I check 538 in my regular rotation, and I’m morbidly curious about its polls of Trump’s approval rating; it’s hovered just below 40% for several months now.
But I was wondering whether anyone has broken that down by state. IOW, if you stipulate (and I know this is a super-sketchy stipulation, bear with me) that states where he has a 50% approval rating or more would cast their EC votes for him, and states where he has less than a 50% approval rating would cast their EC votes for a generic Democratic candidate, how would he fare?
The standard SDMB bickering over the premise is to be expected, along with the Nelson Muntz point-and-laugh sore-loser namecalling and all the other dross that goes with the board; but I’m really interested either in a specific answer to this question, or in a specific answer to the question with a better metric for how Trump would fare if the election were held today.
You have to pit him against a specific individual. The key swing voters don’t vote for “generic candidates”, so you have to either measure this against a list of potential candidates, use Hillary again, or pick one candidate you feel confident going with. Given the data you are looking for, I’d suspect you’d be lucky to find it for Hillary, and probably wouldn’t be able to find it for someone else.
Also, whom you pick depends on which election you are talking about. If the 2016 election were held today (in which case you just go with Hillary) or if the 2020 election were held today.?
*Continuing with the trend we’ve been seeing of those who are closest to him hating him the most:
*
** That’s 1/3rd the averaged approval rating he gets nationwide. They hate him 3 times more than the rest of us, which is pretty impressive. They’ll be calling for his execution while everyone else is still warming up to the idea of his removal from office.
At the Survey Monkey link above they link to a spreadsheet with the data for each state.
From there it’s not too hard to copy that data into a spreadsheet of one’s own and merge it with a table of electoral votes by state. Then it’s a piece of cake to add the electoral votes for states greater than or equal to a given threshold. I’m telling you this so you can check my work. I’m not giving you homework.
Here’s what we get…
Approval >= 50% yields 89 electoral votes
The tipping point may also be of interest…
Approval >= 44% yields 237 electoral votes
Approval >= 43% yields 289 electoral votes
Well dang! I just made a spreadsheet and was figuring stuff out, but your work is way better than mine (I got 99 EV for 50%+ approval, but I was looking at the Gallup link). Thanks–that’s precisely what I was asking for.
I imagine Trump’s approval is about as low in many major US cities. When you compare DC to a list of states, they have the rural areas to balance things out a bit, and DC doesn’t.
Trump may have a low approval rating, but a low approval rating is not necessarily to be confused with how he might perform in an election against a Democratic challenger.
But who’s going to take him on, and will all progressives unite behind that person or insist on purity? I’m telling you guys, if we end up nominating someone who looks like Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, we’re fucked.
Well she was the head of the Dirty DNC, who used Bernie Sanders Ethnicity against him by repeating he was Jewish, and did seemed to tolerate ethic slang as long as it was kept internal.
Wasserman Schultz also refuses to explain why she continued to employ Imran Awan, an IT staffer who was under a federal investigation a equipment and data scam.
She’s really a regional type of Congress person in a heavily democratic area. Her bandwagon was hitched to Hillary Clinton.
The democratics need a centrist in the Joe Biden model. The party is as fractured as the right, with a large Bernie/ Elizabeth faction pulling the party left. An FDR democrat that appeals to the coal miners et al will bring part of the south home.
The South was a democratic stronghold for decades. Lee Atwater brilliantly started the Southern Strategy.
The democratics lost sight of who “brought you the weekend.” (and similar themes) It’s become [a perceived] party of Volvo driving, latte swilling people who want men to use the bathroom next to my 5 year old.
I’m NOT arguing the merits of that, other than to say the people who voted for the Orange Idiot consistently report being forgotten.
Wasserman isn’t the ticket, imv. I don’t think Warren is either.
They already tried an establishment centrist with Hillary Clinton - didn’t work out that well (in 2008 or 2016). Hillary minus personality plus a beard won’t change the equation.
The second sentence has nothing to do with the first; a moderate, centrist Democrat is on a completely different planet from FDR. We have to keep an eye on them just to make sure they’ll keep voting to keep existing social programs; I can’t imagine any centrist Democrat ever proposing a new one. As for a jobs program a la FDR, the centrist Dems proved they don’t have that in them anymore either with their “Better Deal” garbage where they propose giving money to corporations and hoping they use it to train people, instead of employing people via the government.
Agreed… they’ve forgotten (some would say, quite intentionally thanks to large campaign contributions) how to fight for the worker and for the powerless. But running to the right / to the center is what’s causing that problem. Moving left is the solution.
I agree that the underclasses are forgotten; by both parties. Warren is a step in the right direction though, IMO - her push to establish the Consumer Protection Bureau gives her a lot of credibility in that area.
As for the rest of the Democrats, the only battles they can still fight without upsetting their donors are on social issues such as gender equality, sexual orientation and gender, racism, and abortion. Minimum wage increases? 4-day work weeks? Mandatory overtime pay or maternity leave? Affordable housing? Worker’s rights? Government-provided jobs programs?
Those kind of issues used to be the Democrats’ bread and butter - but if even mentioned now it’s only lip-service because they know they can’t do a damn thing about any of it. Our country is being held hostage by the big donors.
Terms change and evolve over time. I read not long ago the term “liberal” in the UK has changed radically over decades.*** So has perceptions.
Let’s agree FDR was a progressive. Unemployment in 1933 was 25%. The white working man was in a soup line in a scene right out of Grapes of Wrath. FDR was his savior. Today’s progressive wants transgendered troops, and vocally support Black Lives Matter.
The same voter who loved FDR now think his [ideological] descendants as wanting to take his tax dollars and giving it people who don’t want to work. So I use the term “FDR Democratic” as a reference to a working class voter who’s addressing his concerns; who’s listening to him. Today’s progressive policy proposals only further disenfranchise him. (usually him)
I’m not saying abandon them. I’m saying the DJT voter is baked in. So is the progressive voter. It’s the 9 million Obama voters who voted for Trump. Rush Limbaugh’s play book is, “McCain and Romney were RINOS! We lost because we weren’t conservative enough. Real conservatism always wins!”
That’s a flawed paradigm. And going more progressive is the Democratic version of Rush’s argument. We shouldn’t be singing to the choir. Go after the white working class voter who thinks the democrats abandoned him.
So sure, we ran a centrist. And she won by 3 million votes. I think we forget the TREMENDOUS efforts in painting her a crook by Trump and the Russians. And not only efforts but IMPACT. And this flawed candidate who’s was the victim of a massive smear campaign won by 3 million votes. Don’t abandon progressive ideas.
But reach out to the guy in a coal mine or driving a truck.
FDR progressive policies spoke to them. FDR spoke to them. Today’s progressive policy ideas do not.
