It is uncommon but a career politician can still be someone who says what they think without over analyzing how it did with focus groups and checking current polling data first.
And “outsiders” can be complete image creations.
He believes what he says and is not the product of focus group testing. For better and worse.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one looking at thresholds when I see polls.
There’s an important caveat though. The DNC rules award delegates both statewide and at the congressional district level with the same threshold applied. Those congressional district delegates are actually 75% of the base delegate total. (Cite with more detail than you probably want.) It’s entirely possible for candidates to cherry pick delegates by focusing on the districts that are most friendly to them. To win district delegates only takes meeting the district threshold. That could hew up a lot of delegates in states where only one candidate breaks the statewide threshold.
Not that we’ll be able to get that level of granularity in typical published polls. That’s the type of polling that gets paid for and staffers dig through in detail.
I think the only two who can beat Trump are Biden or Harris. Possibly, possibly Warren, but she’s a long shot. Bernie? Abso-fucking-lutely no way.
I am 100% in agreement with this except that I don’t see Biden as being the candidate you see him as. I have no patience for arguments against Biden that he is not progressive enough or whatever. I just think he is old and feeble and was never a great politician to begin with. There are candidates at 1% like Bullock who would be ideal if primary voters would give them a chance. But since they won’t, your other objections to the top tier candidates are valid—and that leaves Harris as our only hope.
Do you have evidence that those two appeal to Rust Belt working class white swing voters? Because I see a lot of people making this claim based on the idea that they are good on labor issues and so on, but I think that those kinds of voters are more interested in being able to culturally connect—and I don’t think a Massachusetts senator and former Harvard professor, or a Vermont socialist who is ethnically Jewish but not religious and speaks with a thick Brooklyn accent, are the ticket.
It would be interesting to know more about that large contingent of Massachusetts voters who pulled the lever for other Democrats while voting for Warren’s Republican opponent. I have a hard time imagining that they are anything other than the same type of voters we need. And they don’t like her.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of Lichtman. I first read about his “Keys to the Presidency” prediction system back in the 1980s, so I got to follow it through multiple cycles.
Let’s just say that some of his keys are subject to interpretation as to whether they’re turned or not, to use his nomenclature. And he fudged the hell out of his 2016 prediction; if he’s taking credit for having gotten that one right, then gimme a break.
Clinton wasn’t so much off the wall, as the guy who got the nomination only because all the big shots were scared off by the way GHW Bush was riding high in the polls after Desert Storm. And Carter - much as I love him for his post-Presidential life, he was, in 1975-76, the closest thing the Dems have had to a Trump: a guy whose candidacy came out of nowhere, was way underprepared for being President, but had a good enough line of patter to win the nomination against a field of established but not particularly strong competitors.
By the standards of the day, yes, Carter’s candidacy was off the wall.
ETA: But if Lichtman is saying that Dukakis was a mainstream candidate but Clinton and Carter were off the wall…nah, does not compute. Sorry.
I tend to agree, I think Lichtman has promoted himself rather well using the tricks of your typical tarot card reader.
Carter won in 76 not long after Watergate so the Dems had a big advantage that year. Almost any reasonable Dem would have won in 76.
One would think that history should repeat itself this time.
the difference is nobody elected Ford in 74 so there was not a big cult of fans of his like we have now with Trump. And Carter did not win by much in 76. Maybe a better Dem would have won more easily.
The real difference is that this country is beginning to fracture socially and politically. We live in a society that is increasingly without a shared reality or shared understanding of what truth and reality mean.
I think there have always been differences of opinion about how to define America. We’ve always had an ethnic white (and largely Christian) majority that has believed that its values shall be imposed upon others, and we’ve simultaneously had a competing view of America in which we live in a society of shared prosperity and power. But we’re now at a moment in history in which the ethnic majority feels threatened and anxious at the prospect of losing the power to define what the terms “America” and “American” mean.
Former SF Mayor Willie Brown, who’s been mentioned in this thread before, made some interesting points in this week’s column, which I’ll paraphrase here:
Regarding the prospects of a debate between Trump and the Democratic nominee, he said: it’s not going to happen. The point of a debate is to sway undecided voters, and there aren’t any of those. Trump has shown he’s only interested in rallying his base, as demonstrated by his attacks on The Squad. His strategy is all about voter turnout: if he gets more of his 42% to vote than the Democratic candidate gets of his/her 50%…he wins.
IMHO: this is good. I don’t think there will be any problem generating Democratic enthusiasm.
Cosigned.
I’m not sure there was one on tap that year. Like I said earlier, I really think Carter won the nomination partially due to the weakness of the field.
I don’t know anything about Lichtman’s system. And I’m sure, as with any type of prediction, there are subjective factors. But he did predict it before it happened, unlike most others.
Interesting. Fall debates between the two major-party candidates have been commonplace since 1976; it’s be remarkable if they weren’t any in 2020. But then, so many other political verities have fallen by the wayside in the past few years…
CNN did a focus group published 7/26/19 with 10 undecided voters in Michigan - 5 Independents, 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans.
None were interested in Joe Biden. One woman said she would vote for Biden if he was on the ballot in March. 4 people said they may NOT vote for Biden if he was on the ballot as the nominee. One Republican said he might vote for Joe Biden if he was the nominee. One African-American guy said that Biden’s policies had caused many of the people in his neighborhood that he grew up with to be in jail or dead. Another guy said that Biden was Hillary Clinton 2.0, the worst thing that the Democrats could do
One guy said he was interested in Julian Castro, and several of them nodded while he was speaking. Other than that, there was not much cohesion about their decisions.
One woman mentioned Bernie. Another mentioned Warren but then turned to Harris.
Wow, **TEN **whole voters! :eek:You understand that numbers that small are totally meaningless, right? :dubious:
It’s a focus group, not a poll.
Using focus groups in political science and international relations
I’d agree that focus groups are not completely worthless. But the keyword from above is “qualitative”. They can be useful for understanding the underlying “why” of the numbers that quantitative tools give you. Or at least for generating some hypotheses about the whys.
The value is in the open ended conversations that show the deeper thought processes and emotional responses that lead to the polling numbers and the other good quantitative information or that can suggest what messages might sell better with specific subgroups. Information that yes/no polling questions might not pick up on.
One valid use of a focus group would be by Team Sanders interviewing a demographically diverse group of voters who are currently moving from him to Warren to get a better sense of why and to possibly adjust the messaging to alter that trajectory.
A one guy said A or B as the takeaway from focus groups is however worth less than a someone said on a message board.