She’s doing the right thing.
LADY LIBERTY CLEANS UP
1
If Trump beat Clinton, why can’t he beat Biden?
First and foremost because Biden isn’t Clinton.
Let me be clear. Trump can beat Biden. It’s entirely possible. It’s just looking less and less likely as election day approaches.
This is Five Thirty Eight’s 2020 Election Forecast Snake Chart which I find to be a very easy way to look at what the election forecasts look like as far as what it takes to win and how competitive each state is.
The closer you get to the middle of the snake, the more competitive a state is. If it’s tinted red, it’s leaning Trump, if it’s tinted blue, it’s leaning Biden.
The line in the middle shows where the 270 electoral vote threshold is crossed. The length of the state in the snake is indicative of the number of electoral votes it represents.
In 2016, Trump won everything on this snake up to Minnesota with the exception of Nevada
There are 8 states right now that are leaning blue that all went for Trump in 2016. Biden needs three of them, two if one of those is Florida.
That said, the projections looked similar leading in to the final weeks of 2016. What happened was a few states, most notably Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which were all projected to go to Clinton by a couple of percentage points all went instead to Trump by the thinnest of margins. Trump won the election by winning those three states by a combined margin of 77,744 votes.
The problem for Trump this time is twofold.
First, while he hasn’t lost much of his core following, he hasn’t added to it either. Meanwhile the fringes, the ones who held their noses and voted for him last time are melting away.
Trump Defectors Help Biden Build Leads in Wisconsin and Michigan
Defectors are a major problem in an election because a defector counts as 2, you lost a vote you had last time, and the other side picked it up. To understand how big of a problem that is, in Michigan, if nothing else changed and 5,353 of the 2,279,543 people who voted for Trump in that state defect, Michigan’s 16 Electoral votes slide away from Trump’s total and hop on top of Biden’s, a 32 vote swing. That’s 0.23% of the people who voted for Trump in Michigan in 2016.
New voters are also a problem for Trump. 52% of People who didn’t vote in 2016 say they’re voting for Biden, only 32% say they will vote for Trump. Biden also leads by 11 points among voters who voted third party in 2016 and do not intend to do so this year.
Poll: 52 percent of people who didn’t vote in 2016 say they’re voting for Biden
Second, as I said, Biden isn’t Hillary. And the point of that is that no matter what you think of Trump, Hillary or Biden, it is clear that Hillary inspired a LOT of irrational hate. I don’t just mean disapproval, I mean hate, on the same level that Trump does. Biden doesn’t inspire that kind of hate. Disapproval, sure. Dislike, sure. But not that same seething hatred people felt for Hillary.
Especially look at the difference among independents, more than half of whom strongly disliked Clinton:
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If Trump beat Clinton, why couldn’t he beat Biden?
Chris O’Leary·October 15Lifelong Political Nerd
Blogger’s Note: This is from three months ago but is extremely important NOW!
BLOGGER’S NOTE:
First and foremost because Biden isn’t Clinton.
Let me be clear. Trump can beat Biden. It’s entirely possible. It’s just looking less and less likely as election day approaches.
This is Five Thirty Eight’s 2020 Election Forecast Snake Chart which I find to be a very easy way to look at what the election forecasts look like as far as what it takes to win and how competitive each state is.
The closer you get to the middle of the snake, the more competitive a state is. If it’s tinted red, it’s leaning Trump, if it’s tinted blue, it’s leaning Biden.
The line in the middle shows where the 270 electoral vote threshold is crossed. The length of the state in the snake is indicative of the number of electoral votes it represents.
In 2016, Trump won everything on this snake up to Minnesota with the exception of Nevada
There are 8 states right now that are leaning blue that all went for Trump in 2016. Biden needs three of them, two if one of those is Florida.
That said, the projections looked similar leading in to the final weeks of 2016. What happened was a few states, most notably Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which were all projected to go to Clinton by a couple of percentage points all went instead to Trump by the thinnest of margins. Trump won the election by winning those three states by a combined margin of 77,744 votes.
The problem for Trump this time is twofold.
First, while he hasn’t lost much of his core following, he hasn’t added to it either. Meanwhile the fringes, the ones who held their noses and voted for him last time are melting away.
Trump Defectors Help Biden Build Leads in Wisconsin and Michigan
Defectors are a major problem in an election because a defector counts as 2, you lost a vote you had last time, and the other side picked it up. To understand how big of a problem that is, in Michigan, if nothing else changed and 5,353 of the 2,279,543 people who voted for Trump in that state defect, Michigan’s 16 Electoral votes slide away from Trump’s total and hop on top of Biden’s, a 32 vote swing. That’s 0.23% of the people who voted for Trump in Michigan in 2016.
New voters are also a problem for Trump. 52% of People who didn’t vote in 2016 say they’re voting for Biden, only 32% say they will vote for Trump. Biden also leads by 11 points among voters who voted third party in 2016 and do not intend to do so this year.
Poll: 52 percent of people who didn’t vote in 2016 say they’re voting for Biden
Second, as I said, Biden isn’t Hillary. And the point of that is that no matter what you think of Trump, Hillary or Biden, it is clear that Hillary inspired a LOT of irrational hate. I don’t just mean disapproval, I mean hate, on the same level that Trump does. Biden doesn’t inspire that kind of hate. Disapproval, sure. Dislike, sure. But not that same seething hatred people felt for Hillary.
Especially look at the difference among independents, more than half of whom strongly disliked Clinton:
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BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP!
Biden279270
Trump21474,523,535 votes50.5%70,356,82147.7%President-elect Joe Biden is expected to deliver a victory speech at 8 p.m. Eastern time tonight. (Demetrius Freeman/The Post)
‘It’s time for America to unite,’ says president-elect
Joe Biden’s victory came after a hotly contested election in which it took four days for a winner to be declared. He won three swing states that Trump had claimed in 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — reconstituting the “blue wall.”By Toluse Olorunnipa, Annie Linskey and Philip Rucker
Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, is set to become highest-ranking woman in U.S. history
By Chelsea JanesLIVE UPDATESAccess to these updates is free
Biden adds another state with projected win in Nevada
- 4:10PMRepublican-led lawsuit over Sharpie-marked ballots in Arizona to be dropped
- 3:55PMSen. Bernie Sanders congratulates Biden, says he faces ‘enormous challenges’
- 3:49PMCelebrations erupt in streets of NYC, D.C., Philadelphia
- 3:33PMHundreds gather outside Minneapolis police station destroyed in May protests to mark Biden victory
- 3:27PM‘I’ve never been there before’: What Trump said about golf and his fear of losing
- 3:27PMWhat we know about Biden’s transition plans
Impromptu celebrations pop up in Washington following Biden victory announcement
A parade broke out on the streets of the nation’s capital to celebrate Joe Biden’s victory. People spilled out of homes, shops and restaurants in downtown D.C. to join the march.By Rebecca Tan, Jessica Contrera, Marissa J. Lang and Joe Heim30 minutes ago
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Republican fears grow over rising Democratic tide
Gallery
FINALLY! Just In… BY REID WILSON – 10/07/20 06:00 AM EDT 2,33652 VIEW ALLRelated News by © Greg Nash Republicans are growing increasingly concerned about poll numbers that show a rising Democratic wave just four weeks before Election Day as President Trump suffers one … Continue reading
Interruptions, accusations, chaos: Trump trolled the debate stage
The Critique
Perspective
Interruptions, accusations, chaos: Trump trolled the debate stage
BIDEN DEFAULT DEBATE APPEARANCE
TRUMP AT HIS CALMEST
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and President Trump argued against each other in a tense debate on Sept. 29. (Blair Guild/The Washington Post)
September 29, 2020 at 11:53 p.m. EDT
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Donald Trump came to heckle. He came to interrupt and to pontificate and to flail his arms, batting away questions and facts in a chaotic fury. He was a boor and a troll, holding up his stubby mitts in an angry pantomime as he tried to halt the words coming from former vice president Joe Biden’s mouth. Trump seemed to believe that with a single rude hand gesture, one that he regularly uses to assert his dominance, he could hold back the truth so he could be free to spin and hype and vent.
It was an exhausting mess that spun beyond moderator Chris Wallace’s control and outside the bounds of anything that could reasonably be called a debate. It was a 90-minute display of a president’s testosterone-fueled, unmanaged rage and insecurity.
Biden came to debate, God bless him. Trump arrived seemingly hopped up on grievance and indignation, determined to just bellow his way through the evening without ever having to answer a question or speak with clarity and sincerity to the home audience. He raised issues with Biden about his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings and then refused to let his political rival answer. He yammered about fake news and Hillary Clinton. He talked over both Biden and Wallace. He talked so much that it became impossible to even understand what he was talking about. He talked ceaselessly, and yet he said very little. He talked so much it was as though he was trying to pummel the viewer into submission with his words.
“Will you shut up, man?” Biden said in a moment of dismay and exasperation. It was a plea that surely channeled the desires of a significant percentage of the viewing audience.
It was awful. It was miserable. And one wished desperately that there were commercials during the grotesque spectacle if only to give someone a chance to throw cold water on the president. But there were no breaks. It was an endless display, and it was frustrating to hear Wallace calling the president “sir” as he pleaded with him to adhere to the rules to which he had agreed. Sir. Trump did not deserve that nicety because he did not come to the debate bearing the mantle of the presidency. He came with the demeanor of a thug.
Surely no one thought the evening would be dignified and civil. That’s not the way in which Trump gins up ratings and attracts attention. Bellicosity is his rule. But Tuesday evening, Trump was exquisitely inexhaustible. He stepped to his lectern with a scowl and a jutting jaw. Biden walked out with an expression of geniality. Because of coronavirus precautions, the audience was limited to only about 80 people sitting socially distanced in wooden chairs.
It was a rare sight to see the entire Trump clan wearing masks as they entered the Samson Pavilion, which is owned by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic. They removed them upon sitting. Jill Biden wore a mask as well. She left hers on as she took her seat in the audience. The stage was set with the trappings of democracy. The carpet was blue with a ring of white stars. A large eagle with a banner reading “The Union and the Constitution Forever” was draped overhead.
In many ways, the setting was one that should have inspired a sense of calm and a more conversational tone. There was even a certain sobriety to the location, which at one point had temporarily been turned into a covid-19 hospital. There was no need to yell with such a small audience. There were no bursts of applause, laughter or cheers to fuel a candidate’s energy. One might have thought it was the perfect occasion for a reasonable back-and-forth.
Even the lack of the usual greeting, an opening handshake, was a reminder that these are trying times. Human connections, at their most fundamental level, have been frayed. One might have thought that these would have served as reminders or encouragement to speak seriously, to speak compassionately.
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Confidence Interval: Will Texas Go Blue In 2020?
Texas Flag at Veterans’ Memorial Park, Port Arthur, Texas
Confidence Interval: Will Texas Go Blue In 2020?
Welcome to another episode of Confidence Interval, where we make a persuasive case for a hot take … and then reveal how confident we really feel about the idea. This time, politics podcast host and producer Galen Druke asks if this could be the year Democrats win Texas for the first time since 1976.
Galen Druke is FiveThirtyEight’s podcast producer and reporter. @galendruke
Tony Chow is a video producer for FiveThirtyEight. @tonyhkchow
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Five things we learned from this year’s primaries
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Five things we learned from this year’s primaries
BY REID WILSON – 09/04/20 06:00 AM EDT 2,243
Through a pandemic, protests and partisanship, voters in all but four states have picked party nominees for November’s general election, setting up the clashes that will determine the shape of American politics over the next two years.
Their choices have sent clear signals about where each party’s electorate stands, and what the two warring factions have in common: Both Democratic and Republican voters want change — though there is little agreement on what, exactly, ought to be changed.
As the first general election ballots go out, here are the lessons we learned from the 2020 primary season:
It’s the year of the woman
A century after the ratification of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, women are running for office in record numbers.
The two major parties have nominated 296 women to run for U.S. House seats, blowing away the previous record set in 2018, at 234. Forty-seven districts feature two women running against each other, according to a tally maintained by the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
More women — 60 — ran for seats in the Senate than ever before. Voters in four states — Iowa, Maine, Wyoming and West Virginia — will decide between two female Senate candidates in November.
It helps that both parties are making special efforts to recruit women — albeit for different reasons. Democrats relied on women to win back the House majority in 2018, when 24 of the 43 candidates who flipped Republican-held seats were women. Republicans, who fear a gender gap they cannot overcome, have made a point of recruiting women candidates, though not all have survived their primaries.
All politics is (still) local
It is very hard to beat a sitting incumbent in a party primary. It is easier when that incumbent has lost touch with his or her district.
Eight members of Congress lost bids for renomination this year. In most cases, those who will find themselves out of a job come January were ousted by voters who thought they had gone Washington.
In the midst of a global pandemic, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) did not travel from his Maryland home to his Yonkers-based district for several months. GOP insiders said Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Colo.), who lost to conservative activist Lauren Boebert, rarely traveled home.
Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) lost to Cori Bush, who began her political activism in protests against police brutality in the wake of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Bush made an issue out of Clay’s absence from protests this summer over the deaths of Black people in Minnesota and Kentucky at the hands of police.
Reps. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) and Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) each lost renomination after breaking with their constituents over hot-button policy issues. Lipinski, perhaps the last anti-abortion rights Democrat in Congress, lost to a progressive activist who had support from major abortion rights groups. Riggleman lost a renominating convention, restricted to only the most die-hard conservative activists, after he had the audacity to preside over a same-sex wedding.
Some of the long-serving incumbents who held off challenges took constituent services more seriously. Reps. Richard Neal (D-Mass.) and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), two more House committee chairs who faced progressive activists in their primaries, each campaigned hard to win another term.
The GOP is shifting right
Some election cycles mark ideological shifts in one party or another. The 1994 wave ushered in a new generation of hard-nosed Republicans in the image of Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). The 2010 wave brought the Tea Party to Congress.
This year, a host of Republicans poised to win office in November will make the Tea Party look like genteel moderates.
Boebert is just one of a new brand of arch-conservatives who are likely headed to Congress next year, some of whom have embraced the fringe and fantastical QAnon conspiracy.
In other districts, candidates backed by national Republicans lost primary elections to more conservative challengers. Promising Republican recruits like Pierce Bush in Texas, former Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti in Illinois and Earl Granville in Pennsylvania all lost Republican nominations in potential swing districts to more conservative rivals.
The Tea Party’s arrival in Congress ushered in the Freedom Caucus, a group that caused headaches for Republican Speakers John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The next wave of Republicans will make life just as difficult, albeit in a much different way, for GOP leadership.
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Trump is everything
President Trump loves touting his support among the Republican base, and he is right. The GOP is held together less by an ideology than to a fealty to their party leader; more Republican-registered voters say they are a supporter of Trump (49 percent) than of the party itself (37 percent), according to a recent poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.
Among candidates running for Congress, that number may be even more skewed.
Trump has appeared in a quarter of all advertisements run by Republican candidates this year, according to data maintained by political scientists who run the Wesleyan Media Project. That is more often than any issue mentioned in GOP ads except taxes.
Trump’s popularity among his party’s core supporters has given him the room to diverge from the ideology that has driven the GOP for decades. He has broken with past Republican presidents on free trade, America’s role in the world, spending and deficits.
Trump’s time in power is limited to either the next few months or the next four and a half years. But even out of office, he is almost certainly not going to give up the Twitter feed that has become his bully pulpit. The party of Trump now is likely to be the party of Trump for years to come.
Absentees are king
The share of Americans who voted by mail has roughly doubled this century, from 10 percent in 2000 to almost 21 percent in the 2016 election, according to Pew Research Center.
Some states, like Washington, Utah and Colorado, have already shifted their elections entirely to the mail. A huge majority of voters in states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada also use mail-in voting.
The coronavirus pandemic is hastening those trends across every other state — even in some where absentee voting has never been a major part of the political culture. State after state has set new records for the number of voters casting ballots in the mail, in some cases beating their old records five, 10 or 15 times over.
Most states are well equipped to handle the surge in volume, and many begin counting ballots even before the polls close. But others are not — New York took more than a month to count the absentee ballots cast in its June primary, and Alaska took a week to begin opening their absentee ballots.
The two parties like absentee ballots: Knowing who has returned their ballot gives the parties the ability to focus their scarce resources to the population that has yet to vote.
But as Trump raises the unsubstantiated specter of fraud in the mail — and even urges his own supporters to vote twice, a felony — the heavy reliance on mail ballots has become a factor fraught with dread. In a close race, absentee ballots counted long after Election Day will prove fodder for those on the losing side, and the Russian bot farms determined to undermine confidence in American democracy.
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Biden’s Approval Rating, G.O.P. Recasts Trump: This Week in the 2020 Race
MELANIA IN ROSE GARDEN, POMPEODORO SHILLING FROM JERUSALEM, FIREWORKS ON THE PEOPLE’S MALL BAD TASTE, AUTOCRATIC: CLASSIC DESPERATE TRUMPINO.
Biden’s Approval Rating, G.O.P. Recasts Trump: This Week in the 2020 Race
Welcome to our weekly analysis of the state of the 2020 campaign.
The week in numbers
- An ABC News/Ipsos poll released at the beginning of the week found that Joe Biden’s favorability rating had risen by five percentage points, to 45 percent, in the wake of the Democratic National Convention.
- That was driven particularly by Democrats: 86 percent of partisans expressed a positive opinion of him, up seven points from Ipsos’ previous poll from the week before the Democratic convention.
- A Franklin and Marshall College poll of Pennsylvania, conducted during the week of the D.N.C., found Mr. Biden leading President Trump in the key swing state by seven points.
- Pennsylvania voters tended to say Mr. Biden was better suited to the job of president in various ways — though handling the economy was a notable exception. Forty-eight percent said Mr. Trump would be a better steward of the economy, compared with 44 percent who chose Mr. Biden.
Catch me up
Two weeks of back-to-back conventions are finally behind us, weeks during which the candidates tried to define themselves and their opponents. Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, pledged to heal a suffering nation by being an empathetic and decent man, while also managing to blow a hole in the Republican attack line that he was senile and could not string two sentences together.
President Trump, in a very long speech, did little to acknowledge the coronavirus pandemic, warning instead of what would become of the country’s economy and “greatness” if Mr. Biden were elected.
Now, the next big moments where voters will get the chance to compare and contrast the candidates will be in the debates, kicking off on Sept. 29.
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What the Republicans promised, and what they delivered
Republican officials involved in Mr. Trump’s convention planning promised to deliver a positive vision for the country, and a week’s worth of programming that would look like a “normal” convention to people watching from home, i.e. more live speeches, less reliance on videos, than the Democrats used.
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President Trump, during his convention speech, did little to acknowledge the coronavirus pandemic, warning instead of what would become of the country’s economy and “greatness” if Joe Biden were elected.
They did, and didn’t. The positive vision for the country was possible only insofar as they mostly ignored the reality of the pandemic that has so far killed 180,000 Americans. Many speakers, like the president’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, referred to the virus in the past tense. And there was little acknowledgment from the marquee speakers of the distress that has swept the country in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the more recent police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Several speakers told stories of hardship and pain and described Mr. Trump’s attempts to comfort or support them. But such remarks mixed with fear-mongering by others about what would happen if Mr. Biden were elected. “Joe Biden is not the savior of America’s soul — he is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness,” Mr. Trump said. As for live speeches, almost the entire program was prerecorded inside the Mellon Auditorium, save for the headlining speeches each night that took place in front of live, mostly maskless audiences.
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