stevenkesslar

That's probably the best educated guess of what will happen. Which is to say, 2020 will be a ripple of 2018 and 2016. In 2016, it rippled one way. In 2018, it rippled the other way. But it could ripple either way in 2020. What's missing is what I cited about what historian Theodore White said in 1980, as it was first becoming clear on Election Night that a tidal wave was coming in. It was, in fact, a tidal wave, he said. And everything needed to be rethought. To keep it abstract, there is a big similarity in 2020. I'm not sure I get this part of White's thinking. But I read what I could find (but not his book) about what he thought happened in 1980. Part of his view was that history crushed Carter. Which is to say, the Democratic coalition became unglued. Part of what was interesting about watching the coverage is these smart anchors were saying, "Reagan might even win North Carolina." Now we're saying, "Biden might even win North Carolina." Recall that in 1980 Georgia was one of the few parts of the Southern Democratic base Carter held, only for Mondale to lose in 1984. Carter's victory in 1976 and 1980 were built on states that are now solid red. I thought it was funny that when they filled in the map in 1980, red was the color they used for the states Carter was winning. In 2020 the party that seems to be becoming unglued is the Republican Party. Even Rick Snyder, of all people, is saying President Toxic is a bully, and he's voting for Biden. I know you don't like the concept of "Biden Republicans". But the fact that we're even having the discussion suggests this is not 1972 ("Nixon Democrats") or 1980 ("Reagan Democrats"). Moving from the abstract to the practical, White would of course never have argued these tides happen in a vacuum. The essay of his that I did read about 1980 suggested that he thought it was largely the economy, stupid. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Inflation, inflation, inflation. And, back then, gas lines, gas lines, gas lines. is there a similar driver in 2020? I'll repost this chart from another model by UVA's Alan Abramowitz I posted above and called "Lichtman Lite", or "It's only the economy, stupid." This was published in March, just as were becoming aware that COVID-19 had hit US shores. So the assumption was that it could slow the economy down. And the author knew that President Toxic was an incumbent seeking re-election. So he modeled (he says within 25 electoral votes) what will happen to Trump based on what has actually happened to every incumbent since World War 2 in the Electoral College. The two variables are their approval rating in June and second quarter GDP. The author said that if President Toxic could improve his approval ratings by a few points, he might get past 270. But only if he could at least squeeze just a teeny tiny bit of growth out of the economy in the upcoming (at the time) second quarter. In fact, President Toxic's approval rating got worse. And 2nd quarter GDP was -9.5 %. If we're looking for drivers of tidal waves, I'd say that qualifies. Even if you assume Rasmussen is right, and the people who will vote actually see Trump as having 0 net disapproval. And even if you assume that a lot of these authoritarian followers simply believe Daddy is taking care of it all, no matter what they see actually happening around them with COVID-19 and a recession. If you go the other way, the numbers above suggest that the current "no toss up" analysis of RCP - that President Toxic will get 185 electoral votes - is wildly optimistic for Republicans. Coincidentally, RCP just shifted North Carolina from Trump to Biden. What matters to me is that the three states right on the edge that could tip to Biden are North Carolina, Georgia, and Iowa. I'm assuming that 2020 will be like 2016 and 2018. If Biden wins those three states, he more likely than not takes four more Democratic Senators to Washington with him. We both agree, it seems. That only happens if there is a tidal wave. But not a ripple. The best all-purpose rejoinder to models like this is, "This time is different." Maybe so. My contrarian bias is that the more people say, "This time is different," the more likely it is that this time is exactly the same. Best to have flippers, a snorkel and a wet suit available come November. It's at least possible that a tidal wave is headed our way.

John Dean is out with a new book that offers another lens for viewing what's driving the election. This may help to explain some voting behavior that Lichtman's theory does not. Particularly the "stickiness" of President Toxic's supporters. John Dean's "Authoritarian Nightmare" That's a 24 minute audio interview of Dean. I listened to three interviews and read one review yesterday. If you prefer visual to audio this is an interesting interview of Dean on Democracy Now. The audio interview is longer and better for understanding his ideas. Amy asked him some interesting questions about current stuff. So it's a good interview, but a bit less about his book. I really miss Lookin from Daddy's forum. He was a very thoughtful poster. And he kept bringing up authoritarianism as a theme to explain Trumpism. As well as why so many people have been captured by the NRA. Dean and him were obviously reading the same books. Because everything Dean is saying echos points Lookin has made for years. I've got a very superficial understanding of the "science" behind this. But I'll summarize the basic theory in a paragraph, and then tell you my main takeaways from listening to about an hour of this stuff. The science of this started after World War 2. The initial question was: Could America fall to a Hitler or Mussolini? The answer researchers came up with was, "yes." Dean's co-author is one of the noted (and few) psychologists who is an expert on authoritarianism. There are psychological tests that have been used for decades that are believed to objectively measure support for authoritarianism. So the two key players in the nightmare are labelled Social Dominants and Authoritarian Followers. Social Dominants are the Trumps, who are power hungry Machiavellians who are driven to dominate others. Authoritarian followers are just that. In one interview Dean jokingly refers to them as "Daddy will make everything alright" types. They tend to be low information voters who are not great critical thinkers. At the extreme, this is the world of Q Anon and Deep State conspirators and radicals in dark clothes on airplanes. One takeaway is it reinforced my belief that the best way for people like me to change this is to do whatever I can to simplify defeat them. They're not John Kasich. They're not particularly interested in reason or compromise. But they do understand defeat. At one point, I think in the Amy Goodman interview, Dean says that, verbatim. They understand defeat. President Toxic is no Hitler or Mussolini. At least not yet. But it will end the same way. As I was listening to this I was reminded of that video Schwarzenegger made after Charlottesville about Nazis. He said growing up in Austria he knew these people were not heroes to honor. They were broken men who had been defeated. I suspect many of President Toxic's most ardent followers will feel the same way. They will understand defeat. But their impulse will not be to reconcile. This would be why they could nominate Don, Jr. in 2024, I think, even if his Dad lost. I hope I'm wrong. But I would not rule it out. If they nominate Nikki Haley, who I personally think is much less nuts, it would be because she succeeded in convincing the Trump base that she's basically Don in a dress. How exactly are these people going to be defeated? Dean says that young people don't follow President Toxic. He didn't say why in these interviews. But the fact that they are generally better educated and more critical thinkers probably has something to do with it, I suspect. The Berniecrats certainly have a different analysis about what's broken, and how to fix it. So the surest way to get rid of President Toxic is what I believe Dean called a "tsunamai" of youth voters. I've been reading smart Republican operatives for years who have been saying that a wave is coming that is going to wipe out Republicans, and Republicans are doing nothing to stop it. And that wave is young people. Separately, there is research that suggests that Millennials are acting like their parents: the older they get, the more likely they are to vote. That explains some part of Democratic wins in 2018. So this is just a huge unknown that could determine whether President Toxic wins Minnesota, on the one hand. Or loses Georgia, on the other hand. Rep. Omar was supposed to be vulnerable in her primary. But she blew her opposition away. That is one small data point that suggests that the opposition to President Toxic (and authoritarianism) may actually get out and vote. I checked on Omar. In 2018 she won her primary with 48 % of the vote out of about 135,000 votes cast. In 2020 she won 58 % of the vote out of about 178,000 votes cast. That may mean nothing. But I'm taking it as a sign that President Toxic's followers are not the only ones who are highly motivated to vote in this environment. One other point Dean made is that there has been a massive shift to the Republican Party of authoritarian followers. As a Democrat, that pleases me, if true. I don't want them in my party. The bad news, as @tassojunior keeps warning, is that if they consolidate in what is becoming The Authoritarian Party and elect someone even worse, that could move us into Hitler or Mussolini territory. Dean keeps referring to the known poll numbers of President Toxic's approval rating - 40 to 44 % - to describe his "base". I'd probably have to read the whole book to understand whether Dean thinks all of President Toxic's base are the "poorly educated" authoritarian followers President Toxic loves. Whatever Dean thinks, I think the slice he's describing is not all of them. My own sense is that President Toxic's followers are a minority, and this truly pro-authoritarian group is a significant minority within a minority. It is big enough that they were able to deliver the nomination to Trump in 2016. Which means they could do it again to someone else like him in 2024. In his closing comment to Amy Goodman, Dean says 24 to 29 % of President Toxic's followers said in a poll they will tolerate him ignoring The Constitution if he loses. Dean calls that "troubling". True. But even if we take the best case numbers for Trump, 29 % of a base that is 44 % of Americans on his best day is about 12 % of the electorate. If President Toxic loses, I don't see that 12 % of voters will be able to keep him in power. At least that's what I hope. Presumably this means 76 to 71 % of President Toxic's voters believe that if he lost the election, The Constitution says he has to go. This is another lens to view what is happening in the polls in Pennsylvania right now. The good news to me is that if Biden slipped back to "only" 49 % of the vote, that's consistent with the 49 % who said in both July and now they'll vote Democratic. So Democrats are close to what seems like a stable 50 % in Pennsylvania, at least so far. I think the best way to think about the people shifting around - who tend to be White men and under 50, and also maybe a slice of more conservative Black or Hispanic men, is this: jobs, jobs, jobs. It's the economy, stupid. But it's possible you can get to the same place by thinking authoritarianism, authoritarianism, authoritarianism. The phrase Dean used, "Daddy will take care of everything", sounds insulting and dismissive. But it does explain some things. It makes no sense to me, as an ideological guy who overthinks everything, that someone could say they'd vote for Bernie or Trump, but not Hillary. It makes more sense if I think the lens is simply, "Who's your Daddy?" Hillary isn't a very good Daddy. She's more like a nagging bureaucrat to a lot of these guys. Or just a bitch. So you can call it sexism. But seen through their eyes, it could be that they just don't see Hillary as the kind of guy that will take care of things for them. Standing next to Bernie in 2016, maybe they thought Bernie could take care of things better than Hillary. But then in 2020 we learned that Biden makes a better Daddy than Bernie all across states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Now they have to decide whether they like Daddy Biden or Daddy Trump. Viewed through this lens, it's even more clear that President Toxic's hateful tweet is aimed directly at people who Dean says are authoritarian followers. President Toxic is strong. All you get from Biden is a "weak response". So who's your Daddy? "President Trump is making it stop." President Toxic is your Daddy. He'll will take care of everything. If you buy this, Biden saying he's the most empathetic guy in the world doesn't close the deal. If anything, it confirms that Biden is no Daddy at all. He's a wimp. One of the things i think Biden is doing right is calling President Toxic weak. Biden and Harris are projecting the kind of strength that Angela Merkel and other female leaders in Europe tend to project. Which is to say, the kind of strength that appeals to women, and I think to critical thinkers. Biden can't be that and a mini-Mussolini at the same time. It makes no sense for Biden to try to out-Trump President Toxic to me. If these theories of psychology intersect with politics, I think the best way to connect the dots is jobs, jobs, jobs. The promise that Daddy made in 2016 that cut in the Rust Belt is that Daddy would go in to these devastated areas with closed factories and struggling families and businesses and lots of addiction and hurt. And Daddy would take care of things. Daddy has not only NOT taken care of things, which was true before the plague. He's made it worse. Before the plague, there were no new factory jobs in Pennsylvania. After the plague, which is thanks to Daddy fucking it all up so that over 200,000 will die by Election Day, they have fewer jobs. President Toxic isn't Daddy. He's not even Mommy. He's just chaos. Part of Dean's point is that these types of people are not high information thinkers. That's of course why they like Fox News. And why the ratings say in the Fox Universe they'd much rather listen to Sean Hannity than Chris Wallace. So here's some data, which is probably next to useless with true Trump followers. Even in the "best economy ever", Pennsylvania lost 2000 factory jobs between January 2019 and January 2020. If you start the clock from January 2017, when President Toxic promised to end American carnage, Pennsylvania has lost about 25,000 factory jobs under Trump, as of June 2020. Daddy isn't very good at getting the job done. There's a significant difference between Pennsylvania and Wisconsin if you look at long term trends. Whether it has any impact on elections, who knows? In Wisconsin, there are periods of "recovery" since 1990. In the 1990's, Wisconsin actually gained in the ballpark of 75,000 manufacturing jobs, to a peak of about 600,000. By the end of the Great Recession, almost 1 in 3 of those jobs were gone. From the trough of The Great Recession, they did gain back about 60,000 factory jobs - mostly under Obama/Biden. So the sense of it is two or three steps back, one step forward. Pennsylvania has had no "recovery" of manufacturing jobs for three decades. Even in the Clinton heyday, they lost 20,000 or so factory jobs. Under both Obama/Biden and President Toxic, the "recovery" of manufacturing was basically a flat line. So Wisconsin today is at least better off than during the worst days of the Great Recession. Pennsylvania is actually worse off. You can make up any theory you want about how this might impact voting behavior. It certainly explains why people who are not necessarily racist or sexist felt that eight years of Obama/Biden was enough, and they didn't need Hillary. But President Toxic hasn't been any better. You can make a good argument, based on factory jobs, he's been worse. Or you can argue that this is the kind of environment that breeds authoritarian followers. Nothing works. Nothing gets better. But at least we can feel and hope that Daddy is taking care of us. Biden has done well, I think, by being disarmingly honest. His line about "Do I look like a radical to you?" worked. So one way to deal with this, which in most cases would be horrible political advice, would be for Biden to look President Toxic in the eye at a debate and say, "Donald, you choked. You promised decent hard working people you'd bring back their factory jobs. And you choked. There are fewer factory jobs. You choked. You're weak. You let people down. You choked. People are worse off today. You're a choke artist, Donald. Don't you get it? Because everybody else does." That's going way too far. But Biden has been effective using President Toxic's own words against him. And if you go back to 1980, Biden has the opposite problem Reagan did. Reagan needed to prove he wasn't a radical. So he had to NOT be inflammatory. The disarming, "There you go again" did the trick. Biden needs to prove he is not weak. So turning some of Trump's authoritarian language against him might make sense. President Toxic is not strong. He's a choke artist. Something like that might help Biden. This is where I find Lichtman helpful. His theory is based on the idea that over a very long period of time, American voters have made sound judgments based on fundamentals. Like, "it's the economy, stupid." If he's right, the sound judgment in 2020 will be that President Toxic fell short, and should not be re-elected. Dean's numbers, if I understand him right, don't contradict this. If 15 % of Americans would choose President Toxic over The Constitution, that's probably something America can survive. The most pessimistic thing I feel, especially if I really buy into Dean's ideas about authoritarianism, is that this is a big problem for America for a long time to come. These people won't go away. And they are not likely to change their minds. I'd like to think George Will is right, and after Trump loses these are the people that will be purged from the Republican Party. Or they'll just take their marbles and go home. More likely, they will blame President Toxic's defeat on RINOs like George Will. And they'll purge any of the RINOs that are still left in their authoritarian party. One other thing I've said ties in here, and in reason for hope for me. I said that I didn't think in 2020 The Bernie Show (or The Social Democratic Show) was ready for prime time. One reason I said that is that the Berniecrats didn't vote in the droves that were hoped for. That in itself is not a great omen for Democrats for November 2020. But if I understand Dean, he says they are ultimately the best solution to this problem. I certainly feel that way. They are not attracted to authoritarian leaders. So if any of this is in the ballpark of correct, it's only a matter of time until a minority that responds to authoritarian leaders is crushed by an ascendant electorate that rejects Trumpism root and branch.

I didn't take them to mean those were the only swing states. And let's all keep repeating this: nobody should take anything for granted. If things swing one way, President Toxic could win Minnesota. If things swing another way, Biden could win Georgia and maybe also pick up two Senate seats there. There's poll data that suggests that The Divine Miss Graham could even lose her job in South Carolina. It's turnout, turnout, turnout. The main words in everyone's vocabulary for the next two months should be "vote, vote, and vote." Trafalgar, the Republican outlier, has a poll out today saying it's a tied race in Minnesota. The RCP average, which includes that poll, says Biden is leading by 5.4 points in Minnesota. Trafalgar says that President Toxic has a 3 point lead in Florida. That poll pulled the RCP average down, so now it shows Biden with a 1.8 % lead in Florida. We don't even have to guess what's going on here. In 2016 Trafalgar was right on the money. They published the last two state polls in Pennsylvania and Michigan, a few days before the election, both showing Trump with a very small lead. In 2018 they were way off the mark in a lot of states. Their model of who would vote was just way off. What I found interesting is that Trafalgar screwed up in both directions in 2018. In states trending red, they underestimated how badly Democrats like McCaskill and Donnelly would lose by. In states going the other way, like Arizona and Nevada, they underestimated the shift to Democrats. They called both of those states wrong in the Senate races. Bottom line is it all depends on who the electorate actually is. And no one can predict that. But we can control it. Send money. Volunteer. Vote. What happened in 2018 is likely to happen again. The intensity on both sides will feed off each other, and lead to through the roof turnout on both sides. That in itself is not a bad thing in a democracy. If that happens, it will probably help Democrats in states like Georgia. McBath won in 2018, and Abrams came closer than any Democrat in about a generation. If Blacks and Millennials crawl out of the woodwork to vote, 2020 could be the opposite of 2016. Instead of the loose bricks in the Blue Wall falling, it could be the loose bricks in the Red Wall this time. But it's all turnout, turnout, turnout.

I think we agree. To oversimplify what you said, it is being passed in states the Democrats have majorities in. It is being obstructed by Republicans in states like South Carolina. It's a highly partisan issue, as that poll I posted above shows. So I'm pretty sure the only way to get to 270 is to have a solid Democratic majority. If President Toxic loses badly, I do think that Republicans will at least soften their opposition, as they did in the early Obama years. The key argument that may work, with some of them, is that taking power this way tends to result in the same thing. You take one step forward, and two steps back. If President Toxic loses badly, that's happened twice in a row. And even during that one step forward you're stuck with unpopular leaders who bungle things (W. in Iraq, President Toxic and COVID-19). While Republicans are taking the one step forward they won't want to hear this. They'd rather focus on appointing more conservative judges. After they realize they've actually fallen two steps back, and helped open the liberal floodgates in reaction to their unpopular and inept leaders, some of them may be a bit more open-minded. That's at least what the poll data shows happened with Republicans after Obama won. It became less partisan for a while. This will be a test of how permanent the damage caused by President Toxic is. I have no clue. It could be in 2024 John Kasich, or someone like him, will be the Republican nominee. If I had to bet, I'd bet on Donald Trump. Jr. - if those were my two choices. All these people that stand behind President Toxic are not going to go away. At least until they die. So I hope I'm wrong. But I see it as a solid wall of opposition that will just get harder, and more bitter, about "losing" their America. In that context, they will see this whole debate about dumping the Electoral College and letting the person who wins by millions of votes actually be President as a Deep State plot to destroy democracy. It's not rational. But who ever said that reason was these people's strong point?

That's the interesting question. What kind of a nation do we want to be? I've been saying for years that we are headed to a Moral Awakening. Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and the growing awareness of income inequality, the Sanders campaign, the Warren campaign. To me those were all signs of what may be coming. Now I would not say an Awakening is coming. I's say it's here. By Awakening I mean eras like the 1960's and civil rights. You could also throw in the explicitly religious Great Awakenings in US history, although that fuzzes it up more. They are periods of social renewal and a focus on the "soul" of the nation. As opposed to what might be called "greed is good" values. And one sign that we've arrived is that suddenly people see things that they were slumbering or passive about previously. BLM is certainly a good example of that. There was protest, including violence and looting, after Ferguson. But not like this. What goes along with the new tide, which President Toxic is missing entirely, is that part of the movement is around personal morality. That was true in the religious Great Awakenings. It was also true in the Civil Rights Era, when MLK asked us to look into our own hearts. Is this the nation we aspire to be? Any leader who thinks the simple and one-dimensional answer is bulldogs or water hoses or federal troops or assault rifles is missing a huge part of what's really going on. Of course, why am I not surprised that President Toxic is not the kind of guy who gets this? I was impressed with a new Biden ad running which I will post below that fits into this theme. I went to find that "Jobs Not Mobs" tweet President Toxic sent out. When I Googled "Jobs Not Mobs Trump", this ad from 2018 came up, which I'd never seen. I thought the first part of the ad, about the economy, was powerful. This is clearly the campaign President Toxic was hoping to run in 2020 as well. And the little kick at Hillary at the end was a nice touch. So you have to wonder. If this didn't work in 2018, what makes them think it will work better in 2020? One number that pops up in this ad refers to 4.1 % GDP growth in the second quarter of 2018. In the second quarter of 2020 it was - 9.5 %. In 2018 they said "the core economy is on fire". In 2020 Coronavirus is spreading and killing like wildfire. I'm going to keep using Charlie Cook's 2018 phrase: "color intensifier". Ads like this probably did work in states like Indiana and Missouri and North Dakota in 2018, where Democratic Senators got their asses kicked to the curb. But they didn't work in most places. If it was just the economy stupid, the Republicans probably should have done better in 2018. So some part of this is that voters, particularly women, just aren't sold by this. This 2018 ad proves that this has nothing in particular to do with any of the riots or looting that happened when the BLM protests really took hold of the nation. This shouldn't be any surprise. It's the same President Toxic that was just Donald Toxic back in the Central Park 5 days, when he said this: Same hate, different century. So he got his wish. He's had three years to preach hate. My sense is that this is partly why things didn't go so well for Republicans in 2018, despite a good economy. I can't imagine the 2020 tweet is going to work much better, since it doubles down on the fear and hate without mentioning a thing about the economy, or COVID-19. Wonder why? Here's one of the Biden/Harris ads that is being blanketed all over about 15 swing states. I can't think of a clearer distinction between campaigning on fear, and campaigning on hope. I'd take it further and say it's the difference between offering up hope, and offering up hate. And that ad is Moral Awakening territory to me. Biden is gambling on the idea that the nation is ready to talk about racial justice. And the question, "Who do we want to be?" I used the word gambling. But if I'm reading the polls right, it's a pretty solid beat. I don't think the Democrats could have run an ad like this to rebut "law and order" in 1968. The fact that this is what Democrats are selling today is itself a small sign of progress, at least to me. Ron Brownstein has delivered yet another great analysis relevant to this, full of both good data and good insights. The Huge Snag in Trump’s Reelection Pitch The president’s own volatility complicates his effort to convince Americans that he can stabilize their lives. He's coming at it from a somewhat different angle, which I think compliments what I'm saying. It's a bit hard to sell "law and order" when even your supporters equate your Presidency with chaos. It's hard for President Toxic to say he'll calm down this situation when he's the one saying he hates "these people", and we should, too. The one thing he's got going for him is the idea that hating people gets something done. Although even the majority of Independents seem to think what it actually gets done is more violence, not less. This is where I wish Elizabeth Warren was our nominee. I think Biden is probably a bit more of a calming presence than her, actually. But he's not the guy I would put forward as the poster child to fidelity to the law. Which is not to say he's broken any law. But Team Toxic will keep arguing he did. As well as his family. All they had against Warren was "fake recipes" in a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow. She's the one that could have said "Really? President Law And Order? Really? I know you don't read, Donald. But the polls say people see you as President Chaos, and President Corruption. You want us to buy President Law And Order? Come on. Give the viewers a break!" That said, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this issue of race/crime/safety does not hurt Biden, and probably mostly works in his favor. The polls certainly suggest that. There is zero evidence it's hurting him in Wisconsin. And my gut feeling is that President Toxic is making sure Black turnout will go through the roof. And not, of course, to vote for him. Biden is simply giving Blacks who think America has racial justice problems - meaning almost all Blacks - a positive reason to vote. If there's a problem with the ads above, it's not what it says but what it doesn't say. As Brownstein says in that article, for a lot of people it's not about race. And if it's about safety, it's COVID-19. But the biggest thing for most people is still the economy, stupid. PENNSYLVANIA: PRESIDENTIAL RACE TIGHTENS That poll is worth digging through a little. It's the only "bad news" for Democrats. And with bad news like this, who needs good news? The scary headline is that Biden dropped from a 13 point lead in July, 53/40 to a 4 point lead today, 49/45, in Pennsylvania. There was no change in support for Democrats in general. The partisan lean question went from favoring Democratic Congressional candidates 49/45 in July to 48/45 today. Biden's favorability rating actually went up, from 45 % in July to 48 % today. My read of those numbers is that Democrats are solidifying a lead that is close to 50 %, but not quite. Monmouth says this about the people who shifted away from Biden: My guess is this shift is more about the economy than anything else. The slice of President Toxic's supporters that think like the McCloskeys, and own lots of guns that they feel okay pointing at Black people, are never going to consider voting for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. There's no reference to geography in the polls. But I'd also guess that a lot of these men under 50 live in the parts of Pennsylvania Jim Carville refers to as "Pennsyltucky". Or the ailing old factory towns, like Scranton. I'd also guess that some of these men under 50 are Black. And probably a big chunk of them are Hispanic. The 2018 version of "Jobs Not Mobs" didn't cut nationally, and it certainly would cut less well today. But it's the best thing President Toxic still has going for him. As an article I posted in a different thread argued, it's the last strength of President Toxic Biden has to go after. The good news in the bad news is that if Biden had these folks seriously thinking about him in July, there is no particular reason he can't close the deal with them by November. No one is talking yet about all the factory jobs NOT CREATED in President Toxic's three "good" years, before the plague started. Or about that fact that Pennsylvania now has fewer factory jobs than when President Toxic was elected. When I say we have arrived at Moral Awakening, that is a statement of hope as well as what I think is a statement of fact. I'm fine with Biden winning by asking, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Or by asking, "Are you safer than you were four years ago?" But he is definitely adding a moral dimension here, which is clearly targeted at Blacks. But not just Blacks. "Are we a better nation than we were four years ago?" I do find that genuinely hopeful. It is an invitation to move forward, into a new and better era.

First, let me say this about third parties. My hunch is you and I would agree about 90 % about third parties in general. And about all the value they could add to the US political system, in theory. In practice, in Presidential elections, there is no such thing as a third party in the 21st century. Sure, Ralph Nader can run. That elected W. Sure, Jill Stein can run. That elected President Toxic. (I'm adding their vote totals to the Democrats, which would have meant victory in Florida in 2000, and the three Rust Belt states in 2016.) So there is the Democratic Party on the one hand. And the Republican Party and all the others like Nader and Stein that elect shitty Republican Presidents on the other hand. In practice, those are my two choices. So speaking as either a Democrat or a liberal, the great thing about third parties is they elect incompetent Republican Presidents who do really shitty things I abhor. Beyond that, we have a number of huge fucking messes on the national plate. So a discussion of third parties is a luxury I don't feel I can afford. The main reason I'm sending the most money to the Democratic Senate candidates I agree with least is so we can have a Democratic majority and actually govern. Implicit in that is the idea that centrist or arguably center-right Democrats (you could call Steve Bullock center-right) can agree on center-left laws, and pass them, and make sure they actually make huge problems less bad. If we can do that - which is actually a collection of really big "if's" - maybe Democrats can withstand the barrage of Republican attacks, much like in 2010, about how [fill in the blank] Democratic initiative is the end of civilization. That worked for McConnell's attack on Obamacare in 2010. I have full faith he'll try it again. So for at least the next few years, anybody who wants to talk up third parties is basically shilling for President Toxic or McConnell, I think. Even if their intentions are the best. Second, I think most of what you said, and the map you posted, confirmed my main point. We're not going to have the power to get rid of the Electoral College until we have a very solid Democratic majority. Again, this is something where you and I, and in fact most Americans, would agree in theory. The electoral college should go. In practice, it doesn't work that way. After W. won there was still majority support for dumping the Electoral College. But Republicans opposed it. And since Republicans were in power, what they thought kind of mattered. Whatever their viewpoint, they got over it by the time Obama was President. But when it worked for them again in 2016, they shifted so dramatically that it was, at best, a 50/50 split in America. This also reinforces my point. Part of the Trumpist doctrine is that power is the end, and any means is justified to attain it. So Republicans may have stuck to their principles after W. won, and still felt that the Electoral College was an anachronism. By 2016 principles didn't matter. They could, and did, flip flop on a dime. Ironically, some of them see all this nonsense about the Electoral College as just another Democratic attempt to destroy democracy. I think I should add something about what I posted above. You might conclude from what I wrote that I think Democrats should make the argument, to Republicans, that if they support the Electoral College they are racists. I don't believe that at all. My point is that Democrats pretty much have to win this on our own, with the help of Independents. Republicans are a lost cause. I do think we should argue, to put it dramatically, that the Electoral College always was and always will be drenched in the blood of slavery and the hate of racism. Republicans won't agree. That said, I think we may have an opportunity starting in 2021. But only if President Toxic loses. Especially if he loses badly. My argument would be that the people who got fucked the most by this are Republicans. In the short term, they won. But look at what you won. Two Presidents who never had popular support. And who did their level best to destroy their party. The Iraq War. The Great Recession. 5 million factory jobs gone missing. 200,000 dead Americans from COVID-19. Two glorious and spectacular electoral humiliations in 2008 and 2020. (If, again, that is what happens.) My line would be, "Hey, Mr. Republican. Thanks to the Electoral College, it really sucks to be you, doesn't it?" The other part of the argument is that if you win and govern with a view that you have to actually get 50 % of the vote, you end up with Republican Governors like Kasich, or [fill in the name of any Republican Governor in New England]. If President Toxic loses re-election, this argument is much easier to make. Republican Governors who are popular and competent, like Kasich and [fill in the name of any Republican Governor in New England] can actually win re-election, and not take the whole party down the shit hole to Hell like Trump did. My best guess is that a significant minority of Republicans have secret time machines. So if President Toxic loses, they will all hightail it straight back to Summer 2016. Back then, they were all whining about how their party was being hijacked. Then, when they realized that meant winning and conservative SCOTUS justices and tax cuts, they liked that whole hijack/hate-mongering thing well enough. After President Toxic, some of them will go back to blaming it all on the hijackers. Mostly, I don't think there's any value in trying to persuade Republicans at all. Mostly, these days, I just don't see the logic in putting words like "persuasion" or "compromise" in the same sentence as the word "Republican". I hope that changes after the election. But I would not count on it. Even if they get their asses kicked in 2020, they might do what Democrats did in 1980 and 1984. Go from the humiliating defeat of Jimmy Carter to the even more humiliating defeat of Walter Mondale. In this case, I'd guess the Republicans - if they actually go that way - would be more likely to nominate Donald Trump, Jr. than Mike Pence in 2024. There is always, of course, Mike Pompeo. Back to the real world we actually live in, to me Democrats just have to win. If Democrats can't do that, forget about changing the Electoral College. And even if Democrats do win, we have to have the power to bring the baby home. Almost every state on the map you posted is solid Democratic. California and New York being the treasure troves. As blue states that would have more power if we bagged the Electoral College, why am I not shocked California and New York are for this? I checked on Ohio and South Carolina, where it is "pending", based on your map. I know nothing about this effort in Ohio. But with Governors like Kasich and DeWine, I doubt this will pass. Here's the main story I could find about Ohio, from Spring 2019: Organizers Withdraw National Popular Vote Proposal So it may be "pending", but it is hardly imminent. You actually argued that the anti-labor right-to-work fight in Ohio proved that people like Kasich. I was the one who quoted Wikipedia about how the people of Ohio disagreed with him, overturned the law by popular initiative, and Kasich basically got his ass kicked. So I could see how Ohio could enact this through a ballot initiative. But it would probably be over the dead body of Republicans. Probably including Never Trump Republicans like Kasich, who may still harbor the idea of being elected President after they clean up the wreckage of Toxic Trumpism. In South Carolina, a bill was filed in the State Legislature. I won't hold my breath for that to pass and be signed by the Governor. There is this from the website: If I go by the chart I posted above, about 55 % of Republicans were ready to bag the Electoral College in Obama's first term. After President Toxic won, that plummeted to 20 %. So if they are going off 2011 poll data in South Carolina, they might be surprised how Republicans would vote if this did actually get on the ballot. Now let's play out my fantasy. Jaime Harrison wins in South Carolina, and Rev. Warnock wins in Georgia. You now have powerful Black voices in red states to argue why the Electoral College needs to go. And if guys like that can win statewide elections, in theory you could get a majority of voters to kick the Electoral College into the trash heap. Maybe even some Republicans. They'd still be states that are mostly run by Republicans. But Republicans that are losing power rapidly. And if they have half the smarts of Jeff Flake, they know that this all happened after they received the gift of President Toxic. Not through God's grace. But thanks to the Electoral College. In my 20's, when I was helping to choreograph a big redlining fight between Blacks and a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and the Atlanta banks, I remember going to meet with whoever ran the SCLC at the time, at MLK's old church, which Rev. Warnock is now the pastor of. Somehow, I don't remember why, we got into a discussion about B'rer Rabbit and "don't throw me into the brier patch" as a political strategy. Only half jokingly, there may be some value in that today on this issue. Arguably, if President Toxic loses and takes the Senate majority down with him, that should be our play. If Rev. Warnock wins, which will only happen in a massive blue wave, he needs to profess the most solemn belief in the beauty and dignity and glory of the Electoral College, passed down to us from our Founding Fathers. Because whatever the goal was back then, when men were men and Black men were slaves, it now just elects Blacks to the White House and US Senate. That's what I'd want Warnock to say. You gave us W, through the Electoral college, and you got President Obama and a massive Democratic landslide in 2008. You did it again in 2016 with President Toxic, and you got me in the US Senate in 2020. And, if that happens, probably Stacey Abrams as Georgia's first Black Governor. So this works out great for Democrats. Every time you use the Electoral College to get an unpopular President in power, you take one step forward, and two steps back. Whatever else you do, please don't get rid of the Electoral College. It's a great way to build real Democratic governing majorities that an actual majority elect and re-elect, like Obama. If President Toxic gets his ass kicked, I think that chart above is predictive. For Republicans, the Electoral College won't look so good after all. I think that's when we have our best chance.

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.