I agree with the simple language.
As for shouting as loud as the other side, what if Trump says Biden is going to hell (or maybe even more likely, Harris, considering DJT just said Nancy Pelosi is going to hell)? What shouting response would you suggest?
My guess is that voters who conclude that there is a new Biden, just as aggressive as Trump, will break for Trump. Yes, just speculation.
Biden has to shout about his accomplishments, which are many. People do not associate the improved economy with him, for example, so he has find a way to pin that on his administration.
I’m in this constituency you are talking about. My brother is a felon. You can’t get much closer as a relative than that.
I think that makes me less likely to vote for a felon, because I am so well-acquainted with one.
Fwiw, in the president election betting on predictit.com, Biden is at 46% and Trump is at 30%. Newsom and Kamala total 16%, and DeSantis is at 11%, so it’s not just because of republican primary.
On a party level, it’s 59% Dem to 43% Rep.
I don’t think felons would be inclined to vote for Donnie, after hearing him tell rallies that the cops shouldn’t gently hold down the suspects’ heads when putting them in police cars and should rough them up a little. If I was a forme inmate I’d be disinclined to vote for someone antagonistic to the rights of the accused.
The big gorilla in the room in 2024 is abortion. This is going to incentivise moderates to show up and vote. If the nominee for the GOP is by then a convicted felon, we’re in for a blue tsunami.
It’s always odd watching the Democrats struggle to win, or to win by anything more than a narrow margin.
It’s like watching the Alabama Crimson Tide go up against a high school football team for ten times in a row, and usually Bama wins, but even then, by no more than 1-2 touchdowns. Like…wtf? It should logically be a 63-0 drubbing each time.
@Velocity I wonder how you can think to say that.
Your Mom votes. You vote. That’s a 50/50 tie right there. There are a hundred million copies of your Mom wandering around our benighted land. And more are being trained up every day.
You say that, but upthread we have discussion and data to show it really isn’t nearly the powerful issue you and I would hope it is.
Being jailed would give him a chance for a reset on this. His starting point would be to say that his cellblock friends are so much better people than Hillary and the Bidens.
Do I think he would take full advantage of reset options? Probably not. But from a purely partisan Democratic perspective, there’s a risk.
Imagine that the high school team had football officials tied to the school that were constantly changing the rules to favor the high school. Then that would be a more plausible scenario.
It’s called political economics.
As an exercise in economic efficiency for political success, why would you run up the score now? It just, drains resources, fires up the opposition and makes your side complacent.
At this stage of the cycle both sides reckon they can win via the devil they know with a good turn out of their base. To entice any votes from outside the base is expensive both in the campaigning and the policy platform to get a uncommitted/centralist on board without losing that or more off your home team.
If the ad buy pushes polls, and it’s state-by-state with winner takes all, then anything more that 51-49 is a waste of cash. So the collective political machines repeat that approach over a few cycles and then you get, well what you have now.
Look what happened last time somebody wanted to sweep the floor.
This gives the prowess of both state level polls, and political campaigns, too much credit.
The average of the final polls in 2020 showed Ohio was within one percent – and Trump won Ohio by eight percent. If you go through my links, you will find more dramatic examples than that of state polling failures.
Besides uncertainly of where the horse race really is in any state, running up the score helps with downballot races. So if there was an efficiently close presidential contest in New York State, won by the Democrats, that would increase the number of House of Representatives seats won there by Republicans. Even in the New York City media market, swing districts exist.
As for running up the score now vs. later, it would depend on how far in advance voters are making up their minds, if political campaigns could reliably measure that. But there is a lot of guessing here.
That was from one of those political dinners where the candidates act as comedians:
True, you could argue whether it should have been Jack or Joe Kennedy cited. Plenty of quotation sites accredit Joe.
But regardless of origin the quote illustrates my point aptly.
Moreover, given the controversy over several states in 1960 inc the Cook County, Il vote the point is rather more barbed than merely apt.
Thing is that to the degree political economy explains it explained as much for JFK as now.
JFK and other presidents though had periods with very high approval ratings. Voters of both parties agreed they approved.
Recent decades only a short stint with GWB after onset of war. Otherwise calcified.
So why the change?
The existence of a continuous commercially motivated political propaganda machine. Which in turn has changed US politics from something at least mostly policy-based into something simply rah rah team-based.
I’d argue that historically speaking “political economy”, or really “economy of political effort / political spending” is not really the driver and never was.
The real driver is that if either party got blown out, next cycle they’d tack towards the other party hoping to poach their most adjacent centrist voters. It’s a self-stabilizing equilibrium.
With advanced propaganda tools, and assortative mating, moving, etc. we are now in an era of permanent ideological camps. Where tacking to the center doesn’t gain centrist votes. Instead it causes your own highly partisan fringe to no-show in disgust.
The danger for the D party is that unlike the Rs they do not have a commercial grifting propaganda machine to drive outrage and therefore turnout. When that’s added to the structural R-party advantages of the over-powerful rural vote and the over-powerful small states in the EC, that may well become an insurmountable obstacle even though most of the US populace are people who live in a few states in urban / suburban settings and don’t know many / any raging rightists.
Such an explanation posits an unchanging set of voters who are persuadable by advertising. American history shows no long-term examples of this. Demographic and economic changes, along with major non-political effects, regularly roil the electorate. The 20th Century alone saw the rise of industrialization and the opposing worker movements, Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, the flight to the suburbs, the rise of a college class, and the depopulation of the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt. Women got the vote, the black population went from 9 to 34 million and were given full access to the polls, immigration was nearly cut off for 50 years after the Immigration Act of 1924, and the voting age was lowered to 18. New York and California were once solidly Republican states, although Democrats ruled New York City. In 1900, the Republicans had a progressive wing and the Democrats had a viciously conservative wing. By 2000 all Republican politicians were to the left of all Democratic politicians (with infinitesimal exceptions.)
All the systemic shocks combined to move political preferences locally, by state, and nationally, sometimes radically from one presidential election to the next. Few of them moved the country to a balance. Usually the swing produced a clear leader: Republicans from 1897-1913 and 1921-1933; Democrats from 1933-1949. (The slow shift of the South from Democrat to Republican muddled this after 1965 but the sweeping, large-scale trend was clear.)
We have not seen anything like this in the 21st Century. Except for a few swing states, the rest are locked to a party. Yet those non-swing states produce Congresses and Presidential elections that are almost exactly 50-50. That even split is historical and logically astounding; that it’s continued for over 20 years is confounding. Surely something - demographically, socially, foreign - should push one side to at least a temporary commanding lead. Social bubbles do tend to keep those at the committed ends of the spectrum faithful, but the vast differences shown in attitudes and opinions among age brackets should move the needle toward those in the younger brackets over time. From 2000 to now is a generation. Generational change is real; it’s been seen regularly across American political history. Why don’t we see it now?
Advertising can’t explain it. It’s effect is too minor, especially if it’s confined to swing states. In any case, the percentage of eligible voters voting has seen a steady, if bumpy increase since 2000, rising almost 13 percentage points across the country. That can’t be a local advertising effect. Bringing new people into the voting pool was at one time almost certain to be skewed toward one party or the other. Yet the 2000 election was ridiculously close and created a 50-50 Senate and a 221-212-2 House. Today it’s 49-49-2 and 222-213. Nor has it varied much in between. That’s what I want an explanation of.
Politics of hate.
Some thoughts to consider in this article -
I’ll also throw in gerrymandering which enables Southern GOP states to remain red even when they are under 50% buffering a flip based on demographic changes.
Another hypothesis to toss in.
The political divide is now mostly urban rural.
My suspicion (will research if time later) is that even “rural” Red states have a sizable percentage of their low total population in their smallish cities.
And more “urban” Blue states have GOP politicians who fight for suburban voters along with large rural areas.
Hence those maps showing that each state is actually a big mix of red blue and purple.
An example of those maps.