It's official: Trump Is History, Says The Prediction Professor

[Suckrates]

Just now, Suckrates said:

 

"It'll be OK Donnie Boy,  I got your Back.  I'll send you Special CAKE in prison"

 

[Suckrates]

 

Trump may be Dancing at his Rallies now, but soon he'll be dancin elsewhere.......

[DelRetiro]

Although states do not release vote totals by candidate, they do provide stats on votes by party registration.  So far, it's looking really bad for Democrats FL, NC, and AZ.  Thanks to big GOP gains in FL & NC (in AZ Dems had a small gain) and better than expected numbers for GOP-registered voters, the Dems are way below the numbers they need to hit to offset the expected red wave on election day.

If Trump wins FL, NC & AZ, then he needs just one of the four Rust Belt states (PA, MI, WI, MN) to win 270.  The odds that Biden will thread the needle & win all four are slim, especially since the early MI numbers are looking bad for Ds.

Hey, it ain't over 'til it's over for Dems, but it's getting dark awfully early for the Biden campaign.

[JKane]

[AdamSmith]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbR1J_4ICg

 

[DelRetiro]

With just 9 days before the election, the Biden campaign called a lid today at 11:27am. With the polls closing fast & the early voting tallies looking good for the opponent, what presidential candidate takes the rest of the day off so close to the big day?? Barely There Biden has declined so much physically & mentally that he needs to move into assisted living, not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

[Suckrates]

VOTE TRUMP OUT !!!!

[stevenkesslar]

On 10/25/2020 at 3:24 PM, DelRetiro said:

With just 9 days before the election, the Biden campaign called a lid today at 11:27am. With the polls closing fast & the early voting tallies looking good for the opponent, what presidential candidate takes the rest of the day off so close to the big day?? Barely There Biden has declined so much physically & mentally that he needs to move into assisted living, not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

You might want to read what Charlie Cook has to say about your way of thinking.

Cook is one of three of my favorite political pundits I will quote today.  As far as I can tell, he is a fully nonpartisan and objective observer who tends to call it right.  And also offers insight into what is driving what is happening.

This whole article is probably a good read on what's about to happen.  But I'll quote the parts you might want to reflect on if you guessed wrong.  You didn't exactly make a wise guess, in Cook's view.

The Six Faulty Assumptions on Which the Trump Campaign Rested

Quote

The last erroneous assumption was that Biden was senile or had dementia and the debates would expose it for all the world to see. Anyone who covered Biden trooping around Iowa, or who watched the Democratic debates or his convention acceptance speech, could have told them that while he often goes off script, it was nothing new. I would chalk it up to wishful thinking.

This election is going to a very different place than many expected, and it may turn out for Republicans to be even worse than they fear.

It seems like there is an awful lot of wishful (or perhaps delusional?) thinking going on among the fervent core of President Toxic's beloved and loving and devoted base.  They love him so much that they would be shot on 5th Ave. for him.  Which perhaps explains why they don't see the bullet coming.  Not like the objective moderates like Cook do.

To piggyback this thought on another post I'm about to start, this all goes to the point that Trump has been more symptom than disease.  He was the logical culmination of trends that were building for decades, and really took off with the Tea Party revolt in 2010.  Which President Toxic essentially took over.  It was baptized in "birtherism", and has spewed out racism and polarization and hostility ever since.  Although is you are in the Trump tent, you don't call it racism and hostility.  You call it "healing" and "unity".

In fairness, Democrats were perhaps thinking wishfully in 2016.  The RCP poll average at this point in 2016 - the day before the election - said Clinton would win the national vote by 3.2 percent.  She won by 2.1 percent.  So it was close.  Today the RCP average says Biden will win the national vote by 6.7 percent.  If the poll averages are within a point or so of the national result like in 2016, meaning Biden wins by a 5+ percent margin, it's hard to imagine he loses the three states President Toxic barely won in 2016.  If Biden wins Georgia or North Carolina, which lots of smart people are predicting is quite possible, it's an early game over.

President Toxic certainly used his bully pulpit - in this case, it was literally a bully pulpit - to spread and aggravate the disease.  But again, he's a symptom.  40 % or so of America won't be happy after the election is over.  And my guess is they will want to buy guns, resist, buy more guns, resist more, buy even more guns, and fight. 

That is the nature of the disease.  Trump was just a sad, fucked up mess of symptoms.

 

Edited November 3, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[SexyAsianStud]

We may still not know the final results of our election for days.

What we do know is that Trump was not repudiated, despite his lies, despite his crude behavior, despite his poor handling of the pandemic.

Conventional wisdom has informed us that when high voter turnout occurs Democrats win. Conventional wisdom can now stick it up its ass. This country is a majority bigot, racist, xenophobe, and ignorant nation. Let’s come to term with this fact.  The nation is no more. It’s a rigged game. And we lose. Even if Biden gets 271 electoral votes, his administration will get nothing done, get all the blame, and is doomed because the American people are too stupid to comprehend reality. The Senate will continue to obstruct (or bend over and take it if the Idiot remains). The Supreme Court is a rubber stamp. The House will be a shrill, useless entity. We will have no international allies except for Brazi, Israel, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, North Korea, and our new masters, Russia.

The so-called confederacy won the long game.

 

[AdamSmith]

4 hours ago, SexyAsianStud said:

The so-called confederacy won the long game.

I don’t know. We’ve been through truly discouraging periods before. But we eventually got leaders who took us out. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln... on to FDR, LBJ...

I have some considerable faith in Uncle Joe, and a lot in Kamala.

[stevenkesslar]

19 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

I have some considerable faith in Uncle Joe, and a lot in Kamala.

It's funny.  I have less faith in Kamala than Joe, not more.  And that's coming from a California liberal who was very excited when she won her Senate race in 2016.

To clarify that, what is being talked about a lot on TV  right now, especially among Blacks and women, is how exciting and empowering it will be to see a Black woman speaking to America, tonight perhaps, as Vice President elect.  So I strongly agree with all that.  She does not look, think, or vote like Mike Pence.  This is a huge fucking deal, to quote Joe Biden.  Democrats should feel very excited about that.  I do.

We now know that even if Warnock and Ossoff win we can forget about a bold progressive agenda, Labor Secretary Sanders, or Treasury Secretary Warren.  We need them in the Senate.  And Warren or Sanders would never be confirmed by Rich Mitch.  This actually solves some internal political problems for Biden.  I'm both progressive and pragmatist, I think.  I get the fact that Democrats will now have to fight hard for relatively small victories, on things like jobs and the pandemic and voting rights and climate change.

There will be more young voters in 2024.  And they just crushed Trump.  There is no reason to think they will convert to Trumpism in 2024. 

So Democrats did not really settle this internal battle between progressives and moderates in 2020.  And we now have Kamala as a possible presumptive heir in 2024.  I have mixed feelings about that.  She kind of flopped in 2020.  She didn't have much time in the Senate.  But she isn't a Joe Biden, meaning someone who can clearly win elections outside California, or gets laws passed.  We just don't know.

Joe Scarborough said today that he is convinced now that Joe Biden is the only Democrat that could have won in 2020.  I think that is worth thinking about, both in terms of present and future.

I tend to disagree with Morning Joe and agree with Alan Lichtman.  This was a referendum on Trump and Trumpism.  Period.  Trump lost the referendum.  Period.  In January, Biden will be President.  Period.  Lichtman's basic argument is that who the Democrats nominate doesn't matter so much, or even at all, if the conditions are right to remove the party in power.

Here's how my bias plays out.  I think Sanders might have made a negative difference, certainly in very close states like Georgia and Arizona.  It's not logical to argue that making it easier to attach the label "socialist" to our candidate would have made it easier to win.  Especially given that we now know the "socialism" label had traction in Florida, and probably with some moderate suburban women as well.  

I will go to the grave thinking my preferred candidate, Elizabeth Warren, would have won.  You can argue she's too liberal, or even too female.  But she would have thrown this shit right back at Trump.  "I'm not a socialist.  I was a Republican capitalist who saw how corporate greed crushed people by taking their homes, or taking their jobs to China.  I'm the one who fought predatory Wall Street lenders, Donald.  You're just the predator."  I think you can make a good argument that Warren could have done a very good job inspiring the base without freaking out moderate women who grew up and look a lot like her.  She would have had a logical and powerful argument that she is fighting for these women, and guys like Donald Trump simply are not.

Regardless, none of that really matters now.  Warren and Sanders won't be in play for 2024.  And now Biden has the perfect reason to say we need their votes and their passion in the US Senate.  And I'm not against the idea of Kamala being heir in 2024 or 2028.  But I'm not convinced.  While I know Independents in Iowa who kind of do view her as "The Dark One" who may have questionable and excessively liberal views, I view her the way progressives do.  I'm not sure she's the one I'd want leading the ticket in 2024 or 2028.

Being a pragmatist, I'm getting used to what the voters just did.  It is clear now that there is zero mandate for moving directly from Trumpism to a full-on progressive agenda.  There are not votes for that.  Again, that's true even if Democrats have 50 Senators in January.  It may have been true even if we had 51 or 52.  Did we really think Joe Manchin was on board for the kind of Green New Deal AOC would support?

The main lesson I am taking out of this is that if we build power, we will win.  I sent a lot of money to people like Harrison and Warnock and Ossoff.  What just happened suggests Stacey Abrams can be and should be elected Governor of Georgia in 2022.  Some Latina Democrat should run in Arizona for Governor, because what happened suggests she could win.   

We again lost a chance to get ahead of the redistricting fight for an entire decade.  But we won big in 2018, anyway.  So if we figure out how to build a majority, Republicans simply can't stop us.  We just proved that.  Biden is winning over 50 % of the vote. They can not stop him from kicking Trump's sorry ass out of The White House.  That itself feels like a huge victory.

I think history just answered some questions.  This was not 2008, or 1992.  It was not a Democratic version of 1980.  It was not 1932.  Again, I think 1960 may be a pretty good year to think about.  Kennedy won, but barely.  It opened the door for things that had already been bubbling for years - like the civil rights movement - to gain a bully pulpit, legitimacy, and stature.  It means we need to feel like we won, to feel proud, and to keep donating and voting and organizing.

I'm not 100 % convinced Kamala is the right leader.  That said, we now get to give her a test ride.  And she will have a great chance to show America her leadership skills.  

Edited November 6, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[stevenkesslar]

On 10/20/2020 at 3:15 PM, DelRetiro said:

Although states do not release vote totals by candidate, they do provide stats on votes by party registration.  So far, it's looking really bad for Democrats FL, NC, and AZ.  Thanks to big GOP gains in FL & NC (in AZ Dems had a small gain) and better than expected numbers for GOP-registered voters, the Dems are way below the numbers they need to hit to offset the expected red wave on election day.

I tend to agree with your point about grassroots organizing, even though you didn't refer to it as organizing.  You are offering a good and probably correct explanation for why Trump overperformed in Florida, in particular.

It may be the case that Trumpism overperformed and what I'll call "Bidenism" underperformed in part because Trumpism had a better ground game.  Meaning everything from registering new voters months ago, to a massive GOTV machine on Election Day.

As a former community organizer, I will never say a bad thing about organizing real people to gain power.  So if Trump did better than we thought because of many volunteers who organized, kudos to the army of Trump voters who made that happen.  One thing we can all agree to is that Biden and Trump are now, factually, the #1 and #2 voter getters in any race for President in US history.  That's good news for democracy.

I'd also say half heartedly that some of the money I sent to people like Jaimie Harrison was a waste of money.  But I mean that only in the sense that there is no evidence that running a $100 million ad campaign was enough to convince people whose heart is "red" that they should vote "blue".  It did not work in South Carolina.  That's no shocker. 

And I'd argue that's a good thing.  I mostly feel positive about democracy, and American voters.  That includes 2016, when a minority of Americans narrowly gave Trump and Trumpism a chance.  I feel they just proved my faith in American voters is well placed.  Because a majority of American voters just rejected Trump and Trumpism.  The verdict is clear:  you had your chance to actually make our lives better, as promised.  And you failed.  My point about huge amounts of money is that I'm actually glad that slick ads or stupid Facebook or Twitter messaging mostly doesn't convince people to believe things they just don't believe, or support people who don't really work in their interests. 

Poor Brad.  Wasn't his $1 billion Death Star supposed to make Trump II inevitable?

The flip side of that is that the money I sent to people like Abrams and Ossoff in 2017 was hardly a waste.  It paid off big today in Joe Biden winning Georgia.  It is not out of the question that Ossoff and Warnock can deliver two Senate seats in Georgia, just like Sinema and Kelly have now delivered two "blue" Senate seats in Arizona.  My point is the same as yours.  A lot of the money that went into Georgia in the past few years paid for getting I think something like 800,000 new Democrats registered.  I'd bet money that between now and January, Abrams and Ossoff and Warnock will be turning over every rock in Georgia to see if there is some eligible Black or Latino or progressive White adult who is not yet registered.  Again, whoever they vote for, that's just a very good thing for democracy, period.  I'll gladly donate more money to support that.

It may be that we Democrats would have won a few more Senate seats and held a few more House seats, and maybe won North Carolina for Biden, had the Democrats done a better ground game during a pandemic.  Even if you could prove to me that was true, I still feel very good about the outcome.  Biden never has been and certainly never will be a "ground game" kind of guy.  I think at core, like Trump in 2016, his message mattered a lot more than money.  Biden did turn out to be a pretty good choice for top of the ticket at a particular moment in time when healing and unity and ending divisive bullshit meant a lot to people.  If we lost some votes because we were timid about going door to door in a pandemic, that is not an unreasonable or certainly an unhealthy decision.

I strongly suspect that some of Trump's overperformance did have to do with a passionate ground game that Democrats did not match - in part because of a pandemic.  One way you could read that, which is a stretch but not a wild stretch, is that Trumpians really were desperate to keep power.  So they were not even going to let a pandemic stop them.  I'm not going to judge whether a decision like that is right or wrong.  Any more than I judged Black Lives Matter one way or the other for marching with masks on during a pandemic.  Again, it all adds up to saying that democracy is alive and well.  I have respect both for the Black marchers with masks, and for the White Trumpians going door to door to register people to vote.

I do believe that Trump's loss in Georgia sends exactly the same message to Democrats.  If we want to know how to win, look to Georgia.  Today on TV almost every Democrat in America who has the mike is lavishing praise on Stacey Abrams, and everything she stands for.  She deserves it.  As a former community organizer, I adore her.  What she did was not about slick 30 second ads.  It was about building sustainable grassroots power person by person, face to face, church by church, door to door.  That is the American way, which we should all be very proud of.

Honestly. I'm not sad but I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sent thousands and thousands of dollars to people like Kelly and Ossoff and Warnock and Greenfield and Cunningham and McBath.  And I assume lots of that went to slick ads.  As a former organizer, it seems like a cheap (although hardly inexpensive) and almost dirty way to try to win elections.

Again, this election proved as much as any that people are not stupid.  Democrats did well in Georgia because we registered Blacks and young people to actually vote their interests.  Meanwhile, probably no amount of ads in South Carolina could convince conservative Whites to vote against The Divine Miss Graham.  I can live with that. 

I can also live with the fact that no amount of ads could change the fact that Cal Cunnigham came up short on a major character test.  I'm not going to argue he didn't deserve to lose after his sexting nonsense.  He's not going to feel good ever again about the way he let the people he claimed to be fighting for down.  (Have to say.  Multiply Cal x 10 and you get the male scumminess of Trump, which Republicans and Christian evangelicals seems to be just fine with.)

I knew it was a long shot that good guys like Bullock could win in increasingly Trumpian places like Montana.  I sent them money anyway.  You never know, and some of this is luck and fate.  North Carolina (Cunnigham) and Maine (Collins) were our best shots, after Colorado and Arizona.  Cunningham perhaps lost because of character.  Just like Collins probably prevailed because Mainers still feel she has character.  None of these decisions make me feel bad about the decisions voters made.  Georgia actually gives us two more shots, one of which I did not really expect to have.

Again, this is why I adore women like Stacey Abrams.  She's had a lot of shit thrown at her.  If she runs for Governor in 2022, she'll be called a socialist and every other name in the book.  I'm sure she has flaws.  But she has now demonstrated that she is tough, and she is going to fight like hell for what she believes in.  Democrats should be investing more in leaders like her than in slick 30 second ads.  Although, that said, Kelly and Sinema in Arizona both had huge TV budgets, some of which my small donations helped pay for.  So that works, too.  It's not either/or.

I'll be interested if they ever do an analysis of the impact of The Lincoln Project.  On the face of it, if their goal was to seed doubts about Trump and get one or two percent of Republicans to switch from Trump to Biden, there is probably plenty of evidence that it worked.  And in a state like Georgia, if Biden wins by maybe 2000 votes, anyone can argue that their ads were the ones that made the difference.  Certainly I would not complain if The Lincoln Project bragged that they helped bring Trump down in Georgia.

That said, I did and do have very mixed feelings about The Lincoln Project.  It's a one trick pony, which in itself is fine.  It would be stupid to argue in the 21st century that TV ads don't make a difference in political campaigns.  That said, those are mostly people who traffic in highly emotional 30 or 60 second ads that often just try to demean people.  So Lindsey Graham got to be a maggot, which is further than even an outspoken Democrat like me would go. 

And if you use Graham as an example, there is no evidence it worked.  Arguably, you could say it backfired.  All those attacks on Graham just made him a victim, which he played to.  And maybe it got people to come out and support him.  That's possble, too.

When I was sending money to Ossoff in 2017, a Republican client from Georgia was saying it was essentially a joke.  This is Georgia.  Ossoff can't win a House seat here, he said.

Well, McBath won the seat in 2018 and just held it by a pretty strong margin.  Biden just won the state, probably.  Bordeaux looks like she is going to flip another Georgia House seat when the votes are all counted.  I would not dismiss the possibility that Ossoff and Rev. Warnock will be the newly minted Democratic Senators of Georgia in 2021.

Georgia has just given the Democrats a perfect example of how we need to fight and prevail over Trumpism.  Slick 30 second ads may play a role.  But it is going to take like what the Trumpians did with their ground game.  And Stacey Abrams just proved it.  Face to face.  Person to person.  Church to church.  Door to door.

 

 

 

Edited November 6, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[stevenkesslar]

This is a great summary of a few election trends by Dave Wasserman of Cook Political report:

House Republicans Defy the Polls, Narrow Democrats' Majority

1. Democrats suffered a catastrophic erosion in Hispanic support  (note: but mostly in the specific House districts they won in mostly red states). 

2. It was a stellar night for Republican women. 

I got to that because I saw Wasserman being interviewed on a few different TV channels tonight.  And he said some things that did not quite fit with the early analysis coming out of all the cable stations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox.  What he writes above also contradicts what he was saying right before the election, as he states in the article.  Like everyone, he got blindsided by both external and interrnal polls - including internal polls of both Democratic and Republican House candidates.   For whatever reason, the Republican internal polls were mostly off, too.

I think perhaps the polls could have been off because of "shy" Trump voters.  That's the main theory going around.  But I actually think the biggest factor was simply that everybody had to guess about turnout.  And a lot of pollsters guessed wrong.  Once again, for whatever reason, they underestimated Trump  turnout.  That said, Republican pollsters like Trafalgar actually overestimated Trump turnout, and said he would win several states (Michigan and Arizona by 3 points each) which he lost.  So basically everybody guessed wrong.  Which is perhaps understandable in an election that broke all past turnout records.

Here's another thing I mentioned once already that could partly explain why the polls were off.  In the Fox exit poll of Pennsylvania I cited above as well as this NYT exit poll, the group that decided in the week before the election broke heavy for Trump:  63 % for Trump to 30 % for Biden.  One can only guess about why that is.  This group was only 2 % of the electorate.  But another 3 % decided in the last few days, and they voted 50 % for Trump and 45 % for Biden.  The people who decided in September and October leaned to Biden.  They were about 20 % of all voters.  The 75 % who came into Fall 2020 knowing who they supported split dead even - 49 to 49 - between Trump and Biden.

This is exactly the opposite of what I expected.  I expected, or at least hoped, that the last week would be like 1980.  Meaning  the small group of remaining undecided people would break against Trump.  They actually did the opposite.  That would explain at least part of the reason why Trump did better than it seemed he would based on polls taken a week or two earlier.  The shifting at the end clearly helped Trump based on exit polls.  One explanation that strikes me is that Trump had a better ground game to get last minute deciders to vote, and to vote for Trump.  And Biden did basically sit on his lead while Trump was running around having rallies everywhere like in 2016.  That may have helped him.  Certainly the ground game did.

The main thing Dave Wasserman talked about that surprised me is that Biden did NOT do particularly well in the core cities compared to Clinton, like Milwaukee and Detroit.  He said the real difference in the Blue Wall states came in the suburbs, which shifted heavily from Trump to Biden.  Like I said already, that somewhat contradicts some of the narrative about why Biden was able to win the three Blue Wall states, as well as Red Wall states like Arizona and Georgia.  What a lot of people at least think happened, including a lot of Blacks and Latinos interviewed, is that turnout for Biden among Blacks and Latinos spiked.  But at least based on a little research, including the article above, it appears Wasserman is largely correct.  It may be that Biden's victory has less to do with changes in voting by Blacks and Latinos, and more to do with changes in voting among Whites.  And I'll cite some data below that suggests it might actually be more White men than White women who shifted from 2016.  That would be a surprise as well, since so much of what I read is about suburban White "wine Moms" who despise Trump.

Another thing that prompted my curiosity is a riff that Chris Cuomo and  Don Lemon got into about the overall national vote totals.  Cuomo was arguing that this election was a "spanking" to Trump.  Because while a lot of people (70 million) voted for him, maybe 4 to 5 million more people (getting close to 75 million) came out to fire Trump.  So I buy Cuomo's idea that it is fair to say that this was a clear rejection of an incumbent, by a margin of millions of votes.  The pushback against this, which is also true, is that at the same time there was a sort of red wave as well, in part due to Trump's well organized ground game.  That red wave helps explains why Republicans did better than expected.  In this context, somebody mentioned that we know this was a rejection of Trump because he actually underperformed, by millions of votes if I heard right, how Republican House candidates down-ticket did.  If true, that would certainly help explain why some Republicans won House seats while Trump lost The Presidency.

I've tried to find numbers that add up the total votes cast in this election for ALL Republican and Democratic House candidates in every district.  I could not find them, since it's obviously a work in progress.  The House is Wasserman's area of expertise, so he would know.  And in the article above he does state this:

Quote

Most Republican incumbents in white-collar suburbs didn't just survive, they thrived — running well ahead of President Trump down-ballot.

Again, if I heard Cuomo on CNN right I think he suggested that Trump may have UNDERPERFORMED all Republican House candidates by something on the order of a few million votes.  If anyone has seen data that backs that up, please post it.  Once all the votes are counted, it will be easy to get a number of votes cast for all House Republican candidates, and compare that to all the votes cast for Trump. 

I checked in the key Senate races, and no big divergence shows up there.  Trump actually got a little bit more votes than McSally, Tillis, and Ernst.  He did slightly worse than Gardner.  The one state where we know there was a big divergence was Maine, which Trump lost, but Collins won handily.  With the Senate races, the most important big picture is that like in 2016 people who voted for Trump voted for a Republican Senator as well, by and large.

Based on this information, my tentative takeaway is this may help explain some of the crosscurrents on Tuesday.  It does seem like Republicans did a good job of fielding female House candidates, often women of color, that were a good fit for the districts they won in.  As Wasserman states, that is certainly true in Miami-Dade and the Rio Grande border district in Texas.  I'm not sure there is any evidence that Trump did much better with Latinos in MOST places - like in Arizona, for example.  So as we heard a lot this week, everyone is learning that we can't generalize about "the Latino vote".

Wasserman makes another point that probably helps to explain this election.  In 2018, the only way that voters could send a message to Trump was by voting out a Republican House member.  This year, they could support a Republican House member while voting against Trump.  If it is true as Wasserman says that Trump underperformed many House Republican candidates, that would prove the point.   If this happened, it only worked at the margin.  Of the three Republican Orange County seats Democrats won in very close races in 2018,  the two that are still razor close as of right now are ones in which White male Democrats are defending seats against Asian American Republican women who are good fitting candidates for their districts.  Trump did lose in both districts in Orange County, just like he did in 2016.  Again, these elections all ended up like 51/49 in  both 2018 and so far in 2020.  So this is not about massive swings.  But at the margin it can mean the difference between winning and losing in several dozen swing districts.  And if this is what happened in districts all over the country, it would explain why Republicans will pick up a handful of House seats even as Trump got fired.

I also looked up exit polls for Arizona and Georgia - because they are the two parts of the Republican Red Wall that fell this week.  Again, Wasserman is saying that in the Blue Wall states Biden's wins were based first and foremost on suburban Whites, not inner-city Blacks.  I'll take Wasserman's word at that for now.  But I figured I'd check how that compares to how things played out in Georgia and Arizona compared to 2016.  And what I found seems to confirm Wasserman's point about shifts among WHITE voters - at least if you go by exit polls.

Here's CNN exit polls for Georgia in 2016 and here for 2020.  As I would have guessed, Biden did best among Blacks.  CNN says that in 2020 30 % of all Georgia voters were Black, and they voted 87 % Biden and 11 % Trump.  But that's actually pretty much the same as in 2016.  In 2016, Blacks were also 30 % of all voters.  And they voted 89 % for Clinton and 9 % for Trump.  So Trump is not wrong in saying he got a small sliver more of Black votes.  Although either way 1 in 10 is a really horrific judgment from Blacks, who mostly view Trump as a racist in every poll I've seen for years.  So Blacks ARE NOT the explanation for why Biden won Georgia.  He had to crush Trump among Blacks, which he did.  But that was not enough to get either him or Clinton to victory.

So the real difference was among Whites in Georgia.  In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote, 21 % Clinton to 75 % Trump.  In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, 29 % Biden to 70 % Trump.  So we now know that cutting a 54 % loss among Whites to a 41 % loss was just enough to get Biden to about 50 % of the state vote, when you add overwhelming support among Blacks.

Like I mentioned above, the way this played out by gender is also a surprise to me.  Biden cut the losing gap among White women from a 44 % loss (70 to 26) by Clinton in 2016 to a 36 % loss (67 to 31) by Biden in 2020.  But the shift among White men was bigger.  They voted against Clinton in 2016 by a 64 % spread (80 to 16).  Biden cut that massive gap to a 46 % spread (72 to 26) in 2020.  I have to wonder whether part of the reason in Georgia is that White men just felt more comfortable voting for a man than a woman.  It's impossible to say.

There's also a few other demographic things about Biden's win in Georgia that are interesting and that relate to what Democrats need to do moving forward to build a majority, I think.  Biden did better than Clinton among older voters, which is something we've been hearing about.  Clinton lost all Georgia voters aged 65 + by 67 % to 31 %.  Biden lost them, too, but by only 56 % to 43 % in 2020. 

that said, my guess is that the part of the White vote Democrats most need to focus on in places like Georgia is the young White vote.  My guess is that a big chunk of the newly registered voters in Georgia who pushed Biden to victory were young Whites.  The exit polls say that in 2016 voters aged 18 to 29 were 18 % of the entire Georgia electorate, and in 2020 they were 21 % of the electorate.  So their participation expanded as a share of the total voting pie, even in a year with massive turnout.  That said, in 2016 Clinton won the 19-24 year old vote by a 65 % to 29 % margin.  By comparison, Biden won it, but by a slimmed down 56 % to 42 % margin. 

Either way, the youth vote helped both Biden and Clinton and are an obvious key ingredient to any future winning coalition in Georgia.  But this is one area where perhaps a candidate - like Jon Ossoff - who is younger and more dynamic than Biden, or a woman, might actually be able to do better than Biden among young voters.  We'll see how Ossoff does among young voters in Georgia in January.  Or whether they even turn out for a special election.

A very similar thing happened in Arizona.  Latinos in Arizona, like Blacks in Georgia, turned out strong for both Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.  But the real difference in voting came from White voters.

Again, here's a CNN exit poll for Arizona for 2016 and here's an Arizona exit poll for 2020.  In 2016, Clinton won Latinos in Arizona by a 61 % to 31 % margin, when they were 15 % of all voters.  In 2020, they were 19 % of all voters.  And Biden won them by a 63 % to 36 % margin.  So it's roughly in the same ballpark as Blacks in Arizona.  Unlike Blacks in Georgia, Latinos in Arizona actually did grow as a share of the electorate, from 15 % to 19 %.  So that helped Biden.  Trump can argue he did just a fraction better with Latinos - cutting a 30 % losing margin to a 26 % losing margin.  But the more Latinos vote in Arizona, the better it is for Democrats. Period.  All that said, the shift among Latinos was not sufficient to explain moving from a Clinton loss to a Biden victory.

Like in Georgia, the single most significant change in Arizona was Whites.  In 2016 Clinton lost the White vote in Arizona 40 % Clinton to 54 % Trump.  In 2020 Biden lost the White vote, but by only 47 % Biden to 51 % Trump.  Like in Georgia, the most important shift was by men - not women.  Which is a bit of surprise.  The White female vote went from 44/51 for Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/52 Biden/Trump in 2020.  So Biden cut Clinton's 7 point losing margin to a 5 point losing margin among Arizona White women.  Among White men, it shifted from 36/56 Clinton/Trump in 2016 to 47/51 Biden/Trump in 2020.  That's huge.  Biden closed Clinton's 20 point deficit among Arizona White men to a 4 point deficit.  That has to be the single biggest factor in  explaining how he won.  Whites are 74 % of all voters in Arizona, so a shift like that among White men in Arizona is massive.

Something similar happened in Arizona with Latinos.  Clinton won Latino men 51/44 in 2016.  Biden won Latino men 59/39.  Again, I have to wonder whether running a man against Trump had something to do with that.  Biden actually did slightly worse among Latino women in Arizona.  Clinton won Latino women 73/17 in 2016.  Biden won them 66/32 in 2020.  Again, Trump can argue he maybe did a smidgeon better among some Latinos.  But that doesn't cut across the US.  In  most states, it seems clear that most Blacks and most Latinos view Trump and his policies as racist, racist, and racist. 

So we ought to be thinking hard about what kinds of candidates, policies, and organizing will win more and more Latino voters.  While it did not happen in 2020, I still think what happened in Georgia and Arizona in 2020 CAN happen in Texas by 2024.  We just have to be patient, and organize.

 

Edited November 7, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[stevenkesslar]

I'm on a roll talking about exit poll data and what it suggests about building a Democratic majority.  So I'm just going to rock on.  This builds on the post directly above.  But also on a post where I talked about a Fox News Pennsylvania exit poll. 

The key thing to me about that PA poll is it showed that Biden won a majority of all Pennsylvania voters who made less than $100,000 a year.  Trump won a majority of voters making over $100,000 a year.  So I said that we Democrats just have to go back to being very good at calling bullshit when Trump or other Republicans claim to be the economic populists fighting for the little guy and gal, and the working class. 

"Working Class Joe" is not the worst politician in America at doing that.  Which is why Rev. Sharpton today said he thinks Trump could never get his hooks into Biden being an "elitist", the way he did into Clinton.  I agree with Rev. Al.

As if to prove my point, I watched a five minute or so riff between Sean Hannity and two Black guys he just had on that claim to be the very future of the Trump Republican Party.  If I believed what I heard, Democrats are basically the coastal elite party that speaks for Wall Street and Silicon Valley.  The Trump party speaks for Blacks, Latinos, and the working class of all races. 

This whole rap makes me want to vomit.  After 5 minutes I had to change the channel.  If it had anything to do with reality, I suspect Trump would have won Georgia and Arizona in a landslide.  For whatever reason, Blacks in Georgia and Latinos in Arizona don't seem to understand what Sean and his two Black friends do.  Dare I say that Sean is an elitist, and he needs to explain the truth to Blacks and Latinos better than he does?

I also have to get on my soapbox for a minute about Sean Hannity.  He is a lying, factually incorrect piece of shit.  My low water mark for him was his rant on the "Community Investment Act", which he said forced banks to "give" homes to uncreditworthy people - many of whom are Black, and which they defaulted on.  In fact, it is  called the Community Reinvestment Act - not that accuracy matters to Sean.  This was in an interview during the subprime crisis with Michael Moore.  I was impressed that Moore was informed enough to ask Hannity how a law passed by Proxmire and Democrats in 1977 resulted in people losing homes in 2007, when the interviewed occurred.  (By coincidence, a 30 year mortgage made in 1977 would actually be paid off in 2007.  So you'd have a lot of equity, not a foreclosure).  My point is that it was very clear that other than having a right wing talking point, Sean Hannity is completely ignorant about what comes out of his mouth.

In fact, what Clinton did in the 90's on Black and Latino and White first time homeownership turned out to be arguably the single most effective thing any President has ever done to promote both homeownership and wealth creation for Blacks, Latinos, and low-income Whites.  As a low-income White community organizer, I actually bought my first cheap home in a largely minority neighborhood for $77,000 in 1997.  By 2005, it was worth at least $100,000 or $125,000 or so.  Today it is worth triple that, and I own it with no mortgage.  So I know Blacks who bought homes in the Clinton years built wealth and came out smelling like a rose.  Elizabeth Warren can explain in amazingly accurate detail how the Blacks (and Whites and Latinos) who got screwed were the ones who bought the bullshit sold by predatory lenders in the Bush years - especially 2003 to 2005, when the Republicans ran everything.  Predatory lending had more to do with refinances than purchase mortgages.  So you can't blame any of that on Clinton.  It happened years after his Presidency ended.  Predators essentially stole Black wealth Clinton helped create.  Blacks who know what happened don't blame it on Clinton.

My point is that Democrats have done things that work for Blacks and Latinos.  And it all has to do with things like homeownership, capitalism, wealth creation, and the American way of building net worth.  It is the Republicans that usually fuck these things up.  And it has nothing, nothing, and nothing to do with socialism.

In early 2017 I actually thought, as a developer, Trump might have gone back to some of the things Clinton did that worked for Blacks.  Instead, he went for trickle down and tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires like him.  So I give credit to Trump for inheriting an improving economy and not fucking it up until 2020.  He inherited the lowest Black poverty ever from Obama in 2017, and brought it a bit lower until 2020.  It is now worse than it was under Obama.  That may explain why 9 in 10 Blacks seem to have voted against Trump, not for him.

The Pennsylvania data suggest that people who make under $100,000 voted for Biden, because they probably viewed him as the better and true economist populist.  The days when Sean Hannity can put two Black talking heads on Fox News with him and claim to be the very heart and soul of Black America need to end.  Democrats have to get better at being the party that talks - and delivers - real economic populism.

So I thought some of this exit poll data was interesting.  In Georgia, in 2016, Trump actually won by a sliver (48 % Trump to 47 % Clinton) the vote of Georgians who made under $50,000 a year.  That's of all races.  So we know among Whites in Georgia who make under $50,000 a year Trump had to have cleaned up in 2016.  In 2020, Biden actually won this group handily.  Of the one third of Georgians who make less than $50,000 a year, Biden just won them 56 % to 41 %.  Meanwhile, Trump won Georgians who make over $50,000 a year 50 % to 48 %.

I have no illusions about the fact that many low-income Whites in Georgia live in rural areas or small towns and probably are now fully culturally attached to the Trump/MAGA identity.  I'd also guess many of them, especially the older ones, are racist and homophobic as hell.  But politics is a game of margins.  So if we've gone from Clinton barely losing the real low-income/working class in Georgia to Trump in 2016 to Biden winning them in 2020 by a 15 point margin, that helps to explain how he just won Georgia. 

It also explains why Democrats better not let Sean Hannity define them as the "coastal elite".  Even Sean's two Black friends had to refer to the Blacks who are Democratic as "the Black elite".  (As if being Black and rich was a bad thing?????)  So it's true that part of what has changed in Atlanta is that you have an affluent and largely left-of-center and Democratic Black elite.  Good for my party!  We have to build on that, not be ashamed of it. 

I take it as a good thing that a few Black fat cats on the extreme crawled up Joe Biden's ass about how he wants fat cats of ALL races (most of whom are White) to pay more in taxes.  It probably helped Biden win Black votes. 

Democrats need to do more of this.  We need to be the real economic populists, and call bullshit on Trumpists like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

Let's take a trip down memory lane to when and why this abortion of a failed and rejected Presidency began.  I'll end by playing Bernie Sanders.  Shame on the Democratic Party for forgetting our roots, and our base, and letting this happen.

 

Allan Lichtman would agree with O'Reilly that Hillary had the fundamentals working against her in the 2016 Presidential cycle.  Period.  That is probably the way I'll view what happened in 2016 moving forward.  Just like by 2020 Biden had the wind at his back, no matter what he said or did.  But my point is that if the Democrats legislate and govern like the real economic populists, we might have a better time holding on to the base we need and that Trump stole.

 

Edited November 7, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[Suckrates]

  

           

[Suckrates]

 

       BA-BYE !!!!!!!!!

 

[Suckrates]

 

It's a MUST watch !   SoooooooooSatisfying 

https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_qj9w6oWHRC1yj2hz1.mp4

[Suckrates]

 

Well, Mr Trump, I guess BLM (Black Lives Really DO Matter) ?

THEY sure as hell sent your sorry, saggy Orange ass packin...   

Now maybe you'll learn to SAY it ?   Black Lives MATTER !   (you listenin Jared ?)

[nynakedtop]

Our long national nightmare is over!

Trump must go. Pack his bags. Clear out and take Don Jr., Eric, and Stephen Miller with him.

Expect the Trump Rage Show to go on. But it’s the flailing rage of a loser trying to deny that he’s a loser. And that’s a sweet thing to watch because it’s so well deserved.

Edited November 7, 2020 by nynakedtop

[stevenkesslar]

Why did so many Latinos vote for Donald Trump?

 

I'm posting that article because the guy's main point is that White people (like me) who try to describe "the Latino vote" are going to get it wrong.  I agree with him.  That's why in what I said above, I clung to very specific polling data from actual states Biden won.

The polling data contradicts some of what even this guy says.  He states pundits will  "ignore the fact that Trump also seems to have drawn significant numbers of votes from Mexican Americans in Arizona and Texas."  What the exit polling data from CNN showed is that Biden did a whole let better among Latino men in Arizona in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016.  As the author notes, the theory that Latino men like Trump because they see him as a "caudillo" is questionable.  Latino men, primarily Mexican American, in Arizona didn't seem to groove too much on Trump's authoritarianism.  In 2020, they seem to have decisively rejected it.

Mostly what I liked about this article is it's a plea for outreach, base building, and understanding.

Quote

A fairer and more nuanced analysis would take note of what former Vice President Biden did wrong in not appealing to Latino voters and appearing to take their support for granted. It was also no doubt difficult for Biden to make a pitch for Latinos while also trying to assuage the concerns of African Americans who worried that the Democratic nominee would betray them like he did in co-authoring the 1994 crime bill.

That's a great statement.  As a White liberal, I don't regret the outreach Biden did to Blacks, the ads clearly targeted to Black men, the selection of Harris as VP in a clear act of showing he "got it" to Black women.  But there was no similar effort made to Latinos, as far as I can tell.  Meanwhile, I'll keep saying that the efforts Bernie made in the primary seemed to provide one effective model of how to expand Latino participation. 

I mostly feel Democrats have a ton of work and outreach to do.  This is stuff the mainstream media just is not good at covering.  It is mostly quiet and tedious work.  But my guess is that there were Latino progressives in Arizona and Nevada doing lots of work to register and motivate Latino voters, and that had an impact.  We know the Trumpians, including lots of Cuban American Trumpians, ruled the air waves of South Florida.  And Democrats' response was too little, too late.  We now see the results.  We should not be surprised.  We should learn.

A few other points in the article I'll reiterate.  A lot of Blacks and Hispanics are just conservative.  The history is not the same.  Being anti-immigrant and even throwing Latino kids in cages is NOT the same as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and systemic racism targeted at Blacks for all of US history.  So I don't think it's realistic for Democrats to think that all Latinos or all Blacks are going to be Democrats.  And I see Latinos as White people, much like I see Polish American people or Italian Americans as White people.  Those ethnic groups suffered from anti-immigrant discrimination in the past, too.  The author quotes Reagan in the article.  But he didn't quote Reagan's best line about Hispanics:  "They are Republicans, but they just don't know it yet."  Speaking as a Democrat, I don't think Reagan is wrong.  If Democrats aren't organizing and listening, we will lose more and more of the Latino vote.

It also should be said that it is good for democracy, not to mention Blacks and Latinos, if both major US political parties are competing for their vote.  So as a Democrat I don't feel bad about the fact that as the Trump ship goes down, the GOP picked up some House seats that will be filled by candidates that are mostly women, including Latina and (maybe in Orange County) Asian American women.  The Republicans SHOULD feel good about that.  And I applaud them for it.  I was hoping South Carolina would be the first US state ever to have two Black Senators, one a Democrat and one a Republican.  If we want healing and we want unity, that's exactly what the future of America should look like.

Mostly I am delighted the Trump ship is going down.  Thanks for that wonderful video. @Suckrates.  Everything that has happened this week suggests that Trump and Trumpism will in fact rule the Republican Party during his post-Presidency.  If I were a Republican, I'd feel more than a little worried about that.  75 million Americans, a majority, did just repudiate Trump and Trumpism.  In that sense, Biden does have a mandate - even if it is NOT for liberalism.  To me the brightest lights shining in the Republican Party are people like Sen. Scott, and some of these newly elected Republican House members (not, of course, the Q Anon whack job).  If the Republican Party has a future as a majority, it is leaders like that that will build it. 

It's a different discussion for later, but if Republicans think or hope that blocking Biden for four years and reviving Trumpism in 2024 will be easy, they are being as delusional as Trump.  Young voters voted 2 to 1 against Trump in 2020, and they turned out in droves.  When McConnell pisses over everything most Americans in their 20's believe in, he will assure that the Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthwhile horse shit for the rest of our lives. 

Sorry, but let me repeat that.  The Republican Party in America will be viewed as worthless horse shit for the rest of our lives, if McConnell pisses over all the young Americans who just voted 2 to 1 Democrat and helped turn states like Arizona and Georgia blue or purple.  I'm glad you did well with some Cuban Americans and conservative Mexican Americans, Republicans.  But if you are going to spend 2021 and 2022 saying "FUCK YOU" to progressive young America, don't be confused that there will be consequences in 2024 - just like there were in 2020.  Again, there will be more of THEM and less of you in 2024.  You might want to think that one through very carefully.

I think my main takeaway from this election is already formed.  The smart wizards of elections like Axelrod or Carville or Rove would probably agree that a good ground game can earn you 2 to 3 points in any election.  So I'm going to just assume that some of these close 51/49 races Democrats lost might have been won if we had a more aggressive ground game, like the Republicans did. 

That said, we had a deadly pandemic in 2020.  If being safer cost us a few House seats, I'm personally okay with that.  The real takeaway is we have to do tons of outreach and organizing to Blacks, Latinos, and Whites who make less than $50,000 a year, and especially I think young voters.  The very good news from 2020 is that all those groups can be registered to vote, and will vote, and will vote Democratic, if we organize and govern in a way that reflects their interests and priorities.

Let me just say one other thing about young voters.  More than any other group, they broke hard for Democrats.  That's not quite true, in that Blacks seem to have broken up to 90 % Democratic in at least some states.  But there are actually more young people than there are Blacks.  And of course many of those young people are Black or Latino.  And they tend to be the Berniecrats and Warrenites. 

So I just flat out disagree with the moderates who are trashing AOC and saying that talk about "socialism" cost the Democrats a few House seats in South Florida.  That may be true.  But if Democrats want Donald Trump, Jr to win in 2024, the smartest thing they could do now is tell young voters who supported Sanders or Warren to go fuck themselves.  Instead, I think Biden did a more than adequate job reaching out to them and forming a coalition  that just put Donald Trump to bed.  Props to Biden for being smart enough to do that.

The person who is about to tell most young voters in America to go fuck themselves is Rich Mitch.  Let him do it.  Let Rich Mitch define the Republican Party as the one that is antithetical to the goals and beliefs of the vast majority of young Americans.  See how well that works for you in 2024.

Edited November 7, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[Suckrates]

 

Countdown to Melania DIVORCE announcement !  

[nynakedtop]

If you are in the need of some comic relief, take a trip over to the daddy site, do a search for postings by some moron named augustus and get ready for either an endless belly laugh..... or performing an intervention to put this senile old fool out of his misery!

[Suckrates]

49 minutes ago, nynakedtop said:

If you are in the need of some comic relief, take a trip over to the daddy site, do a search for postings by some moron named augustus and get ready for either an endless belly laugh..... or performing an intervention to put this senile old fool out of his misery!

 

I actually and truly believe that @augustus IS Sean Hannity !  

but funny how ALL the other Trumpies there are SILENT ........   either in shock or do they finally realize their Road Show is OVER ?   

[nynakedtop]

24 minutes ago, Suckrates said:

 

I actually and truly believe that @augustus IS Sean Hannity !  

but funny how ALL the other Trumpies there are SILENT ........   either in shock or do they finally realize their Road Show is OVER ?   

i've never met @augustus (luckily for him) AND i have never it and Hannity in the same place, so I suspect you are correct.

but he is a good example of the ability of the crazies to pre-empt discussion and to re-set the focus of discourse. even though the man clearly long ago lost ALL of his marbles, he is still able -- iike a common schoolyard bully -- to control the "conversation" over there.

(although i have noticed that he never either answers a question or responds to a point that anther poster makes - all he does is reproduce AgentOrange's tweets)

gotta love 'em for showing the unabashed, uncensored, unfiltered ugly face of what trumpism really is.

[Pete1111]

3 hours ago, nynakedtop said:

If you are in the need of some comic relief, take a trip over to the daddy site, do a search for postings by some moron named augustus and get ready for either an endless belly laugh..... or performing an intervention to put this senile old fool out of his misery!

Augustus is an example of why I quit that forum.  He cites as fact widespread voter fraud in NV, yet does not cite a news source.  False claims about the election are supposed to be removed, yet Daddy does nothing, while he punishes other members, usually on the Blue side of the arguments.  I don't have time for Daddy's inconsistent and often questionable standards.