PA-SN 2022 megathread: Shrek vs. The Wizard of Oz

[GALeftist]

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1577682323654561792

[GALeftist]

Is it too early to start talking about potential running mates for Fetterman in 2028?

Yes. In fact, my prediction is:

Mehmet Oz: 50.7%
John Fetterman: 46.4%

Stop the presses.

[GALeftist]

Fetterman people apparently mad on twitter that NBC News is playing up his incoherent issues so close to the election. It matters. Look how long Mark Kirk was out and then ineffective until his eventual defeat in Illinois.

Mark Kirk outran the top of the ticket by 2% despite making a blatantly racist statement at a debate.

On top of that, Mark Kirk's stroke was pretty clearly very different from Fetterman's; in Kirk's case, the stroke was sadly pretty bad for his actual mental faculties, whereas Fetterman's stroke seems to have basically given him hearing difficulties which he can overcome handily with closed captioning or whatever. I legitimately can't tell if people actually don't see the distinction here or are just being hackish.

[GALeftist]

The way certain media figures have been treating Fetterman's aphasia/need for closed captioning is frankly extremely callous and disheartening, yet unsurprising, to see. One reason this race is really dangerous for me, personally: the people who find Fetterman most objectionable (movement conservatives, alt-centrists/KHive, "reasonable" Republicans who remain partisan hacks, journalists more interested in ensuring a close horse race than anything else) pretty neatly line up with the people I on a personal level find to be the most irritating. If Fetterman loses, OK, I've seen better candidates whiff more important races before and I almost certainly will again at some point in the future, but if he wins I may die of schadenfreude.

[GALeftist]

It depends on the disability. If you have cognitive impairment on the level of current-year Feinstein you are not fit to serve. Calling it "ableist" to say that is not meaningful.

I don't even necessarily disagree with this, but in these cases it's the responsibility of the media to do their research and actually figure out whether it is a relevant concern, but that isn't what they're doing here; they're just latching onto what is effectively a hearing issue and attempting to construct a debilitating mental condition out of that, which is patently ableist and also misleads voters who are unfamiliar with aphasia.

[GALeftist]

The MSM going full blown ableist against Fetterman makes my skin crawl. I use closed captioning whenever I watch Netflix or Hulu, does that mean I'm disqualified from holding political office? What a f****** joke. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there's such thing as the "liberal media" in this country.

One of the only things I will ever agree with Trump on is that the media in this country is irredeemably rotten.

A lot of people have been saying variations of "the media likes Republicans and wants them to win." I think that actually gives them too much credit in that it's only incidentally true. They know that if they were to actually be scrupulous in their coverage here, it would just be an ordinary interview using closed captioning that no one would care about, so they intentionally poked the hornet's nest to provoke an artificial controversy that they can then profit off of. They aren't interested in informing you, they're interested in engaging you, and if anger is more engaging than information then that's what they'll pursue.

[GALeftist]

I think the difference is obvious—a hearing impairment alone doesn't point to any underlying cognitive issue

Neither does aphasia. This is like one of my biggest issues with the coverage of this issue. I think it's intuitive to people that issues with the speech processing part of the brain imply issues elsewhere, but that is not the case! This isn't like my spin or anything, this is settled science, feel free to look it up. As such, this should be something that the media emphasizes, because it is unintuitive yet highly relevant to Fetterman's performance as a Senator, yet they have done an extremely poor job at conveying this message, as you've demonstrated.

Fetterman also evidently struggles to read the captions and speak, which is a disability I would consider unfitness for Senate service and has nothing to do with his hearing, except that they stem from the same cause.

I'd be interested to see an example of this, because this doesn't comport with what I've seen.

[GALeftist]

“News reporting draws criticism” is one of my favorite euphemisms for an editorial disguised as news reporting. Another good one is “experts say.”

As I said earlier, differentiating auditory processing issues from general intelligence is both important and relevant here and not common knowledge. Shame WaPo had to pick up NBC's slack, but better late than never.

[GALeftist]

Two weeks ago a Trafalgar poll with Oz ahead probably would have given me a heart attack. Now, I'm certain it's just going to be pure hackery. I'll laugh if they still can't manage to find him up though.

About that...

[GALeftist]

Not watching the debate, but all the people informing me the sky is falling, left right or center, also said that Herschel Walker won his debate, so I'm going to assume that Oz slightly outperformed/Fetterman slightly underperformed expectations and it will not move the needle much either way.

[GALeftist]

The weird conspiracy theories around Gisele Fetterman are absolutely hilarious to me, no idea how they came to be so widely accepted among conservatives online.

[GALeftist]

Better question: why is someone with the name citizenq even allowed on the forum? Might as well name yourself Heima Trollman.

[GALeftist]

Anyway, end of the day, I think the era of debates really mattering for stuff other than presidential races is basically done unless one candidate has a major major gaffe. I'd have to imagine the number of swing voters tuning into them is pretty remote since swing voters tend to be less engaged than the median, and the partisans who watch the debate will almost always find some way to defend anything that happens. Open to recanting if the polls show otherwise.

[GALeftist]

Making predictions that run contrary to yours isn’t trolling.

Forumlurker, you've changed your name to "9 Days until the slaughter." You and I both know that this has evolved into something more akin to a backlash against a perceived forum consensus than a value-neutral prediction.

[GALeftist]

https://twitter.com/NapervillePol/status/1590179513274863616

The Lean R switches may come back to bite forecasters. Oz underperforming pretty consistently by 7-10 points across rural PA too. He'd better hope for a strong showing in SEPA.

[GALeftist]

I am already getting drunk off of schadenfreude. Fetterman is going to substantially outperform Biden. I hope all the haters and losers who couldn't admit that this was a possibility do some serious reflection.

[GALeftist]

https://twitter.com/blockedfreq/status/1593812284714819586?s=46&t=T5aNsHvkme...

Gonna end up being like a 5 point victory. Pretty nuts. People got way too cute about this race. Honestly it reminds me of the primary where everyone was like “yeah fetterman has a huge lead over lamb but it’s just name rec/no attack ads/whatever, the lead won’t hold” and then it did

[GALeftist]

It seems kind of unsurprising that a recent stroke victim would act out of an abundance of caution here lol. The whole lesson from his initial stroke was to do that, right? Don’t get why everyone was freaking out about this