Is there any reason to believe 2016 won't be a landslide victory for the Democrats?

Democrats used to be able to nominate anyone who seemed like they could win. Now they go for star power. In 2008, the field was all upside down: three junior Senators got all the attention, while two senior Senators and an incredibly qualified governor got overlooked because they weren’t exciting enough. If Clinton chooses not to run, I don’t know what your side will do. Martin O’Malley seems like the only plausible nominee with Cuomo damaged. The other candidates are problematic for the Democratic base(Webb, Schweitzer). O’Malley’s actually a quite solid candidate, but given the expectations of the base for superstars nowadays I wonder if they’ll turn out for him?

Republicans also have a problem, the “next” problem, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a factor in 2016. The nominee will most likely be a fresh face, and an outsider.

If Hillary isn’t the nominee, I’m very confident of a Republican victory. If she is the nominee, I’d rate it a 50-50 race. Demographics won’t save you if they don’t come out, and there is no evidence they’ll come out for an old white guy(or lady). The Obama coalition has been notably asleep in all elections from 2008 to the present in which Obama hasn’t been on the ballot.

Bill Clinton was the frontrunner in a field in which all the Democratic stars declined to run because they thought Bush was unbeatable. Clinton was a rising star until he laid an egg at the 1988 convention in much the same way Jindal fumbled his big moment on national TV. Hopefully history repeats.:slight_smile:

Good news everyone, the Democrats are a sure thing!

Quite a bit of difference between that post and this one:

Are there two of you sharing an account?

The funny thing is, I started off saying the 2016 GOP field looked a lot stronger to me than the 2012 GOP field. But I keep on waiting for Rand, or Cruz, or Ryan, or anyone to catch fire among Republicans themselves, and nothing’s happening. The nomination may come down to a retread war between Huckabee and Santorum.

I’m starting to downrate the GOP field because Republicans themselves aren’t finding much to get excited about.

It’s true that I (a registered non-partisan) don’t ‘have to’ vote for whomever the Democratic party puts forward. I could write in Sergeant Pinback if I wanted to. But the reason I vote is to attempt to elect the person I think is most likely to do the things I want him or her to do.

Your statement bears little resemblance to real elections. In real elections, there are only two candidates who have any possibility of becoming President. If I vote for Sergeant Pinback, or if I vote for a third-party candidate who stands no chance of winning, I am, in effect, voting for the person I do not want to put into office.

You have probably noticed that Presidential elections are leaning increasingly Democratic, and off-years are increasingly leaning Republican, due to who turns out in each instance.

This (and the fact that they’re defending all their 2008 pickups and holds) is why the Dems will be lucky to hold onto the Senate this year.

But if you look at Presidential elections, you surely notice that Dems have won a plurality in five out of the last six, and lost that sixth one by only 2.5%, even though they were running a notoriously bad candidate, John Kerry, against an incumbent GOP President.

Getting back to the OP, though, it’s hard to envision a Dem landslide, unless we define ‘landslide’ way down. The 46% that McCain got in 2008 is probably a floor for what a GOP candidate can get in a Presidential election these days.

The Dems will pick up a bunch of Senate seats in 2016, though. What happens in the Senate is basically the intersection of (a) is it a Presidential year, or not? and (b) who won big in this Senate class in its last election or two?

2018 is going to be a tough year for the Dems, because they’ve maxed out their gains in that class after three good elections in a row: 2000, 2006, and 2012, and it’s coming up in a midterm. 2016 is going to be a good year for the Dems because it’s a Presidential year, and the GOP gained big in 2004 and 2010. And 2014 is going to be a tough year for the Dems, because it’s a midterm, and the Dems won big in 2008. We’ve got this weird dynamic where each Senate class is dominated by one party or the other.

How not? You know very well there are millions of Americans who will vote for the Dem no matter who it is, and millions who will vote for the Pub no matter who it is.

I’ll just let the two of you argue this one out.

And Romney’s 47% is probably a ceiling.

It didn’t use to be weird, back in the days when both parties were run by adults and “politics was waged between the 40 yard lines”. Ticket-splitting used to be a recognized tradition among voters who didn’t fully trust either party, hoping they’d keep each other honest. But the demonization process started by Gingrich, culminating in the current situation of one party being run by tantrum-throwers, has made ticket-splitting a thing of the past.

So, her association with Obama is going to keep voters away, while at the same time nobody is going to turn out to vote for someone who isn’t Obama?

It didn’t really happen for Romney, either. It was pretty much all “He’s the only electable one out there”, which was true. Now only the others are left.

Cruz does seem to have the admiration of the Teahadists, and he does have the chops to have made himself the effective Speaker of the House of all things. So he may well be the “Aw, hell, let’s let them get it out of their systems so we can nominate an adult next time” candidate the party can unite behind.

I’m going to go ahead and just assert that every state that Kerry won in 2004 is in the bag for the Democratic nominee in 2016. I guess there are some extreme cases where that won’t be true (significant economic regression that gets put on Obama, a significant terrorist attack that is credibly blamed on him, etc), but if that happens, the Republican’s going to win, so no further analysis is necessary.

So with that in mind, to win, the Republican nominee has to win some of these states: Nevada (6) , Iowa (6), Colorado (9), New Mexico (5), Ohio (18), Florida (29), and Virginia (13), all of which Obama won in 2012. And he’s going to need some combination of those that adds up to 64 electoral votes. That’s going to be a pretty tough row to hoe - even in a year in which the Republicans are doing about as well as can be imagined, they’re getting most of their pickups in red states. They might squeak out a win in Colorado, but that’s a toss-up currently.

I don’t see more than about a 25-30% chance that the Republican nominee could run enough of that table to manage a win. It’s not a foregone conclusion that the Democrat will win: (s)he could run a lackluster campaign, the Republican nominee could run a great campaign, voters might just be tired of Democrats, all the other reasons mentioned in this thread. But the Democrat will come into the election with a significant structural advantage in the electoral college, and demographic trends are very favorable.

More particularly, he can’t get to 64 out of that group unless it includes Florida. Which it won’t, given what the Republicans have done about immigration and said about Social Security and Medicare, so there go the Latino and retiree votes.

From an electoral perspective, I think you kind of have to count Gore in that since Bush won on what is effectively a technicality. It was close, yes, but I’d put the 2000 election down as “no clear data” as opposed to evidence to support that claim.

Romney came close in 2012 despite fighting the huge Incumbent’s Advantage. The GOP will be up against that again in 2020 if they don’t win in 2016. And anger against Obama and Obamacare gives them a unique chance in 2016 that may never come again.

I expect the Koch brothers and other giant GOP fundraisers to go for broke in 2016. The cacophony of nonsensical anger is still mounting and election is still 25 months away. With the other choices mostly dolts and nutcases, the Kochs will put their money on Mitt Romney the New and Improved Version (“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”)

I’m still betting that Romney will win the whole pie in 2016. Any takers? (Only 7-1 is available at Betfair.com, lower than anyone except whats-her-name.)

What about my decree (no more Republican presidents)? Nobody seems to be paying any attention to that. And I issued that decree in 1972. If it’s anybody’s so-called “turn,” I’d say my decree has been waiting more than long enough to kick in.

Not to mention, it doesn’t seem the GOP has done much to figure out why they lost in 2012, nor have they done much to show they know how to (or care to) actually govern. If they take hold of the keys to the Senate in November, as the polls are showing they will, the next two years could very well give us a full-fledged Republican civil war in Congress as both sides of the GOP coin fight to claim power. It’ll be interesting to see Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell all playing king of the mountain. Gaining control of the Senate actually doesn’t give the GOP any sort of advantage, but it does give them a bigger stage to screw up on a colossal scale. And that bodes extremely well for the Democrats in 2016.

Relevant Politico story: Good News, Democrats, You’re Going to Lose!

Well, the first test of all these wonderful predictions is going to be how the Republicans govern once they are in control of the Senate(assuming they do take it).

If you guys are wrong in your assumptions about that, then you’re likely going to be wrong about everything else. And the reason you’ll be wrong is failing to know your enemy.

Of course, you could be right, too. The Republicans rarely fail to disappoint, which is why there are so many conservative independents.