Example
NEWS
Arizona corporate records, and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
show that FeedMe was an old moniker that Superfeed abandoned more than a
year before Lake made her disclosure. Why Lake, whose campaign did not
respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Beast, used a
defunct name for the company in the official filing is unclear. The
address Superfeed lists on its website is the same UPS Store which Lake identified in the disclosure as the location of her and her husband’s personal businesses.
". . .In fact, the only flow of money reflected in public records has passed from the mobile app developer to the TV host-turned-politician. In personal financial reports Lake filed with the state earlier this year, she reported receiving compensation for work as a “communication advisor” to FeedMe, Inc. The forms do not specify the amount of the commission, except that it exceeded $1,000. . ."
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"If the pollsters and handicappers end up being spectacularly wrong on Election Night, there’s one group that won’t be too surprised: the pollsters and handicappers themselves.
The 2022 midterms could go exactly as modeled—a 20-some-odd-seat pickup for Republicans in the House and maybe a 51-49 GOP Senate—but the people who watch these races the closest are also warning they might be wrong in decisive ways. In either direction.
No one really knows because, like every election, pollsters are extrapolating their best guess based on a set of assumptions. But unlike previous elections, the assumptions are getting bigger.
According to Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report, the big problem is that “response rates suck.”
“We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” he told The Daily Beast.
“We are, in many respects, stumbling through the dark with headlamps and flashlights.”
— Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report
Wasserman, perhaps the top handicapper of U.S. House races, said everyone was trying different ways to solve for “partisan non-response bias”—essentially a measure of how a poll isn’t representative of the actual population—but that means every pollster was making “a different assumption about who’s going to show up on Nov. 8 that may or may not be accurate.”
Part of the issue is that Republicans seem less and less inclined to answer poll questions. And another part is that pollsters are being less transparent about their methodologies to correct for those types of difficulties.
“We are, in many respects, stumbling through the dark with headlamps and flashlights,” Wasserman said. “And we have a vague understanding of where these races stand, but there are bound to be surprises.”
Nate Silver, the founder and editor in chief of the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, expressed many of the same concerns as Wasserman.
“The quick version is that polling is getting harder because fewer and fewer people answer phone calls from unknown numbers, and among those who do, it’s still a fairly big ask to have them complete a long survey at a time of declining civic trust,” Silver told The Daily Beast. “So those people who do respond are unusual in some respects, in ways that you may or may not be able to correct for—and there may also be the risk of overcorrecting.”
Silver noted that online polls could avoid some of these problems, but they introduce others, “namely that it’s hard to get a truly random sample online the way you can with phone numbers.”
“I don’t think this means that polling is irrevocably broken,” he continued. “But we shouldn’t expect pinpoint accuracy and there is not necessarily a correct, ‘gold standard’ way to conduct polling anymore.”
“Even the numbers nerds like me are approaching polling with a bit more skepticism.”
— Nate Silver, founder and editor in chief of FiveThiryEight
No one really knows if the polls will have systemic problems this year. While 2020 polls undercounted GOP support, the 2018 midterm polls were pretty much dead on. “But I think it’s sunk in more after 2020 that polling may be hard to fix,” Silver said, “and even the numbers nerds like me are approaching polling with a bit more skepticism.”
One of the reasons for that skepticism is partisan polling. A flood of new firms this cycle has raised questions about how handicappers should treat these polls that are conducted by partisan operatives—and what these polls (most of them GOP-affiliated) are doing to polling averages.
Silver addressed some of these questions over the weekend, when he tweeted that he didn’t think the complaint that Republican-leaning pollsters were “flooding the zone” was very convincing. He said his news site adjusted the polls to some extent and that the polling averages were a “free market.” Democrat-leaning pollsters could release polls if they wanted to. “That they don’t says something,” he tweeted.
But many Democrats have expressed frustration that some of these polls are being used for political ends, such as fundraising, voter outreach, and even shaping or manufacturing a narrative. In their minds, these polls aren’t measuring public opinion so much as they’re trying to inform it. That isn’t a new phenomenon, but seasoned observers are noting an uptick this cycle.
Stephen Fowler, a political reporter for Georgia Public Broadcasting and the host of the Battleground Ballot Box podcast, has tracked the trend in Georgia this year.
Fowler told The Daily Beast that voters need to know who is behind a poll and why—that not all “snapshots” of a race are equal, that some polls this year are “not realistic,” and that on the whole, the media and pundits could do a better job filtering the signal from the noise.
“There have been partisan polls released in Georgia that have Republican candidates ahead by 14 points in a state that was decided by 12,000 votes in 2020, which is not realistic,” Fowler said, “while nonpartisan polls essentially have the governor and Senate races as neck-and-neck tossups that will be determined by who shows up more before polls close.”
Part of the problem is human nature. Polls are often an “easy shorthand” that can reinforce preconceived notions of who is winning, Fowler said. But the devil is in the details.
“Plenty of the more recent Senate polls have unrealistic crosstabs that show Republicans having record Black support but cratering preference among white voters—which is not something real-life reporting has borne out in either case,” he observed. “Still, others don’t share many details about how they conducted the poll, who they talked to, and why, making the skepticism meter run even higher.”
Jacob Perry, the co-founder of Center Street PAC and a former Republican campaign manager for six U.S. House races before he turned against former President Donald Trump, noted that his group does online polling, which is much cheaper to conduct but frowned upon by most handicappers because of the self-selection bias.
But Perry said he thinks all polling has flaws. People like to treat polls like an accurate snapshot of a race, he said, “but you have no fucking idea what’s going to happen.”
The thing no one can really predict in any poll, Perry said, is turnout. He noted that, in 2016, pollsters had real difficulty forecasting how Trump’s voters would show up.
“Here’s a guy who breaks all the rules, does everything wrong, tells you to fuck off, does what he wants to do, and it worked for him,” Perry said of Trump.
“All the rules are over,” he added.
Jim Hobart, a partner at the prominent GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, observed a paradox at work—polling is getting both harder and easier.
“The irony of polling now is that, even though polling has gotten much more challenging, the barrier of entry is low. For instance, text message and autodial is pretty cost-effective, so if some new firm is looking to build their name ID and they think it’s gonna be a good night for Republicans, I can see the logic in releasing a bunch of polls that show that,” Hobart said.
Hobart told The Daily Beast that, while polling has gotten more challenging, baked-in partisan polarization has determined a lot of the playing field. He put it like this: Major upsets in college football are rarer than in the NFL. Louisiana-Monroe is extremely unlikely to beat Alabama, but, given the more equal distribution of talent among NFL teams, it’s possible the Jets beat the Bills, as they did on Sunday. The political races drawing most of the attention are ones where the outcome is in play.
Democratic pollster Ethan Winter made a similar point about the limit of how wrong polling could be given what we know about partisan divides among voters. Winter, the lead analyst at Data for Progress, said he was a “glass half-full guy” on the accuracy of polling. He noted that, even with the challenges everyone faced with non-response rates in 2020, Data for Progress predicted the winner in more than 70 percent of close races that year.
“It’s basically a miracle and I think a testament to the sorts of innovations that the polling industry has been able to deploy in a relatively short amount of time,” he said.
Those innovations are a blending of different kinds of polling—live caller, texting people to fill out a survey online, and sending people postcards to convince them to fill out online surveys. And it’s the aggregate averages, as well as the consistency of many of those averages, that gives handicappers some degree of confidence that they’re not completely off. While pollsters have to make some assumptions, they’re not starting from zero. The partisan breakdown among different constituencies determines part of the playing field for any candidate, and history is a helpful guide on what sorts of assumptions are solid.
Pollsters could be off by five points—a huge but theoretically possible miss—but the majority of congressional races will be determined by double digits. Even if pollsters undercount GOP support by five points, a Republican running in a district with a Partisan Voting Index that benefits Democrats by 30 points won’t be turning red.
However, a systemic undercount of one party could mean there are a handful of surprises in close House and Senate races. It happened to some degree in 2016 and 2020, and pollsters are worried it could happen again, in either party’s favor.
On Saturday, The New York Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, sent out his newsletter with the headline “Polling Averages Can Be Useful, but What’s Underneath Has Changed.”
“There has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters,” Cohn wrote. “None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.”
If that sounds like a potential recipe for overstating the GOP’s standing in polls, it could be. But Cohn sent out a different newsletter on Nov. 1. That one was titled “A Worrisome Pattern Re-emerges in Seeking Response From Republicans.”
“In our final wave of Senate and House polls in the last few days, that hallmark of nonresponse bias looks as if it’s back,” Cohn wrote.
“Overall, white registered Democrats were 28 percent likelier to respond to our Senate polls than Republicans—a disparity exceeding that from our pre-election polling in 2020,” he continued. And Cohn’s point is that, if their polling was seeing a big partisan non-response bias, it’s not much of a stretch to think other polls are experiencing that, too.
He concluded it was “entirely possible” polls on the whole wouldn’t have the same problems as two years ago, and that non-response bias was just one factor among many that could cut either way.
But the simple truth is that, no one knows for sure. . ."
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The Daily Beast was unable to reach the fourth and final candidate with Superfeed apps, state legislature hopeful Austin Smith. Smith has attended at least one event with DeWit, and according to his LinkedIn works as an enterprise director for the conservative activist group Turning Point Action.
Superfeed’s Google and Apple stores show it has developed apps for both Turning Point Action and its Phoenix-based parent organization, Turning Point USA. Neither organization replied to requests for comment from The Daily Beast.
Barton left open the possibility that Superfeed had received payment from at least some of these candidates via another vendor, which could have then subcontracted with the mobile app developer. However, no one company has provided services to all four campaigns. The attorney suggested that Arizona’s Clean Elections Commission, which he represented during his time at the state attorney general’s office, could probe the situation and determine whether Superfeed had committed campaign finance violations by providing professional services free of charge.
But there is no way that work will be done by the time the candidates face their opponents on Election Day.
“I think it’s something that they would investigate,” Barton said. “It’s just, it’s going to take a few months.”
The Clean Elections Commission did not answer repeated requests for comment from The Daily Beast.
Looks like Pattern-and-Practice that's for sure ". . .Despite the battles, Palmer is forging ahead with plans to expand his empire. He's building new projects in L.A., Ventura and San Diego, as well as “aggressively targeting opportunities to develop and/or buy" apartment complexes with 200 units or more in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
“I enjoy what I’m doing,” Palmer said in 2015. “If somebody asked me, “What’s your favorite deal?” I’d say it’s the next one I’m doing.”
Geoffrey Palmer has been called the “worst developer” in Los Angeles and a real estate “villain.” He prefers to call himself a “true visionary.”
One title not up for debate: billionaire. Since completing his first apartment complex in Santa Clarita in 1985, Palmer, 72, has built up a portfolio of nearly 13,000 apartments throughout southern California, including faux-Italian luxury “fortresses” in downtown L.A. Those properties are now worth an estimated $3 billion, boosted by a 17% increase in rents in L.A. from pre-pandemic levels and a more than 75% rise since 2010.
✓ He’s made those riches by developing properties in historically low-income neighborhoods and installing high-end apartments that price out local residents. He’s done it by unabashedly fighting local government for years. He’s done it ruthlessly, bragging about how he’s in the real estate business to avoid taxes.
✓ And, most recently, he’s done it by spending $31.5 million in the past six years on ballot measures and politicians—particularly Donald Trump—that will keep his juggernaut going, no matter who he drives out.
Palmer has more than enough money to keep funding politicians and financing lawsuits. Between his real estate firm, G.H. Palmer Associates, a private jet and nine homes—in upscale locales like Aspen, Beverly Hills, Malibu and Saint-Tropez—Forbes estimates Palmer is worth $3.2 billion, even after factoring in debt. Palmer did not respond to Forbes’ requests for an interview for this story but a representative for Palmer told Forbes he had no comment on the valuation.
✓ Much of his fortune comes from Palmer’s so-called “Renaissance Collection” of high-end, Italian-style buildings. Before redistricting last year, eight of Palmer’s nine downtown Los Angeles developments were located in California’s 34th congressional district, where 23% of people live below the poverty line, double the nationwide average. That puts his properties out of reach for many local residents. Rents at his Piero complex—two blocks from the 110 freeway and a one mile walk from Skid Row, home to more than 4,000 unhoused people—range from $2,266 a month for a studio to $4,068 for a two-bedroom apartment.
Not surprisingly, he has quite a few critics. “You have these luxury apartments [with] fairly rich people overlooking homeless encampments," says Susie Shannon, policy director at Los Angeles-based nonprofit Housing is a Human Right.
Palmer built his Da Vinci Apartments (pictured in 2014 when still under construction) next to a homeless encampment in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
"Palmer has been involved in a lot of unhelpful [and] destructive behavior in terms of solving Los Angeles' housing crisis,” says Cynthia Strathmann, executive director of the economic justice nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE.) "But he's been here for so long and people are so used to him doing unhelpful and unpleasant things that it's no longer a surprise."
[. ]
Palmer’s first salvo against local real estate regulations came in 1987. In a bid to oppose the incorporation of the city of Santa Clarita—which would have slowed down his plans to build 1,452 condos—he allegedly routed $7,000 in political donations to an anti-incorporation committee through seven of his company’s employees and one employee’s mother. The incorporation measure passed, and the new Santa Clarita city council shot down his proposals in 1990. Two years later, the California Fair Political Practices Commission charged him with 15 counts of illegally laundering campaign contributions and fined him $30,000. (Palmer did not respond to a request for comment from Forbes about the charges.)
At that same time, Palmer was building in Los Angeles and completed
his first project there in 1988. He sued the city for the first time in
2001 over its affordable housing requirements, arguing they violated a
1995 law allowing landlords to set rent levels. He eventually settled
for $2.8 million, which allowed him to build his Visconti project with
only market-rate units. . .
✓ He sued the city of Los Angeles once again in 2007 over its policy mandating 15% of rental units to be priced for low-income residents. This time an appellate court ruled in Palmer’s favor in a case that had far-reaching consequences. In what has come to be known as the “Palmer” case, in 2009 the court determined that the mandatory housing policy violated a 1995 state law, a decision that effectively prohibited local governments from requiring owners to offer units at lower rents.
"[Palmer] was directly responsible for the city not being able to mandate affordable housing in a city that had growing homelessness and people who just couldn’t afford to live [there] anymore," says Shannon of Housing is a Human Right.
. . .
For his part, Palmer claims to have almost single-handedly revitalized a once-derelict neighborhood. “Everybody was trying to create downtown as a ghetto, and it was my concept to re-gentrify it,” Palmer said in a rare 2015 interview with trade publication The Planning Report. “We’ve created prosperous areas out of what were formerly blighted and decayed areas. If you remember what LA looked like [in 2000] downtown, it looked like Sarajevo—just bombed out.”
That comparison is far from the truth: Many of L.A.'s tallest buildings in the downtown financial district were built in the 1980s and 1990s. Still, Palmer’s first developments in the area came at a time when downtown was becoming a more attractive destination, with the opening of the Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena, where the L.A. Lakers and L.A. Clippers play) in 1999 and the L.A. Live entertainment complex in 2008.
“When he first started building in the downtown area, there wasn't much else other than a couple of older high-rises that you could rent,” says Greg Wasik, president of real estate appraisal firm Los Angeles Valuation Group. “He's definitely made an impact in proving the viability of downtown L.A. as a 24-hour city, being the first one to go in there more than 20 years ago.”
Palmer’s aggressive moves don’t always pay off. In 2019, he was sued in a class-action lawsuit by tenants from several of his buildings who alleged he had kept millions of dollars in rental security deposits. Last June, Palmer agreed to a proposed $12.5 million settlement with more than 19,000 tenants.
Palmer shares not only a love for gaudy architecture with former President Trump but also a disdain for taxes. In his 2015 interview with The Planning Report, Palmer said he’s in the real estate business for a simple reason: “Quite simply, I don’t like paying taxes!” He also claimed that “through the magic of depreciation,” his firm hadn’t paid federal taxes for 30 years—another parallel to Trump, who once said he “loves depreciation.”
. . . In the meantime, Palmer has continued filing—and defending against—lawsuits. In August 2021, he sued the city of Los Angeles over its pandemic eviction moratorium, seeking more than $100 million in compensation for missed rent payments. Several community groups joined the case on the side of the city in October 2021. The case has been on hold for several months while the defendants wait on a decision from the judge on their motion to dismiss Palmer’s case, according to Faizah Malik, a senior staff attorney at Public Counsel, who represents the community groups.
Palmer’s attorneys in the case did not respond to a request for comment..."
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Welcome to the Infinite Conversation:
an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon.
NOTE Its creator positions the site as social commentary on audio deepfakes and upcoming technologies that may undermine trust in media in the near future. "This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice," Miceli writes on the site. "Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom."
"This week, an Italian artist and programmer named Giacomo Miceli debuted The Infinite Conversation website, an AI-powered nonstop chat between artificial versions of German director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, complete with realistic voices.
Upon visiting the site—which is unaffiliated with either person—you'll see AI-generated charcoal portraits of the two men in profile. Between them, a transcript of AI-generated text is highlighted in yellow as AI-generated voices simulating those of Herzog or Žižek read through it. The conversation goes back and forth between them, complete with distinct accents, and you can skip between each segment by clicking the arrows beneath the portraits.
Its creator positions the site as social commentary on audio deepfakes and upcoming technologies that may undermine trust in media in the near future. "This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice," Miceli writes on the site. "Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom."
Herzog and Žižek seem like particularly ripe targets for AI impersonation because listeners might be predisposed to believe that the philosophical director and philosopher might say deep-sounding things that are difficult to understand. As a result, when the GPT-3-style large language model behind The Infinite Conversation spits out philosophical nonsense, it almost sounds like the real thing. Here's an example of something the faux Herzog said on the site:
In a way, Freud also has something to do with literature.
He was, after all, a writer.
Yes, he was a scientist, he wanted to
be a scientist, but he was also a writer
who wrote these strange stories.
There's something that seems at odds with each other in Freud.
On the one hand, he had such a
strong anthropological vision, which I find very attractive
on the other hand, he was limited in his understanding of cultural history.
He was very antiquarian, for him antiquity was
the most important epoch because it clearly revealed drives
whereas the Middle Ages were just nasty.
Only towards the end of his life did
he see anything good in the Middle Ages.
The dialog apparently goes on forever. "When you open this website, you are taken to a random point in the dialogue," writes Miceli. "Every day a new segment of the conversation is added. New segments can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time."
Miceli reportedly created the site using "open source tools available to anyone," declining to give technical details, although he wrote on Hacker News that he might create an explanatory write-up within the next week. "The generation of the script itself is done using a popular language model that was fine-tuned on interviews and content authored by each of the two speakers," he writes in the site's FAQ.
On Ars, we've previously covered technology that can manipulate your voice using AI or even allow someone to audibly impersonate someone else. And in October, we saw a podcast that featured similar voice synthesis technology to power a fake interview between Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan.
Few may doubt that we are on the vanguard of a new age in synthetic media, but when the machines speak, will they make sense? On The Infinite Conversation, that is not quite the case—yet. "Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine," writes Miceli. "The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Results will take a while
"Though Election Day is just days away, it may take Americans up to a month to know which party will be in control of the United States Congress,
All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for grabs on Tuesday, as are 35 U.S. Senate seats and 36 governorships.
Republicans would need to pick up five seats to take a majority in the House and just one to control the Senate. Nonpartisan election forecasters and polls suggest Republicans have a very strong chance of winning a House majority, with control of the Senate likely to be closer fought as voters say they are most concerned about the economy.
A massive wave of Republican support could lead to declarations of victory hours after polls close.
But with dozens of races expected to be close and key states like Pennsylvania already warning it could take days to count every ballot, experts say there's a good chance Americans go to bed on election night without knowing who won.
'When it comes to knowing the results, we should move away from talking about Election Day and think instead about election week,' said Nathan Gonzales, who publishes the nonpartisan newsletter Inside Elections. . .
The earliest vote tallies will be skewed by how quickly states count mail-in ballots.
Because Democrats vote by mail more often than Republicans, states that let officials get an early jump on counting mail ballots could report big Democratic leads early on that evaporate as vote counters work through piles of Republican-leaning ballots that were cast on election day.
In these 'blue mirage' states — like Florida and North Carolina — election officials are allowed to remove mail ballots from their envelopes before Election Day and load them in vote counting machines, allowing for speedy counting.
But states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don't allow officials to open the envelopes until Election Day, leading to a possible 'red mirage' in which Republican-leaning Election Day ballots are reported earlier, with many Democratic-leaning mail ballots counted later.
Experts like Joe Lenski, co-founder of Edison Research, which will be tracking hundreds of races on November 8 said he will keep an eye on the mix of different types of ballots each state is counting throughout the night.
'Blue mirage, red mirage, whatever. You just have to look at what types of votes are getting reported to know where you are in that state,' said Lenski.
. . .
The first wave of vote tallies are expected on the East Coast between 7pm and 8pm ET. An early indication of Republican success could come if the races expected to be close — like Virginia's 7th congressional district (where Republican Liz Cheney has put her support behind a Democratic candidate) or a contentious U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina — turn out to be Democratic routs.
By around 10pm or 11pm EST, when polls in the Midwest will be closed for an hour or more, it's possible Republicans will have enough momentum for experts at U.S. media organizations to project control of the House, said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
If the fight for the House still looks close as vote tallies start coming in from the West Coast — where there could be more than a dozen tight House races — it could be days before control of the chamber is known, experts said.
California typically takes weeks to count all its ballots, in part because it counts ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive days afterward. Nevada and Washington state also allow late ballots if postmarked by November 8, slowing down the march to final results.
'If the House is really on the edge, that would matter,' said Kondik.
It may take longer, perhaps weeks longer, to know which party will control the Senate, with close contests in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia likely to determine final control.
And iIf Georgia's Senate race is as close as expected and no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a run-off election would be scheduled for December 6, possibly leaving control of the chamber in limbo until then.
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