Some people really do seem to think this could work. It’s the old “There’s no such thing as bad publicity!” claim.
But I can’t imagine it actually working. Who is it out there, who wasn’t going to vote, but suddenly decides, “Hey! That crap about people eating cats has decided it for me! I’m voting TRUMP!!!”?
I mean, I can see it working the other way - it’s so over the top, it finally gets through to them that Trump is just as bad as we’ve been saying, so they drop him. But who would be “pushed over the top” to be pro-Trump by this? Are there people out there who weren’t going to vote for Trump because he was insufficiently racist?
It could start out as a battleground state at the beginning of the cycle, but the gap could be closed during it.
Harris is doing some crazy-good (albeit not yet winning) numbers in certain red states. That has to have the Trump campaign more than concerned about the heretofore battleground states. Imagine if Trump looked good in, say, New York or Illinois–losing but within the margin of error. Everyone in this thread would be losing their head.
It’s been said many times and it bears repeating: in an election this close, turnout is what matters. Undecideds are rarely waffling between the candidates, they’re waffling about whether or not to bother to vote for the one they sort-of like. Trump isn’t peeling Harris voters off to win them into his camp (for the most part), he’s peeling them off the group of active participants so they stay home, and vice versa. And so on.
Well said. In this election, I think we are going to see outstanding turnout on both sides, as was the case in 2020. That election had turnout better than any since the 1908 election, IIRC (and we say that people don’t vote, but that’s probably as good as it can get without legally requiring people to vote).
But I still think we Dems are going to win hard on turnout. Plus new registrations.
That’s interesting but those are opinions. The FACTS are that Wisconsin was effectively tied in 2016 and 2020 and there is nothing now suggesting it isn’t just as close in 2024.
The problem with your rosy view, in this context, is that the Dems are honorable and the Pubbies are finks. The Dems want to depress Trump turnout, but solely via messaging and discouraging his supporters. Whereas the GOP has raised institutional vote suppression to a fine dark art. In a race which purely measures turnout, the GOP has the clear edge.
Purely anecdotal evidence, and probably apropos of very little, but the Kansas Secretary of State, Scott Schwab, announced yesterday that since January of this year, there have been over 83,000 new voter registrations in the state. This brings the total number of registered voters to over 2 million, in a total population of 2.9 million. (One source yesterday showed me that the 18-and-over population was about 2.3 million. I cannot verify the accuracy.)
Again, I have no idea what it means, if anything, but a boy can dream.
I would need more evidence that they are actually succeeding where it will make a difference. I don’t deny that they are trying, but as I said earlier, does Trump really seem to be leading that kind of effort? I don’t think so, so it will come down to individual actors in individual battleground states.
The writer is another idiot who doesn’t understand what triggers a contingent election.
If, for example, the Nebraska legislature ensured that their electoral college votes were in dispute, and the courts had not decided the matter by 6 January, and no one had reached the threshold of 270, that state of affairs would automatically trigger a contingent election. In a contingent election, another abstruse mechanism of the US electoral system, each state delegation, whether it’s California or Wyoming, gets a single vote, which means that the Republicans would always win.
The amount needed to win is not fixed at 270. It’s a majority of the electoral votes counted by Congress.
It’s nonsense like this that made me start this thread
Right. Harris could take Biden’s under and turn it into a strong over. But it would take a very dramatic turn to make Harris or Trump a sure win. 60/40 polling sounds strong, but polling isn’t voted for. It isn’t even will vote for. Even if every person polled actually does vote and votes the way they answered the poll, there are people not polled who will show up. And weighting the results of the poll to reflect demographics risks that the weighting isn’t parsed as finely a the demographics actually are, so what looks like a representative sample misses a subgroup of one set that doesn’t conform to the broader set.
My point was that non battleground states would need a big X factor to switch outcomes. Harris winning Texas would be bizarre and need explanation.
A state running 49/48 doesn’t need a big X factor for the 48 side to be the winner. Even a spread of 55/45 in polls is outside the stated margin of error, but still essentially open. Things can happen that the polls can’t forsee.
If the polls start showing 90/10 in Harris’s favor in Pennsyvania, somebody is going to be doing some hard work on why. “Because Harris is sane and Trump is not” is insufficient to explain it. I mean, it shouldn’t be, but then why is it insufficient to make all the vote projections 90/10 Harris? Why here now?
So I’m saying is model runs predicting 60/40 Harris aren’t “it’s over for Trump”.
Not quite sure which election thread it belongs in, but today I saw a plump 40-something denizen of Wal*Mart sorta person wearing a bright red T-shirt. The white writing across the front said
Resist
Like it’s
1776
No mention of whether they’re supposed to be resisting Fascism or imaginary Socialism / Woke-ism, but I bet they plan on resisting the latter.
At this point, I would put more betting money on Mondale to beat Reagan in 1984 than on Trump to beat Harris this year. It’s not even so much about there being a big gap in the polls as it is that Trump has no clue how to reverse his slide. He’s like a pilot who’s stalled the plane but keeps pulling back on the yoke.