US election 2020

[Pies4shaw]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/09/poli ... index.html

"Former Vice President Joe Biden holds a wide lead over President Donald Trump in the national race for the White House, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Biden leads Trump 53% to 42% among registered voters, roughly steady from CNN's poll in early March."

[Tannin]

[David]

^ What percentage of the adult US population are self-identified Democrats? It would have to be 30% at best. And sure, maybe if every single one of those turns out and votes Democrat, you get a close win. But let’s be real: you can’t just turn out the base, because every candidate does that pretty much every election. You need to reach out to those outside it.

Clinton wasn’t unique in her weaknesses in attracting certain voter demographics; Biden fares very, very poorly among under-40-year-olds, and would have lost to Sanders in a landslide if that had been the only group voting. Guess which demographic tends to be the hardest to get to the polls? Biden is going to have an uphill battle to get young voters out for him, and I honestly have no idea where he’s even going to start.

[Pies4shaw]

We aim to please:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/part ... ation.aspx

From that, at the time nearest the last Presidential election, the split was:


2016 Nov 9-13 Rep: 27 Independent: 40 Dem: 30

and is, most recently:

2020 Mar 13-22 Rep: 30 Independent: 36 Dem: 30

which probably shows that the collection of that data is irrelevant to the outcome of a two-party race, since the "Independent" figure at both times has been larger than either party's figure.

[Tannin]

But let’s be real: you can’t just turn out the base, because every candidate does that pretty much every election.

You are flat wrong on this, David. The numbers are unequivocal - people simply didn't turn out for Clinton. They stayed away in droves. Democrats hated Clinton. That is why Trump got in: not because Trump got a lot of votes (he didn't - he got even less than Mitt Romney) but because Clinton couldn't attract the usual Democrat voters.

As for a Sanders supporter pretending that turn-out is a strength of the Sanders supporters, words fail me. As we saw in the primaries, all the highly motivated election workers turned out for Norm, but pretty much nobody else. Contrast with the Biden results: ordinary conservative Democrats turned up in huge numbers. Biden has the ability to get out the vote. Sanders does not.

Notice that Sanders only won primaries when there was no clear opponent. He and Warren shared the left-wing vote, with Sanders getting by far the larger part. On the other side, there were about ten different moderates, none of them particularly standing out as the one to vote for, so people didn't. Once the field narrowed to a single clear choice (Biden), Sanders "majority" was exposed for what it always was: an artifact of the primitive American first past the post voting system.

PS: it is my belief that Sanders would have beaten Trump in a canter, if the Democrats had not been so stupid about giving the plums to Clinton last time. But that's unknowable and only an opinion. I think Sanders could have run Trump close this November. Could have gone either way. Biden, however, will start a short-priced favourite, and rightly so.

PPS: I'm not backing my favourite despite the evidence here. My favoured candidate is Warren, followed by Sanders. I don't much care which of the various others it is after those two.

[Wokko]

Nonsense. Seriously.

Oh, your opening argument is plausible, but it's a pointless straw man from start to end. This is not and now and never was about attracting "moderate Republicans". Sure, if there is such a thing as a "moderate Republican" (which I doubt() he or she is welcome to vote Democrat this time around.

The whole point of this campaign is to put up a candidate that Democrats will vote for.

Trump only came anywhere near winning the election (he lost, remember, but because of America's stone-age electoral system his fairly narrow loss resulted in him getting the job anyway) - Trump only got in because Democrats did not vote. The insane decision to select the hugely unpopular Clinton meant that Democrats stayed at home in their millions.

This isn't opinion, it's a fact and the numbers prove it. Trump got a very poor turnout. Fewer people voted for Trump than voted for Mitt Romney - the nonentity loser in 2012. Trump got in despite attracting a record low Republican vote because mainstream Democrats couldn't stomach Hillary Clinton.

Biden doesn't need the moderate Republican voter. He quite possibly doesn't even need the Sanders crowd (though they would of course be very welcome). Biden just needs ordinary Democrats to turn out - and he has proved in the primaries that that is exactly what he has the ability to do. Bring out the vote.

In any case, the Saunders crowd doesn't bother to actually vote. Only the rusted-on activists turn up. Who needs them when they don't vote?

There's nothing you wrote here that's remotely right.

Firstly saying Trump lost because he lost the popular vote. The election isn't WON with the popular vote so why would he try to win it? He barely campaigned or not at all in Democrat strongholds like California and New York or try and get people there to vote because why bother? If that was the system then the game itself would be played differently. He campaigned in Blue battleground rust belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin and won them, Hillary ignored them.


On to number of votes, Trump received 2 million more votes than Romney.


As for not getting moderate Republicans or left Democrats out to the vote he absolutely has to. He needs to switch Florida or Arizona while clawing back the independents and democrats who gave Trump the win in the Midwest. If Bernie voters stay home and Republicans stick with Trump then it'll be a landslide. If Republicans are energized, which is what Trump does best then Trump wins easily. Biden doesn't enthuse anyone, he's a disaster waiting to happen, the DNC has kept him hidden away for weeks but he wont be able to hide on the debate stage from Donald.

[stui magpie]

While we're considering voting intention and turnout, this is also worth considering. While Biden my be ahead of Trump in the CNN polls, it's not exactly all bad news.

The headline out of CNN's new national poll released on Thursday morning was not good for President Donald Trump: He trails de facto Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by 11 points in a hypothetical general election matchup.

Much of the poll was equally dire for Trump -- Biden leads among women by 30 points, for example -- but there is one data point that the President and his supporters can rightly note as good news.
It's this: 8 in 10 Republican voters are either "extremely" or "very" enthusiastic about voting in the fall election as compared to just more than half of Democratic voters (56%) who describe themselves as equally excited about casting a ballot in November.
That's a significant enthusiasm gap -- and it shows up in other subgroups that favor Trump in the poll too. Whites (63%) are far more likely than non-whites (41%) to say they are "extremely" or "very" enthusiastic about voting this fall. Ditto self-identified conservatives (69%) vs self-identified liberals (56%).

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/09/poli ... index.html

So it's all well and good to say who you would vote for if, hypothetically you got off the couch and went down to the polling booth to actually vote.

Trump will win, like it or not, lock it in Eddie.

[Tannin]

^^^ How to lie with statistics 101. Pretend that there is no such thing as population change.

Did you really think anyone would fall for that three card trick, Wokko?

Romney 2012: 47.15% of the vote
Trump 2016: 45.95%

Trump lost votes, no two ways about it.

[Wokko]

You didn't say anything about percentages, which are meaningless, you said Trump got less votes that Romney, he got 2 million more.

So yeah, lying with statistics. That's you.

[Tannin]

^Clueless number-punching there. ALL elections are determined by the percentages. Always have been, always will be.

Face facts: Trump won because the Democrats were really, really stupid and put up a dreadful candidate.

[Pies4shaw]

That's not fair, Tannin. Wokko has a point - Trump got over 30 times as many votes as Lincoln, too (1,865,908).

[Wokko]

^Clueless number-punching there. ALL elections are determined by the percentages. Always have been, always will be.

Face facts: Trump won because the Democrats were really, really stupid and put up a dreadful candidate.

That's one factor, but it's incredibly simple minded to have that as the only analysis.

Trump was filling stadiums around the country, his message resonated in all the places it had to and with all the demographics it had to. He campaigned tirelessly and endlessly; he had to build from scratch what Hillary already had; a ground game of campaign offices across the country.

He out debated a career politician, the media said he lost the debates but polls of voters said otherwise. He had the media totally against him but they couldn't stop giving him free coverage, he played them and people who might vote for him loved him for "sticking it to the elites" in Hollywood and the Media. He listened and showed he was listening to a large swathe of the electorate; white working class voters. Those voters were Democrats, union types and blue collar types. The Democrats, like left wing parties across the world were ignoring them to pander to inner city intellectuals and racial minorities. It cost them and thus far they haven't won them back.

At this stage I'm picking Trump to win. Like I did in Jun 2016.

[David]

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies4shaw]

Life is too short to go looking back over too many US presidential elections but it may be worth adding that the voter turnout in 2012 was way down on the turnout in 2008 (58.2% down to 54.9%).

So, when he won in 2008, Obama received 69,498,516 votes, whereas by 2016, Trump only received 62,984,828. In other words, Obama actually received 9% more votes that year (on raw numbers alone) than Trump.

This is what makes it so difficult to interpret 2016 - whatever the triumphalist/Trumphalist view might be, the Democrats actually lost because - despite winning the popular vote - Clinton did not get enough people off their backsides to go out and vote for her in appropriate places. However, the number of votes Trump managed to win with was very low. George W won by a slim margin against Kerry with 62,040,610 (voter turnout 56.7%) and an even slimmer margin against Gore with 50,456,002 (voter turnout just 51.2%). In those elections this century, Bush lost the popular vote narrowly in 2000 and won it comfortably in 2004, Obama thrashed McCain and comfortably accounted for Romney and Trump lost comfortably to Clinton.

Given that Clinton was generally expected to win, the failure to mobilise vote may have been inevitable, at least to an extent. You would expect that the Democrats would be onto that, this time. Fundamentally, though, the US election is always unpredictable because it is generally won with less than 30% of the available pool of voters (Trump's 46% was actually 25.7% - or a quarter - of the voter pool).