stevenkesslar

The real reason we have an Electoral College: to protect slave states “In a direct election system, the South would have lost every time.” If the goal is to dump the Electoral College, this analysis makes it both easier, and harder, I think. It makes it harder because Republicans are for the Electoral College. For the obvious reason that it delivered them a minority President twice in a century. "Minority" in this case meaning someone who lost the popular vote by hundreds of thousands to millions of votes. It matters to me that the Presidents who got elected this way did particularly harmful and divisive things to the nation, compared to most other Presidents. And that the public ultimately rejected what they did. W. gave us Iraq, The Great Recession, and the loss of 5 million manufacturing jobs on his watch. 2008 was a massive repudiation of his leadership. Those lost manufacturing jobs are a great explanation of the pain and resentment that led to Trumpism. The verdict is out on President Toxic. But nobody feels 2020 is a great year. Then add that this whole racist edifice of the Electoral College is built on enslaving Blacks. Republicans just don't want to hear it. That's been my experience for a very long time. Meanwhile, if this is one of the points in American history where we're going to be open-minded about the legacy of slavery, as well as related issues about democracy and racial equality and income inequality that disproportionately hurts Blacks, this is a perfect time to have the discussion. As a practical matter, I doubt there is any hope of dumping the Electoral College until there is a solid Democratic majority, anyway. Republicans will make the point that there are lots of good things about the Electoral College. It protects minority rights (except for Blacks, of course) and small states. As does the US Senate, by the way. That was by design as well. If the Electoral College were history, the idea that small states have an outsized voice through the US Senate is still built in to the system. The argument that makes the most sense to me is that if we want to call ourselves a democracy, the person who wins by millions of votes should win the Presidency. Period. I think we are living in something like The New Civil War. It is not as deadly as the last one. But there is a lot of violence. And, like in the 19th century, there is a deepening reality of irreconcilable differences. The practical comparison that cuts for me is that in both civil wars there was a group who wanted to hold on tight to things that needed to go ............. and did actually go. In the 19th century, that was slavery. What needs to go now is everything that President Toxic is putting a face on. Biden has now used the word "toxic" to describe Trump. No one supports slavery anymore. But to me "Make America Great Again" has always been a way of putting a nice face on what has always been the toxic part of America. The part that gave us slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism. I don't think there is any simple or quick solution to this problem. Every follower of President Toxic is hoping that he gets four more years by winning a few states based on the "cultural anxiety" or racism or whatever you want to call it of a relatively small group of Americans. Who are primarily old, White, and male. If President Toxic loses by millions of votes again, they don't give a shit. And yet they want to argue that they are the true voices of democracy. What bullshit. They just want to hold on to power, and America as they know it. And any means justifies that end. I feel like they are shoving their racism and hate and inability to move forward down my throat. It doesn't matter that I'm in a majority that actually won in 2016. They just want to shove their racism down my throat and say, "This is the America we want. Shut the fuck up and deal with it." If you buy the idea that there is a New Civil War, I don't think I declared it. I don't think Barack Obama declared it. I think they declared it, and found their perfect leader in President Toxic. Although I know for a fact, based on the words coming out of their mouths, that they feel that Obama declared it ............. by being a Black man who, in their view, soiled their beautiful Constitution. You know, all that stuff that men who were 100 % men and 100 % White came up with centuries ago. In part to explicitly support slavery. Even the 100 % White 100 % men who were against slavery knew they had to somehow manage the deep political conflict slavery caused. That's a big part of the reason why we have an Electoral College. That's why they will fight to the death - in some cases, literally, given COVID-19 - for President Toxic and what he stands for. They know the economy is in bad shape. They know he was wrong when he said that the virus would miraculously go away. They know that we're much worse off than just about every other country on the planet. They know 1000 people are dying a day. But in the bigger picture, they also know that he is fighting for the America they believe in. I'll post it again here. This is their America: Freeze frame a few of the images. The face of the criminal mob is a dark-skinned Muslim woman. Can you believe, these criminal mob people actually got her elected to the US House? What the fuck happened to America? The face of order and jobs is 100 % White 100 % men, in the image where you see the word "jobs". That's just a coincidence, right? It doesn't mean anything, right? My read is this is why Never Trump Republicans like Stewart Stevens and Rick Wilson bailed on the conservative party they helped build. That tweet is not the America they planned on. Or the America they want. Part of the reason I think this is a New Civil War is guys like that, hardly radicals, are saying it's worth burning their ex-party down to the ground for. That's pretty strong stuff. I'm not 100 % sure I buy Nate Silver's analysis. He's good at projecting past trends into the future. But trends change. Lichtman has been more accurate, I think, because he focuses on historical forces that are far more stable - like the economy. As opposed to poll numbers or even election results from any particular election. This is a great article from Ron Brownstein that goes to the heart of this. He's one of my favorite journalists. He's a data whore, like me. And he is better than most at using data in the service of trying to figure out what's really going on below the surface. He wrote this a few days before the election in 2016. For anyone who says the polls were wrong, and no one saw it coming, read this. He even specifically names Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as the "loosest bricks in the blue wall." His key point relative to this discussion is that Team Hillary was "betting that the surest path to victory is to fight mostly on terrain that Clinton can win without". Oops! It must have been in some other article he wrote before the election, but there was a poignant image I recall him using of how he thought Hillary could lose. The idea was that she could be crushed in a very narrow passage between the future of the Democratic Party, and its past. That's exactly what I think happened. Arizona and Georgia and even swing state Florida were a bridge too far. Meanwhile, those bricks in the Rust Belt were just loose enough to bring The Blue Wall down. Lichtman would argue that Republicans were poised to win in 2016, anyway, based on the fundamentals. So I tend to view it as a victory that President Toxic almost fucked up. Not that he's some political genius. Part of the reason I think President Toxic almost fucked 2016 up for Republicans is that there have not been many Republican victories since. Larry Sabato helpfully lists close House races that have incumbents who are the opposite party of who won the Presidential vote in 2016. So there are 6 close races with Republican incumbents in districts that voted for Hillary in 2016. There are 30 close races with Democratic incumbents in districts that voted for President Toxic in 2016. Most were new pick ups in 2018, like Lucy McBath in suburban Atlanta and Lauren Underwood in suburban Chicago. The graceful way to remember Hillary is how we remember MLK. He pointed us to the mountaintop, even though he never got there himself. Hillary pointed us to the future Democratic Party she will never lead. Some of which actually arrived in 2018. It is possible that 2020 will be the opposite of 2016, where pretty much every close call broke wrong for Democrats. Sinema won Arizona in 2018, and Biden and Kelly are way ahead in the polls in 2020. Meanwhile, moderate pundits like Morning Joe are saying that right now Pennsylvania looks like the wobbliest of the three loose bricks in the old Blue Wall Biden is trying to rebuild. I suspect there is a tug of war between Black Lives Matter types and those older factory workers, or ex-factory workers, who just don't like what the Democrats are saying. It's possible that Biden could lose Pennsylvania and win Arizona and Florida, and be President. Or, it's looking quite possible that "Scranton Joe" could patch up the Blue Wall, at least with him on the ticket in 2020, and be the one that anchors Arizona and North Carolina and maybe Georgia into the new Democratic majority. When Jeff Flake came out for Biden, he said if Republicans do nothing Democrats are poised to win Texas by 2024. Flake is not a flake. Something very similar to this happened in 2016 and 2018. In 2016 Republicans got 49.1 % of the House vote, and Democrats got 48.0 %. Yet Republicans got 241 seats to the Democrats' 191 seats. There was a logical argument that Democrats would need to have a 3 or 4 or even 5 % margin of victory just to get a one vote House majority. In 2018, Democrats won 53.4 % of all House votes cast. They ended up with 235 seats, which is 54.0 % of the total. Part of the reason why is that Republicans used gerrymandering to create "safe" Republicans seats in suburbs that were not viewed as Democratic prospects around 2010. But because they were suburban, they were not as safe as conservative rural areas where Republicans usually win in landslides. So the same thing that happened with the House in 2018 could happen on the Senate side. Arizona and Georgia, once fairly safe Republican strongholds, could tip. Discussions about the Electoral College will be even more divisive than where we are at now. They won't go anywhere anytime soon. Not until there is a solid Democratic majority. Which will be accused of being ................wait for it .......................................un-democratic. So I think we all need to ask our conscience this question. Is it un-democratic to say Hillary should be President because she actually won by millions of votes? Who is being un-democratic now? There's another thing Republicans need to forced to own up to, I think. I'm very used to the dogma that says that I don't own slaves, my parents didn't own slaves, and my grandparents didn't own slaves. So what the fuck does all this slavery bullshit have to do with me? Get over it. If some Black guy got shot in the back, it's because he's a thug. They sexually assault women and deal drugs. What did they expect? This has nothing to do with slavery. The argument usually goes something like that. Black conservative ex-cops support this analysis. If we want to get rid of the Electoral College, my own view is that we'll have to force Republicans to face facts. It exists because lots of White men wanted to own lots of Black men and women. If Black men and women didn't agree, they were brutally tortured and murdered. So, sorry. Republicans can't divorce the Electoral College from the fact that the whole idea was to own, torture, and brutally murder Blacks. That is what the Electoral College is. That is what the Electoral College actually did for a big chunk of US history. It's easier to argue that Blacks like Jacob Blake are just today's Willie Horton ............. a thug. But it's harder to sell the argument that these Black thugs and Muslim radicals are actually electing Marxists and radicals like Rep. Omar and soon-to-be Rep. Cori Bush to the US House. Who's being un-democratic now? I don't think it's a coincidence that all this is happening when the Electoral College, not the popular vote, was kind enough to hand us a racist and hateful man like President Toxic. The Electoral College is still doing what it is there for. It may not be slavery. But I believe it's still dishing out the vicious torture and murder of Blacks. It's still undermining democracy with a small "d". In conversations with Republicans, I have tried to take another approach. I'd actually quote the statements of the Founding Fathers, like from the article above. Some of them did clearly state that they put the Electoral College in place to support slavery. In theory, conservative Constitutionalists who think Obama pissed all over the Constitution should at least be willing to listen to the words written by The Founding Fathers. But they won't. It may be hypocrisy. But the easiest way to think of it, for me, is that any means justifies their end. They want to hold on to power, and their America. So arguing about what The Founding Fathers said or meant is useless. I think what we need to focus on is the hate and lies and racism their leader is spouting today. Including the defense of torturing and killing Black men like Jacob Blake and George Floyd. You can of course argue these men were no saints. But neither was the White vigilante who took out peaceful protesters. President Toxic says the White kid "probably would have been killed" if he didn't defend himself. After all, as Morning Joe pointed out, some of those protesters were armed with skateboards. Again, I think they'll use any means necessary to justify their end. Including White vigilantes who love weapons of war and are good with killing people who believe in their right to protest. If the MAGA conservatives are good with vigilantes using assault rifles to kill protesters, I very much doubt they will be open to compromise on the Electoral College. Any more than the South was open to compromise on slavery. That's not quite true, because the Electoral College actually was THE compromise on slavery. But what I mean is that it did allow The South to hold on to power, and their slaves. Just like today it's helping MAGA conservatives hold on to power, President Toxic, and an America where systemic racism is alive and well. We are just going to have to take power. And to win this debate, after we take power, we are going to have to be very clear about what The Electoral College was built for. And what it has actually done through US history. We'll especially have to be clear about the election of President Toxic, and the racism and hate and division he has promoted and thrived on. I was going to post this YouTube video on another thread. But I think I'll post it here as an afterthought. If only to avoid starting yet another long-winded post. I stumbled on that yesterday when I was wandering around YouTube. It's about 6 1/2 hours of live election coverage from 1980. I scanned through maybe 30 minutes of it. Partly it was fun to see what the computers and clothes looked like back then. And to see a young Chris Wallace (covering Reagan) and a young Judy Woodruff (covering Carter). I was going to post this on the prediction thread. The interesting point is that people didn't know history was happening, even in the moment it was happening. Pat Caddell, Carter's pollster, always thought it was the last minute turn in hostage negotiations. Even Reagan, in his victory speech, said he thought it would be a "cliffhanger". George H.W. Bush said he was surprised, because he thought it would be close. In the last minutes before sign off, Garrick Utley announced that the Republicans won surprise Senate victories in New York and Florida. No one saw that coming. The Democrats had a 9 seat Senate majority before the election. The Republicans had a 3 seat majority after. At one point, David Brinkley said this wasn't a complete surprise, because Reagan had a huge lead in the polls after the convention that year. But while many of the polls showed Reagan leading, none called the margin. And there was none of the "wisdom" around why things were shaping up that way. It's quaint that someone as smart as Brinkley would use the words "wisdom" and "polls" in the same sentence. The only person I heard that had a sense of the historical bigger picture was - this ain't a shocker - historian Teddy White. (At about 42:00 in the video.) He was interviewed early in the coverage, before any of the Senate surprises were called. So he said it's a bit too early to say. But some elections are the end of an era, when a big historical wave comes in. Most elections are just ripples. He cited 1932, and 1964. And maybe 1980. He of course turned out to be right. 1980 was the end of an era, and the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. Lichtman is a sort of Teddy White. His critics might say he is Teddy White revisited as a snake oil salesman. He is not calling for revolutionary change in 2020. He's saying the election will be close. And that while President Toxic should lose, voter suppression and Russian interference could change the outcome. I was going to post this in the Lichtman thread. But it fits here, I think. If we're going to dump the Electoral College, it would take something like the Reagan Revolution. And I don't mean one dramatic election, necessarily. From the vantage point of history, we know that what happened in 1980 foreshadowed what happened in 1984. The even bigger landslide in 1984 confirmed that the Minnesota liberalism of Humphrey and Mondale was, in fact, history. That's still playing out. If President Toxic does win Minnesota, it will be because of those blue collar Iron Rangers who once voted for Paul Wellstone, but now vote for President Toxic. What the polls seem to be saying today is the opposite. If Biden wins Wisconsin, it presumably will be because people simply rejected President Toxic's fear and racism and hate. Not because they are for looting, fires, and radicalism. And, of course, because they care about the economy, stupid. And the soon to be 200,000 dead. All I feel I can do is send money to people running for Senate in places like Arizona and Georgia and North Carolina. If they win, history may show that it was one big nail in the coffin of the Electoral College. And in the toxic and racist parts of American history is was designed to support. And has in fact supported up to and including today.

About a month ago some pollster, I think a Republican, said he'd been doing focus groups and the "Biden is a few steps behind" thing kept coming up among undecided voters. The pollster's main point was don't underestimate President Toxic's resilience. It comes up both in positive ways (Trump is strong. He gets things done.) and negative ways (Biden is weak. He's two steps behind.) That's a good warning. We should certainly not ever assume this is a slam dunk. That said, some of this is that people are just repeating the scripted talking points of President Toxic. We'll be hearing Biden is senile all through Election Day. I'm not sure it hurts Biden. All that poll data I posted included that the number of Independents who think Biden is not mentally fit to be President is in the low 40's (I think 42 %) whereas for Trump it's in the high 40's (I think 47 %). And with Biden it has lowered expectations to the point where it's easy for him to look good unless he really screws it up. I was not a Biden fan last year, partly for this reason. He'll never be someone I view as eloquent and smooth as silk. But I've been impressed, both with his scripted teleprompter speeches and the impromptu stuff. He will almost certainly make some gaffes this Fall. The only question is when, and will it matter. It's actually a plus that he has a history of gaffes, as well as stuttering. Because of that, it's harder to argue that when he's less than dazzling it's a result of clear cognitive degeneration. I agree with you that Lichtman's argument that what happens during the campaign basically doesn't matter is a stretch. But I do agree with his fundamental point that winning is driven by governing, not campaigns. As in, if you governed really well people are going to vote for you. If you governed really crappy, people won't. He has been right 9 out of 9. So the basic concept that people are predisposed to reward competence and punish incompetence makes sense in theory, and holds up in practice. Lichtman's claim to fame is obviously that he's been able to call elections based on how political parties have governed. I think the greatest value of his theory is to flip it. Instead of using it to predict who will win, use it to figure out how you govern in a way that will result in re-election. If you forget about the prediction part and just look at Lichtman as a theory about how you govern, and what voters really care about, it makes a lot of sense to me. I'll be really interested to see how Biden works with Congress. There's theories that Obama was his own worst enemy. He was condescending, he made anyone who disagreed feel like a racist, blah blah blah. We know for sure he was not from the back slapping, poker playing, "where's the bottle of whiskey?" school of deal making. I've also read that at least some staffers in Obamaland wanted Biden to stop cutting deals with Congress (i.e. Republicans) during crises because they thought he gave away too much. I never felt it was worth worrying about this. Because by the time the Republicans took back the House in 2010, I think it was a known fact the McConnell, Gingrich, and other Republicans had adopted an "obstruct everything" strategy. So even if Obama bent over backwards, which I don't think he did, I assume he still would have been met with obstruction on any big policy - like Obamacare or climate change.. Biden better go in with the understanding that he needs some major policy achievements if he doesn't want it to all come crashing down in 2022 and/or 2024. in theory, Biden should be better than most Presidents at getting what he wants out of Congress and cutting deals. And if he does that, that isn't something that makes him looks senile. Even though I voted for Bernie in the primary, one reason I'm not too disappointed in Biden as nominee is I think he has a much better shot than Bernie would at getting laws passed that people support. And that actually make a difference in their lives. I certainly hope Lichtman is more right than wrong that this is what people care about: governance, and getting things done that have a real impact in people's lives.

Congratulations! You got my point. I know there was a ton of content I posted about Independents in the YouGov poll. But what they found is entirely consistent with this poll you cite. For a lot of Independents, this is a "hold your nose" election. A minority view President Toxic favorably, and a minority view Biden favorably. Add Pence and Harris and you get the same thing. So I suspect that adds up into a majority of Independents who view either President Toxic or Biden favorably. But there's also some who don't like either. And while it's not clear from the poll, that probably correlates with the 20 % or so who say they care little or not at all about who wins. Probably because they don't like either of them. We have been here before, and done this before. In 2016 the people who didn't respect or trust either candidate swung heavily to Trump. And it was probably at the last minute, because their thinking is fluid. Which would explain why Trump did better than the polls suggested. There's almost always a late break to one or the other candidate. In 2016 it broke to President Toxic. Karl Rove said on Election Night 2016 that this is why President Toxic won. People who didn't like either candidate voted for change. In 2016 that was Trump. That 6 minute analysis sums up most of the important lessons of 2016. But particularly the last few minutes is where Rove talks about how President Toxic won the "hold your nose and pick one smelly turd" vote. South Park satirized it as the choice between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. My guess in 2020 is this is bad news for President Toxic. The same people who didn't like what they saw, held their nose, and voted for change may do so again. Of course, President Toxic could portray himself in 2016 in a way Biden can't. He was the outsider who'd go in and flip the table and drain the swamp. Biden is Mr. Establishment and, if Trump has his way, the poster child Swamp Thing. Those polls suggest that Independents are already leaning toward the idea that President Toxic isn't making things better. And, if re-elected, he will probably just make things worse. If I'm right, and they hold their nose for Biden/Harris, it won't be out of love and deep respect. I do think Biden (like Reagan) is playing to hope. I do think President Toxic is playing to fear. My biggest criticism of Hillary in 2016 is she played the fear card too much. She assumed that people would be so afraid of Trump that he couldn't win. Trippi confirms that in the 2016 piece above. Fear did not work in 2016, if you view it that way. I don't think President Toxic will convince voters that Joe Biden is the end of civilization as we know it. This article below only tangents on your point. But I think the author absolutely nailed it. I'm putting it here because I think this applies in particular to Independents who don't believe the worst things people say about either President Toxic or Destroyer Joe. The Democrats’ Next Challenge: Hit Trump Where He’s Strong It's the economy, stupid. The polls show that if there's an area where Biden needs to close the deal, it's the economy, stupid. I agree with Shafer. If Biden and his team can't figure out how to sell that, Biden doesn't deserve to be President. There's another point Shafer made that did help me to understand something. I've said in this thread that it amazes me that only 30 % of Americans see President Toxic as a good person. About half of America sees Joe Biden as a good person. I don't remember the exact number, but I think about 1 in 3 Republicans say President Toxic is not a good person. So how does that work? How do you elect someone you see as a bad person to be POTUS? Shafer's point is that Biden can't turn this around, and should not bother trying. He can say, like Hillary tried to in 2016, that this guy is a bad person who doesn't deserve to win. But he did win. And he won despite the fact that many Republicans don't think he's a good person. And Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton, is not the one to make the case. Here's what Shafer said: There could be a debate zinger in that. Biden could just read the poll data that 1 in 3 Republicans think Trump is not a good person. So it turns out that I have a lot of things in common with Republicans, after all. Mostly, he should keep asking people if they are better off and feel safer than they did when President Toxic came to power.

To use the 538 averages, Biden is leading by 4.3 in Pennsylvania today. His lead was as high as 7.7 in mid-July. So all these polls show that things aren't looking quite as bad for President Toxic as six weeks ago. The economy is maybe a bit better. COVID-19, which was surging then, has stabilized for now at about 1000 deaths a day. Some of it may be the RNC and a small convention bump. Remember. Even McCain, in 2008, was in the lead with his Palin convention bump for a week or two around now. President Toxic needed a lot more than this out of his RNC. And the Palin fiasco might be a relevant comparison . President Toxic doesn't have Palin, of course. But throwing red meat at the crowd may help a little in the short run, but hurt in the long run. Just as an anecdote, Morning Joe said today that speaking as a "law and order conservative", which he is, this isn't even close. Biden is being thoughtful and balanced about the underlying issues. As in condemning violence, but condoning policies to reform the police and promote racial equality and justice. President Toxic is just presenting a one-dimensional picture. Pure red meat. There's not even a question anymore whether President Toxic is peddling hope or fear. This is pure authoritarianism. Pure fear. To me, it feels un-American. And is it working? Is Biden behind in the polls? Did Rep. Omar lose her primary? The whole strategy is built around ignorance, fear, and reaction. Biden will defund the police and make America less safe. The only problem is that a majority of Independents - let alone Democrats - just don't buy it. Maybe ads like this will persuade them. But I think the majority of Independents will look at that ad like Morning Joe does, and say that President Toxic is throwing fuel on the fire. That ad says, "President Trump is making it stop." About half of Independents flat out disagree. They think he is making it worse. And if he's re-elected there will be "more violence". I think a good phrase everyone should have in their mind is "color intensifier". That's Charlie Cook's phrase from 2018. It ended up being an accurate description of why things went in two different directions at the same time. Meaning areas that leaned blue got bluer, and areas that leaned red got redder. In 2018 his prediction came true. It explains why Democrats like Lauren Underwood and Lucy McBath won so many suburban House seats that were trending blue. Even Newt Gingrich's old seat! So Gingrich right now is blathering on about how Democrats are causing lawlessness and every other type of evil known to old White men. But his district is now in the hands of a Black woman who wants reasonable gun control laws. This stuff appears to be toxic with suburban women of any race. Meanwhile, in 2018, I was sending money to women like McCaskill and Heitkamp, from red states that were getting redder. They got slaughtered in the polls in Fall 2018. And it was White men that slaughtered them. Who can blame old White men whose very testicles were on the chopping block - at least according to old White man President Toxic? I'm a Lichtman boy. Most of this is noise. Behind the noise what I suspect is happening is that people are making a decision that President Toxic is the wrong guy for the job. I've read polls this week that suggest that some White men have shifted back to President Toxic relative to a few months ago. And a small portion of Blacks - maybe 5 %? - have shifted into the undecided column. Probably black conservatives who listened to guys like Brewer and said they'd think about it some more. Among other groups, Biden does not appear to be slipping. In terms of everything I said above in this thread about how I don't see how Kenosha and this issue automatically hurts Biden, I stand by that. Morning Joe said that emphatically this morning. He thinks Biden is playing this right, and getting ahead of it with his big ad buy. And this story provides a lot of data about the same thing: Trump attacks take a toll on Black Lives Matter support But a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows more voters favor Joe Biden to handle public safety. I think that sums it up. The visual version of this is the picture of the fat cat McCloskeys holding an assault rifle and waving a gun at Black people. The poll results are slightly better for Biden than that massive YouGov poll I went on and on about. In this one, Biden has an even bigger advantage on dealing with race relations. In the YouGov poll, President Toxic led Biden on crime by a few points. This one uses the word "public safety", and Biden is leading on that. One of the talking heads on Morning Joe said that part of what Team Toxic is desperate to do is change the subject from COVID-19, where the majority of America now believes President Toxic did a poor job. Biden did an excellent job of tying the crime and COVID-19 issues together, I thought. "Do you feel safer? Are you safer today than you were four years ago?" Biden just needs to keeping asking the question relentlessly. I'm a liberal Democrat. But I look at that Trump filth above and see it as pure hate, pure fear mongering, pure authoritarianism. Conservative Never Trumper Republican Morning Joe sees it the same way. This is bad news for President Toxic, I think. The other question that Biden needs to keep asking is the Reagan one: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The objective answer for most Americans is NO. Playing off what I wrote about Ohio above, this election will test to what degree perception is reality. Even if it is the economy, stupid, maybe people who like President Toxic will simply decide that the economy is fine. And that COVID-19 is under control and China's fault. The day Trump was elected a lot of Republicans decided the economy was a lot better all of a sudden. And a lot of Democrats decided it was a lot worse. If you go by data, like jobs, Youngstown is no better under President Toxic. Even in January 2020, before the plague started. And now it is actually worse. Will that matter to White men in Youngstown? (There are Black factory workers in Youngstown. If they are conservative, this rhetoric may be nudging some of them too.) Morning Consult released a bunch of state polls in the last few days. A bunch of them are from Aug 21-23, so before the RNC. But they were all taken the same days. And I thought the results were interesting. And they may have something to do with a trend. Biden was up 9 points in Wisconsin, 10 points in Arizona, 3 points in Georgia. President Toxic was up 1 point in Texas and 5 points in Georgia. A different poll out today from Opinium, which seems like an outlier, says Biden was up 13 points in Wisconsin for a poll from Aug. 21-28. It reinforces the idea that there is no evidence that Wisconsin is buying President Toxic's fear and hate. It's one poll. But think about that. Biden is probably doing well in Wisconsin. But he's doing just as well in Arizona. He's actually doing better in Georgia - and Texas! - than he is in Ohio. At least in this one poll. So these may all be blips and useless noise. But that story about Minnesota I posted nailed it, I think. Wherever there are people of color and cities and suburbs, Biden will do better. Wherever old White men and cows roam free, and perhaps wherever there are working class factory workers of any race, President Toxic will do better. I'll say it again. Some of those factory workers are Black and Hispanic. What's just not clear is whether they will hold President Toxic accountable for the fact that he never brought the factory jobs back, as promised. Morning Joe made another point that is relevant. Remember how Blacks would never turn out for Mr. Crime Bill Biden? Well, President Toxic has actually turned that into an advantage for Joe Biden. It's hard to recast Mr. Crime Bill as the guy who will unleash the fires of hate on every city in America. And then when Chicago and New York and LA are toast, President Crime Bill and Vice President Prosecutor will lead the angry swarms of Black Marxists (one of whom was elected to Congress!) into the suburbs to pillage and destroy. No one is safe. Our only hope is President Toxic. Be afraid. Be very afraid. G.I.V.E.M.E.A.F.U.C.K.I.N.G.B.R.E.A.K. My guess is that we are watching Black turnout in the 2020 election go through the fucking roof. President Toxic is cozying up to White vigilantes who have actually shot peaceful protesters dead. So the symbols of Black America include Jacob Blake's Mom, who is being the voice of hope and unity and healing. And Jocob Blake's Dad, who called on BLM protesters in Kenosha to raise a clenched fist. I suspect both parents, and both messages, speak very powerfully to most Black Americans. One speaks to the hurt and anger and rage that is authentic. The other speaks to the fact that Blacks haven't forget who MLK or John Lewis were. or what they stood for. I can't imagine Blacks will greet this election with apathy. It has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. While there is a small minority of Black conservatives like Jack Brewer who may be thinking about voting for President Toxic, I imagine many more will do whatever it takes to get this horrific racist asshole out of office.

I'm not really responding to your post @Pete1111. But the specific states you cited dovetail with something I was going to post, anyway. I thought this was a really good analysis relating to Lichtman's ideas about fundamental drivers. It's a counterpoint to, "it's the economy, stupid." Why Has Minnesota Been Slow to Realign? The author makes a great argument that, at least in the Midwest, it's the geography, stupid. Iowa, for example, had the biggest Democratic lean of these seven Midwestern states he looks at back in 1988. By 2016 it had the second biggest Republican lean. (Indiana was # 1.) Why? Here's what the author says: The easiest way to make his point is to just list the percentage of voters in these states that live in large cities: Illinois: 69 % Minnesota 63 % Michigan 55 % Ohio 51 % Indiana 48 % In the article he doesn't give a specific number for Wisconsin or Iowa. And it's not 100 % clear how he defines "large cities". But it is clear that he's including suburbs and exurbs. To me, this dovetails with Rahm Emanuel's idea of "metropolitan alliances". So you won't like this much, @tassojunior. I'm throwing Rahm and suburban women into the melting pot together. Watch out! The whole article is detailed and thorough. His point about Minnesota is that the Republicans might be waiting a while. Because despite being called The Land Of 10,000 Lakes, Minnesota is kind of The Land Of Twin Cities And Suburbs. Mike Pence put on a good show up in The Iron Range. But if The Iron Range becomes redder, and the suburbs become bluer, that's not good math for Republicans. The 538 poll averages today show Biden with a 6 point lead in Minnesota, and President Toxic with a 2 point lead in Ohio. As the author argues, the pattern is clear. In 2016, Michigan was the cutting edge between winning and losing. So far, at least, it looks like the pendulum is swinging to blue, not red. But it's too early to tell. This other article from 538 covers a lot of the same ground as the article above, and presents a somewhat more optimistic picture for Republicans who want to take Minnesota. I'm including it because the thing it adds is one possible driver: the concentration of non-Hispanic Whites without bachelor's degrees. This graphic from the 538 article sums it up nicely: Arguably, you could also say "It's the education, stupid." Having gone to a liberal arts college in Minnesota, this all makes sense to me. Paul Wellstone won in 1990 because he could go up to the Iron Range and preach left-wing populism, and it worked. As long as he went easy on the gun stuff. Now there's more guns, and fewer jobs in the Iron Range. So where the educated people are - the cities and suburbs - that where Democrats do well. And it's about the only place they do really well these days. 2020 will be a test of whether, and how, economic fundamentals matter. If Lichtman is right, President Toxic can't survive an election in which the economy and jobs have tanked. Not to mention COVID-19 and all the other stuff. That said, Barack Obama won re-election in 2012 on the backs of Blacks, who turned out at an even higher rate than 2008. Despite the fact that the Black economy in particular was the slowest to recover from The Great Recession. So will Team Toxic not only turn out their base, but add to it with new voters that didn't vote in 2016? Given what happened with Obama and Blacks in 2012, it's possible. But Blacks knew that Obama did not cause The Great Recession. So far it looks like Trump's America doesn't think he's to blame for anything going on in America in 2020. I'll be fascinated to see how that plays out when people vote. And to see which people vote. Ohio county tells story of the seismic shift of working-class voters toward GOP I'm including that article mostly for the headline. If you read the whole story, the headline sounds better for Republicans than it is. So in the county around Youngstown, Ohio, enthusiasm for President Toxic is high. But the article also states that in suburban Columbus, Ohio, in 2018 a Democrat came within 4 points of tossing out a Republican in a district that was supposed to be totally safe for the GOP. For me, it all keeps coming back to the bumper sticker "metropolitan alliances". One question I have that 2020 will maybe help answer is whether there is anything that "The Establishment" can do that will make things right for these places like Youngstown. I say "The Establishment" because one way of looking at it is that whether it's Jeb! or Hillary or good ole' Destroyer Joe, some Trumpians seem to be convinced they are all at best blood sucking swamp creatures, and at worst pedophiles who eat babies. The other question is whether President Toxic can do anything that will convince his supporters that we're not really on the fast track to Greatness in 2020. I'm going to close with a summary of all manufacturing jobs in Ohio and the trend going back to the 1990's. I picked January of certain years because that's the month new Presidents were inaugurated. So the assumption is that Presidents are somehow judged based on what actually happens while they have power. Again, if Lichtman is right, and voters make judgments about how well incumbents governed, President Toxic should have real problems in Ohio. And at least some polls show him behind. All Employees: Manufacturing in Ohio January 2001 992,900 manufacturing jobs January 2009 671,000 manufacturing jobs July 2009 609,700 manufacturing jobs January 2013 655,100 manufacturing jobs January 2017 689,900 manufacturing jobs January 2020 697,000 manufacturing jobs July 2020 657,200 manufacturing jobs The best way to get the picture of factory jobs in Ohio is to look at that long-term chart. It's bleak. Ohio lost about 300,000 factory jobs under W. "Recovery" didn't get close to getting back to the 1 million + factory jobs Ohio had under Bill Clinton. They never even got back to the 767,000 jobs they had in December 2007, when the Great Recession started. You can look at Obama/Biden a few ways. If you start counting from July 2009, at the bottom of The Great Recession, Ohio gained about 80,000 jobs. Again, that didn't even get them back to December 2007, let alone December 1999. If you count the 61,300 jobs lost in the first six months of Obama/Biden, that works out to a new gain of 20,000 manufacturing jobs after eight years of Obama/Biden. I don't think Ohio factory workers look at this FRED data every month. But I do think what the numbers speak to - stagnation, crappy paying jobs, addiction - is what we keep reading about that led them to gamble on President Toxic. On an objective level, President Toxic has made it worse. There's over 30,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in Ohio than when he took office. Even if you count from January 2017 to January 2020, pre-COVID-19, the "best economy ever" produced a net gain of about 7,000 factory jobs in three years. If the question is whether President Toxic brought jobs back, the answer is no. If the question is whether those rich "job creators" took their tax cuts and created factory jobs, the answer is no. President Toxic will replay 2016 and blame all this on NAFTA and Destroyer Joe. But there is a difference. Trump speaks as if he isn't really President. And he never really made promises. But he is President. And he did makes promises. And people are not better off. Biden can at least say in 7 1/2 out of 8 years the recovery created tens of thousands of jobs, without having to fill the trough of the greedy millionaires and billionaires. Even if you count before the plague, President Toxic just couldn't do that. Jobs and the economy are not the only issue driving this election. But to the degree people in Ohio vote on the reality of their jobs and lives, as opposed to the Trump Reality TV Show, it's not clear to me that President Toxic can pull this off. I don't believe he can simply make the same promises that Smartest Business Genius Ever Donald Trump did in 2016.

Exclusive: Dem group warns of apparent Trump Election Day landslide So this post goes the exact opposite direction of the one above. This one is about GOTV and getting the base to vote. While both matter in pretty much every election, my own view is that getting the base to vote is the single most important thing. The one sentence explanation of why Democrats got shellacked in 2010 is a lot of Democrats did not vote. I buy the idea that turnout in 2020 will be off the charts on both sides. Which, if true, is good news for Democrats. Since there are a lot more of us. (News flash: Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by millions of votes.) Arguably, the biggest challenge in 2020 won't be whether Democrats vote. It will be how they vote. And how they know their vote is counted. And what happens if President Toxic appears to be "winning" in a landslide on Election Night. Maybe I'm too optimistic. But the thing I worry about least is President Toxic declaring he won, and there's no need to count ballots. Even if you forget mail-in voting, it's not like we're not used to elections that go one way, until they go another. If I remember right, Andy Gillum was ahead in the early counting, and then it was all downhill from there. Doug Jones I think was behind most of the night in Alabama, until city votes came in and put him over the top. Granted, that took four hours. Not four days. But the principle is the same. Everybody who cast a legal vote deserves to have it counted. What that article describes is basically what happened in California in 2018. Here's an article about how Paul Ryan whined about possible voter fraud. It went nowhere, because they had no argument. Ryan's position was basically that "it defies all logic to me" that it takes more time, but is cheaper, to have a system that actually makes it easier for more people to vote. It also defied logic to him that when you do that, Republicans got their asses kick. Poor Paul! Out of curiosity I Googled "California Election Fraud" and got this page from The Heritage Foundation which i'm guessing is every vote fraud case going back to the 1990's. If I'm reading that correctly there was one conviction in 2018 and three in 2019. Hardly the thing stolen elections are made of. President Toxic may whine and rant. But the value of putting out the warning now is that we all just need to be prepared for it. My bigger fear is those other issues, about the actual movement of ballots, efforts to prevent them from being cast, and efforts to invalidate them after being cast. I haven't followed it closely, but I think Biden (like President Toxic) is staffing up an army of lawyers all over the potential swing states. One worst case scenario is that it's like 2000 again. But we have five Floridas, not one. And whether mail in ballots are invalidated could impact the outcome in states where it's close. That said, Florida 2000 was all about ballots cast in person. So it's not clear that votes cast in person in 2020 could not be an issue, too. Another worst case scenario is that Team Putin hacks the actual state voter files. People who aren't real could vote in person. Or people who are real may find their registrations disappeared. My way of dealing with this is to send money to Biden and Senate candidates who can win in swing states. My assumption is that Biden and the statewide candidates are the ones who will be coordinating state-level GOTV and also ballot tracking systems based on the laws of each state to get the base out to vote. This voting environment is probably more curse than blessing for Democrats. But it could be both. My assumption is that Republicans will march through the fires of hell to vote in person for President Toxic. This article from The Nation about down-ballot voting is both good news and bad news for Democrats. The good news is that of the roughly 1000 state-level seats Democrats lost in the Obama Era, we've now won about half back. In a blue wave, we could get the rest back in 2020, just in time for redistricting. The bad news is that Democrats could be hurt more than Republicans due to the lack of human person to person contact in COVID-19 America. Like door knocking. GOTV and ballots could be a complete nightmare for Democrats this year. The article anecdotally quotes several Black women running for State Assembly seats who came surprisingly close to winning in 2018, and could win in 2020. @tassojunior should like this. Because they are intentionally targeting "low propensity" voters. Especially "low propensity" voters of color. But I think it says three different times in the article that human contact at their door or somewhere else (Bernie used picnics a lot in Nevada) is the single best way to get people who don't usually vote, or never vote, to vote. So there's volunteer efforts to phone or text people instead. But I'm not sure that does the anything close to the same thing. Meanwhile, I keep reading these articles like this one from Ohio that reinforce Michael Moore's point. Enthusiasm for President Toxic in Trumpland is through the roof. And it shows up in grassroots organizing efforts, like people going door to door despite COVID, or texting people they know or maybe who are on some target list. I think the blessing here is that Democrats with the brains and resources (money, staff, volunteers) have a built in reason to get people to vote early, if that is a legal option in their state. My experience as a volunteer doing phone or door to door GOTV on elections is that the single best excuse is always, "Stop bugging me. I'll vote on Election Day." COVID and President Toxic's antagonism to mail-in ballots changes that completely. I'm hoping lots of Blacks and Millennials, among others, get the message that if you don't vote early President Toxic's lawyers will do everything they can to make sure you can't vote. Or that your vote won't be counted. Rep. Clyburn is talking about October being "Election Month". He talked in an interview about Colorado's system for early voting as a model to adopt in other states. If I understood him right, the idea is to vote absentee, but in person. Like by having ballot drop boxes rather than mailing them back. I know I plan to vote as soon as I get my ballot in the mail. And then I'll track it or probably just drop it off in person. I have to imagine lots of people are thinking this way. If a lot of Democrats do this, it could also confound the expectation that President Toxic will be way ahead on Election Night. We've never had an election like this before. Many Californians, including me, waited until the last minute to vote in the 2020 primary to see what happened in earlier states. So while it's likely that President Toxic will be ahead in swing states on Election Night based on people who vote in person on Election Day, that's not necessarily true if a lot of Democrats vote early. I think those mail-in ballots that come in and are counted early are pretty much the first ones to be reported, at least in some states. So it's clear, the top chart is midterm elections. The second chart is the last three Presidential elections. What I worry about the most in terms of GOTV is that because of COVID-19 it's just going to be particularly hard to get the people Democrats need to vote to do so. On the face of it, the fact that you can't go door to door or have community or church picnics or voter registration tables is going to hurt. What might help the most is the environment of panic and frenzy we are already in. The message is already out that if you don't vote, it's the end of democracy. And maybe civilization. Or, your suburbs will be cancelled. I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from it. But in the Wisconsin election and with the members of The Squad, like Rep. Omar, people turned out in droves the Democrats did well. Including Democrats who were supposed to be vulnerable. Unlike 2016, this already feels like an "all hands on deck" election. If I had to guess, we're not headed to a repeat of 2016 in terms of turnout. Rule # 1 for Democrats seems to be DO NOT REPEAT 2016. So while there will be huge challenges with the nitty gritty work of GOTV and ballots at the grassroots level, my guess is that 2020 will be most like 2008 and 2018. Turnout for both parties were at record highs. Note that Republicans turned out at higher rates in 2008 than in 2012 and 2016. My subjective sense is that the intensity we're feeling now is felt by vote sides. And it plays off each other. If anything like this actually happens, President Toxic will be toast. Republicans even beat Democrats on turnout in 2008, narrowly. But Obama and Democrats romped simply because there are so many more of us. Obama also won more Independents than McCain 52/44, according to Wikipedia. As I argued above, Biden ought to be able to do that in 2020. Obama 2012 might be the textbook example of the relative importance of turning out the base, compared to persuading Independents. Wikipedia says that Romney won the Independent vote over Obama by five points in 2012, 50/45. Obama won handily regardless, and Democrats carried pretty much every close Senate race in states like Missouri and Indiana and North Dakota - which set up losing those ones in 2018.

I never said Independents were "Republican Lite". I think you actually just agreed with me. Some Indepedents are "Republican Lite". But other are young Independents who are progressives and increasingly don't identify themselves with either political party. Even though if they vote they tend to vote Democratic. So it is all over the map. In my posts about Independents relating to the YouGov poll, I did say about 40 % of Independents appear to basically be conservatives Republicans. They don't think Biden is mentally fit, and they think he'll make America less safe ... blah blah blah. Since we know that many Republicans have shifted to Independent precisely because of their antipathy to President Toxic, it makes sense that there's a big chunk of Independents - maybe larger than before President Toxic - who basically think like Republicans. Because for much of their life they have been Republicans. My read of both conventions is that they mostly played to the base and mobilization - not persuasion. Biden had Kasich. President Toxic had Black conservatives. But mostly it was ginning up the known base. I've written a lot about Independents the last few days. Obviously, I believe that persuading Independents matters. But mostly I think this election will be determined by who gets their base to vote. Relating to Independents and persuasion, I'll restate what I think are the most important things I see in the polls. If anybody is going to benefit from persuasion, given where we are right now, I think it's Biden. In the poll I kept citing, President Toxic has 44 % of the Independents. That's more than percentage of Independents who think he'd do a better job than Biden on anything. Or that identify him as a good leader in any number of questions. Again, this is right after the RNC. Other polls I cited from July showed Biden in the lead with Independents then. But now he has 34 % of Independents in this one poll. So I think we can conclude two things that seem like facts. One, there are some Independents changing their mind. So persuasion does matter. Two, right now Biden has the most to gain, and President Toxic the most to lose, by persuading Independents. When you look at where Independents are at both on policies and the personal leadership qualities, it favors Biden a lot more than President Toxic. If it's true that they've been sliding toward President Toxic in the last month, that also means they can slide back to Biden. There's two extremes I cited above that may define the range either candidate can go with Independents. Only 28 % of voters in the poll I cited say Biden would be better than President Toxic on the economy. This is a reversal from another poll I cited from mid-July that showed Biden leading with Independents on the economy. Meanwhile, Biden is perceived as way better than President Toxic on race. So while this "law and order" stuff could hurt Biden in theory, there's no evidence of that in reality as of now. Including in Wisconsin, where a Morning Consult poll out today give Biden a 9 % lead. The 538 average of polls shows Biden up 6 % in Wisconsin. That 28 % figure strongly suggests to me that Biden closing the deal is all about the economy, stupid. Flip side, 60 % of Independents say the nation is worse off than four years ago. If past patterns hold, that suggests Biden has a huge number of Independent voters he should be capable of closing the deal with, grounded around the reality that the economy is not in good shape - in general, or for them personally. Some of these polls suggest before either convention Biden was on the way to doing just that. My own view is sort of "Lichtman Lite". His key insights are that historical forces matter. And that voters judge based on the fundamentals of governing, not political games. So I do really think that President Toxic is predisposed to lose in 2020 because of all these voters who feel worse off. Then add the corruption, and COVID, and racial chaos. But I think Biden does need to close the deal, which he hasn't. That is the part Lichtman seems to dismiss. He's basically saying Biden, Bernie, Elizabeth, Tulsi ..... any of them would have won if nominated. That said, he did put in the caveat in 2016 that even though Trump should win, he is so far outside the box that he may manage to lose. So Lichtman is not a purist. I think we are in agreement that the phrase "Independent" covers people who are all over the ideological map. In addition, ideology may not be the most important factor, or even an important factor, to many of them. about 20 % of them says they care very little, or not at all, who wins. So it could be that what matters most are these questions about whether they are better or worse off. Or whether they believe this or that candidate will really make them less safe. If this is an accurate picture, it also may matter who the last person to speak with them before they vote is. They are very fluid, and may not know themselves who they'll vote for until they vote. I checked the last three elections that seem most similar to what Lichtman thinks will happen. Meaning elections where the incumbent or incumbent party lost, and it seemed to be in large part because of the economy, stupid. They are 1980, 1992, and 2016. In none of those cases was the winner clear around Labor Day. If there's an example where a candidate had to close the deal to win, and did, 1980 is it. The sole debate was about a week before the election. There were polls in mid-October that showed Carter with a healthy lead. Then again, Reagan had opened up a lead over Carter in the Summer. So it was fluid. The one thing that is clear is that Carter's final polling slide started right after that debate, and could not be stopped. It's relevant to 2020 that the question that cut is: are you better off than you were four years ago? I'd argue the last person Independents listened to in that election was Reagan. And it was decisive. In 1992 Clinton had a healthy lead through most of the Fall. It's another one where you can argue he closed the deal in the second, town-hall style debate. That's the one where he felt your pain, and Poppy looked at his watch. Clinton opened up a 20 point lead in mid-October. That said, there's a few Gallup polls in late October where Clinton only had a one or two point lead. There's zero consensus on whether any of these debates really matter, with the possible exception of that 1980 debate. We all know what happened in 2016. There's two points I'll reinforce. First, Hillary's loss is not a great example of its the economy stupid. Slightly more people said they were better of (31 %) than worse off (27 %) than four years ago. But the overwhelming vote against Hillary by the 27 % who felt worse off was probably the single biggest nail in her coffin. And I'd argue that the last person a lot of voters listened to was Jim Comey, which of course didn't help. My "Lichtman Lite" interpretation of this is that in all three cases the incumbent party was predisposed to lose. And in all three cases they did lose. But that wasn't clear until they actually won. That's what I'd bet on in 2020. Biden is more likely to win than not. But if it happens, we won't know it until Election Day. Part of the reason is these Independents who may be predisposed to fire President Toxic but won't do that - if they do it - until the last minute. And given the mail-in ballot situation, in 2020 we may not know until well after Election Day. Which is a perfect lead in to yet another long rant, This post was all about persuading and Independents. The follow-up on is about getting the base to vote.

And that, of course, is an irresistible set up. I hope you all cut me some slack. For a long time, as an escort, my motto was even simpler: Fuck 'em.

I think President Toxic is making lots of mistakes that will bite him in the ass in the end. First, he's coming dangerously close to endorsing violent organizations. This would be like Biden saying anti-fa is just a bunch of great patriots. There's no way to argue that whoever killed the guy in Portland did so in self-defense. So it's not quite apples to apples. President Toxic can argue that vigilantes have the right to take up guns in self defense. But many people hear that as a toxic President just fanning the flames. Biden is the only candidate who has unambiguously condemned anyone who kills, for any reason, and instead focused on trying to get back to unity. I think it's better when he lets the Black mother of a guy that was shot seven times say that for him. Even though Biden has now wrapped his heart around the message publicly and passionately. The main mistake President Toxic is making is the same one he's been making his entire Presidency. He plays to his rabid base. I get that he has no choice. If he wasn't a racist who race-baited, he wouldn't be President. You can argue that Democrats, or at least the forces of history, are partly to blame. When a better and more decent man ran in 2012, he lost. Some Republicans decided that the only way to win was, to quote one analysis, "to bring a gun to a cultural knife fight." Need I mention that the McCloskeys fit right in to this party? Which is not to say that every Republican - or even most Republicans - agree with President Toxic. That's the problem for him. They don't. That's why they abandoned the party in droves in 2018. And seem to be primed to do it again. To quote Michael Steele, the former Black head of the RNC in happier times, "How do you stop the slide once it starts?" He was specifically talking about whether Republican Senators can hold on and only lose four seats. Or whether the slide will take out more like seven. I won't replaster this thread with all the poll data I posted in the Lichtman thread. But Biden's positions on race and crime, at least as I hear them, play to where the vast majority of Americans are at. True, 30 % of Independents think Biden will make America less safe. That suggests to me that those "Independents" are basically conservative Republicans who just don't want to own the stench of Trump's Republican Party. But almost half of Independents think there will be "more violence" if President Toxic has four more. years. That's Independents. Not Democrats. If pro-Trump Republicans think it's awful that Democrats are blaming President Toxic for the violence happening in "their" cities, maybe they should have a heart to heart with all these Independents who believe that President Toxic is a racist. And that more of him means more violence. Trump's approval rating with Black voters soars by 60% during RNC: poll HarrisX-Hill survey finds Black support increases from 15% to 24% As a Democrat who wants more racial equality and justice, I hope that's true. Having two political parties that compete for the votes of Blacks (and suburban women, and White working class men) is a good thing. This is, of course, why the Republicans put Michael Steele, a principled economic conservative, in charge of their party in better times. In terms of the big picture and trends, as the article above notes, President Toxic lost a sliver of White approval even as he was gaining among Blacks during the RNC. I'm going to assume, or at least hope, that those Whites were ones who couldn't quite stomach the McCloskeys. As far as the Black speakers went, they mostly did a good job, I thought. The particular Harris poll cited showed President Toxic with a -12 % net disapproval rating after the show was over. That is actually three points worse than the current - 9 % net disapproval rating the RCP average shows. So if conservatives are looking for the silver lining in the cloud, I'd rather have them conclude that they will maybe get more Black support if they focus on creating a party that is actually more inviting to Blacks. The conservative-slanted article above points out that the message that Blacks pushed at the RNC offsets what "Democrats" are saying: that President Toxic is a racist. That's fair enough. They don't mention that one reason President Toxic may have a 24 % ceiling with Blacks, even after a week of his very own reality TV show, is that in any poll I've seen at least 3 out of 4 Blacks say he's a racist. It's a bit of a hard sell for Whites, or even Black conservatives, to argue that 3 in 4 Blacks are stupid. But if 10 % of the Black community took this as an opportunity to think that maybe President Toxic isn't so racist after all, I'm good with that. The reality TV show is over, and we're back to reality. So let's just see. It may have also helped President Toxic's cause that even some of the thoughtful speakers, like Jack Brewer, didn't tell the truth. I know, it's shocking! Black Lives Matter is not trying to destroy the nuclear family, as he stated. Maybe he lied. I'd tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think it may be a perfect symbol for how, and why, we are at civil war. We try to disrupt a system that we view as unjust. They genuinely see that as destruction. Why would Black Lives Matter speak up for Black single Moms, and Black queer Dads? Isn't it obvious? They must be socialists out to destroy America and ................................. wait for it .................................. abolish the suburbs. This article speaks the truth about Black Lives Matter, in their own words: I can easily imagine that the same people who had a problem with LGBTQ rights and same sex marriage read that and go, "What the fuck?" This is a very big part of my problem with Daddy, and all the Republicans I've known for a few decades or so who I am no longer friends with. I think of it as "free ride" racism. The people who should understand the importance of tolerance and diversity the most - because our liberties and lives and even websites depend on it - are instead spouting racist nonsense. As a belief system, I can see how you can argue that Gay Lives Matter and Drag Queens Matter and Gay Marriage Matters, but Black Lives Matter is racist. There's a pretty good parallel with the same sex marriage fight. As a volunteer knocking on doors, we targeted non-White areas where people know what discrimination is. So I spoke with a number of Black Evangelicals who thought slavery and homosexuality both involved sin. For them, it was a sin for Whites to enslave Blacks. And it was a sin for a man to have sex with another man - let alone marry him. But they could at least empathize with the fact that I felt discriminated against. As a practical matter, there are more Blacks than Gays or lesbians or transgender people. So if we're playing our cards that way, it's not too late for us to lose the game. We are a minority among minorities. Had Justice Bork been the swing vote rather than Justice Roberts, who knows if we'd have same sex marriage today? We probably would. But that's because we won the culture war that was fought around the concepts of acceptance and diversity and empathy. I think they want a free ride. They want to be able to have Gay rights, and hire escorts, and maybe even wear a dress. But they won't stick up for Blacks who are protecting our rights, like Black Lives Matter. And who are pushing things that I suspect most Americans frankly find easier to stomach than an old Gay guy who likes to wear a dress. If we assume that the 24 % of Blacks who are open to Jack Brewer's message also feel the way he does about this "nuclear family" stuff, that's good news. At some time fairly recently, we got to the point where the majority of Blacks now accept same sex marriage. (It's mostly religion, not race, in that so many Blacks are Evangelicals.) I think the only segment of society left that still harbors majority opposition and disdain is White evangelicals. This is what "free ride" racism means to me. They expect acceptance and diversity for themselves. Or at least tolerance and safety. But they won't give it back. News flash: this is not only kind of unfair. It's also a great way to lose, not to win. President Toxic, aka President Divide And Rule, gets this. In fairness, I know from years of experience that many of these Gay conservatives aren't .......................................... Gay conservatives. They don't culturally identify as Gay. They are not out. They didn't fight for same sex marriage and don't especially care. I could name the ones who were more excited by bombs dropping on Iraq than by winning same sex marriage, but I won't. They have every right to their beliefs, and their prejudices. So it's not like they really want a free ride. They're still back in the Greater America that encouraged people like them to just shut up and be happy enough in the closet. Just like Brewer obviously thinks Blacks should be happy with what they've already got with President Toxic. What's not to like about "our first Black President", to quote him? For the conservatives who are openly Gay, and have been for a long time, this is definitely a free ride. These two words I cited already best sum up the problem for me: "disruption" and "destruction". As in, BLM wants to disrupt things so that Black drag queens or Black Queer Dads feel safe. Many White conservatives, and presumably Brewer, see that as "destruction". And it's not just President Toxic. I keep going back to Jeb Bush's line about same sex marriage: "Thousands of years of religion and culture are being wiped away at warp speed. And I just don't get it." He didn't get it, of course. But it's basically the same resistance. What we saw as disruption to make things better they saw as destroying religion, marriage, and culture. The disruption is happening, and will likely accelerate, because we want to move forward. I think especially on issues like race and crime and LGBTQ rights, there's a majority that wants to move forward. We'll know soon. To end where I started, this is why I'm glad Brewer spoke at the RNC. And I'm glad there is a debate. My guess, sadly, is that most older White conservatives just can't change. Even the Gay (or closeted) ones. These attitudes and prejudices are just too deeply ingrained. And with President Toxic, they get constant reinforcement that they're not racist. It's Black Lives Matter and the Obamas that are racist. If President Toxic morphs into Ex-President Toxic, leader of the Toxic Cult, many of these folks will be with him until they die. That said, just like with same sex marriage, many will come around. Biden is basically doing what worked for us on same sex marriage. Go the high road. Call on people to have an open mind. And especially an open heart. We taught the world it works. We should be taking a victory lap for that. And hopefully another one in November. This is all helping me to process how I feel. I feel sad a lot. To me, the fact that the free ride racists see it the way they do is a tragedy.

Juxtaposition of two videos from Kenosha: A Black man gets shot seven times from behind; a white teen with a gun walks past police

Let me turn that into a positive statement. If you don't want to see examples of victim blaming and people who proudly wear their racism for all to see, avoid Daddy and his forum, like Steven Kesslar decided to. It's easy. And you'll feel better.

As much as I'm a Lichtman guy, I have to admit that Wall Street and JP Morgan had a perfect track record in 2016: Wall Street reacts: Here’s what the markets will do after the election PUBLISHED MON, NOV 7 2016 9:41 AM This is good news. If Biden wins, they'll be 3 for 3.

We're of course being bad boys, and ignoring Prof. Lichtman's advice to not follow the noise of the polls. But, hell. I doubt he'd be against a little more intellectual masturbation. Let's just make sure not to get any goo, or hot air, on the pages of his books. The story says Emerson had Biden 4 points ahead of President Toxic in July. Now it's 2. So the trend is the same. Emerson is calling it closer than the national polling average, which has moved from as high as 10 to about 6 today. Most of these national polls have margins of error in the ballpark of 2 - 3 %. With the state polls it's usually a bit bigger. Axelrod has said field work/GOTV can be worth 2 - 3 %. Another way to think of that is a different electorate can be worth 2 - 3 %. None of these pollsters know what future turnout will be, and whether Democrats will stay home (2010) or Republicans will (2006). And then there's the issue that these days a Democrat can win the popular vote by millions and still lose. So the national polls would have to be in the high single digits a day or two before the election to feel pretty secure. And this year will be different, too, because of all the early voting. As we know, it would have been worse for Bernie on Super Tuesday, because the early mail-in voting was more favorable to him. So, basically: anything can happen. And guess what? I just told everybody something they already know. This headline speaks for itself: Don't get too excited about Biden's lead in the polls: a close election is dangerous Biden is leading in the polls now, but bigger leads than his have been blown so the only way to get Trump out of office will be to have an overwhelming win. This paragraph is worth quoting: I think this paragraph from that Emerson poll article you posted is worth quoting, too. The reason that jumped out at me is that what's clearly the most dangerous form of voting - in person on Election Day - is what Republicans will do the most. People should of course vote however they want. My reading of what the Democrats are saying is people should be able to have multiple choices to vote safely - by mail, in person and early, and in person and on Election Day. President Toxic is clearly saying people should vote in person - except perhaps in states like Florida where he thinks voting by mail might help him. To me it's just another example of President Toxic's reckless disregard for human life. And of the Republican bullshit machine. Herman Cain was diagnosed with COVID-19 less than two weeks after he went to President Toxic's Oklahoma rally. It's pushing the limit to say that President Toxic was responsible for Herman Cain's death. Cain can, and did, choose to do what he wanted. But President Toxic did a whole hell of a lot to create the toxic and unsafe environment that Cain died in. So to me, this is another example of where he just doesn't give a shit if more people die - including former Republican Presidential candidates. Dem’s Blaming Violence in American Cities on Trump Is Despicable I wasn't able to read that story from the right-wing Epoch Times because it's behind a pay wall. But the headline says it all, I suspect. So Biden comes out and unequivocally and passionately denounces violence and looting. His message was clearly directed to both sides. While I doubt Biden scripted Jacob Blake's Mom, he has been speaking with her. He clearly listened to her. And I'd bet money there is some choreography between her eloquent statement about national unity and his comments in Philly, which quoted her extensively. It wasn't Gandhi or MLK. But I thought he did really well. Meanwhile, the right wing will slam him and Democrats as in the headline above. And they will cheer when the vile, racist, and deplorable words keep coming out of President Toxic's mouth. On either mail-in voting or President Toxic's goading people to hate and be violent, all you have to do is listen to the words coming out of President Toxic's mouth. Or the exact words of the key people around him. Biden was smart to quote a few of those statements, verbatim, during his speech. There's an endless sewer of bile to choose from that came out of President Toxic's evil mouth. I give Biden extra points for actually calling President Toxic .......................................... wait for it ..................................................................... "toxic". He's right. This is a very easy one to defend rationally .... not that reason, facts, or logic matter. Forget about what Democrats says about President Toxic. 40 % of Independents say he is the "cause of the chaos". That's actually radical to me. When the people who are NOT Democrats and slightly right-of-center on almost every poll question say the President is the cause of national chaos, that's deeply fucked up. Worse, as I said above, just about half of Independents - not Democrats, but Independents - say that re-electing President Toxic will result in "more violence". Their words, not mine. And the weak, morally timid Republicans who support President Toxic just shut up when their leader spews more bile and hate and lies. i should qualify that. They shut up, and clap loudly. Or worse, they shout in support without masks on. This election is a little bit like therapy fro me. Especially now that the gloves are off, and people are saying what they really think. Of course, President Toxic himself does that about 99 % of the time, anyway, which is a big part of the problem. When I read things like that quote above - that Democrats are "despicable" for saying President Toxic is causing violence (and also for denouncing violence ourselves, of course) it triggers lots of memories. Years and years and years and years and years of conversations with Republicans I was very close to. If I had to date this I would date it to the early Tea Party days, like 2010. And it wasn't that people said things they'd never thought or believed before. I think it's that The Tea Party movement and the culmination of it - Trumpism - made it okay to say it. My go-to example is White conservatives i knew saying they're not racist, but Barack and Michelle Obama are. They were convinced that the Obamas believed that anyone White who disagrees with them on anything is automatically a racist. Like the birther bullshit, it became an entrenched emotional lollipop that both explained away conservative racism, and fueled it. One of the enduring mysteries to me in the latter years of Obama is that "respectable" Republicans I knew very well, who were close to high profile "respectable" Republicans like Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, would say they hated the Tea Party. And yet they kept saying things that sounded exactly like I was reading in the most inflammatory Tea Party rags. Including, of course, that Obama himself is the biggest racist around. I think I've made clear with poll data above that if I had to explain why I think Hillary lost in 2016 in a bumper sticker, I would say, "It was the economy, stupid." The poll data undeniably states that many people who voted against were feeling economic pain. That said, there's a big minority of other people who that does not describe. I know this for a fact, because these conversations I had happened in Italy, and France, and Mexico, and in very expensive restaurants or hotels. So this had nothing to do with economic pain. This had to do with racism and hate. Or, to put the polite bumper sticker on it, "cultural anxiety". I don't like the idea of cancel culture at all. That said, I cancelled these people from my life. On an individual and interpersonal level, I feel I have the right to do that. I'll never feel good about that. My guess is these feelings will just gradually dissolve away over years as sadness, and tragedy. But revisiting all this in the heat of a campaign when these words and attacks trigger the memories and feelings, I do feel it's fair to believe these Republicans disqualified themselves from conversations. Because my experience of conversation was that they'd say shit like this. When Hillary denounced violence, it just proved what a bitch or a liar she was. When President Toxic said punch em in the face and he'd pay the legal bills after they were carried away in stretchers, they popped little chubs over that. The experience was consistent and unpleasant to the point where conversation and relationships no longer made sense to me. When I told them why to their face, like I was tired of the racism or the attacks on Republicans like Kasich as RINOs, and the total antipathy to compromise, and the ever deepening support for President Toxic's ever shallower leadership, it did not go well. No surprise. I'm quite sure my decision to speak so bluntly reflected the fact that I'd already decided the relationships just weren't worth it any longer. This is also why I feel that it's very important, especially as a Democrat, to honor and defend Republicans like Kasich, and the Lincoln Project types. Even if I disagree with most of their ideology. To me, they are vessels of light in a time when the nation is led by a vessel of darkness. Of course, I'm not God. I don't get to decide who is the light, and who is evil. But I do think historian John Meacham called it right. This is not a difficult choice. Leaders (and their followers) are making who they are and what they stand for very clear. Biden tried to change the tone today. I hope he keeps doing it. And I hope it sticks. Some of this will be a debate about tax plans or deficits or complicated health care funding schemes or trade deals. But Biden invoked MLK and John Lewis, and made this into a kind of moral crusade. Biden explicitly and implicitly claimed the high ground of hope. I give President Toxic's most devoted followers credit for at least feeling the same way. This rhetoric about evil hordes rampaging or cancelling the suburbs and the end of America as we knew it resonates to them because they do see this as a moral crusade. That is actually how and why we got to where we are today. Ideological disputes and political conflicts end in compromise, ideally. Moral crusades are like civil wars. None of this should be surprising. Back in the 1980's, when Donald Trump was publicly promoting killing Black thugs, he said "maybe hate is what we need if we're going to get something done". Same hate, different decade. They knew what they were voting for. Biden in particular has to relentlessly speak the language of unity and hope. And on a political level, I think that is exactly where people like Stuart Stevens and John Kasich and a lot of Republican Governors are. I'm also quite sure if President Toxic loses, some Republican MOCs will feel like it's a nightmare that ended. And now we can get back to normal. Back in the days of the Reagan Revolution, which was my political coming of age, I read conservative opinion leader George Will a lot. He was usually eloquent and interesting, even if I mostly disagreed with him. If he was writing about Reagan or like-minded Republicans winning elections, or winning conservative policies, he was right a lot more than he was wrong. So it says a lot to me that he's a Never Trumper. And that he just said on MSNBC that after the election some factions are going to be purged from the Republican Party. His words, not mine. I hope he's right about that one , as well. My reason for skepticism is that he's not even talking about his party anymore. He left it when President Toxic was elected. Some Never Trumper Republicans say they want to burn the party down. Because if President Toxic loses he will then just become a true cult leader, in effect, and gradually guide a constantly diminishing party to its end. If this is a battle between ex-President Toxic and people like George Will, I kind of feel sorry for George Will. Either way, the toxicity preceded President Toxic. And I'm pretty sure it will survive his Presidency. The good news about this to me is that if Biden wins, that is not primarily our problem. The massive challenge for Democrats will be to try to effectively govern our way out of the deep hole we're in.

I have a hangover from my intellectual masturbation marathon this weekend. And yet there's still a few other interesting pieces of data that I'm going to post because I think they may determine the outcome. I already mentioned the "better or worse than four years ago" thing above. There is another question in the YouGov poll where you can do a direct apples to apples with exit polls from 2016. So the CNN exit poll from 2016 asked voters to describe their "financial condition compared to four years ago". The 31 % who said "better today" voted Clinton 72/23. The 41 % who said "about the same" voted Clinton 47/45. The 27 % who said "worse today" voted for President Toxic 77/19. We now know that Hillary knew all this as it was happening. Stan Greenberg in particular wrote a lot about how she was trying to both run on the Obama/Biden legacy, but also speak to the fact that a lot of people didn't feel any better off. Biden will of course have the same challenge. Here's the thing, though. Today only 17 % of voters say they are "better off financially than they were one year ago", whereas 27 % say they are worse off. 51 % say they are the same financially as a year ago. It's not quite apples to apples, since the 2016 exit survey compares it to four years ago, and this current survey compares it to last year. But if Hillary had a weight around her neck in 2016, President Toxic has the same one in 2020. Except it's much heavier. And unlike Hillary, President Toxic was President. Biden will, and should, keep hammering the shit out of President Toxic for never really wanting to take responsibility for anything that happened while he's been in charge. Other than the great reality TV shows. All of this suggests Lichtman will likely be 10 out of 10 when the votes are counted. And it will be the economy, stupid. One other little tidbit. Hillary was up in Florida about three points right around now in 2016. In Florida Biden is doing a little better than Clinton, but a little worse in the Rust Belt states, compared to the same time in 2016. We should take nothing for granted. The comparisons to Hillary will probably make Biden look good by mid-Sept., since that was when she was actually in the worst polling shape. (Deplorables, walking pneumonia.) In the Florida polls President Toxic had a small lead in Sept. Then in mid-Oct. during the debates Hillary was way out front. So this is why I think every day in Sept. and Oct. all we should be talking about is "Did you vote?" and "Did you make sure your ballot was received?" I actually got an email from the California Secretary of State today saying they now have a "track your ballot" system up. We need that in every state.

This whole word "Independent" is a catch all for all kinds of things. There's the conservative Never Trumpers, the Black progressives who unlike their parents don't want to identify as a Democrat even though they vote that way, and then the people in the middle who truly go back and forth between each party. The military slants hard Republican, but when you add in that they are Millennials or Gen Z that may offset it. It's a tragedy with Hillary that for whatever reason she seemed to be good at playing to the worst stereotypes about her. You'd have to know her to understand that, I think. People who know her and admire her have written that all the decades of scars led her to build up an emotional wall around herself that comes down in private. I know that even though she was labelled as a phony, I always felt that Elizabeth always came through as authentic in a way Hillary often didn't. I can't explain it, and now it's history. Joe comes through as authentic. I'm just loving what I read. The minimum needed is what he said: rioting and looting is NOT protesting. But these other lines are great: “Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioting? Really?” “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” Biden is clearly reading the polls. I did try to select the most important questions from that massive trove of YouGov poll data. But here's a few more that may help explain this. Among Independents, 46 % say there will be "more violence" if President Toxic is re-elected. 33 % say the same, and only 23 % say "less violence." So by saying that President Toxic will just fuel the violence, Biden has no votes to lose, and probably many Independent votes to gain. 72 % of Independents say "racism" is either the most important factor or an important one in explaining the unrest. 65 % say "lack of economic opportunity" is either the "most important" (21 %) or "an important" factor in explaining the unrest. So Biden has the vast majority on his side on things President Toxic won't even talk about. The danger for Biden is that 59 % of Independents say "liberal policies" are the most important or an important factor in explaining the unrest. The 29 % who say liberalism is the "most important" factor are no doubt part of the 40 % of Independents that I think are a lost cause for Biden, anyway. But this is where progressives should probably be happy now, even though we may pay a steep price for it in the future. The idea that Biden is soft on crime and Harris is too weak to throw Black men who are bad in jail just won't sell. The pattern on COVID-19 is essentially similar. Most Independents think Biden would have done a better job (42 %) than President Toxic, or the same (17 %). Only 30 % think he'd have done worse. Biden ought to be able to win the Independent vote, perhaps handily. Like he was in some polls this Summer. I think closing the deal is all about the economy, stupid. The only sad thing about President Toxic maybe being the new President Carter is that he almost certainly will not be one of the most admired ex-Presidents. Poor Donald just can't catch a break, can he?

Quite honestly, one silver lining in the cloud if President Toxic is re-elected is that we get to watch Mike and Karen dance again. I'm all for silly walks and goose steps. But sometimes the simplest things in life are the best.

Biden Beats Trump on Economy in New Poll This Newsweek article is from mid-July. After I asked my question above I Googled "Why is Trump beating Biden on the economy?" I got this and several other articles saying he isn't. If it's true that 60 % or so of Independents feel that we're worse off than four years ago, it seems like Biden should be able to end up where that July poll shows with them. Like with Biden getting up to half the Independent vote or a bit more, and President Toxic maybe low 40's. If that happens, and Democrats (who outnumber Republicans) turn out at similarly high rates as Republicans, it's a wipe out.

I agree. If there's one thing I would point to where I keep feeling, "This can't be true. It's too good to be true. It's bullshit." that would be the polls in Florida. Florida is always close. And as you say, if Biden wins there it is game over. So I have a hard time believing he is running away with it. Unlike the national polls, President Toxic was tied to or slightly ahead of Biden in Florida this Spring. So what goes up can come down. But if the primary driver is COVID-19, its not going to be easy for President Toxic to reverse the perception that he just botched it. So an apology and a question. I just reread my last post above. There's like half a dozen typos and some words left out. Sorry about that. It's probably transparent, but I use these posts when I want to learn something to process my thoughts. My project this weekend was to learn what I could about where swing voters are at. On the other website my habit was to post, then edit. Here I've now figured out that shortly after you post, you can no longer edit. In this case, I was starving and ran out to get a pizza and by the time I got back I couldn't edit anymore. Here's the question. With Independents, as I posted above, the issue that Biden is doing the worst on relative to Trump is the economy. 44 % of Independents say they are for Trump, 34 % for Biden right now in this YouGov poll. In terms of who would do a better job on the economy, 43 % say President Toxic and 28 % Biden. My strong gut feeling, based on this data, is that what's holding Biden back with Independents is this stuff on the economy ..... not COVID-19,. not race, not anything else. Why? I don't quite get it. I understand that until March anyone for President Toxic could argue, and also genuinely believed, that the economy was the best ever. But now it's the worst ever. Lichtman has incorporated this in his analysis. Before COVID-19 he was saying it's too early to tell, but at this point it looks like Trump. The three things that changed were the short term economy, the long term economy, and the social unrest - which I actually believe is not just race, but also all these young people of every race who feel they've been left behind by the economy, and now stand on common ground. Independents don't see it this way. At least not right now. I'm not sure if it's fear that Biden will go too far left, a lack of faith in Biden because he represents the Establishment that has failed, something else, or some combo of all the above. The most salient number to me is 60 %. As I said above 60 % of Independents say we're worse off than four years ago. Based on past election cycles, like the exit poll data from 2016, Biden should be winning like 75 % to 80 % of these "thing are worse" Independent voters. It seems like he SHOULD be able to get up to the high 40's of all Independents, as opposed to the mid-30's where he's at right now. Ideas?

My intellectual masturbation marathon this weekend has involved wondering what Independents think about Biden and President Toxic. If there's anybody who actually is still undecided, which is itself questionable, they are probably Independents. So this long ass post is my masturbation about what Independents seem to be saying that actually matters. Let's start with this: US election 2020: Trump handed huge boost as Biden makes major mistake - Exclusive poll There's people online saying this is a fake poll based on crappy assumptions. Trafalgar is out with a poll saying President Toxic has a slight lead in Michigan. So I see no reason to dismiss the idea that President Toxic may win. I'd rather break the glass and act as if these polls are right on the money. There is one specific point I'd like to make about this poll. This is what the clearly pro-Trump people who put it out said: What I predicted is that Team Toxic will say Biden is full of shit about violence unless and until he takes up arms and, much like a vigilante, go kills some Black looter. And then they will condemn him for it. This comes close. They are trying to portray Biden's denunciation of violence - and call for President Toxic to do the same - as a sort of flip flopping. My category for this is simple. It goes in the "desperate people do desperate things" file. John Kerry did flip flop oh his vote for war in Iraq. Biden, and Jacob's Mom, are actually articulating how the vast majority of Americans think and feel. At least according to the polls I'm reading. On the polling trend itself, I already pointed out that Rasmussen, a Republican poll that is an outlier compared to most polls, said that Trump's approval rating increased during the DNC, decreased during the RNC, and after two weeks of conventions his - 6 % net approval was one point worse than before either convention. Again, this is a Republican poll which in 2020 is an outlier showing much more approval for President Toxic than most polls. They are not arguing that President Toxic won the election this week. Or even that he gained any ground. I'd tend to go with Rasmussen on the trend. All this data about Independents reinforces the point I just made. At least in 2020, they seem to NOT like most of what either Biden or President Toxic say. At least the small group of Independents that aren't mostly Republicans or Democrats. When Democrats talk, Independents like President Toxic just a little more. When he talks, they like him a little less. I think part of it, based on years of relationships with Independent clients, is they just kind of disdain the whole sausage making process. So anyone who makes sausages is someone they are skeptical about, and in some cases just look down on. Out of curiosity, I tried to find data about how Independents viewed Obama during the 2008 campaign. This is an interesting but tangential point: Independents abandoned Obama quickly after the 2008 election, and were a big part of the 2010 Democratic wipeout. This resonates with my lived experience. The good part of it is that these people held Obama accountable to his campaign rhetoric about unity. That said, I know several of the ones I've known have been involved in lobbying and writing federal regs on business matters that affected them. So I've always felt they tend to hold all politicians up to a higher standard than they hold themselves to. Beyond that, I think some of the messages at the DNC reinforced specific economic fears Independents have about Biden. And some of the messages at the RNC - like around racism - reinforced things they don't like about the whole President Toxic experience. I'll get into specific poll data on that below. But it would explain what Rasmussen's data suggests: that the Democratic convention gave Trump some points, and the Republican convention took them back. That said, there's some slightly contradictory data in this huge YouGov poll that could explain any convention bounce President Toxic had. When asked whether the RNC made them more likely or less likely to vote for Trump, 47 % of Independents said more likely and 25 % said less likely. That right there would be sufficient to explain a possible bounce of a few points. Particularly because a few months ago, Biden was winning a slightly higher percentage of the Independent vote. So if Independents shifted a little more toward President Toxic, is that .... the economy? the looting or violence? the choice of Harris? the RNC being a good show? We can't really know. But the RNC itself is a good enough explanation to me. If you are worried about some new poll that says President Toxic will win, here's a blast from the past. In early September, a few days after the RNC, USA today put out a poll showing that John McCain had a 10 point lead over Barack Obama. In the early September averages, McCain led. The last poll showing McCain with a lead came out in later September 2008. I think in a month we'll have a much better picture of whether this is going to be a nail biter. Alan, welcome to the conversation. Professor Lichtman would point out that the Republicans had so many fundamentals working against them in 2008 that there was basically no way either Barack or Hillary could have lost that election, regardless of which one was nominated. He'd say most of this campaign stuff is just noise. This Gallup report says if you look at who was ahead BEFORE the conventions, the leader BEFORE THE CONVENTION won 12 out of the 15 Presidential races. This of course suggests Biden is way more likely to win. The objective fact I come back to is that it's been almost exactly one year since RCP started measuring a Biden/Trump horse race. Of those 365 days, President Toxic has been in the lead for exactly 0 of 365 days. The closest he's gotten to Biden, so far, is about 4 % in the national popular vote. If Biden wins by 4 % (as opposed to 2 % like Hillary) it's very hard to slice and dice the math so that he loses the electoral college. From here on out in this post, I'm going to focus on what this YouGov poll says Independents are thinking. My assumption is that most voters still in play are Independents. And their thinking offers insights into the underlying trends. My related assumption is that Lichtman is right. So what's really of interest is data about underlying voter trends about fundamentals. Therefore, the most useless question is the horse race poll question. But some of these other questions paint a picture that is less "sticky", and in many cases seems to already be hardened into concrete. I said already several posts up that I think about 40 % of Independents are a lost cause to Biden. I'd put that number in the low 40's. 42 % of Independents say Biden is not mentally fit to be President. 41 % say America would be less safe under Biden. It seems like somewhere around 4 in 10 "Independents" are basically conservative Republicans who will end up voting for President Toxic, or perhaps just not vote. Biden is disqualified for them, I think. I don't think that's about race of BLM or Kenosha or violence. Here's an example. Nikki Haley said her party is not racist. But 52 % of Independents say race relations are generally bad. 50 % say the US suffers from systemic racism. That is obviously NOT the Republican position. I think race may be an issue that is drawing people away from the Republicans. Perhaps just for appearance's sake, because they don't want to be seen as racists. Or more likely because they simply don't agree with Haley, and they do believe America has a real and big race problem. I also said several posts up that another 40 % of Independents are a lost cause to President Toxic. I'd put the number in the mid- to high 40's. Here's examples. 45 % of Independents say President Toxic is not a good person. 47 % say he does not have the mental ability to be President. 39 % say he is the source of the current chaos. To me at least, these are all disqualifying statements. You're a bad person, you're mentally unfit, and you're causing chaos. But I'll vote for you? Uh .................... probably not! I think this poll, which shows President Toxic winning 44 % of Independents, is probably getting close to as good as it gets for him with Independents. Meanwhile, Biden has 34 % of Independents in this poll. I'm guessing that's about as bad as it gets for him. Party because this poll comes right after an RNC that almost half of Independents said made them more likely to vote for President Toxic. And partly because close to half of Independents have really toxic views of President Toxic, as both a person and a leader. Finally, in most polls this year, and especially this Summer, I think Biden had a slight leads with Independents. Here's another one of Lichtman's underlying factors that I think is probably sticky, if not cemented in. 60 % of Independents say "thing have generally gotten worse" in the US over the last four years. I put the exact wording because there are variations of this question. But in general, if you think the economy is worse off, or if you are personally worse off, your chances of voting for the incumbent plummet. So, in theory, a little more than 40 % of Independents are a lost cause for Biden. But the 60 % who say the US is in worse shape would pretty much all be candidates for ending up as Biden voters, I think. If they actually vote, that is. About 20 % of these Independents care little or not at all who wins. That's why GOTV matters so much. These were some of the biggest nails in Hillary's coffin when she ran against Trump. In the 2016 exit polls, 72 % of voters said their financial situation was either better off or about the same as four years ago. Hillary won those two groups handily. But the 27 % who said they were worse off voted against her, 77 to 19. On the overall economy, about 1 in 3 voters said the economy was excellent or good. Hillary won over 3 in 4 of those votes. The 41 % who said the economy was "not good" voted for President Toxic 53/40. The 21 % who said the economy was "poor" voted for President Toxic 79/15. Cue up Jim Carville, please ... My sense is that last week was a mostly well choreographed effort by Team Toxic to convince anyone persuadable that you're better off than you were before me. And other than these few little Corona-glitches, things will be just fine. So we know from this poll almost half of Independents said, "Okay. I'm open to think about that. Maybe." But 60 % of them still feel the US is worse off. Lichtman's point is that voters are not fundamentally stupid. And the economic fundamentals, which are quite ugly, will manifest themselves in the final vote. If it's a fair vote. If that's true, what could possibly go wrong for Biden? On leadership traits, over half of all voters, including half of Independents, aren't particularly impressed with either man. Is anyone surprised? Biden does best on decency and empathy. Even there, only 4 in 10 voters say he has that quality. As opposed to only 2 in 10 who say the same about President Toxic. With strength, it's the opposite. One of President Toxic's favorite four letter words this Fall will be "weak". Because 4 in 10 voters see him as strong, as opposed to 2 in 10 for Biden. Either way, that's hardly flattering. As far as closing the deal with Independents that can still be persuaded goes, the polls suggest Harris met the "do no harm" rule. Among Independents, she has a 36 % favorable/ 52 % unfavorable rating. That may sound bad. But Biden is 39 % favorable/54 % unfavorable. So Harris did not harm. Meanwhile, President Toxic is 41 % favorable/55 % unfavorable. Again, he may be maxxed out with Independents already. If I'm right that maybe at most 20 % of Independents are in play, they are probably almost all voters who don't particularly admire either man. I doubt these perceptions will change. The good news to me is that slightly more Independents agree with what I view as the disqualifying statements for President Toxic - like that he's mentally unfit - than with Biden. So combine that with the latent fact that a majority of them thinks the country is worse off, and there's a good chance that a majority of Independents will ultimately vote for change, and Biden. Here's how Independents view which candidate who would do a better job on key issues, ranked from ones where Biden has a lead to those where President Toxic has a lead: Dealing with race relations: Biden 42, Trump 26, Biden has + 16 % advantage Dealing with Coronavirus: Biden 40, Trump 33, Biden has + 7 % advantage Foreign policy: Biden 36, Trump 40, Trump has + 4 % advantage Crime: Biden 33, Trump 37, Trump has + 4 % advantage Immigration: Biden 35, Trump 42, Trump has + 7 % advantage The economy: Biden 28, Trump 43, Trump has + 15 % advantage. I think some of the conventional wisdom may be wrong. If "law and order" means "crime", President Toxic may have a slight advantage. But it's slight. Once it gets into race, Biden has the advantage. I think it's probably in cement that Biden is viewed as more likely to be able to bring us back together. And President Toxic is more likely to create chaos and pull us apart. 50 to 52 % of Independents believe that race relations are bad, and there is systemic racism in the US. Biden is getting the votes of 34 % if Independents in this poll. That suggests either people are lying, or Biden has room to grow support on this issue. President Toxic, right after the RNC that half of Independents say persuaded them, is actually outperforming right now. He has 44 % of the Independent vote in this poll, even though there's no issue on which 44 % of Independents think he'd actually do a better job than Biden. The other obvious thing is that it's the economy, stupid. That's where Independents say President Toxic looks the best, and Biden looks the worst. And we should add in the cohort that is basically with President Toxic on The Wall and the borders. That's 42 to 43 %. Again, there's a whole bunch of poll results that suggest for some percentage of voters in the low 40's Biden is just a bridge too far. And President Toxic already has all those people in this poll, in which he's still losing by six points. I don't think Kenosha is preventing Biden from closing the deal. When a Black mother of a guy who just got shot 7 times speaks out about violence and healing, that helps Biden. Honestly, watching how Biden is doing this, I'm pretty impressed. I'd guess that he personally encouraged Jacob's mother to do that. I actually think it inoculates him if some crazy anti-fa people kill someone. he's unequivocally against it, and saying it nonstop. President Toxic isn't inoculated in the same way. Because he says things that either explicitly or at least implicitly seem to provoke the hot heads. That's part of what I read into the poll results. if there's a way "Kenosha" hurts Biden, it's by President Toxic backing Biden into a cul de sac. There's a question that deals with that. Asked which is a bigger problem, systemic racism or a breakdown of law and order, the country is split 49/51, right down the middle. But with Independent voters, 43 % say systemic racism. 57 % say that the breakdown of law and order is a bigger problem. You could argue if Biden is the racism guy, and President Toxic is the law and order guy, that hurts Biden. Especially if you argue that Biden is somehow causing this breakdown of law and order. Which is of course what Republicans, including surrogates like Black conservative, are selling. I think it's a hard sell. The polls suggest it's not working, other than with those already coverted. Brewer can discredit BLM as socialist or against the nuclear family, but it's a lie and it's not cutting for the people who aren't like the McCloskeys. Meanwhile, Democrats - including many who are Black - will keep arguing that if you want law and order, you need to dump Trump. That almost 4 in 10 Independents say the President of the United States is very strong language - really it should be shocking. If you watered it down to "throwing fuel on the fire" more than 4 in 10 Independents would agree. Which is precisely why only 1 in 4 Independents think President Toxic would do a better job on race than Biden. As long as Democrats keep shouting that this is Trump's America, and President Toxic is making this worse, I don't see this hurting Biden. More likely, it helps him. I think what's really Biden from closing the deal is .......... the economy, stupid. And I'm not sure why. Again, 60 % of Independents say the US is worse off than four years ago. That syncs with the fact that 44 % are already voting for President Toxic. And that 43 % say he will do a better job than Biden on the economy. My guess is President Toxic is getting an overwhelming majority of the 40 % who DO NOT think that we're worse off. And a thin slice of the 60 % who do feel we're worse off, but don't blame it on him or are willing to give him more time. But there's a big gap between the 34 % support Biden has in this poll, and the 60 % who say America is in worse shape under President Toxic. I can only speculate about what that 's about. My guess is that this "socialism" thing has bite. Nobody thinks Biden is a socialist. But the "Trojan horse" argument is a slippery slope argument. Let Biden in the door, and you just can't trust who he'll bring with him (Elizabeth Warren! AOC! Bernie! Black Marxists!) or what they'll think up next. My strong hunch is that some Independents who watched the DNC had some buttons pushed, and told Rasmussen that week (but not the following week) that maybe I like President Toxic after all. Another theory is that Biden has all these word bubbles hanging over his head like "NAFTA" and "Job Destroyer" and "Green New Deal" and "tax hike". This is where maybe Axelrod and Brownstein were right. As they said, maybe the DNC should have presented a more explicit economic agenda to persuade these Independents. I think it was implicit in the choreography that both conventions were focused less on persuading Independents, and more on ginning up the base to vote, and donate, and volunteer. Biden has two months and several debates to deal with these economic questions and reservations and close the deal, if economic policy or any policy is the hurdle to be jumped. Again, the good news to me is that, at least in theory, most of the 60 % of Independents that feel that the US is worse off under President Toxic are targets to vote for Biden. he's lost the other 40 % because they think he's senile and they buyt the "Destroyer Joe" trope. But he only has a bit over half of the other 60 % in this poll. Meanwhile, President Toxic has 100 % + of the Independents who feel he's doing a better job on any issue. It that sense, this is like 1992. Biden has to close the deal. And he has the time and voters to do so. My read is that the key phrase is what we all know it is ............ it's the economy, stupid. Reinforcing President Toxic's incompetence on COVID-19 will also help. 40 % already say Biden would do a better job on that. So they should be voting for him, but for the fact that they probably haven't been sold on the economy yet. Michael Steele, former RNC Chair, asked a good question this week about Republicans: "How do they stop the slide?" The context of his statement was that his former party has probably lost 4 Senate seats irreversibly, and if the slide continues it could be 7. He's no dummy. The Republicans had their week of reality TV to present their alternative universe. So is this is what they've got, and most polls still show they're down maybe seven points, this is not good news for them. Steele sure knows that. This is another area where President Toxic may be pulling a Carter. He set expectations for Biden so low that Biden has already outperformed them. At least at the DNC. He's doing the same thing with his talk about socialists, Marxists, and Trojan horses. The policy fear with Reagan was that he'd go way too far. Reagan had to calm people down. The killer line from the one and only debate right before the election was ... "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Biden has it better and worse than Reagan. If you see Biden as a socialist, or even very liberal, that means you are a conservative Republican, and you'll be voting for President Toxic. So he doesn't have to explain that he's not radical. The bigger problem may be that he does have to explain how he was a Senator and a Vice President for half a century. And yet, to quote President Toxic, "it is what it is." How does the guy who spent half a century in power getting us into this mess now get us out of it? I've never been a student of Joe Biden before. I had no reason to be. Now I do. I'd bet he'll pass this test with flying colors, just like he did with his convention. I can think of arguments and zingers. But Biden's people will (hopefully) impress me with much better ones they think up.

So it seems like it's "break the glass" weekend. Michael Moore is the smartest guy in the room saying, "Oh my God, this could be 2016 all over again". There are several others I admire less saying the same thing. Mostly I'm glad. Because for the next two months Democrats should be in an endless cycle of vote, donate, volunteer, repeat. Just don't vote more than once, okay? This is leading to some people saying fairly dumb shit. There's an Atlantic article I won't bother posting that is titled "This Is How Biden Loses" which runs out the Kenosha Theory. The author's idea is that Biden should go to Kenosha as a sort of shadow President and pronounce something about peace, calm, nonviolence, or something. I guess the idea is that now that he's proven he can give a good convention speech, let's try making Biden look like Jesus, Moses, and Gandhi rolled into one. It's a bad idea. A better idea is what Cedric Richmond, Biden's co-chair said, "This is Trump's America. He needs to own this moment." I think most people get that. I've been spending the weekend poring through that 273 page You Gov poll. I think there's a treasure trove of "sticky" data about how voters, especially Independents, view this election. I'll get to that. But I don' buy the idea that Biden loses because of this kind of violence. Race relations is actually his BEST issue, according to these polls. 51 % of Americans say President Toxic is a racist, including 78 % of Blacks. Independents see Biden as being better than President Toxic on "race relations" by a 16 point margin. So I get the idea that this plays to the "law and order" fears. But it also plays to the idea, which almost half of America agrees with, that President Toxic is the cause of this national chaos. Portland is kind of my political home time. I've never cared for the anti-fa people. Or the conservative people who mostly don't live in Portland who come in to push back. This has been happening all through President Toxic's Presidency. So in the last few days there's all these people waving MAGA flags. And one of them gets shot in the head twice and killed by someone who says "We have a Trumper right here." First, every Black and every Democrat needs to speak like Jacob Blake's Mom. Which is do say, we need to condemn any type of violence as a way to create change. Like Jacob's Mom, we need to keep saying what makes America great is our ability to unify around common values. Second, you don't have to guess about some of the passions driving this. It's branded. MAGA flags. "We have a Trumper right here." I'm not arguing President Toxic caused this. But his name and branding is right in the middle of it. The idea of killing anyone because they are a "Trumper" is repugnant and wrong. But how did we get to where we are? No one is doing this in the name of Joe Biden. Or going out with Biden buttons on and Biden stickers on their guns and killing people. As President Toxic would say, "It is what it is." I think people see what it is. Everything Jacob's Mom said above - every word in every sentence - is exactly what Biden has been saying. I'll pull a Lichtman and argue that much of this - especially the horse race polls - is just noise that has no impact on the outcome. His theory says, correctly I think, that social disorder is one of 13 fundamentals that suggest a political earthquake is coming that will turn out the party in power. He would argue that chaos hurts the incumbent party. 78 % of Americans say the country is out of control. 46 % of Americans say President Toxic "is the cause of the chaos". Only 27 % say Trump "will protect us from the chaos". These are bad numbers for President Toxic. It is not clear to me that this will end up being somehow blamed on Biden, or Democrats. People are much more likely to say President Toxic is causing this chaos. Or at least throwing fuel on the fire. I'm with Cedric Richmond. This is President Toxic's America. He needs to own it. A few historical notes that are relevant, I think. Like many, I worried that some White whack job would assassinate Obama. Thankfully, that didn't happen. But most people did not associate Obama, or Obama's America, with throwing fuel on fires. That said, I've known a number of White conservatives who think Obama was a racist. When you probed why, they cited things that I viewed as attempts at calming, and reconciliation. My perception is that Obama would go to Dallas after a cop was killed, or speak up about Ferguson, and say things like, "We are not as far apart as we think." He would speak up for the core values and ideas of both cops, and protesters. Some White people perceived that as anti-cop. Meanwhile, it's apparently an open secret that Michelle Obama feels that President Toxic's birther nonsense could have gotten her husband killed. All it takes is one nut with one gun. This week proved there are plenty of nuts and guns out there. My point is that President Toxic is more symptom than cause. I think all this racist bile, which includes the idea that Obama was a racist for trying to get people to meet in the middle, started to well up from the conservative or Tea Party base long before Trump came along. I know this for a fact, because I ate, slept, traveled, and talked with these people. President Toxic simply articulated - or bellowed - how they felt. I can't divorce my perceptions from my political views. But the polls I'm reading suggest most Americans perceive reality as I do. They are far more likely to associate the racism and the chaos and the violence with President Toxic. I think Democrats need to make him own it. Another historical reference. It's a well kept secret, but in 1968 the name of the President was LBJ. Nixon was challenging an incumbent party. Back to Lichtman, he suggests that social disorder signals problems for the incumbent party. So the people who cite Nixon and 1968 have to remember that the Nixon of 2020 is Joe Biden. He's the one who, like Nixon, can and is arguing that he can clean up this mess. The polls say America is inclined to believe that President Toxic is a racist. And that Joe Biden is simply better suited to calm down race relations and deal with the underlying issues causing the violence. So this is a complicated issue that could go either way. But the notion that this automatically helps President Toxic is nonsense. Nixon had a very easy case to make, because the symbol of the chaos in 1968 was all the violence associated with the Democratic National Convention. That certainly does not describe what happened at the 2020 DNC. The 2020 DNC was about "Empathy Joe," The polls suggest it worked. It mostly reinforced an image of decency among people who saw Biden that way already. It may have persuaded a single digit percentage of Independents that Joe is a really decent guy. That's not what happened in 1968. About half of America see Biden as a good person, and they see empathy and decency as his strong suits. Again, only 29 % of Americans see President Toxic as a good person. Even many Republican agree that he lacks empathy and decency. I think Biden's bigger problem is issues. More than anything, it's still the economy, stupid. There's a trove of poll data that suggests this, that I'll get into below. My point here is that I think Biden has won the "decency debate". It's probably a reason for more Independents to support Biden. Because most people don't even think President Toxic is a good person. Biden's problems probably have to do with Independents fearing he'll go too far - open borders and socialism are probably the two biggest hot buttons. This whole trope about Blacks abolishing or ruining the suburbs is mostly just inflaming Blacks who already think President Toxic is racist to the bone, I think. In my eyes, there is no question at all that President Toxic is a racist. And that he is fueling the fire. In part because he is what he is. And in part because polarizing and dividing is his sole path to win re-election. I am clear that not everyone agrees with me. But the polls suggest that Americans, including Independents, tend to view it more my way than President Toxic's way. I'll post more of this poll data below. It makes what I think are some very interesting points about underlying drivers in this election. But this post I wanted to focus mostly on the questions of race and violence. And on what I view as the mistaken idea that this will somehow lead to Biden's undoing. If anything, I think it helps Biden at the margin, for the reasons I said above. People see Biden, not President Toxic, as the guy better suited to deal with this issue.

Everyone here is just being so unfair, and jumping to conclusions. There's a lot of good reasons he might not want to release his DNA. For example, in this massive You Gov poll I've been citing, only 29 % of voters think President Toxic is a good person. What if they aren't saying Trump is bad? What if they are saying he actually isn't a person? Bill Maher actually out on front on this issue. Sadly, he didn't have the DNA to prove it. Maybe this explains everything.

There's actually a part II to the last long rant of mine directly above. I was editing what I had posted and fact checking all these poll numbers from the Morning Consult poll. And I guess the edit function on any post times out after some relatively brief period of time. So I'm going to reprint the final paragraph from above about whether voters even care from this huge poll, and then post the remainder. Then there's a question about whether voters care who wins. 90 % of both Democrats and Republicans care "a lot" or "somewhat". 10 % of both Democrats and Republicans say they care only a little, or not at all. So my read of that is that there is no real difference in partisan motivation. Both parties are on fire. And turnout will likely be really high for both parties. If that happens, Democrats win. Because there are more registered Democrats. Republicans only win big, like in 2010, when Democratic turnout sucks. The thing that jumps out at me most is that 25 % of Independents care only a little, or not at all, about who wins. For me, this is very easy when you just think about it in whore think. You can fuck me because you are madly in love with me. Or you can fuck me because I'm just an asshole. In the first case, you'll slip a wedding ring on my finger. In the second case, you'll leave an envelope on the dresser. But either way, I'm fucked. So whether we love Biden, or it's just whoring, winning is still winning. Granted, I'm just a dumb ass whore. But that's how I see it. Related to that, here's another very interesting and disturbing poll result in terms of motivation. To me, there's a difference between being a political whore, and saying any means justifies the end of winning. 50 % of all voters say Joe Biden is a good person. Almost all Democrats see him that way. Only 29 % of voters see President Toxic as a good person. That right there is incredible. He is the President of the United States. And most people don't even see him as a good person. Only 65 % of Republicans think President Toxic is a good person. And this is AFTER several years of bleeding party registrations. Meaning for the first time ever there are more registered Independents than registered Republicans. So the ones like Flake and Kasich that think President Toxic is NOT a good person already abandoned ship. But even 1 in 3 of the rats on the sinking ship still say this guy is not a good person. Is it possible some of that third will decide between now and November that they'd best jump ship? Who knows? But it's possible. Now I'll make a 100 % emotional statement. It's based on years of intimate relationships with lifelong Republicans. But it's reinforced by almost everything these Never Trumpers who know the party deep in their heart are saying Some of these people would gladly elect Satan if it got them power, and got them their agenda. They don't give a shit. Any means, including putting Satan in power, justifies their ends. They want conservative judges, a big fucking Wall, get rid of abortion, get rid of same sex marriage, get rid of Obamacare, cut taxes, as many guns as they want, and can we all just figure out some reasonable way to get these Black people to just dribble their fucking basketballs and SHUT THE FUCK UP and not have these god damn awful Marxist Black women running for Congress AND FUCKING WINNING!!! How could Black Marxists win? Now maybe not every Republican is like the McCloskeys, and they may part company on this or that. But I agreed with Hillary back in 2016 that some of these people were deplorables. It was really, really dumb for someone running for President of all Americans to say it, of course. It was a big nail in her political coffin. But history has kind of redeemed her, I think. So yes, maybe Donald Trump did not 100 % drain the swamp. But it's a tough job for a mere perfect mortal. So that's why we'll just haul Satan's ass up from hell to finish the job. What could possibly go wrong? Sorry. But if I just listen to what lifelong Republicans who fled the rat's nest are saying, that's what they say about how some of these people who stayed behind think. Again, I'm having a moment. But some of what these people say and do suggest I am not far off the mark here. Now, to try to tiptoe back to fact and logic, there's a few other really interesting things here about Independents. I suspect it means that about 80 % of them are cemented in already for either Biden or President Toxic. Again, this poll shows 44 % of Independents for President Toxic, 34 % for Biden. But a few months ago another poll showed Biden with a slight lead with Independents. And either way, Biden is winning among all voters - by 7 points now, by 10 points in early Summer when he was winning the Independent vote. So this poll says 42 % of Independents think Biden does not have the mental ability to do the job. 41 % say he would make America less safe. Again, right now 44 % of independents say they are for President Toxic. So I think it's a good guess that 4 in 10 Independents are a waste of time for Biden. That's not bad. Most Independents lean toward one party. And this is after several years of lots of Republicans rebranding themselves as Independents. So it is no surprise to me that a significant minority of Independents may not like President Toxic, but they still will go with these Republican messages. These are no doubt the Independents who Team Toxic is hoping will hold their nose and walk back into the tent. 47 % of Independents say President Toxic does not have the mental ability to do the job. That's 5 % more than say the same thing about Biden. 43 % say Trump would make America less safe - 2 % more than said the same about Biden. And as I said above, in this poll Biden has only 34 % of the Independent vote right now, although a few months ago it may have been in the 40's. So it seems to me that Biden actually has more room to grow among Independents than President Toxic. There's one other question about chaos that goes toward this same point. The fact that they're now polling on chaos, and whether our President is causing chaos, is itself a measure of just how horrible things are right now. I've never seen a question like this on a poll before. Right now 78 % of all Americans say America is "out of control". A follow up question explores why people think that. Of all Americans, 46 % say "Trump is the source of the chaos", 27 % say "Trump will protect us from the chaos", 10 % say things are in control, and the rest don't know. Because there are more Democrats than Republicans or Independents, and Democrats feel strongly that President Toxic = chaos, they are over-weighting those numbers. When you only ask Independents, President Toxic does slightly better. 39 % say Trump is causing the chaos, and 29 % say Trump will protect us from the chaos. So now that I did a big number dump out of a humongous poll, here's my point. These horse race polls have been very stable. So have President Toxic's approval ratings, for years. So it seems like even among Independents, about 40 % simply will not vote for Biden. My guess is they likely will vote for President Toxic. If they say Biden is not mentally fit, and will make America less safe, he's not an option. Likewise, at least 40 % and probably more will not vote for Trump. Up to 47 % say he is mentally unfit, and just about 40 % say he's the source of the chaos. That's probably disqualifying. So probably both President Toxic and Biden ought to be able to get about 40 % of the Independent vote. There is this other very fluid 20 %. My guess is Biden has a better shot at winning the majority of that slice. Unless Biden somehow fucks things up really badly, anyone who was willing to buy the "Senile Joe" or "Destroyer Joe" tropes has probably already bought them. But this other 20 % or so slice is in play. Like in 2016, they don't particularly like either guy. I'm guessing that these people are also the 25 % who say they care very little, or not at all, who wins. In 2016, this slice of voters broke heavily for Trump, because they wanted change. If they felt worse off than in 2012, they were even more likely to vote for Trump. Lichtman would argue they were basically casting a thumbs down vote on the party in power. So my strong hunch is that this group of Independents, which is a single digit of the electorate, is probably more likely to hold their nose and vote for Biden than President Toxic - if they vote at all. At the end of the day, they will probably agree that things are out of control, and so therefore change is better than more of the same. My other guess is that Team Toxic knows this. Which is why they are making this a choice between 1) a bad person (because they can't make President Toxic look like a good person, even to 1 in 3 Republicans), and 2) Black Armageddon. They are calculating they can get their own people to vote, even if they are surrounded by plague, locusts, and the fires of Satan. And they are probably trying to make it unappealing or just difficult for everyone else to vote. I'm guessing that includes this 20 % or so of Independents, which is maybe 5 % or so of the entire electorate. That cohort is at best a gamble, and at worst a group that would be most likely to break against the party and leader that got us into this mess. At least so far, they have not bought the message that Biden is unfit, or will make America less safe. Again, all of this is happening in a frame where Biden is winning the popular vote by 7 to 10 %, and ahead in almost every swing state - even if by a thin margin. This is why I think it's all about GOTV and mobilization at this point. 80 % of Independents are probably already locked in cement for either Biden or President Toxic. The best thing that President Toxic has going for him is that he's got a rabid base. Most of whom will walk through the fires of hell to vote for President Toxic. So I think the smart Democrats are right to say the incessant chorus for the next two months has to boil down to one four letter word: V-O-T-E! In a situation like this, I think that anyone who votes who does not already know who they are for is more likely than not to break for change and ending the chaos. That's means Biden. Even if it's another "hold your noser" like in 2016. I could throw around more numbers, but to make my closing point I won't bother. Because I think most people who accept that facts are facts will agree. By almost any objective economic standard, we are worse off than in 1980, 1992, 2008, and 2016. Those were all "it's the economy, stupid" elections where these truly on the fence Independents all tipped the election in the final days against an incumbent, or an incumbent party. Some years, like 2008, the outcome was pretty clear already. Other years, like 2016, it really was the last minute "shift happens" that changed the outcome. It could work out better for President Toxic in 2020. But I really can't see why. Outside the rat's nest, pretty much everyone agrees that he's not a good person. And that either he's created the chaos himself, or at least he does not know how to end it.

I've loved you since we were separated at birth. And while I was woke dreaming on Gillum, you did sniff him out as phony. (Thankfully, I don't mean that sniffing part literally.) But data isn't your strong suit. Then again, I guess you have Czaba or his buddies, so that counts for something. I'm not wild about Ossoff. Then again, I sent money today to Hickenlooper, Bullock, Cunnigham, TJ Cox (toss up House seat in CA). The final last name notwithstanding, I ain't popping a chub - political or otherwise - for any of these guys. I really like and admire Doug Jones. So I changed my plans today and decided instead of $100 to Ossoff like the other ones I'd send $50 to both Ossoff and Jones. I'm mostly just going by the data, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, anyone who thinks they know anything. Jones is a very long shot. Ossoff is unlikely, but possible. To me, Kelly, Hickenlooper, Cunnigham, and Gideon are the ones who are all ahead in the polls, and the must haves - assuming Jones loses. That's a 50/50 Senate, plus VP Kamala. Which is about what I'd guess if it's really a razor thin Presidential race. If you get into what Lichtman or that other model based on the economy and President Toxic's approval rating says, Michael Steele is right. In a wave, we could win seven Senate seats. Problem solved. Then again, we could also lose. I'll actually get to that in the next post. On the House side, my big thing is I'm just a girl from Kansas. So like Dorothy, I'm focusing on my very own back yard. The CA House races that are toss ups are Rouda and Cox and Christy Smith, who is going for the seat Katie Hill resigned from and the Republicans took. I just want to hold on to what we've got in the House. If things go well I'll add Ammar who is a House long shot. He's the only one on my list I could actually pop a chub for. And don't say it. I'm obviously a threat to the suburbs and civilization. Because I get hard ons for hot terrorists. To be brutally honest, it's a very good thing I have porn of Czaba/Kris Evans on my computer. Because if the goal is an orgasm, no offense to Ammar or Jon, but porn is probably the most efficient way to do it. I am hoping for a political orgasm in November. That's the best way to solve your worry, which I think is everyone's worry. Which is that this will drag on forever, and we won't know until January. And President Toxic's position is either he won or it's a fake election. We need to keep saying this every day. Hopefully it gets the idea in the mind of everybody that would you please just go fucking vote so that we can get this over with quickly. Lucy McBath is the only House candidate outside CA I'm donating to because like you I think she's a great candidate. I do have a hard on for her on the gun issue, and also on her personal courage and resilience. Also my guess is that this is the cycle we can flip Arizona and Georgia and North Carolina, while holding those three blue Wall Rust Belt states. I just saw somebody smart - I think Jeff Flake, but maybe not - who said in an interview about why he's standing up for Biden that as a conservative he realizes that Trumpism is unsustainable. He said on the current track they'll lose Texas in the 2024 cycle. There's actually a very, very, very consistent analysis among all these Never Trump conservatives, I think. But it's like getting puzzle pieces in that article or this interview that you then have to piece together. As Flake implied, probably their biggest driver is to kill the cancer and then try to rebuild their party. More on that in a future post. But in terms of 2020 I think it's realistic that we can have the Blue Wall and add Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina up and down the ticket. I'm not sending money to Rev. Warnock in Georgia or Jamie Harrison in SC, at least not yet. Even Fox News is saying The Divine Miss Graham may be in trouble. I think we'll know a lot more, good or bad, in a month. I do pop chub when I start thinking about two Black Democratic Senators from the South. I think you're making a lot of assumptions about Kamala. The really interesting question is if Biden/Harris wins, and for some reason Biden is not running in 2024, does that make Harris the 2024 nominee? Or is it a battle royal between her and the progressive wing? That's a fight for another day. For now, I think she at the very least satisfied the "do no harm" rule, and as Rep. Clyburn says probably helps at the margin with both Blacks and suburban women. But there's no way to objectively prove I'm right or you're right. And let's not remember. Feinstein lost state races before she won. She said she regretted endorsing Harris when she found out about some liberal position Harris took. So if the debate in 2020 among Democrats is whether Harris s too conservative, that's not a bad place to be. Remember, to Republican true believers she is a socialist radical who will pillage suburbs with all those other Blacks, I guess. Unless it turns out she's not Black, or American, maybe. Who the fuck knows anymore. The only other thing I'd say about Ossoff is the same. We don't know. The thing I most disliked in that special election is that he didn't live in the district. That alone could be seen as disqualifying. If I donated with my heart, I'd be sending money to Rev. Warnock instead. But it's quite possible that what Ossoff did helped pave the way for McBath to win in 2018. And even if Ossoff and Warnock both lose, it's possible that paves the way for Stacey Abrams to be Governor. We don't know. This is a long slog. And yeah, we agree that Biden is not good for popping chub either. There is a trend here. On top of everything else, 2020 is all about sexual frustration, I guess. Gotta say it again. Good thing i got plenty of porn on my computer, cause this politics stuff is all pretty much limp dick territory. There's a few interesting tidbits about Biden ED (it stands for electoral dysfunction) in this new 5000 page Morning Consult poll, which makes me look terse. To your point, when asked why they support their candidate, 87 % of Republicans say they are voting FOR President Toxic, and 13 % say they are voting AGAINST Biden. With Democrats, 60 % say they are voting for Biden, and 40 % say they are voting against President Toxic. So, yes, almost all Republicans have the true religion thing going for them. The Democrats are just being political whores. There's no real love there, for many of us. Then there's a question about whether voters care who wins. 90 % of both Democrats and Republicans care "a lot" or "somewhat". 10 % of both Democrats and Republicans say they care little, or not at all. So my read of that is that there is no difference in motivation. Both parties are on fire, and turnout will likely be really high. If that happens, Democrats win. Because there are more registered Democrats. Republicans only win big, like in 2010, when Democratic turnout sucks. The thing that jumps out at me most is that 25 % of Indepedents care only a little or not at all who wins.

If there is anything to ignore, it's those odds tables. Look at how wrong they've been. Like the horse race polls, they are a lagging indicator. But at least the horse race polls more or less accurately describe where things were actually at a few day ago. The odds tables may be a good way to understand popular sentiment. But it has nothing to do with prediction. At one point, Warren was certain to win. Then Bernie was. Biden was certain not to win. it proves nobody knows. Lichtman thinks he knows, pretty much. I'd call him a leading indicator, who so far has been about 100 % accurate. Trafalgar just came out with a poll that shows President Toxic and James winning in Michigan. Albeit by only a point of two, which is in the margin of error. To the degree that this induces panic and gets Democrats to volunteer or donate, that's good news. Trafalgar was the canary in the coal mine in 2016. I'll be the angry crank who keeps lecturing on polling. In an environment where maybe 1 in 10 voters will decide at the last minute, a poll taken on November 1 can't and won't predict what people will actually do on November 8th. On the face of it, a poll on November 6th may be closer, just because it is closer to November 8th. So, on November 6, 2016 Trafalgar put out a poll saying Trump would win Michigan by 2 %. They were off by 1.7 %, within the margin of error. They also had the last poll out in Pennsylvania in 2016, which predicted a 1 % Trump victory - only 0.3 % off the final result. Anyone who says the 2016 polls were wrong is wrong - both in their understanding of polls, and in terms of what the polls actually said. Here's the similar Trafalgar polls a few days before the election from 2018, and the actual results: Arizona: McSally (R) will win by 2.0 %. (Sinema won by 2.4 %) Florida: Scott (R) will win by 2.0 % (Scott won by 0.1 %) As an aside, go ahead and rub it in. You were right. I was wrong. Trafalgar brags about calling the Guv race for DeSantis, which everyone - including me - thought the pretty boy would win. At least I wasn't the one who ended up in the hotel room with Gillum. So don't be too mad at me. Michigan: Stabenow (D) will win by 9.0 %. (She won by 6.5 %) Missouri: Hawley (R) will win by 4.0 % (He won by 5.8 %) Montana: Tester (D) will win by 1.0 % (He won by 3.5 %) Nevada: Heller (R) will win by 3.0 % (Rosen won by 5 %. This is the one where they weren't even close.) North Dakota: Cramer (R) will win by 9.0 %. (He won by 10.8 %) Texas: Cruz (R) will win by 9.0 % (He won by by 2.6 %.) In early August, Trafalgar said Donnelly (D) would win in Indiana by 12.0 %. Had the election been in August, they might have been right. In November, Braun (R) won by 6 %. Shift happened. "Color intensifier" was a great phrase Charlie Cook used to describe part of what happened. He was specifically referring to the Justice Rapist hearings. He said that in blue states it intensified the blue, and in red states it intensified the red. You can see that above, which is partly why I posted each state. I also wanted to do my own reality check and make sure I remembered what I think know correctly. I was sending money to North Dakota, Missouri, and Arizona in 2018, so I tracked them pretty close. I may have sent to Nevada as well, because at some point I decided that Heitkamp was a lost cause. I'd argue even Trafalgar underestimated the power of the red wave in the states with lots of cows, and White men with testicles that felt like they were on the chopping block. It probably cost Claire McCaskill her job. Men who has been okay with moderate women like them especially on health care, abandoned them in droves in Fall 2018 when President Toxic was bleating about how no male testicle in America was safe any longer. Meanwhile, sorry to say, with women all roads lead to the suburbs. Sinema won, and Beto did way better than expected, because of the suburbs - more women than men, but some of both. If we flip House seats in Texas in 2020 like we did in California in 2018, that's mostly about suburbs, too. There were other factors, of course. I always assumed Harry Reid's machine would pull through for Rosen in the end, and I was right. The 30,000 foot point is that Trafalgar hit the nail on the head in 2016. In 2018, they didn't do anywhere near as well. It was respectable. I think it boiled down to which electorate voted. In 2016, President Toxic got the electorate he wanted, or needed. Blacks stayed home, for whatever reason. Those mythical White working class people came out in droves. In 2018, not so much. Although whether it was rural/small town White men or suburban women made a huge difference. McCaskill did worse than expected. Sinema did better than expected. This poll stuff is fun to talk about, mostly because it's intellectual masturbation. And masturbation is always fun. That said, at this point it's really about money and GOTV. And how voting works out with COVID-19 is anyone's guess. It is possible Trafalgar could be right again, and that President Toxic will win Michigan. But he'd have to get the best case scenario electorate for the second time in a row. If there's anything Lichtman leaves out that really matters, it's the ground game. Axelrod has said that can be worth 2 to 3 % in just about any election. I'm not making an argument that we should take anything for granted. The opposite. Democrats should donate, volunteer, and be scared shitless. Just like President Toxic's followers are.

Thanks, but you can be honest. You're mostly glad, like me, that Trump can still get a mini-chub. I commend your patriotism.