Agree with the majority of your analysis. i think it comes down to Ohio and Pennsylvania. I fear Wisconsin and Michigan go red again. Ohio manufacturing has been totally screwed over by Trump’s promises of jobs coming back, so I think there’s more hope of Ohio going blue than WI and MI.
We really don’t know what Trump’s chances are until we know who his opponent is going to be, and as usual world events and the economy, all of which are unpredictable a year out, will have a large effect.
The Democrats had a huge opportunity here to pick a moderate, center-left candidate who could co-opt Trump’s appeal to the working class, as well as picking up moderate Republicans who can’t stand Trump. Instead, it looks like they are going to run either a billionaire who condescends to them, or some variety of old socialist. The only moderate candidate is Pete Buttigieg, and he’s only moderate by the standards of the other candidates. In any other election year he would have been the most radical candidate.
The other dilemma Democrats have is that their only moderate candidate who’s got traction is gay and white, and he’s having a terrible time with the black community. This is going to be critical, as Trump has a very good chance to pull a significant fraction of black people to his side. After all, blacks and hispanics have fared better in Trump’s economy than any other demographic group. Black and Hispanic unemployment rates are at all-time lows, and their incomes are rising.
And it’s clear that the Trump campaign is going to make a major push for the black vote:
Trump Shocks Black Voters - By Trying to Get Their Vote
Trump doesn’t have to get a majority of the black vote. He doesn’t even have to get 50%. If he simply doubles his 2016 result of 8% of the black vote to 16%, Democrats will have a very hard time winning. Buttigieg will help get moderate voters back into the Democratic camp, but at the same time he may help Trump get more of the black vote.
This is the dilemma of intersectionality. The Democrats are trying to win by organizing a large coalition of identity groups, under the assumption that they all have the shared identity of being disadvantaged. But what happens when those groups fundamentally disagree with each other? The Black community is one of the most socially conservative in America. Feminists are starting to clash with the trans community. Muslims and Jews don’t exactly get along. The working class they used to have is not particularly fond of elite liberal professors.
Somehow, the Democrats need to find a candidate who can hold that coalition together, keep them energized enough to vote, and still appeal to enough of middle America to win in the Electoral College.
Right now, the unifying force between them all is probably hatred of Republicans and of Trump. If that starts to change during the election, either because Trump manages to hold his tongue and control his Twitter Finger (not likely), or because Democrats nominate a candidate who only appeals to extremists in the big cities on the coasts, which is the now the heart of the Democratic party. They need the extremists to keep the base revved up and working hard to GOTV, but those same extremists will make it really hard to win middle America.
So Trump may win again, but probably with an even bigger gap between the electoral college results and the popular vote.
But again, any prediction this early in the game is little better than a random pick.
From yesterday:
There’s going to be a lot of this sort of thing.
Biden is not a moderate now? Picking a moderate runs a different risk. You lose the progressives and people are less motivated to get out and vote for a cause they believe in. There’s no way to know which way is likely to get more votes.
Cite that incomes are rising? From what I’ve seen wage growth across all sectors is basically stagnant. And the unemployment levels are simply a continuation of the trend from years ago. Trump is not helping them.
Wow. This is a messed up way to analyze things. For most people, voting is about right and wrong, not “who can help me with my disadvantage?” I really hope most people don’t vote completely selfishly like you are assuming here. As a white man in the top 10% income percentile, I vote democratic because the Republican Party has become an absolute shit show with no regard for reality or morality.
I haven’t settled on a preferred candidate since my very slight preference( Inslee )dropped out. But I’d agree Biden slots into the moderate slot at least relative to his two main opponents at this stage, Warren and Sanders. And I still believe consistent front-runner Biden will get the nomination, barring a major collapse of some sort. He hasn’t really eroded much and I suspect it is likely that the more progressive wing of the party just doesn’t have the numbers to get it done( for example I don’t think Sanders/Warren supporters will automatically line up behind the other if either drops out ). So I agree Sam might be barking up the wrong tree a bit on that.
But while I’d normally agree that “moderate” candidates lose progressive votes, in this case I’d be inclined to bet it doesn’t cost more than a fairly small and inconsequential number of hardcore voters in mostly safely blue states. Because as I’m sure you’ll agree progressives mostly hate Trump. I mean really, really loathe him. Poor Ronald Reagan could only have aspired to being so detested by an ideological demographic. As a result I think this is going to be an odder than usual election and I think progressive turnout will probably be high regardless of the candidate.
You nailed it with the “dilemma of intersectionality.” Blue collar labor and whatever the far left happen to be don’t intersect much anymore.
Ohio is important for sure, but if Ohio slips away from Trump then I think he’s got a potentially big headache on his hands. For now, though, I would submit that while Ohio is certainly not in the bag (in fact Trump’s approval rating is underwater there as it is in a number of states), I think Ohio is more likely to pull through for Trump, the incumbent Republican nominee who can be replaced in four years anyway, than Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where he’s in real trouble.
Taking Wisconsin for instance, I would say that the disastrous fortunes of dairy farmers (and their own losses in manufacturing) are a bigger problem there than industrial decline in Ohio. For sure, Trump’s number crunchers and strategists are probably concerned about Ohio, but it has a longer and more reliable history of coming through for incumbents who manage to stay out of economic trouble generally speaking. It’s important to remember that this isn’t the same election in 2016, with two nominees vying for a first term. It’s a referendum on the incumbent who won’t (at least we assume) be running again.
I also worry that these states’ voting systems in particular may be the target of sustained attacks by foreign governments (i.e. Russia).
Right now doesn’t matter because voters aren’t comparing candidates A vs B. It’s only when we get to that stage that we can begin to see the trends. I would be looking at Trump’s favorability (approval) rating and see how close to 45% he can get, and then probably factor that on election night, he could pick up an additional 2% of the actual vote (or he could not). My hunch is that Trump realistically needs to be at least at 43% and preferably 45% or above going into that final week. If he’s near 50% approval, I don’t see how anyone beats him.
Ooops; embarrassing. I mean 2020, of course. Rosenberg points out that most sectors of the U.S. economy are contracting already; the notable exception being the all-important Consumer Spending.
I happen to agree that ‘Who can help me with my disadvantage?’ is a factor in voting. Might not be the only factor, but definitely something voters take into account.
Sam, how did you manage to write that without acknowledging that Biden is a moderate candidate, ahead in the polls, with strong black support?
I have to be honest… When I wrote that I completely forgot about Biden. Call it a brain fart. And I would agree that he’s historically been a moderate, although this year he seems to be signing on to some radical ideas, probably because he thinks he needs to given where the Democrats seem to be. For example, he endorsed the ‘Green New Deal’, which is pretty damned radical.
But still… I’d consider him a moderate and the best chance to beat Trump. And it would appear that Democrats generally agree, which is why he’s leading the field despite being a gaffe machine and the problems he’s having with his son.
But while Biden may be the best of the current rank of candidates, he’s still pretty weak. He’s old, he hasn’t exactly been campaigning with vigor, and his previous attempts to run for president flamed out pretty badly.
Yes, they will have had four years to learn from any shortfalls and deficiencies of their 2016 efforts.
They will be better at it. And there will be less opposition or resistance, thanks to the efforts of MoscowMitch and his allies. In many venues, as a matter of fact, there will be a virtual red carpet laid out for them.
There is certainly pandering going on.
And timing will increasingly be an issue. I’m concerned that Republican-dominated state legislatures will tighten the screws too close to election day for Dems to counter effectively in the courts. Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina legislatures all have solid experience in fucking over Democratic voters.
I agree that the Russia thing probably hurt the Democrats more than it helped. I don’t think it convinced many folks who were on the fence about Trump that he cheated or colluded and they were basically drawing even more attention to the fact that the DNC and the Democratic establishment was rigging the game in favor of someone who eventually ended up losing an election that she should have won.
The hullabaloo and focus on the russia probe also made it much easier to dismiss the whole ukraine scandal as yet another episode of the democrats crying wolf.
That was part of the arrogance of hillary. Noone thinks trump is going to be a pushover and yet the democrats haven’t done very much to address the issues that lost them the election.
I think he definitely wins re-election. The impeachment will make his supporters like him even more. He might still lose the popular vote, but i bet by a smaller margin than 2016.
The only thing that will cause him to lose is if one of his many blunders actually causes the the economy to tank and stay there for a few months. So far when he has said or done something stupid the the stock-market takes a momentary plunge, but then rebounds after relatively a short period.
I hope i’m wrong.
Being a white man in the top 10% income percentile may be exactly what allows you to be so pollyannish about the state of politics today.
There was a time when democrats were primarily interested in equality of opportunity but intersectionality and identity politics has shifted the focus from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome by racial groups. And if you are a poor white man rather than one in the top 10%, where does that leave you? Your race has already met its quota of success so the focus of the party is on poor folks of other racial groups.
This is the way Fox News and the GOP apparatus want these folks to think about Democratic policy, but there are a ton of Democratic policies supported by pretty much everyone that would greatly help these folks (and are generally very popular with these folks): higher minimum wage, universal health care, stronger labor protection, mandatory paid parental leave, child care assistance, etc.