Nov.01

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Feliz Dia de los Muertos!

For those who celebrate today's (and tomorrow's) holiday, we hope your celebrations go well. And yes, we know it's really "¡Feliz Día de los Muertos!" but that coding creates some issues in the headlines.

For everyone, including those who do not celebrate, we are going to use this as an excuse to squeeze one more item out of the Halloween season. And so, we'll start with a holiday-themed "poll" from YouGov. We put "poll" in quotations, because the pollster only released its data to The Washington Post (and not publicly), and the results actually appear to have been produced by drawing information from several polls.

In any event, knowing that Halloween was coming up, YouGov decided to ask people whom they would be most scared to have appear on their doorstep. The results for all respondents were given, and so too were the results for various demographics. Here are the rankings (so, for example, Kim Jong-Un was considered scariest by respondents in general, by men and by independents; second scariest by women; and fourth scariest by Democrats and Republicans):

While we know what is supposedly being measured here, we don't fully grasp what's really being measured. Hard to imagine that a goofy presidential son, regardless of their partisan identification, is even 1/100th as dangerous, scary, etc., as Xi Jinping. After all, Xi is one of the handful of people who has an answer to the question: "Yeah? You and what army?" Also, since the pollster did not release anything publicly, there's no way to know how many options respondents were given. For example, could you vote for "any Canadian, doesn't matter which"? Probably not, unfortunately.

The Internet also did a thriving business in Halloween-related memes yesterday, including plenty of a political bent. We also received a couple of suggestions, from readers J.L. in Los Angeles, CA and J.G. in San Diego, CA. And so, we present the ten best, in our view:

1. This one is evergreen:
   
   
   
   
2. This one makes a similar point:
   
   
   
   
3. We suspect a lot of readers can sympathize, particularly as they think about getting together with relatives at Thanksgiving:
   
   
   
   
4. Today's Republican Party, Part I:
   
   
   
   
5. Today's Republican Party, Part II:
   
   
   
   
6. Today's Republican Party, Part III:
   
   
   
   
7. And some equal opportunity mockery:
   
   
   
   
8. You have to admit, the hair is spot on:
   
   
   
   
9. This one might be a little TOO on the nose:
   
   
   
   
10. And because we've been talking a lot about religion recently, we're going to count this as political. We checked with the judge, and she says she'll allow it:
    
    
    
    

And onward to Thanksgiving! (Z)