This above photo was taken in April when things were pretty grim and quiet in New York. Obviously things are a little grim in the long-term financial projection sense in New York, but comparatively, it was a very lively summer with nice weather and lots of people outdoors and eating!
Fewer links this week because of work!
Links
This piece on how to properly ventilate your home is entertaining!
In terms of nice things to look at: Love a before & after, as previously stated, especially one that’s creative within some constraints, like this surface update to a kitchen.
Eater’s New York coverage I hadn’t really read before the pandemic, but it’s really great; they have a lot of like high-level news coverage of restaurant/small business issues, and a lot of fun stuff around where to eat. Anyway, like most places have done, NYC’s going back to indoor dining at 25% capacity soon, and they asked a ton of owners/trade groups/labor groups for their takes, which are pretty interesting for the variety.
If you like Phoebe Bridgers, she did an NPR performance that’s great.
This is pretty interesting about how to manage the expected heightened demand in in-person voting, and all the little problems jurisdictions might face.
Obviously on YouTube, you see those six-second snippets of advertising that run before whatever video you’re watching. Max Rose (a Democrat who represents Staten Island) has truly mastered the art form here. The Rembrandt of YouTube pre-roll.
There are — suddenly! — a lot of polls out. Like, literally this morning, NYT and Siena put out a poll of Minnesota, Nevada, and a few others, finding that Biden’s up there but not astronomically. Why did they poll those two states? Presumably because the Trump campaign’s targeting those two in hopes of offsetting potentially losing Michigan, as the Times reported last week (that story is pretty interesting in terms of what both campaigns agree on).
A note on polling from a non-expert (don’t even know what a regression is!): It can be tough to take polls from 2016 and 2018 and compare them to now, for various reasons. Four years ago, a lot of polling did not weight white voters by whether they have a college degree, and therefore over-estimated Clinton’s performance by including too many college-degree holders in samples; on the other hand, some experts on this speculate that regional differences matter a lot too; on the third hand, this is the kind of boring stuff you can go crazy trying to figure out. (Some polling has changed course on the white voter thing, though.) In 2018, meanwhile, some polling underestimated Democrats in states like Arizona, but overestimated their final numbers in the Midwest and Florida, the latter of which concerns some Democrats quite a bit, because Biden’s been generally polling ahead there. Ultimately, Pennsylvania and Florida are just much bigger states in the Electoral College than, say, Nevada and Wisconsin.
One kind of process thing I’m interested in the next few weeks is how much TV advertising bolsters Biden’s (in some places apparently tightening) lead, or whether that doesn’t matter. In August, his campaign set up a $280 million ad reservation that started Sept. 1, with $220 million of that set for TV in battleground states. (If you have the fortune of not living in a battleground state, here are some of the kinds of ads they’re running.) There were a ton of polls in the field just before those ad buys started, so it might be interesting to see those as a bit of a control; the Trump campaign seems to be saying they’ll be advertising way more digitally, and they’re also running a field organizing program (like people knocking on your door and such), which the Biden campaign has thus far not done for COVID-related reasons. The Trump campaign also raised a ton of money in August (more than $200 million) but not that eye-melting $365 million Biden number.
Does any of this stuff ever matter, unless it’s an extremely close race? It’s hard to know for certain, since it’s not like you’ll ever get to run the same race again in the same time period with exactly the same conditions. And this is the kind of process-oriented stuff that isn’t about the prevailing issues of the day. But races can come down to, you know, 10,000 people in Central Florida or suburban Philadelphia, and we do have these massive campaign structures every four years, so it’s always a point of interest.
A note on all this
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