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[smjjames]

It does seem like it's going to become a pseudo-referendum on frexit/not-frexit, not to mention a sizeable amount of not-Le Pen voters. Like how there were lots of republicans who held their nose on Trump because they thought Hillary was worse.

Also, I've read that Melechon was so far left-wing that he makes Sanders look right-wing. What with 100% tax on those making over 400,000 Euro or something like that, and other stuff.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pretty map

[scriver]

It's easy to forget that le Penne has made built her road to this election by mirroring the socialist wing. Maccheroncelli supporters going to her over of neo-liberal Macaroni is not unthinkable, but I wouldn't think there would be many of them.

[Sergarr]

It's 100% all but guaranteed at this point.

The complacency sets in

Unlike with previous elections, there isn't a single poll that predicts Le Pen winning. Unlike with previous Brexit and USA elections, the gap in votes is not 2-3%, but a full-on 20%.

This is not complacency, this is a statement of the factual reality based on cold, hard facts that there hasn't been a single candidate in history that overcame such odds without blatant cheating, and that two weeks isn't nearly enough to make a full 1/5th of France's voting population switch sides.

This election is over for your side, LW. Euroscepticism has lost in France. It's just a matter of technical formalities to make it official.

[smjjames]

It's 100% all but guaranteed at this point.

The complacency sets in

Unlike with previous elections, there isn't a single poll that predicts Le Pen winning. Unlike with previous Brexit and USA elections, the gap in votes is not 2-3%, but a full-on 20%.

This is not complacency, this is a statement of the factual reality based on cold, hard facts that there hasn't been a single candidate in history that overcame such odds without blatant cheating, and that two weeks isn't nearly enough to make a full 1/5th of France's voting population switch sides.

This election is over for your side, LW. Euroscepticism has lost in France. It's just a matter of technical formalities to make it official.

I wouldn't count Euroskepticism out yet. Even if Le Pen loses in the May 7th final, Euroskepticism isn't going to go away completely.

[Sergarr]

Well, yes. I meant, for a time being. Obviously. But for the next several years...

it's EuroUnity time

[Azzuro]

It's 100% all but guaranteed at this point.

The complacency sets in

Unlike with previous elections, there isn't a single poll that predicts Le Pen winning. Unlike with previous Brexit and USA elections, the gap in votes is not 2-3%, but a full-on 20%.

This is not complacency, this is a statement of the factual reality based on cold, hard facts that there hasn't been a single candidate in history that overcame such odds without blatant cheating, and that two weeks isn't nearly enough to make a full 1/5th of France's voting population switch sides.

This election is over for your side, LW. Euroscepticism has lost in France. It's just a matter of technical formalities to make it official.

On the contrary, I think Euroscepticism is on the rise and will continue to rise, albeit not at the level that will allow Le Pen to win in May. If you consider from the perspective that 21% of French voters choose Le Pen despite having three other 'viable options', as compared to 2012 when she only got 17.9%, then it's pretty clear that Eurosceptics are growing in number.

I think it's kind of like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, in that this isn't so much a victory for globalism, but a defeat for the far right, if that distinction is useful. Pretty sure such a scenario would have been unthinkable in 2007.

[Loud Whispers]

No, they did not. I am going to repeat this until I am blue in the face- the polls in the US were within margin of error to the actual results, across every single state. What the media reported was a whole bunch of cherry-picked bullshit, but the polls were not wrong.

Being wrong within margin of error =/= Being correct, that said its validity does not have much bearing in how Clinton's apparent lead was taken as good reason to grow complacent. If the polls were 100% accurate and were correct in calling Trump's lead, the same lessons would apply to his campaign. "If polls were 100% accurate and 100% reliable for each moment in time they were taken, times change, and with it people's intentions." Never give up until you've finally won. Why you would give up because a poll is telling you you're winning, even if the poll is true at that time and will continue to be true to the future - is beyond me.

The polls were not wrong!

Yes they were m8
" Yes, the election polls were wrong. Here's why."

We treat polls like weather forecasts – but voters are inherently unpredictable. A hunger for certainty sets expectations that are impossible to meet. The polls were wrong. And because we are obsessed with predicting opinions rather than listening to them, we didn’t see it coming. So, the world woke up believing that Republican candidate Donald Trump had a 15% chance of winning based on polling predictions – roughly the same chance of rolling a total of six if you have two dice. Despite those odds, the next US president will be Donald Trump.
I have a few ideas about what went wrong. In the four years I’ve spent as a data journalist, I’ve been concerned by how much faith the public has placed in polling. Just like you’d check the weather before getting dressed, many people checked presidential polling numbers before heading out to vote. That’s understandable. Politics can feel as unpredictable as the weather, and who wouldn’t want to eliminate uncertainty? The world is a scary and confusing place right now.
But those are two very different kinds of forecasts. One is based on natural science, the other on social science. People are different from planets – they can change their minds, they can decide to not share their opinions or they can flat-out lie. And that’s before you even get to some of the statistical issues that make polling inaccurate.
That’s not new information.

This is all I've been saying.

As for Brexit? I will admit, polling error in the UK tends to be larger than in the US, so in that case I will concede that the polling had issues for Brexit. But for fuck's sake stop waving around the media fuckup in the US as if polls are somehow fundamentally wrong or not working. Shitty reporting is responsible for the premature circlejerk in the US, not polls. The polls showed a close race with the potential for a Clinton win or a Trump win with him losing the popular vote, and the latter happened. For someone who appears very aware of media bias, you sure seem to be buying it hook, line, and sinker when it comes to all the media outlets these days blaming the polls to cover their asses on how they fucked up reporting for a year.

For God's sakes are any of you going to read my posts before criticizing me? That is my argument. It is like I said, pollsters could be 100% accurate and this problem would still remain.

I don't think French pollsters suck exceptionally, I just find it foolish to buy into the sort of strategizing that ignores their own eyes and reason in favour of the assumptions predicated on polls.

First sentence. Right there. French pollsters don't suck. Media that declare wars won before battles have begun instill complacency. Politicians that prefer consulting polls to people suck at campaigning. People assuming they've won before they've done the work needed to win will be surprised eventually. In this specific example - winning the election will not be the same as victory.

Unlike with previous elections, there isn't a single poll that predicts Le Pen winning. Unlike with previous Brexit and USA elections, the gap in votes is not 2-3%, but a full-on 20%.
This is not complacency, this is a statement of the factual reality based on cold, hard facts that there hasn't been a single candidate in history that overcame such odds without blatant cheating, and that two weeks isn't nearly enough to make a full 1/5th of France's voting population switch sides.

I feel like I'm wasting my time.

"because something hasn't ever happened, it won't happen" - is flawed thinking.

If he loses out of complacency, that's one thing. If he wins a victory over a nation united alongside him, but not behind him - in the absence of FN, the inward turmoil will be immediate. In the UK, our politicians stopped listening to people, because they instead looked to see how they polled, divvying up safe seats to honoured members without actually listening to or putting in the work needed to serve their voters. What happened? The election was polled to be neck and neck between Labour and Tory, yet resulted in a Tory landslide and the EU referendum getting put on the table, with the Cameron Premiership running off of polls - not learning anything, and suffering the same fate as labour in the referendum. This mindset of maximizing victory with information analysis without putting in the work needed to actually convince people to follow you is bizarre, it is like throwing away all principles of leadership and good governance in favour of empty victories. Without an answer to why the Far-right and Far-left have grown in France, it will only continue to grow. Does not take a genius to figure that out, in victory you will just be sowing the seeds for a future clash.

This election is over for your side, LW. Euroscepticism has lost in France. It's just a matter of technical formalities to make it official.

"My side?" Excuse you? Technical formalities? The sheer arrogance is extremely repellent, God knows that has always been the appeal to many populist groups. If you tell people their votes don't matter and that the matter is already won - a mere issue of technical formalities, your supporters will not inconvenience themselves with the effort needed to vote, and those on the fence will be repelled by the smug attitude that they are unneeded and unsought for.

Well, yes. I meant, for a time being. Obviously. But for the next several years...

it's EuroUnity time

Which is about as optimistic as thinking winning the war in Iraq means Freedom time.
I can never be sure with you and the EU Sergarr, as you have ironically supported it in a deliberately obnoxious fashion before, thus I wonder now if you act this way in order to undermine the EU and make people opposed to it - I've seen shilling done by Anons in this manner on social media before. Few things can as readily turn someone to the cause you like than an obnoxious endorsement of "the other side."

[Loud Whispers]

For fuck's sake when I say that you're eating into what they say and your rebuttal is linking the exact shit that they're saying, that does not make for a goddamn rebuttel.
A piece before the election saying he is just within a polling margin of error behind Clinton.

This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations, wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory.
It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.
So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts4 aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

M8 we've come the same conclusion. This is the only thing we disagree on, which is of no concern to me. Is the Guardian lying to cover their own arse? Do I care? If the polls were accurate, if the polls were inaccurate, the same problems would remain in how people overly rely upon them, growing complacent and arrogant.

It's funny that that article you linked has her lament about how "disillusioned" she was at FiveThirtyEight despite the fact that they got it right. She seems hella inclined to try and imply that they got it wrong with her phrasing, but she can't say that they got it wrong, because they were right. She's not disillusioned at the site; she's disillusioned because they managed to call it and she couldn't. What better thing to do, then, then blame what you were given rather than say "I fucked up"?

Are you not focusing too much on a Nate vs Mona bullshit? Liberal media today, the inheritors tomorrow. I don't want my dudes to make this mistake, I don't want your dudes to make this mistake, I don't want liberals to make this mistake, it makes everything objectively worse for everyone. Perhaps this is because I don't care about polling, but I don't see the point in squabbling about which e-celeb is right. This is bigger than them.

[Loud Whispers]

Then actually say that instead of saying that the "polls were wrong", as you have been.

As much as I would like to say that, if that would mean I got to discuss my argument, the polls were wrong.

[Sergarr]

Unlike with previous elections, there isn't a single poll that predicts Le Pen winning. Unlike with previous Brexit and USA elections, the gap in votes is not 2-3%, but a full-on 20%.
This is not complacency, this is a statement of the factual reality based on cold, hard facts that there hasn't been a single candidate in history that overcame such odds without blatant cheating, and that two weeks isn't nearly enough to make a full 1/5th of France's voting population switch sides.

I feel like I'm wasting my time.

"because something hasn't ever happened, it won't happen" - is flawed thinking.

If he loses out of complacency, that's one thing. If he wins a victory over a nation united alongside him, but not behind him - in the absence of FN, the inward turmoil will be immediate. In the UK, our politicians stopped listening to people, because they instead looked to see how they polled, divvying up safe seats to honoured members without actually listening to or putting in the work needed to serve their voters. What happened? The election was polled to be neck and neck between Labour and Tory, yet resulted in a Tory landslide and the EU referendum getting put on the table, with the Cameron Premiership running off of polls - not learning anything, and suffering the same fate as labour in the referendum. This mindset of maximizing victory with information analysis without putting in the work needed to actually convince people to follow you is bizarre, it is like throwing away all principles of leadership and good governance in favour of empty victories. Without an answer to why the Far-right and Far-left have grown in France, it will only continue to grow. Does not take a genius to figure that out, in victory you will just be sowing the seeds for a future clash.

To rally the people is the job of Macron the Savior of France, which he's doing with excellence par none. I'm just an observer, who's stating facts. No election without cheating (which automatically excludes the UK election you mentioned, seeing as there's still an ongoing investigation of Tories' election fraud) has resulted in polling being wrong by that much. That's a fact. Of course, events may happen that could render it impossible. For instance, a meteorite shower could descend on Earth and kill all non-FN French via precision space-stoning. There are many possibilities, but if we stay within realistic bounds, En Marche! has already won.

This election is over for your side, LW. Euroscepticism has lost in France. It's just a matter of technical formalities to make it official.

"My side?" Excuse you? Technical formalities? The sheer arrogance is extremely repellent, God knows that has always been the appeal to many populist groups. If you tell people their votes don't matter and that the matter is already won - a mere issue of technical formalities, your supporters will not inconvenience themselves with the effort needed to vote, and those on the fence will be repelled by the smug attitude that they are unneeded and unsought for.

Don't worry, you'll have a chance to get back to EUrope once you realize the folly of your "independence" ways. On EUrope conditions, of course.

Well, yes. I meant, for a time being. Obviously. But for the next several years...

it's EuroUnity time

Which is about as optimistic as thinking winning the war in Iraq means Freedom time.
I can never be sure with you and the EU Sergarr, as you have ironically supported it in a deliberately obnoxious fashion before, thus I wonder now if you act this way in order to undermine the EU and make people opposed to it - I've seen shilling done by Anons in this manner on social media before. Few things can as readily turn someone to the cause you like than an obnoxious endorsement of "the other side."

To put it bluntly, your graphs mean nothing. The unity will be achieved as long as there's political will to do so - and the Brexit/Trump combination has given the governments of Europe just the right kind of impulse in that direction. No other factors really matter. USA enjoys even starker degrees of financial equality, yet even hints of separatism are met with nearly-universal scorn and calls to bring in the troops to suppress them.

It's just a matter of creating a European Army, and within short period of time, the only thing remaining would be to formalize the birth of the new European Unity. If that "Shultz" dude wins in Germany, it could happen in as little as 10 years.

[Antioch]

Then actually say that instead of saying that the "polls were wrong", as you have been.

As much as I would like to say that, if that would mean I got to discuss my argument, the polls were wrong.

No.

[Azzuro]

To put it bluntly, your graphs mean nothing. The unity will be achieved as long as there's political will to do so - and the Brexit/Trump combination has given the governments of Europe just the right kind of impulse in that direction. No other factors really matter. USA enjoys even starker degrees of financial equality, yet even hints of separatism are met with nearly-universal scorn and calls to bring in the troops to suppress them.

It's just a matter of creating a European Army, and within short period of time, the only thing remaining would be to formalize the birth of the new European Unity. If that "Shultz" dude wins in Germany, it could happen in as little as 10 years.

Er I disagree with 90% of LW's post, but you're being awfully optimistic here. There are deep cracks within the European Union which, while they don't threaten its foundations and stability, nevertheless prevent it from growing closer. The economic inequality-political unity comparison with the US is facile. The USA started out as a single nation with a common culture and government, the colonies, which grew over the continent while subsuming and destroying other native cultures and nations. It is thus more culturally and politically united than the EU, which grows by taking over already-extant national cultures and promoting European identity on top, but doesn't suppress them. Also, the US fought a pretty bloody war to prove the point that states are de facto not allowed to leave the union, contributing to the anti-separatist mindset while the UK is now leaving the EU absent any military repercussion (saber-waving over Gibraltar aside).

And creating an European Army is not "just a matter", given that you're talking about armed forces that don't even use the same languages, to say nothing of the nightmare of organisational structures and logistics that would ensue.

[Sergarr]

To put it bluntly, your graphs mean nothing. The unity will be achieved as long as there's political will to do so - and the Brexit/Trump combination has given the governments of Europe just the right kind of impulse in that direction. No other factors really matter. USA enjoys even starker degrees of financial equality, yet even hints of separatism are met with nearly-universal scorn and calls to bring in the troops to suppress them.

It's just a matter of creating a European Army, and within short period of time, the only thing remaining would be to formalize the birth of the new European Unity. If that "Shultz" dude wins in Germany, it could happen in as little as 10 years.

Er I disagree with 90% of LW's post, but you're being awfully optimistic here. There are deep cracks within the European Union which, while they don't threaten its foundations and stability, nevertheless prevent it from growing closer. The economic inequality-political unity comparison with the US is facile. The USA started out as a single nation with a common culture and government, the colonies, which grew over the continent while subsuming and destroying other native cultures and nations. It is thus more culturally and politically united than the EU, which grows by taking over already-extant national cultures and promoting European identity on top, but doesn't suppress them. Also, the US fought a pretty bloody war to prove the point that states are de facto not allowed to leave the union, contributing to the anti-separatist mindset while the UK is now leaving the EU absent any military repercussion (saber-waving over Gibraltar aside).

I'm being optimistic because this is the first major victory for the side of progressive thought in the last period. I'm feeling positively elated. I'm sure it's just temporary, but still.

And creating an European Army is not "just a matter", given that you're talking about armed forces that don't even use the same languages, to say nothing of the nightmare of organisational structures and logistics that would ensue.

Actually, it would be pretty easy. You know, because most EU countries that have military are a part of NATO. Most of the work on introducing the unified command language and decision systems has already been done.

[Erkki]

It will not happen in near future because there is little will to further advance the integration in many(most) countries... let alone combine militaries.