs on them. Depressing turnout in this way can have a big impact both on the outcome and the legitimacy of the election.
No, because Biden would still be pres then? Definitely not a cause to celebrate.
If the election is not held for any reason at all will people dance in the street?
https://youtu.be/68Uv959QuCg?t=2
"The Floyd Riots were about one third of a 9-11 event."
I think the Floyd riots (_approximately_ 100, perhaps a bit more, per original HWFO definition) were somewhere around 3 percent of a 9-11 event, not one third. I haven't checked your 3431 aka 34 Floyds number for 9-11 (from the 2022 post) in detail, but taking it for granted, what is an order of magnitude when there is a political point to be made?
The 9-11 math is in the prior article, follow the link back.
I did look at the previous article, and I think your rating 9-11 as being 34 Floyds is defensible, although I'd probably put it quite higher (I'd put more weight on deaths, by which 9-11 was more than 140 Floyds, using the standard 2977 for the count of 9-11 victims and the value you used of 20 deaths attributable to the mostly peaceful protests of 2020). Apologies for being unclear that *of course* I read the article - I thought your comparison of various natural disasters to the mostly peaceful protests was quite good (BTW, I was living in the city of LA for the King riots, though fairly far from ground zero - if you know LA's geography, Mar Vista: the nearest burning was about a mile away from me).
I continue to object to your calling the Mostly Peaceful Protests aka Floyd Riots "about one third of a 9-11 event." Change "one third" to "one thirtieth" and that would fit into normal stretching. Anyway, thanks for the reply.
Came here to draw attention to the same thing. I concur with @Bayesian's math.
If I am missing something, let me know.