Yeah, I don’t place a lot of credence in the late breaking polls with small sample sizes. The usual purpose of such late polls is to check how a candidate is doing with a particular demographic, and they’re pretty much hopeless in capturing the nation as a whole or even the ‘swing states’ as a block. I’m not convinced that the polling methods are even covering a lot of the non-typical voters who may well skew the vote.
I hear all of the pundits talking about the overt racism at Trump’s Madison Square Garden shitshow as being an “October Surprise” that he foisted upon himself but aside from specifically insulting Puerto Rico (in the city with the largest stateside Puerto Rican community) there wasn’t anything there that we haven’t heard from Trump and his coterie many times before. If you didn’t realize that Trump is a would-be demagogue who will court Latino voters and appeal to their own cultural prejudices even as he evokes racist memes you probably aren’t paying enough attention to allow that incident to change your mind anyway. If anything is going to put off the voters who are on the fence about voting for Trump maybe it will be the most repugnant people who are pitching for him like Elon Musk and RFK, Jr., but I honestly don’t understand the draw these people have for their own fans so I wouldn’t even guess if RFK screeching about seed oils and atrazine causing gender dysphoria is going to alienate more conventional Republicans enough to keep from dropping a ballot for Trump.
Life has become too good and too easy. We used to have real issues of food insecurity, disease, boredom, etc.
Now, everything in life is unlimited and meaningless. There’s not a big difference in importance between who runs the country and who wins the Bachelor. It’s all for funzies.
And, in the world of funzies, a tied horse race is the most exciting. If the numbers are too close, then people are motivated to switch sides to keep it interesting.
…
I’d also blame the advertising arm of the democratic/populist movement. At this point, everyone thinks that we do and are supposed to live in a democracy. And, consequently, we’re suffering the negatives of democracy.
We’re liable to continue down this path until we course correct back to the original plan.
I liked @LSLGuy’s observation about better marketing awareness based on better real time polling data, but this brings up a synergistic factor.
Back when I coming of voting age voters of all stripes shared the same media, be it Walter Cronkite or whoever. We had some shared understanding of reality. The era of Fox inaugurated silos of news to a much greater extent. We became increasingly of different teams.
There is definitely a polarized schism, not just in ‘conventional’ media but in information sourcing in general, and while it is true at both polar extremes that there is a focus on outrage, on the right there is absolute fabrication of nonsensical ‘stories’ that aren’t even based upon reality.
But there is also the fact that US politics has skewed so far right that Bill Clinton was arguably more conservative in many ways than Richard Nixon, and even the ‘uber-liberal’ Barack Obama would have been to the right of an Eisenhower Republican. The political spectrum of viable candidates has become so compressed that the only way tot distinguish between most Democrats and Republicans is via manufactured ‘culture wars’ nonsense, although the GOP has done their level best in the last eight years to move to the extreme right, excluding and often persecuting members to do not move in lockstep, which is one of the hallmarks of incipient fascism.
Obama was not an uber liberal. He was a moderate center Left politician. No one wanted to believe him when he said that. The GOP said he was far Left and the Far Left assumed he was but was just saying he was more moderate to get elected. Surprise! He was telling the truth.
But you may be right in terms of Eisenhower. His “modern Republicanism” was moderate in most respects and is is generally rated as a pretty good president I hear.
I get what you’re saying about Nixon, and I agree in a certain sense. Nixon was progressive in the sense that he signed things like the Clean Air Act, started the EPA, supported universal healthcare, etc. I’ve read some claims that Nixon has been our most environmentally friendly POTUS to date. But he wasn’t a liberal. So I think of him using the term “illiberal progressive”. These days the Democrats tend to be the converse, non-progressive liberals.
You and I know that but a lot of people, including self-professed ‘liberals’, swore up and down that “our first President of color” had to be very liberal and were surprised at how pro-corporate and non-progressive his agenda was. Aside from the pigment in his skin, Obama would fit right in line with the 1950s “pre-flip” Republican party. He was also the best saleman that the NRA and firearms industry every had because while they used him as an uber-bogeyman who was going to take everyones’ guns, Obama himself repeatedly affirmed the personal rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment and essentially quashed efforts within the Democratic party to reestablish the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act” a.k.a. the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, albeit likely as more for pragmatic reasons (trying to avoid losing gun owners to the GOP) as strictly principled ones.
This is precisely my point; Nixon wasn’t at all liberal—certainly not in any sense of social liberalism—and neither was Bill Clinton, nor the majority of the mainstream Democratic party. “The Squad” or agitators like Liz Warren and Katie Porter are the exception that gets a lot of attention for skewering corporate interests but aren’t really representative of what the DNC looks for in candidates they promote. (The DNC came down hard on Porter for thinking she should make a play for the Senate seat that Dianne Feinstein—a stock-in-trade mainline right-center Democrat—relinquished because she’s embarrassed their donors so many times in Congressional hearings.) And even then, these ‘radicals’ would be only slightly to the progressive side of the mean in any North Europe democracy. The lack of political spectrum in US politics is in large part a consequence of domination by two parties which don’t have to form coalitions or accept a diverse set of views within their own umbrella unless forced to do so by a gadfly like Bernie Sanders hijacking their entire primary campaign with the backing of a substantial polity of distressed and disaffected progressives.
As a consequence of that, and the pressures of campaign finance, the Republican and Democratic parties have largely the same pro-corporate, pro-military, anti-labor platforms with a willful blindness to long term issues of infrastructure degradation, demographic contraction, both the public and commercial debt crises, the dire impacts of climate change, wetlands degradation, and industrial and agricultural runoff pollution. Instead, the staking points in nearly every recent election have boiled down to ‘culture wars’ issues (education, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, the place of religion in the public sphere, electric vehicles and the farcical proposals for a ‘green transition’, et cetera), and while each of these are important topics in their own right they are also ones that can be used to create a high degree of polarization while avoiding the difficult business of actually creating consensus on the support systems necessary to maintaining a viable society.
In other words, there are choices on certain, highly emotionally-charged issues, and almost no discussion or diversity of views on what to do about more fundamental, ‘boring’ issues that are every bit as critical but would require changes in governance and society that might compromise corporate profits.
While I think that this is some amount of the matter, I think we can demonstrate that it isn’t the majority of the issue.
First, Brexit. With Brexit, there is no flexibility of policy. It’s Brexit or not Brexit. And the more that the issue was argued and debated, the more the odds of a win became a toss up. Likewise, we can look at the political messages of the current US election. We’ve got Harris saying things like, “Let’s spend an extra $5b ensure proper nutrition for our kids at school, so they grow up strong and healthy.” And Trump saying, “We need to spend $30b to ensure that 1000 legal asylum seekers don’t overrun the 30,500,000 people of Texas.” Trump hasn’t flopped over to some more reasonable position. Outside of abortion rights, he hasn’t flopped on anything notable. Most of his position are just as dumb and patently nonsense as the first time he said them.
Second, money. In general, the team with more money and better organization should be able to deduce and target more effectively than the other team. But we know that Harris’ side is better funded and we can be relatively certain that Harris’ side is better organized since we know that Trump is horrible at that.
The message doesn’t seem to matter and the ability to reach and push a person doesn’t seem to matter.
Overall, we’re left with two (?) options.
There’s a point of saturation where people stop caring. They know from the loudness and consistency of all the noise that other people care more than them, and they just take a back seat, mentally. Given enough targeted pressure - which, these days is so easy to achieve that funding and organization doesn’t really factor in - you can basically get nigh everyone to submit to no longer caring about the end result.
As I said earlier, people are mostly engaged for fun and will take on pretty well any position, to keep the drama and excitement going - with effectively no consideration of any practical outcome of that choice.
But we have reason to doubt that first option. If people were simply oversaturated and no longer care then you wouldn’t have the massive fandom. You wouldn’t have MAGA, rallies, signs out front of houses, Elon Musk jumping for joy, etc.
While I understand the larger point you’re making, this is not a good example. Brexit is, on one level, a binary question as you say — do we or do we not stay in the EU? But in reality there are different flavors of not being in the EU. That’s why negotiations for the actual exit were so protracted: would the UK simply crash out with no agreement? Or was there an appetite for a soft exit, mimicking Norway’s relationship to the EU as a market participant without being a voting member? Or some other variation? So, yes, on the ballot, the question was yes or no, but among the people who voted for Brexit there was a wide range of expectations about what that would actually mean and how they wanted and/or expected their government to pursue the change. It was a binary vote, but far from a binary policy matter.
This or something like this is the only explanation that fits the data. The increased partisanship and lack of independent voter is a reason for there to be animosity and static voting patterns but it doesn’t explain why these partisan feelings would divide pretty much exactly 50/50.
As far a gerrymandering, that if anything would lead to a greater likelihood of landslide elections. The whole point of gerrymandering is to make areas you control non-competitive.
The way you get a 50/50 split is that you have each side positioning themselves to as broad a selection of the vote as they can while stay staying on their side of the front line.
I also wonder if there might not be some sort of anti-establishment correction feature at work, where as soon as one of the parties seems dominant, the electorate decides that they are no longer cool and moves to the other one.
Likewise, I understand your point that there was some amount of gradation to Brexit. But that doesn’t mean that the merits and demerits could be balanced, nor that the gradation was - in particular - being debated among the people. My sense would be that the question to the people really was, “Do we want to stay in the EU?” And it was commonly accepted that the details over how best to do that would be handled by the team that wanted to do it, without much input from the people. The details weren’t part of the debate.
And, like I said, I’m not sure that the details were quite so wide that - put before a rational and reasonable public - you’d see scores from 90/10 down to 50/50, depending on the details. The general difference in scores would probably stay within 10% of one another.
Assuming honest voter registration, voting, and vote counting, gerrymandering has no effect on presidential elections.
It can certainly have a large effect on the makeup of a state’s congressional delegation and the makeup of the stateehouse(s). Both as to count of R vs D and also as to the partisanship / extremism of the membership of each party’s delegation.
It’s started from Reagan. He introduced the hatred of federal gov’t. It has not been the same since. The Democrats have a hard time accomplishing things. Which, cleverly by Republican plan, led them to be labeled as ineffective. Accoplishing the Reagan goal.
But they’re pro- very different ideas of what government is and ought to be doing. And in trump’s case we probably have to differentiate between what he wants, and what his sponsors / Project 2025 want.
The GOP hasn’t been small government since before Reagan. They certainly still talk about it, but they don’t do it, and don’t want to do it even if they had a congressional majority in both houses and a competent president and administration.
I agree their positions are totally different today. What we now have is a strange new and violent predatory beast wearing an ill-fitting but superficially familiar elephant suit.
But not everyone is quite understanding that the switcheroo has happened. A lot of the MSM for example still insists on talking about the R’s as if they are a normal party, not a band of insurrectionists financed by a handful of ultra-billionaires and Russia. Plus, there are lots of people who don’t actually want to live in a Fascist country who are voting today for “Whoever (R)” just like usual. After all, it’s just the same old elephant. NOT!!!
The Congressional Budget Office has graphics for fiscal year 2023. Total federal spending was $6.1 trillion. Mandatory spending was $3.8 trillion. That doesn’t even count military spending of $805 billion.
So when Elon Musk says he can find $2 trillion to cut, he means he would cut the entire cuttable government.
Looks to me like the smallest government possible outside of anarchy.