laklak wrote:Does it really work like that? People get "pushed" to Trump or Biden? Or do they just double down on whatever they thought before? I haven't done any sort of actual study on this, but anecdotally speaking, all my Dem friends are still Dems, all the GOP ones are still GOP. They're still arguing over the same things they were arguing about 4 years ago.

Anecdotes are particularly useless in this case. If you have a look at the big picture you should be able to see a few occasions where a huge number of voters have changed their minds from one election to the next. Check these out, for instance:

1960 & 1964
1964 & 1968
1968 & 1972
2004 & 2008

That does happen, on occasion. But, babies and bathwater.

Hermit wrote:

OlivierK wrote:The distortion I referred to was towards higher turnout in swing states. Given that higher turnout is observed in states where votes have a higher impact on the election outcome, it seems reasonable to hypothesise that removing the discrepancies in vote influence would reduce the discrepancies in turnout. We won't know until it's tried, though, obviously.

I made it clear what I think about the Electoral College. What is your opinion about it? Would you like to see it gone, retained or don't you care either way? Laklak likes it. Stops him being ruled by ignorant coastal city proles. Apparently, it is better to be ruled by corrupt, nepotistic, psychos that voters who are not ignorant coastal city proles elect into office.

I think the Electoral College is an anachronism, and if kept it would be better for states to allocate electors proportionally to the vote in their state rather than winner-take-all, or by district, as is done at present. For pragmatic reasons, this won't happen, so it's probably best abolished, or made irrelevant by the NPVIC.

I also think it's largely a red herring in discussions of what's wrong with the US electoral system. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance rules, first past the post voting and a lack of independent election implementation and oversight are all far bigger issues.

OlivierK wrote:I also think it's largely a red herring in discussions of what's wrong with the US electoral system. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance rules, first past the post voting and a lack of independent election implementation and oversight are all far bigger issues.

The problems you listed are huge issues, but I would not call the way the Electoral College works right now a red herring. Not with Trump winning 56.6% of it despite trailing Clinton by almost 3 million votes.

This is the second time in the past five presidential elections this happened. Al Gore lost in 2000 despite winning a little over half a million more votes than George W. Bush.

Sure. But with the caveat that the vote totals in those elections are at best a proxy for what the vote totals would be under a different electoral system. My point (and I admit it's a pedantic one, but it's a pet peeve of mine) is that you can't just take the vote totals of an election run under one set of rules, and just assume that those would be the vote totals if the election had been run under different rules. Especially when turnout under the current system seems to be influenced by the expected closeness of the vote in that state.

Hillary Clinton didn't win the popular vote in a popular vote election. She may well have done, had one been run, but it wasn't. Ditto with Gore. That election was very close in both vote total and EC terms. It doesn't seem a good example of the EC margin diverging from the vote margin by a large amount.

Take gerrymandering out of the system and I think you’d find a completely different result in those elections cited. Keep the EC and create an independent Electoral Commission based on certain rules like most civilized countries and I think you’d see a lot of problems go away, including dodgey electoral financing.

I'm not sure if it's even required to have a presidential election. Each state can decide how it's electors will vote, and up until 1840 some states didn't even hold elections for President.

I think some state should try it. Just cancel the Presidential election.

Hermit wrote:
1960 & 1964
1964 & 1968
1968 & 1972
2004 & 2008

64: A Kennedy newly assassinated, Johnson capitalized on sympathy. Goldwater's regressive economic platform wasn't going to make a dent (but his conservatism would form one of the 2 pillars of the future GOP - the other being racism).

68: A Kennedy newly assassinated, no Johnson figure to channel the sympathy (he'd removed himself from the running). Partial two-term effect, even though Johnson only served 1 full term. Vietnam War has also badly fractured the Dem party. Some of the most sweeping reforms in US social and economic history under Johnson now made liberals think hard about their allegiances. Southern Strategy already underway since the early 60s, has now metastasized into the de facto Republican party doctrine. At its core is opposition to civil rights reforms, under the guise of "states rights". Racist dogwhistling will now be front and center in GOP campaigning for eternity. Biggest party affiliation shift since the pre-Civil War era, as racists abandon the old white supremacist party for the new one.

72: Incumbent advantage; racist dogwhistling; and a robust social welfare agenda (Nixon's domestic economic & regulatory policies are probably not all that people imagine). McGovern runs such a progressive platform, including single payer universal healthcare, that he's sabotaged by his own Democratic party, the inheritors of which have been running scared from his ideas ever since, a mistake the GOP crucially didn't make with Goldwater. A mass exodus includes key Southern stragglers who now bolster the Southern Strategy by endorsing Nixon.

08: Two-term effect - and this one left an especially shitty taste in people's mouths.

(Pew)

Dem party had committed to always running Southern conservative candidates (with some wiggle room), to try to offset Republican gains since the 60s. Obama was a curveball (he wasn't Southern), yet he was essentially conservative, and he did essentially talk progressive. And he was charming as fuck. They couldn't handle him, and lo they did try.


In all cases, a 2-term effect or incumbent advantage + southern strategy ('72) alone can account for the bulk of the shift. In 2 cases, there's an assassination (3, if you count MLK). Otherwise, the two running threads are economic welfare and racism. Other differentiators include: Vietnam War; civil rights reforms; permanent mass defections (of racists) from one party to the other. Most of that movement has settled, and nothing comparable exists today; the white supremacist banner is now more or less where it's been since '72, while its opponents have to make do with the carcass of what used to be the party of Johnson (for now).

The fracturing of the Dem party also paralleled the weakening of labor unions. Jimmy Carter's presidency did nothing to reverse the trend, and by the time Reagan leaves office, organized labor in this country is a twitching cadaver. So that, too, is no longer a major factor. And the "new wave" of Democrats have taken all this to mean that the only way they can compete from now on is to peck at Republican leftovers.

Russian propaganda ain't got nothing on 100 years of political memory. Russian propaganda is a wet sneeze in the ocean that is social media distortion, which in turn is a pantomime of ideological contests that are older than any of its participants (and much older than the Russian Federation itself).

(Personalities like Obama and Trump are also x-factors.)

It may well be, as I suspect, that the Southern Strategy will finally die when Latinas and out-of-state migrants make enough babies to turn Texas blue. Hopefully the Asian Tigers + EU have staved off global climate catastrophe until then.

Thommo wrote:

Mike_L wrote:In every respect it's more incisive than Lemon's almost reluctant acknowledgement of the problem. But although the slant is different, the basic message is the same: that Biden's lacklustre opposition to the rioting is likely to swing some voters' sympathies toward the Trump camp.

Thommo wrote:If you want people to know what CNN's Don Lemon says, how about a post linking to Don Lemon on CNN, instead of pretending this rubbish is just the same?

A YouTube excerpt of Don Lemon's opinions is embedded in the article. So Tony Cox's piece gives you that... and more.

Right, so in fact you agree it's not "CNN's Don Lemon saying it!" after all.

(Sorry about the late reply. End-of-month RL matters intervening, and all that.)
You're right. I'll concede a half-step.
There's overlap in what Cox and Lemon say (that the upheavals are likely to benefit Trump), but they differ in their attributions and analyses. Where Cox is spot-on, Lemon is plain disingenuous.

Thommo wrote:Why you insult everyone's intelligence with this nonsense I really don't know.

It's Don Lemon who is insulting your intelligence.
He talks about how the street violence is adversely affecting the Democrats ("in the polls and focus groups"), but the extent of his 'analysis' is to say that it's happening "on Trump's watch". Never mind that the disproportionate killing of black people by police long pre-dates the Trump administration, with BLM arising in 2013 in Obama's second term. Never mind that most of the recent street violence has occurred in Democrat-governed states in cities with Democrat mayors. No, just bash Trump and bemoan the fact that the civil unrest might be detrimental to Biden-Harris. That's what passes for journalism for Don Lemon. We shouldn't be surprised. After all, this is the self-important imbecile who said, "It's not All Black Lives Matter".

One of your objections (in your post #1854) to Cox's piece is his reference to far-left activists "staying in their mother's basements". Sadly, though, this is in many cases literally true.
Here's a rare thing... a RT.com op-ed with which at least some on this forum might actually find themselves in agreement. The author, while not condoning the rioting and property destruction, acknowledges just why it is that so many young Americans (of all races) have no respect for other people's property and enterprise...

Millennials can’t afford property so don’t care about protecting it. Why are we surprised they’re setting fires and smashing cars?

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT.
27 Aug, 2020

The sight of Antifa mobs smashing their way through the US’ business districts strikes fear into property owners’ hearts. But what do they expect when owning property is a near-impossible dream for an entire generation?
Video footage of a Kenosha, Wisconsin man trying to impart respect for private property to a group of young protesters has gone viral, mostly among conservatives who hold it up as proof the kids flooding the streets to smash windows and set things on fire are spoiled brats who’ve never worked a day in their lives. That self-serving reading is only half the story, however: while owning a home and business remains the American Dream even for young adults, many of them are finding that, just like any other dream, it vanishes when they wake up.

“What y’all don’t f***ing understand is that people have their lives in these businesses,” the exasperated man tells the younger protesters in the video, posted earlier this week to social media.

“We pay for this!” one of the protesters, a young woman who looks barely out of high school, shouts back, while the man vainly attempts to draw a distinction between private businesses and the police who paralyzed Jacob Blake, reigniting tensions over racism and police brutality that have polarized the nation since a white cop killed black Minneapolis resident George Floyd in May.

“Are furniture stores the police? Are car dealerships the police?” he insists, before he’s finally chased off as the woman promises, “We’ll burn your stuff down, too!”

Most who see the video sympathize with the man, who comes off as a defender of the quintessentially American value of private property. But when fewer Americans than ever can afford to own a home, can young people be expected to uphold a value that doesn’t apply to them?

Like most cliches, the “Antifa protester living in Mom’s basement” trope contains a grain of truth. More millennials live with their parents than with a romantic partner – the first generation in over 150 years to forsake ‘leaving the nest’ in favor of moving back in with Mom and Dad. The trend is only growing: the percentage of young adults living with their parents has more than doubled since 2000. And the Covid-19 economic shutdown has forced even more newly unemployed young adults to retreat to the safety of their parents’ basements.

But this isn’t necessarily because they’re too lazy to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Many work – or worked, pre-pandemic – multiple jobs, struggling under crippling student loan debt, often emerging from the college education they were told would open the door to professional success only to find all the good jobs have been taken and their law degree has merely prepped them for waiting tables at Applebee’s. They don’t qualify for a mortgage or even a rental apartment – landlords generally demand tenants make 40 times the monthly rent – and thus moving back in with their parents is their only option.

Even young adults who live on their own are much more likely to rent than own. While some commentators have tried to spin this as young people not wanting to be tied down, it usually boils down to simple poverty. Nearly three-quarters of millennials believe home ownership is a “top priority” – they just can’t afford it. And a growing proportion have become resigned to the fact that they'll “always rent.”
...

...
With no hope of property ownership in their future, and banks and landlords still circling like vultures eager to pick off whatever earnings they can, it’s no surprise so many young people care little for protecting private property. When they know they’ll never be able to afford a home, what’s barging into a gated community? Who cares about torched cars at an auto dealership when one will never be able to afford a car?
...

The dispossession of America's young people long pre-dates the Trump presidency.

Q: When was the one time Donald Trump had anything good to say about Barack Obama?
A: It was earlier this year, when he was praising Obama's 2011 crackdown on Occupy Wall Street.

There's a lot of backstory to the current unrest on US streets. But for Don Lemon it's very simple. It's just something that's happening "on Trump's watch".

arugula2 wrote:

Hermit wrote:
1960 & 1964
1964 & 1968
1968 & 1972
2004 & 2008

64: A Kennedy newly assassinated, Johnson capitalized on sympathy. Goldwater's regressive economic platform wasn't going to make a dent (but his conservatism would form one of the 2 pillars of the future GOP - the other being racism).

68: A Kennedy newly assassinated, no Johnson figure to channel the sympathy (he'd removed himself from the running). Partial two-term effect, even though Johnson only served 1 full term. Vietnam War has also badly fractured the Dem party. Some of the most sweeping reforms in US social and economic history under Johnson now made liberals think hard about their allegiances. Southern Strategy already underway since the early 60s, has now metastasized into the de facto Republican party doctrine. At its core is opposition to civil rights reforms, under the guise of "states rights". Racist dogwhistling will now be front and center in GOP campaigning for eternity. Biggest party affiliation shift since the pre-Civil War era, as racists abandon the old white supremacist party for the new one.

72: Incumbent advantage; racist dogwhistling; and a robust social welfare agenda (Nixon's domestic economic & regulatory policies are probably not all that people imagine). McGovern runs such a progressive platform, including single payer universal healthcare, that he's sabotaged by his own Democratic party, the inheritors of which have been running scared from his ideas ever since, a mistake the GOP crucially didn't make with Goldwater. A mass exodus includes key Southern stragglers who now bolster the Southern Strategy by endorsing Nixon.

08: Two-term effect - and this one left an especially shitty taste in people's mouths.

(Pew)

Dem party had committed to always running Southern conservative candidates (with some wiggle room), to try to offset Republican gains since the 60s. Obama was a curveball (he wasn't Southern), yet he was essentially conservative, and he did essentially talk progressive. And he was charming as fuck. They couldn't handle him, and lo they did try.


In all cases, a 2-term effect or incumbent advantage + southern strategy ('72) alone can account for the bulk of the shift. In 2 cases, there's an assassination (3, if you count MLK). Otherwise, the two running threads are economic welfare and racism. Other differentiators include: Vietnam War; civil rights reforms; permanent mass defections (of racists) from one party to the other. Most of that movement has settled, and nothing comparable exists today; the white supremacist banner is now more or less where it's been since '72, while its opponents have to make do with the carcass of what used to be the party of Johnson (for now).

The fracturing of the Dem party also paralleled the weakening of labor unions. Jimmy Carter's presidency did nothing to reverse the trend, and by the time Reagan leaves office, organized labor in this country is a twitching cadaver. So that, too, is no longer a major factor. And the "new wave" of Democrats have taken all this to mean that the only way they can compete from now on is to peck at Republican leftovers.

Russian propaganda ain't got nothing on 100 years of political memory. Russian propaganda is a wet sneeze in the ocean that is social media distortion, which in turn is a pantomime of ideological contests that are older than any of its participants (and much older than the Russian Federation itself).

(Personalities like Obama and Trump are also x-factors.)

It may well be, as I suspect, that the Southern Strategy will finally die when Latinas and out-of-state migrants make enough babies to turn Texas blue. Hopefully the Asian Tigers + EU have staved off global climate catastrophe until then.

Laklak cited anecdotal evidence that people don't change their minds when it comes to deciding whether to be Democrat or Republican supporters. I cited statistics that millions of people do change their minds between one presidential election and the next. Thanks for pointing out that people change their minds for a bunch of reasons.

I piggybacked your collection of dates to 1) differentiate those years from a context-free pattern on a graph (which is generally useless), and 2) to flatten the perceived influence of Russian propaganda. It's not an audience of one.

In the era of internet news, nuance is the enemy.

Mike_L wrote:There's a lot of backstory to the current unrest on US streets. But for Don Lemon it's very simple. It's just something that's happening "on Trump's watch".

Your post is generally well taken. People can't seem to juggle enough of the factors at play to get a grip on the gaslighting. Besides, "on Trump's watch" is a content-free election pitch: Don Lemon's ideology has little to do with effecting justice reform, and much more to do with signaling to his economic cohort, which cuts his paycheck. I'd be surprised if it turned out he believes half the stuff he says even when he's advocating for victims of police violence - i.e. that it's much more than a character he plays on TV for money.

Don Lemon has an easy job that pays well, and pays even better when there's a Trump in office. He can cry me a river.

In case my last reply was too nonspecific...

Hermit wrote:

laklak wrote:Does it really work like that? People get "pushed" to Trump or Biden? Or do they just double down on whatever they thought before? I haven't done any sort of actual study on this, but anecdotally speaking, all my Dem friends are still Dems, all the GOP ones are still GOP. They're still arguing over the same things they were arguing about 4 years ago.

Anecdotes are particularly useless in this case. If you have a look at the big picture you should be able to see a few occasions where a huge number of voters have changed their minds from one election to the next. Check these out, for instance:

1960 & 1964
1964 & 1968
1968 & 1972
2004 & 2008

A context-free presentation of election results becomes anecdotal information. In my long post, by pointing out what makes those election years unique, I was bolstering laklak's claim that people "double down on whatever they thought before". That summary in the middle of my post was:

Most of that movement has settled, and nothing comparable exists today.

To underscore the importance of not relying on election patterns without context, I feel I need to point out, especially to American voters: Trump was a maelstrom that neither party was prepared for; he managed to produce more first-time voters than probably any other candidate in my lifetime besides Obama; he managed to consolidate a party that was deeply fractured and had been predicted to disintegrate since 2010; and yet he won in 2016 by less than 100k votes. That's the flattening power of history; it goes well beyond not just winners/losers but even shifts in turn-out.

It's also worth noting again that the 60s and 70s represent a convulsive shift in party affiliation - the biggest since pre-Civil War times, iirc - and 2 political assassinations. It didn't take white conservatives long to take Johnson seriously on civil rights reform, and to solidify around the opposition. None of those questions is at hand in 2020. The racists and anti-racists aren't suddenly confused again.

There's an orphaned anti-war movement in this country (since both parties are hawkish) so once in a while, someone in either party claiming to be anti-war (both Obama and Trump) will get a bump because of it. A bigger bump after a disastrous war like in Iraq. An eclipsing bump after a 2-term administration. So, again, nothing applicable to 2020.

Whatever Trump's people are seeing in the rust belt is the major unknown, and really the only shift(s) that matter. I, for one, dgaf about California's millions-surplus of blue. I care about Michigan, and Michigan scares me.

Billy Bob ain't a'votin' for no Demmycrat 'cuz they wants his AR15s and his Bible. Sunrise Peace Ocean isn't voting for Trump because he's a racist sexist pig.

Pretty much all of current campaigning is aimed at the ever shrinking percentage of Undecideds/Independents.

I suspect people who consider themselves undecideds/independents (never mind voter registrations) actually rival self-described Dems or Repubs in number. But since Americans are of below-average political intelligence, you usually can't count on being able to predict what "undecideds" will do on election day, no matter how they feel days or weeks leading up to it. You may as well flip a coin, and coin-flipping predicts either direction equally.

What should happen this cycle is if Midwesterners are frustrated with their financial outlook, enough of them will blame Trump to skew against him. Everything else tends to cancel out, imo: covid/chaos/racism on the one hand, Russiagate/hypocrisy/tokenism on the other. When the two fossils finally interact in debates, their personalities may come into play, and chances are Trump looks slightly less worrying to these people, unless Biden's had a good nap and the right stims.

I just don't think the fickleness of Wisconsinites and Michiganders is something to ignore when it comes to messaging, even after successes in statewide office in 2018... Republicans took majorities in all 4 state legislative chambers. I think the Dems are snoozing there. Repubs are way more secure in their messaging, have been since the 70's, with a bit of uncertainty at the turn of this century, which has since been cleansed.

laklak wrote:Billy Bob ain't a'votin' for no Demmycrat 'cuz they wants his AR15s and his Bible. Sunrise Peace Ocean isn't voting for Trump because he's a racist sexist pig.

Pretty much all of current campaigning is aimed at the ever shrinking percentage of Undecideds/Independents.

I started out "undecided", but now I'm not so sure.

Being indifferent is not nearly the same as being undecided. The opposite of love being, not hate, but indifference. Is there anything in this season to motivate the indifferent?

Among these are people who will continue their lives unhindered regardless of who's in the White House, because they express themselves via something other than politics, and people who will continue to be screwed, no matter who's elected.

On Wisconsin...

2016, Trump wins Wisconsin with 2k votes fewer than Romney in 2012...
...gets 23k more votes than H.Clinton....
...who wins Milwaukee County with 43k fewer votes in that county than Obama in 2012, almost twice her statewide deficit v Trump. 70% of brown Wisconsinites live in Milwaukee.

Article: The Color of Economic Anxiety (October 2018) by Malaika Jabali. Her mini-documentary below, Left Out (February 2020).




Dems are counting on winning Wisconsin and Michigan with someone who's the champion of a 1994 crime bill which intensified racist police and prosecutorial conduct; who opposed school integration in the 70s and has defended his stance ever since; who calls segregationists his friends but then claims he had to give them what they wanted in order to defeat them ( ); who lied about his involvement in the civil rights movement in the 60s; who lied about being arrested on his way to meet Mandela; who shepherded policy which removed bankruptcy protection from millions of Americans right before the housing crisis and financial collapse (because of course he did); and who picked the running mate that pointed much of this out, after herself using her legal career to perpetuate systemic racism.

So there's no way these people are counting on brown voters in Wisconsin and Michigan... which implies they think they‘re seeing something about white midwesterners this election cycle, that Trump's people aren't seeing. That’s assuming they're even in it to win.

Back to Michigan... An interview with Flint activist Melissa Mays.



Snyder endorses Biden, aims to win over Michigan GOP 'moderates' (The Detroit News, Sep 3, 2020.)
Whitmer: $600M Flint water deal a step toward making amends (GreatLakesNow, Aug 21, 2020.)
How Sick Are the Kids in Flint? Inside the Shocking Health Effects of the Devastating Water Crisis (People, Jan 2016.)

The grassroots takeover of the Dem party may be the only hope for the world, and tiny Rhode Island may be the model.

"Progressive Political Cooperative Could Win Over 50% of GA Candidates’ Primary Races in RI" (GoLocalProv)