About this time in 2016, I was following presidential preference polls—not because I believed them accurate, but because some nationally known and respected polls were including the names Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in their crosstabs.

As of t-minus 89 days before Election Day, I haven't found any polls with the cojones to include the names Howie Hawkins and Jo Jorgensen. They and any other relatively small parties' nominees are merged into the all-purpose mystery candidate known as Other.

The biggest reason that irks me is that Hawkins (Green) and Jorgensen (Libertarian) are already officially nominated by their respective parties; Joe Biden and Donald Trump are merely presumptive nominees.

I'm going to starting checking every other day or so, maybe thrice a week, for the first sign of a polling organization that lists the Sunflower and Hedgehog nominees by name. If you see a four-or-more-candidate presidential poll before I do, please put something in the comments below.

Except that I'm an embittered old American lefty, not a cute British novelty pop star. And if I had a hundred hands, I'd be shooting the bird with all of them and looking around to borrow more.

And there are plenty of fuck-yous to go around. My own allies in the radical and progressive movements would not escape the birdshot.

Before beginning the rant, allow me to link you to some other progressive analyses of the turd sandwich that was 8 November 2016: Brains and Eggs, Socratic Gadfly, and Thomas Frank's piece in Comment Is Free. There's also this surprisingly chill post from Caity Johnstone at Inquisitr, which makes me wonder what she smoked or drank to get in that frame of mind.

Democrats, Clintonites, and Berners who fell into line: Before you starting unfriending all those third-party voters with splinters in their eyes, you'd better see a doctor about that plank in your own.

*****

It's late afternoon, and through the work day, I've managed to slough off some of the bitterness that I felt this morning. But still...two middle fingers way up. Mostly, I'm a tad bitter because I have so many friends who vote Blue, many of whom will continue to froth for years about how third parties fucked up this election just like in 2000.

You First, Progs
Let's begin with my progressive peeps. There's some good news/bad news in Texas: Green candidates for statewide offices set new records for vote total and percentage, but didn't get to the magical 5%.

Stein/Baraka ended up with 1.0% of the popular vote nationwide, 0.9% in Texas. The national tally of 1.2 million votes is a marked improvement over 469,000 in 2012. Thank those of you who defied the duopoly.

As a longtime Greenie, I know how support for third parties usually disappears, but come on! Last-minute polls were showing the Green ticket near 2%. In August and September, it was closer to 4%. Does that drop-off represent a few million of you who chickened out? Were poll respondents lying? Were the polls themselves bogus? Trump and Clinton voters came out of the woodwork? Maybe a combination of all that?

I can understand going voting-booth-chickenshit in a swing state. It looks like a fair number of voters in safe states like Texas (I got that one right: Texas ain't a-swingin'), there's no excuse.

...and the Flying Fickle Finger Goes to...

• The Republican Party, for letting the troglodyte wing take over.
• The Koch Brothers and every other financier with unlimited funds, for bankrolling the troglodytes.
• Republican obstructionists in Congress who have made it abundantly clear that they would refuse to cooperate with that Kenyan in the White House, even after he reached out to you, including rejecting his proposed legislation that was based on your own.
• Millions of Evangelical (alleged) Christians, for their willingness to trust a moral cesspool with the leadership of the most powerful nation on the planet.
• The Media Industrial Complex, for its Complete Coverage of every time that moral cesspool opened his mouth in public, imparting historical significance to his every scratch and yawn, and serving as a gatekeeper on the Democrat side while sweeping clean Hillary Clinton's path to the nomination.
• Late addition: I forgot to include the pollsters for getting it so fucking wrong. The usually spot-on Public Policy Polling had Clinton ahead by 5 points in Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia last Friday. They nailed Virginia, but Michigan...sadly, nope. I fell victim to a certain poll-watching compulsion beginning in June, when Quinnipiac and others started including Jill Stein in the polling questions. It showed that the Green Party had arrived in the national consciousness, in the year of horrendously unpopular presumptive nominees from the major parties. Polling organization will absolutely have to adjust their methodologies to include more regular working-class folks.

The 2016 Grand Prize for Advanced Electoral Fuckery
The Democratic Party wins this trophy in a landslide. No, #NotAllDemocrats, but the establishment, the machinery, the billionaires and the local Dem apparatchiks who greased the skids for Clinton.

PDiddie & Gadfly already said nearly everything I might say about the Democratic fumble—itself an echo of 2000—along with pull-quotes from Thomas Frank. But I can add this:

As I have stated emphatically and repeatedly, five million Americans who voted went Libertarian or Green did so for actual reasons, not just for hipster-cred. We are voting against the Evil Transnational Corporate Empire that keeps both major parties major and keeps the bombs falling on Pakistani weddings. When it's appropriate, or when avenues of civil protest are closed to us, we do more than vote: We take our politics to the street and throw ourselves on the gears of the machine. Apart from the 80 million registered voters who did not vote at all, we five million said "You don't own our vote" in a way that actually means something.

Nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Fewer than 60 million voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday. A portion of those 6 million missing votes went toward Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, but many more went to Donald Trump. (I'll link to the source when I can find it again.) If this election was a referendum on how well our Democratic president has guided the ship of state, fancy MSNBC graphs & statistics be damned, a lot of the white, working-class Democratic base just gave the Dems a big heave-ho. These people perceive, rightly or not, that the Democratic establishment has given up on them, so they have now given up on the Democratic Party. The only progressive alternative left for them was the Jewish doctor and the black philosopher running with the party that never wins.

Of course, the Democratic Party cannot just dump its billionaire benefactors, from whom it gets its life-blood campaign funding, right? Well, it could take a cue from Senator Bernard Sanders, start appealing to regular working stiffs, and become once again the Party of the People.

Now that the voting is over, Democrats, show me what democracy looks like. Organize like a motherfucker. Assuming some Republican Electors don't flip their votes between now and 19 December and change the outcome, the time to defeat Trump is not in 2020, and it's not just by voting. Do unto the Donald as the Republicans have done unto you, and start defeating him now.

This week, somebody on one of the Green Party Facebook pages posted a link to this little item (content warning: Language) from Yale University's not-as-famous-as-the-Harvard-Lampoon satire magazine. It is worth a giggle or two. However, I disagree with "James fucking Madison" regarding the utility of the Electoral College. Unfortunately, the real James Madison was too busy protecting the Republic from the excesses of the majority to see the wisdom of the Ranked Choice or Approval Voting methods.

In his time, Madison had no reason to fear that the majority of the population would pick some raving yahoo to be president. It was left to the several States to determine who was allowed to vote, and they mostly limited the franchise to white male property-owning US citizens 21 or older. As it was, the white landed gentry chose plenty of racists, misogynists, xenophobes, and Indian-killers to be their leaders and representatives.

Speaking of raving yahoos, the NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released yesterday contains some a few interesting questions regarding "Pussygate."

Sorry the print is so tiny. [Insert clever joke about Donald Trump's fingers here.] To sum it up, only 3% of the likely voters polls are now more likely to support Trump following the release of the 2005 conversation with Billy Bush; 39% are less likely, and 56% say it makes no difference (as it would in my case, since the chance of my supporting Trump was already zero).

As to whether Trump should drop out of the race because of his comments, 39% said Yes, 59% said No. This question has more nuance than you would think: You can't just drop out of the race when millions have voted for you, your name is already on all the states' ballots, and early voting has already begun in some states.

So I wouldn't mind seeing Trump drop off the face of the earth, but I would answer that question No, I don't think he should drop out of the race. For the moment, I will enjoy the Schadenfreude of watching Republicans squirming with buyer's remorse—especially Ted Cruz, who, just two weeks before, very reluctantly drank the red Kool-Aid and endorsed Trump. Maybe after the election I will begin to feel sorry for them for being so thoroughly duped.

One of the exasperating aspects of reading poll results is seeing how professional pollsters leave ambiguous questions in their surveys—sometimes intentionally, mostly because they genuinely don't know. It's amazing, and a little disturbing, how a slight change of wording can produce a different result. It would have been more precise to ask if Trump should concede the race. Rep. Paul Ryan has already disinvited Trump and his running mate Gov. Mike Pence from campaign events in Wisconsin. It won't be the last place where influential Republicans will tell Trump and Pence that they are not fucking welcome.

It's at least partly in how you interpret it, of course. It's also partly the smallish sample sizes. But by gum, the Public Policy Polling national survey for August 2016 has Jill Stein rising from 2% in May, June and July to 4%.

The 4% figure complements this week's NBC News/SurveyMonkey results. Stein maintains a 5% standing on NBC/SM, which uses much larger sample sizes and thus attains a smaller margin of error. The two polls differ widely on Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who earns 11% on NBC/SM and a mere 6% on PPP.

"You down with PPP?"

"Yeah, you know me."

I'm trying to imagine an older, not-so-Internet-savvy Texan hearing "Deez Nuts" from the recorded voice of the pollster, and not being able to process those two syllables in any language.

This isn't the only major revelation in the latest Public Policy Polling survey for Texas. First, there is also the question of whether ACORN will steal the election for Hillary Clinton. Fortunately or not, only 24% responded that it will; 39% said no, and 36% were not sure.

In case you weren't sure yourself, ACORN was driven to extinction in 2010.

The numbers in the polls don't mean anything, especially in presidential preference polls. The real picture is likely well outside the margin of error, and the margin of error is already pretty significant when your candidate is polling in single digits.

The numbers in the polls mean everything, especially when the Presidential Debate Commission has set a bar of a 15% average in a specific set of polls in order to participate in televised debates.

The latest NBC/SurveyMonkey poll shows Gary Johnson at 11%, up from 9% two weeks ago, and inching toward that 15% mark (probably not inching fast enough). The same poll shows Jill Stein treading water at 4%, even with millions of potential votes from disaffected Bernie Sanders fans since the Westminster Kennel Cl—er, Democratic Dog & Pony Show in Philadelphia.

With Stein's NBC/SM numbers unchanged, her Real Clear Politics average remains at 3.0%; Johnson moves up to 8.5%.

I had expected Stein to receive a bigger bounce from the Democratic Con at the end of July than from the following week's "The Revolution Might Be on C-SPAN" Green Convention. After all, the Sanders delegates' walkout made for a pretty big news story and comic fodder for Samantha Bee. Neither convention really provided Jill much of a boost.

None of the polls that RCP tracks have Stein above the 5% threshold nationally, the minimum for locking in matching funds for the Greens' next nominee. Optimistic Greens and other #JillNotHill partisans might add the 1.2% margin of error to the NBC/SM figure to put her at 5.2%. It's not empty optimism when you look at the poll's methodology, including the demographic breakdown and the overabundance of land lines contacted.

At least the Stein/Baraka campaign can point to more victories on the ballot access front: As of this week, Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka are fairly well assured of having their names on ballots in 30 states, with more than 70% of the population. There are still more states in play. Stay tuned, as the clické goes.

Even with the news of Bernie Sanders endorsing Hillary Clinton's candidacy, and the resulting stampede of Sanders's supporters toward Jill Stein and the Greens, the latest NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll shows Stein still hovering in the vicinity of 5% nationwide.

Any bets as to whether that number increases substantially, and how much, in the next few weeks?

The NBC/SM poll is notable for having a considerably larger sample size, and thus a smaller margin of error, than most of the academic polls like Quinnipiac and Monmouth. That sample does skew affluent and white, since, per conventional wisdom, actual voting does as well. About 8% of the respondents identified as "Black," and about the same as "Hispanic/Latino," whereas both of these ethnicities compose nearly twice that percentage of the total US population.

As we have noted previously:

• Five percent nationwide will be enough to qualify the Green or Libertarian Party for federal funds for 2020.
• Five percent statewide is sufficient to guarantee a minor party a ballot line in Texas for the next even-year election.

Sadly, these wankers at UT neglected to include "The Green Jill Stein" in their presidential preference questions. So we in Texas may have to wait to find out whether Stein is even close to 5% here. The good news is that the "Someone Else" column is at 14%, about twice the number for "The Libertarian Gary Johnson."

Mystery & intrigue, y'all. Could Dr. Stein be that "someone else" for, say, 7% of the voters?

What do you think? Does this question outdo PPP's question from a previous poll about whether Donald Trump or the Phillie Phanatic is more qualified to be US president?
​
Complete Public Policy Polling results from 29 June can be found here.

Addendum: I should give credit to MSNBC and The Rachel Maddow Show for breaking this story last night and alerting me to it today.

The Quinnipiackers actually call it the Swing State Poll, and it's a poll of the three most populous swing states: Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

This week's presidential numbers for a four-way race in those three states:

• Florida - Clinton tops Trump 42 - 36 percent, with 7 percent for Libertarian Gary Johnson and 3 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein;
• Ohio - Clinton at 38 percent, with Trump at 36 percent, Johnson at 8 percent and Stein at 3 percent; 
• Pennsylvania - Clinton at 39 percent to Trump's 36 percent, with 9 percent for Johnson and 4 percent for Stein.

Check out all the minute details here. Huzzah, Pennsylvania: 13% all ready to vote for minor-party candidates! Of course, about 12% of Keystoners either haven't made up their minds or prefer not to answer the question.