#Republican Party 1984

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

VOTE REPUBLICAN IN 2024? -- 40,000+ PALESTINIANS WERE STILL ALIVE DURING TRUMP'S REIGN.

NOTE: ^Add over half a million Ukrainian soldiers to the death toll as well, another war that the Democrats have been absolutely itching for since 2014, and which they finally "delivered on."

PIC INFO: Spotlight on humorous yet socio-politically charged punk art from the Reagan/hardcore era -- Welcome to 1984.

Anyway, it isn't even a debate anymore that the two political parties in the U.S. have completely @#!*$& flipped beyond all recognition, meaning the current Democratic Party has become the party of neverending bloodshed and endless war. Two wars are currently ongoing under Biden and his neverending death-cult-blood-sacrifice party.

Do the math, follow the money, and wake your ass up to the reality of what's really going on, chumps.

That is all.

More for RaR 1984

[thenotsolittlemisspeculiar]

BlackRock

(Source)

[canadianabroadvery]

[thenewdemocratus]

Governor Cuomo 1984: Mario Cuomo's Tale of Two Cities (1984)

. The Tale of Two Cities, one city looks like a paradise, perhaps like downtown Washington or New York in the summer time. And the other city looking a place that you would only send your worst enemies to. Perhaps North Baltimore, no offense to Baltimore, I love that city, but parts of it are a living hell. Or Compton Los Angeles perhaps would be another example of an urban hell. Or rural…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conservatives are fringe outliers - and leftists could learn from them

The Republican Party, a coalition between Big Business farmers and turkeys who’ll vote for Christmas (Red Scare obsessed cowards, apocalyptic white nationalists, religious fanatics, etc) has fallen to its bizarre, violent, noisy radical wing, who are obsessed with policies that are completely irrelevant to the majority of Americans.

As Oliver Willis writes, the views of the radical right — which are also the policies of the GOP — are wildly out of step with the US political view:

https://www.oliverexplains.com/p/conservatives-arent-like-normal-americans

The press likes to frame American politics as “narrowly divided,” but the reality is that Republicans’ electoral victories are due to voter suppression and antimajoritarian institutions (the Senate and Electoral College, etc), not popularity. Democrats consistently outperform the GOP in national races. Dems won majorities in 1992/6, and beat the GOP in 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020. The only presidential race the GOP won on popular votes since 1988 was 2004, when GW Bush eked out a plurality (not a majority).

But, as Willis says, Dems “act like it is 1984 and that they are outliers in a nation of Reagan voters,” echoing a stilted media narrative. The GOP’s platform just isn’t popular. Take the groomer panic: 71% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage. The people losing their shit about queer people are a strange, tiny minority.

Every one of the GOP’s tentpole issues is wildly unpopular: expanding access to assault rifles, banning immigration, lowering taxes on the rich, cutting social programs, forcing pregnant people to bear unwanted children, etc. This is true all the way up to the GOP’s coalescing support for Trump as their 2024 candidate. Trump has lost every popular vote he’s ever stood for, and owes his term in the Oval Office to the antimajoritarian Electoral College system, gerrymandering, and massive voter suppression.

Willis correctly points out that Dem leaders are basically “normal” center-right politicians, not radicals. And, unlike their GOP counterparts, politicians like Clinton, Obama and Biden don’t hide their disdain for the radical wing of their party. Even never-Trumper Republicans are afraid of their base. Romney declared himself “severely conservative” and McCain “put scare quotes around ‘health of the mother’ provisions for abortion rights.”

The GOP fringe imposes incredible discipline on their leaders. Take all the nonsense about “woke capitalism”: on the one hand, it’s absurd to call union-busting, tax-dodging, worker-screwing companies “woke” (even if they sell Pride flags for a couple of weeks every year).

But on the other hand? The GOP leadership have actually declared war on the biggest corporations in America, to the point that the WSJ says that “Republicans and Big Business broke up”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-corporations-donations-pacs-9b5b202b

But America is a two-party system and there are plenty of people who’ll pull the lever for any Republican. This means that when the GOP comes under the control of its swivel-eyed loon wing, the swivel-eyed loons wield power far beyond the number of people who agree with them.

There’s an important lesson there for Dems, whose establishment is volubly proud of its independence from its voters. The Biden administration is a weirdly perfect illustration of this “independence.” The Biden admin is a kind of referee, doling out policies and appointments to its competing wings, without any coherence or consistency.

That’s how you get incredible appointments like Lina Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division and Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureat — the progressive wing of the party bargained for these key appointments and then played their cards very well, getting incredible, hard-charging, hyper-competent fighters in those roles.

Likewise, Jared Bernstein, finally confirmed as Council of Economic Advisers chair after an interminable wrangle:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-16-team-biden/

And Julie Su, acting labor secretary, who just delivered a six-year contract to west coast dockworkers with 8–10% raises in the first year, paid retroactively for the year they worked without a contract:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/14/statement-from-president-biden-on-labor-agreement-at-west-coast-ports/

But the Biden admin’s unwillingness to side with one wing of the party also produces catastrophic failures, like the martyrdom of Gigi Sohn, who was subjected to years of vicious personal attacks while awaiting confirmation to the FCC, undefended by the Biden admin, left to twist in the wind until she gave it up as a bad job:

https://doctorow.medium.com/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband-4ce1ffb16dc5

It’s how we get key roles filled by do-nothing seatwarmers like Pete Buttigieg, who has the same sweeping powers that Lina Khan is wielding so deftly at the FTC, but who lacks either the will or the skill to wield those same powers at the Department of Transport:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

By refusing to stand for anything except a fair division of powers among different Democratic Party blocs, the Biden admin ends up undercutting itself. Take right to repair, a centerpiece of the administration’s agenda, subject of a historic executive order and FTC regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Right to Repair fights have been carried out at the state level for years, with the biggest victory coming in Massachusetts, where an automotive R2R ballot initiative won overwhelming support in 2020:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#r2r

But despite the massive support for automotive right to repair in the Bay State, Big Car has managed to delay the implementation of the new law for years, tying up the state in expensive, time-consuming litigation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

But eventually, even the most expensive delaying tactic fails. Car manufacturers were set to come under the state right to repair rule this month, but they got a last minute reprieve, from Biden’s own National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who sent urgent letters to every major car manufacturer, telling them to ignore the Massachusetts repair law:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bbkv/biden-administration-tells-car-companies-to-ignore-right-to-repair-law-people-overwhelmingly-voted-for

The NHTSA repeats the car lobby’s own scare stories about “cybersecurity” that they blitzed to Massachusetts voters in the runup to the ballot initiative:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

The idea that cybersecurity is best maintained by letting powerful corporations gouge you on service and parts is belied by independent experts, like SecuRepairs, who do important work countering the FUD thrown off by the industry (and parroted by Biden’s NHTSA):

https://securepairs.org/

Independent security experts are clear that letting owners of high-tech devices decide who fixes them, what software they run, etc, makes us safer:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2022/01/letter-to-the-us-senate-judiciary-committee-on-app-stores.html

But here we are: the Biden admin is sabotaging the Biden admin, because the Biden admin isn’t an administration, it’s a system for ensuring proportional representation of different parts of the Democratic Party coalition.

This isn’t just bad for policy, it’s bad politics, too. It presumes that if some Democratic voters want pizza, and others want hamburgers, that you can please everyone by serving up pizzaburgers. No one wants a pizzaburger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/narrative-warfare/#giridharadas

The failure to deliver a coherent, muscular vision for a climate-ready, anti-Gilded Age America has left the Democrats vulnerable. Because while the radical proposals of the GOP fringe may not enjoy much support, there are large majorities of Americans who have lost faith in the status quo and are totally uninterested in the Pizzaburger Party.

Nowhere is this better explained than in Naomi Klein’s superb long-form article on RFK Jr’s presidential bid in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option

Don’t get me wrong, RFK Jr is a Very Bad Politician, for all the reasons that Klein lays out. He’s an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracist, and his support for ending American military aggression, defending human rights, and addressing the climate emergency is laughably thin.

But as Klein points out, RFK Jr is not peddling pizzaburgers. He is tapping into a legitimate rage:

a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world — inflamed on every level — that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr is campaigning against “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power,” against drug monopolies setting our national health agenda, and polluters capturing environmental regulators.

As Klein says, despite RFK Jr’s willing to say the unsayable, and tap into the yearning among the majority of American voters for something different, he’s not running a campaign rooted in finally telling the American public “the truth.” Rather, “public discourse filled with unsayable and unspeakable subjects is fertile territory for all manner of hucksters positioning themselves as uniquely courageous truth tellers.”

We’ve been here before. Remember Trump campaigning against a “rigged system” and promising to “make America great again?” Remember Clinton’s rejoinder that “America was already great?” It’s hard to imagine a worse response to legitimate outrage — over corporate capture, declining wages and living conditions; and spiraling health, education and shelter costs.

Sure, it was obvious that Trump was a beneficiary of the rigged system, and that he would rig it further, but at least he admitted it was rigged, not “already great.”

The Democratic Party is not in thrall to labor unions, or racial equality activists, or people who care about gender justice or the climate emergency. Unlike the GOP, the Dem establishment has figured out how to keep a grip on power within their own party — at the expense of exercising power in America, even when they hold office.

But unlike culture war nonsense, shared prosperity, fairness, care, and sound environmental policies are very popular in America. Some people have been poisoned against politics altogether and sunk into nihilism, while others have been duped into thinking that America can’t afford to look after its people.

In this regard, winning the American electorate is a macrocosm for the way labor activists win union majorities in the workplaces they organize. In her memoir A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey describes how union organizers contend with everything that progressive politicians must overcome. A union drive takes place in the teeth of unfair laws, on a tilted playing field that allows bosses to gerrymander some workers’ votes and suppress others’ altogether. These bosses have far more resources than the workers, and they spend millions on disinformation campaigns, forcing workers to attend long propaganda sessions on pain of dismissal.

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe

But despite all this, labor organizers win union elections and strike votes, and they do so with stupendous majorities — 95% or higher. This is how the most important labor victories of our day were won: the 2019 LA teachers’ strike won everything. Not just higher wages, but consellors in schools, mandatory greenspace for every school in LA, an end to ICE shakedowns of immigrant parents at the school-gate, and immigration law help for students and their families. What’s more, the teachers used their unity, their connection to the community, and their numbers to get out the vote in the next election, winning the marginal seats that delivered 2020’s Democratic Congressional majority.

As I wrote in my review of MacAlevey’s book:

For McAlevey, saving America is just a scaled up version of the union organizer’s day-job. First, we fix the corrupt union, firing its sellout leaders and replacing them with fighters. Then, we organize supermajorities, person-to-person, in a methodical, organized fashion. Then we win votes, using those supermajorities to overpower the dirty tricks that rig the elections against us. Then we stay activated, because winning the vote is just the start of the fight.

It’s a far cry from the Democratic Party consultant’s “data-driven” microtargeting strategy based on eking out tiny, fragile majorities with Facebook ads. That’s a strategy that fails in the face of even a small and disorganized voter-suppression campaign — it it’s doomed in today’s all-out assault on fair elections.

What’s more, the consultants’ microtargeting strategy treats people as if the only thing they have to contribute is casting a ballot every couple years. A sleeping electorate will never win the fights that matter — the fight to save our planet, and to abolish billionaires.

If only the Democratic Party was as scared of its base as the Republicans are of their own.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

[Image ID: The title page of Richard Hofstadter's 'Paranoid Style in American Politics' from the November, 1964 issue of Harper's Magazine. A John Birch Society pin reading 'This is REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY: let's keep it that way' sits atop the page, obscuring the introductory paragraph.]

[philsmeatylegss]

Daily reminder that in 1980, only 36% of eligible voters between ages 18-20 and 43% of eligible voters between ages 21-24 voted. In 1984, 37% for 18-20 and 44% for 21-24.

Meanwhile, in 1980, 65% of eligible voters aged 65+ voted. In 1984, 68% voted.

Republicans have a history of relying on young voters to not vote. They purposefully make young people feel discouraged; like no matter what, it won’t make a difference.

I don’t care if your state tends to always vote with one party. Get out and vote.

Especially in swing states, every single vote matters. Every. Single. Vote.

Mail in your vote. Go during your lunch break. Plan to take the day off. Your vote matters. In fact, it matters so much that people will purposefully try to sabotage you voting.

Here’s a guide on how to register to vote and how to check if you are registered. Plan ahead. Make sure you know how to mail in your vote or where voting booths will be.

Republicans have been so flippant towards Gen Z because of our historical hesitance to vote.

We have the power to make things at least somewhat okay.

I have seen so many people from Gen z saying voting for Kamala is hopeless because she’s a woman of color, citing past elections as proof.

That discouragement is purposeful. It’s been used for decades. And it’s been working.

This website is relatively young. Especially with a lot of older Gen z, including me, where this is their first or second election that they are eligible for.

Don’t listen to those saying voting is pointless. That there is no way Kamala will win so who cares? It’s absolutely okay to be frustrated and or wary, but don’t let that keep you from taking action.

Young voters are the key. Start planning on your vote now. Take it seriously. Your voice matters. Your vote matters.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Maybe you’ve been asking yourself:

1. “How could Donald Trump have won 51 percent of the popular vote?”

2. “How hard is it to immigrate to New Zealand?”

3. “What the actual fuck?”

Fair questions. Let’s try a thought experiment. Could Tuesday’s election results have been any worse?

Well, what if, instead of 51 percent, the Republican nominee had won 59 percent? Or 61 percent? And what if he had won 49 states?

Those aren’t hypotheticals. Those were the results of the 1972 and 1984 landslides that reelected Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

With thumping victories like those, what could possibly go wrong for the winners?

If history’s any guide, some nasty surprises await Donald Trump.

In 1972, the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, won just 37.5 percent of the vote, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for a total of 17 Electoral College votes. He didn’t even win his home state, South Dakota.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale did carry his native Minnesota, but that was as good as it got for him. In the Electoral College, he fared even worse than McGovern, with a whopping 13 votes.

In the aftermath of these thrashings, the Democratic Party lay in smoldering ruins, and Republicans looked like indestructible conquerors.

Now, some might argue that those GOP victories, though statistically more resounding than Trump’s, weren’t nearly as alarming, because he’s a criminal and wannabe autocrat.

But Trump’s heinousness shouldn’t make us nostalgic for Nixon and Reagan. They were also criminals—albeit unindicted ones. And they were up to all manner of autocratic shit—until they got caught.

The Watergate scandal was only one small part of the sprawling criminal enterprise that Nixon directed from the Oval Office in order to subvert democracy. For his part, Reagan’s contribution to the annals of presidential crime, Iran-Contra, broke myriad laws and violated Constitutional norms.

The hubris engendered by both men’s landslides propelled them to reckless behavior in their second terms—behavior that came back to haunt them. Nixon was forced to resign the presidency; Reagan was lucky to escape impeachment.After the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon from office, this bumper sticker helped Massachusetts voters brag that they handed him his only Electoral College loss in 1972.

Of course, Trump would be justified in believing that no matter how reckless he becomes, he’ll never pay a price. He’s already been impeached—twice—only to be acquitted by his Republican toadies in the Senate. And now that the right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court has adorned him with an immunity idol, he’ll likely feel free to commit crimes that Nixon and Reagan could only dream of. Who’ll stop him from using his vast power to persecute his voluminous list of enemies?

Well, the enemy most likely to thwart Trump in his second term might be one who isn’t on his list: himself. The seeds of Trump’s downfall may reside in two promises he made to win this election: the mass deportation of immigrants and the elimination of inflation.

Trump’s concept of a plan to deport 20 million immigrants is as destined for success as were two of his other brainchildren, Trump University and Trump Steaks. The US doesn’t have anything approaching the law-enforcement capacity to realize this xenophobic fever dream.

And as for Trump’s war on inflation, the skyrocketing prices caused by his proposed tariffs will make Americans nostalgic for pandemic-era price-gouging on Charmin.

It's possible that Trump’s 24/7 disinformation machine, led by Batman villains Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk, will prevent his MAGA followers from ever discovering that 20 million immigrants didn’t go anywhere. And it’s possible that if inflation spikes, he’ll find a scapegoat for that. (Nancy Pelosi? Dr. Fauci? Taylor Swift?)

And, yes, it’s possible that Trump will somehow accomplish his goal of becoming America’s Kim Jong Un, and our democracy will go belly-up like the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.

But I wouldn’t bet on it. I tend to agree with the British politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998), who observed that all political careers end in failure. I doubt that Trump, with his signature blend of inattention, impulsiveness, and incompetence, will avoid that fate.

And when the ketchup hits the fan, the MAGA movement may suddenly appear far more fragmented and fractious than it does this week. You can already see the cracks. Two towering ignoramuses like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert should be BFFs, but they despise each other—the only policy of theirs I agree with.

If things really go south, expect MAGA Republicans to devour each other as hungrily as the worm who feasted on RFK Jr.’s brain—and that, my friends, will be worth binge-watching. I’m stocking up on popcorn now before Trumpflation makes it unaffordable.

One parting thought. Post-election, the mainstream media’s hyperbolic reassessment of Trump—apparently, he’s now a political genius in a league with Talleyrand and Metternich—has been nauseating. It’s also insanely short-sighted. Again, a look at the not-so-distant past is instructive.

In 1984, after Reagan romped to victory with 59 percent of the popular vote and 525 electoral votes, Reaganism was universally declared an unstoppable juggernaut. But only two years later, in the 1986 midterms, Democrats proved the pundits wrong: they regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1980. Those majorities enabled them to slam the brakes on Ronnie’s right-wing agenda, block the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, and investigate Iran-Contra.

The lesson of the 1986 midterms is clear: the game’s far from over and there’s everything to play for. If we want to stem the tide of autocracy and kleptocracy, restore women’s rights and protect the most vulnerable, we don’t have the luxury of despair. The work starts now.

Andy Borowitz

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box:

Poring through the aftermath of a brutal defeat, Democrats are now in their worst position in at least 20 years. Republicans have the White House and the Senate and an excellent chance to capture the House. Trump is only the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote, and he made huge gains across the country, building a multi-racial working-class coalition.

For many of you, I imagine this is painful to read. Trust me. It is even more painful to write. Most of my career has been spent within the machinery of the Democratic Party. I worked in the White House and Senate leadership. I worked for Democratic governors and other party organizations. It pains me to see the party in this state of disfavor only eight years after Barack Obama left the White House. The coalition that Obama built has crumbled. There are millions of reasons why we are in this position — COVID, inflation, an unpopular President, several political miscalculations, and a failure to adapt to a changed media environment. Ultimately, I am less interested in how we got into this mess than in how we get out of it.

The press continues to second-guess and Monday-morning quarterback various tactical decisions of the Harris campaign. I am also not particularly interested in that debate. Two things can be true at the same time. Kamala Harris ran a great campaign in a brutal political environment under an impossible timeline, and Democrats just got their ass kicked by a failed President and convicted criminal who could have been sentenced to jail if he lost the election. Where Democrats go from here is a conversation that will be an ongoing part of this newsletter in the months to come. There is no singular or simple answer, and many strawman arguments are being offered up on Twitter and cable. The solution is more complex than being more left or centrist or less woke. I don’t have the answers. Like the rest of you, I am still processing what happened on Tuesday. As part of my personal therapy, I wanted to do a bit of brain dump on the road ahead for Democrats as we confront another four years of Trump.

1. Recognize the Scale of the Problem

On one level, Trump’s win isn’t that big. His popular vote margin will end up being lower than Hillary Clinton’s when she lost the Presidency. This was far from a landslide. It looks nothing like Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984 or Obama’s win in 2008. But we shouldn’t sugarcoat the size and scope of Trump’s victory. Trump improved on his 2020 performance nearly everywhere in the country and with every type of voter. There was a six-point shift to the right in the country from 2020. Trump did 10 points better in Democratic strongholds like New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. He gained ground with men, women, Latinos, Black voters, and voters under 30. If the GOP can maintain that coalition post-Trump, Democrats will have no shot at the White House or the Senate for the foreseeable future. We are in a deep hole, and because of that, it is essential that we contemplate radical solutions about how we communicate, campaign, and govern. Every option should be on the table and every prior should be questioned. Yes, it was a brutal political environment, but this failure was a long time in the making.

2. Understand Why We Keep Losing on the Economy

Post-COVID inflation is the biggest factor in this election. It’s why incumbent parties all over the world have been getting slaughtered in election after election. It’s almost impossible to win an election when, according to the exit polls, 68% of voters rate the economy negatively, 75% say inflation caused them harm, and only 24% of voters say their financial situation is better off than four years ago. But if Democrats just blame inflation for voter distrust on the economy, we will be whistling past the graveyard. Democrats have lost economically-focused voters in every election since 2012. Even in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, which saw huge Democratic gains, we lost the voters who said the economy was their top issue by an average of 36 points!

President Biden passed a bunch of very consequential and popular policies. Yet, his ratings on the economy worsened over time. While I think we should revisit our policy agenda to look for new, bolder ideas that better speak to people’s concerns, this is largely not a policy problem. It’s a brand problem. When you do a blind taste test, our policies are more popular. This is why ballot initiatives like raising the minimum wage and allowing collective bargaining often pass in very Red states where Democrats have no chance of winning elected office. On economic issues, Democrats have a cultural problem; regardless of our policies, voters in the toughest economic situations simply don’t think Democrats care about them, and they haven’t since Barack Obama left office. Republicans have done an excellent job — with some inadvertent help from Democrats — branding our party as the party of elites even though the GOP standard bearer is a wannabe billionaire who offers tax cuts to other billionaires in exchange for campaign contributions. There is little question that we would benefit from more full-throated populism.

3. Close the Communications Chasm

Democrats are losing the information war. Trump and the Republicans are relentlessly communicating their narrative to a wide swath of the electorate, while Democrats are mostly still playing by an old set of rules. The Right is dominating the information space. In the battleground states where Democrats could spend more than a billion dollars communicating to voters on TV and digital platforms, Trump gained three points over his 2020 performance. In the rest of the country, which saw no paid Democratic messaging, Trump gained six points. This means that Democrats got absolutely battered in earned and social media. An average American who just turned on their TV or unlocked their phone or tablet was getting much more pro-Trump and anti-Democratic messaging. This situation is not unique to the Harris campaign. It’s been a problem for Democrats for more than a decade. Democrats cannot reach the wide swath of voters who don’t actively consume political news. According to polling from Data for Progress, here’s the statistics showing how people voted based on the amount they paid attention to political news:

a great deal: Harris +8

a lot: Harris +5

a moderate amount: Trump +1

a little: Trump +8 -

none at all: Trump +15

If you read the New York Times or watch CNN, Democrats know how to reach you. The problem is that we already have those voters. It's very clear that most of Democratic communications is a circular conversation with the people who already agree with us on everything. The rest of the electorate can’t hear us. They are getting no countervailing information to counter the Right Wing caricature of Democrats. Because of Fox News and other Right Wing outlets, Republicans have long had an asymmetric media advantage. However, in recent years, Right Wing messaging has come to dominate non-political online spaces centered on topics like comedy, gaming, gambling, and wellness.

Most Democrats continued running the same communications playbook for the entire Trump era despite massive changes in the media ecosystem. We haven’t incubated our progressive political media enough nor have we been willing to go into the non-political spaces where the most critical segment of voters are getting their info.

Dan Pfeiffer has yet another home run column on how the Democrats can roar back from their shock 2024 losses.

[mariacallous]

Americans love to focus on presidential campaigns. The House of Representatives and Senate receive some attention every now and then, but our political love affair tends to center on the race for the White House. When congressional elections gain some attention, it usually happens during the midterms when political junkies don’t have much else to talk about.

But this is a mistake. Congress matters. The outcome of congressional elections during a presidential campaign is crucial to shaping the first two years of an administration, the period when the opportunity for legislating is greatest. In the coming months, the fate of the Democratic Party agenda—regardless of who wins the presidency—will depend as much on how power is distributed on Capitol Hill as who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Even after a mandate election, just one chamber of Congress can be sufficient to check a new president’s agenda. This was the story in 1980. The election was devastating to Democrats. Ronald Reagan, who was a key figure in the modern conservative movement that took hold in the 1970s, promised to move the national agenda sharply to the right after the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter. And then, for the first time since 1954, Republicans won control of the Senate with a majority of 53 seats.

The saving grace for Democrats that year was the House, where they remained on top. While Reagan defeated Carter in an Electoral College landslide, 489-49, Democrats exited Election Day with a 243-seat majority. Though the number of conservative Democrats had increased, the caucus as a whole was quite liberal compared with the Republicans. Under the speakership of Tip O’Neill, the lower chamber became the last bastion of liberalism. Using this as a base of power, Democrats were able to veto many of Reagan’s boldest initiatives while continuing to push forward their own agenda, even as the chances for passage were minimal.

The impact of a Democratic House was evident in both domestic and foreign policy. Republicans were forced to back away from many of their most ambitious plans to slash the social safety net. When the administration moved to reduce Social Security benefits for early retirees in 1981, O’Neill mobilized a coalition as he warned that the president aimed to dismantle this popular program. Republicans were shaken. Rep. Carroll Campbell was frustrated with the electoral impact: “I’ve got thousands of 60-year-old textile workers who think it’s the end of the world. What the hell am I supposed to tell them?” Democrats also approved a budget that raised taxes, a move that was anathema to Reagan’s acolytes. In 1983, the administration worked with congressional Democrats to shore up the financial strength of the program. The Democratic majority would be bolstered in the 1982 midterms, which took place in the middle of what O’Neill called the “Reagan recession.” The political scientist Paul Pierson showed in Dismantling the Welfare State? the limited progress Reagan made on cutting most major programs.

Similar effects were evident with foreign policy. Reagan’s hawkish posture toward the Soviet Union had been defining as he rose in national prominence during the 1970s. He railed against Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Carter for practicing the policy of détente, easing relations with the Communists, while ramping up rhetoric against the Soviet Union, calling it an “evil” empire in moralistic terms that presidents had traditionally avoided. He also curtailed negotiations over arms agreements and increased support for anti-communist operations in Central America.

House Democrats responded in force. In 1982, 1983, and 1984, they passed the Boland Amendments, which curtailed Reagan’s ability to provide support to the government of El Salvador and the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, the Contras. The global nuclear freeze movement also found strong support on the Hill as a number of members supported resolutions for limitations on nuclear arms production. “I can’t remember any issue, including Watergate, that has moved so many people so quickly,” Democratic operative Robert Squier noted in 1982.

None of this meant that Reagan could not achieve big changes. After all, the president pushed through a massive supply side tax cut in 1981 that made deep inroads into the finances of the federal government and began a path of ongoing cuts that privileged wealthier Americans and business. Scared to oppose him, many House Democrats voted for the cuts of their own accord. Reagan increased the defense budget, and his administration used illegal methods to direct support to Central America. And House Democrats couldn’t stop the enormous impact that Reagan had on pushing national rhetoric toward the right, either. Nonetheless, House Democrats played a pivotal role in restraining conservatism while protecting the liberal legacy of the New Deal and Great Society.

The reverse has also been true. Some congressional elections are extraordinarily dramatic. For all the attention paid to the legendary political prowess of Lyndon B. Johnson, the fact that the 1964 election produced massive Democratic majorities in the House (295) and Senate (68), while shifting the balance of influence within the party away from conservative southerners toward the liberal North, was instrumental to the passage of the Great Society legislation: Medicare and Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, higher and secondary education funding, immigration reform, and more all became possible because of the size and structure of the Congress that Johnson was able to work with. “The once powerful coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats appeared to have been rendered impotent, or nearly so,” the New York Times noted in 1964. Once the 1966 midterms revived the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans that had ruled Capitol Hill since 1938, Johnson’s window for legislating closed.

Most recently, there was the 2020 election. One of the most important outcomes was Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock winning in Georgia, giving Democrats two Senate seats and effective control of the upper chamber. As soon as they won, the Biden administration’s fortunes changed dramatically. With unified control of Congress, Biden’s path to legislative success opened. Although the administration would have to struggle to placate the demands of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Biden kept his party united enough to move a series of major bills on COVID-19 relief, infrastructure, and climate change. In so doing, he racked up an impressive record.

When Biden was still at the top of the Democratic ticket, one of the greatest sources of concern for Democratic legislators such as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff was that he was making a Republican Congress almost inevitable. Democrats in many parts of the country watched as their polling numbers plummeted.

With the energy and momentum that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have brought to the campaign, the odds for Democrats to win control of the House and possibly the Senate have vastly improved.

As much as Democratic voters will be focused on raising money, canvassing, and promoting their presidential candidate, they would do well to devote as much energy to key congressional races—whether the seats in Long Island that Republicans picked up in 2022 or Senate races in states such as Montana and Ohio.

Johnson always understood how Congress controlled his fate. In 1968, when Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler told the president, “You are the master of the Senate and always have been,” Johnson responded: “I’m not master of a damn thing.” As a veteran of Washington, Johnson always understood that his legacy would ebb and flow based on the composition of the Congress.

This time around, Democratic control of one or two chambers will be pivotal, regardless of who wins. If Donald Trump is reelected as president, congressional power will be essential to impede his inevitable efforts to aggressively deploy presidential power and dismantle the administrative state.

If Harris wins, on the other hand, congressional power will be essential to ensuring that she can use the limited window she would have to expand on and strengthen the legislative legacy of Biden—and to start tackling new issues aimed at exciting an emerging generation of voters.

[captaincorgi128]

On Christmas Day of 2018, I received a paperback copy of George Orwell's 1984. I was 12 years old.

I remember the adults - aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, looking at me cautiously, as if they had handed me a live bomb rather than a book. "That's a very intense book, okay?" my father told me. "If you want, we can talk about it after you read it." 12-year-old me, with only a dim idea of what fascism actually was and an insatiable appetite for books, only nodded.

While my younger cousins and sister played with their new toys, I sat on the couch and read the book in one sitting. When I finished, I looked up to see the adults staring at me with a strange sort of fascination. "Do you want to talk about it?" my father asked.

"No." I shrugged and turned away.

The truth was, I had been expecting a happy ending. Winston Smith was the good guy, wasn't he? Why didn't he win? Evil governments always lost in the end, didn't they? How could Winston have been brainwashed into believing such an evil, awful dictatorship was truly great? After all, when my middle school history teachers talked about dictatorships, those of Hitler and Stalin, it was obvious that they were the worst of the worst. No one actually agreed with them, did they?

Then I remembered my fourth grade class talking about the upcoming election, laughing about how obviously stupid Trump's wall idea was, and how strange it felt to hear someone say Clinton was worse. I don't remember his reasoning, but I distinctly remember thinking it was dumb because what could be dumber than a giant wall around Mexico? I remembered my grandmother arguing against vaccinating children, and I remembered flat Earthers I had seen online. That day was the first time it clicked for me: people believe what they want to believe.

The years passed. I read 1984 again, and again, and again. I watched as Trump shut down the government for sake of a temper tantrum, as he was impeached, as he told Americans to object bleach, as he politicized a pandemic and let thousands die. I didn't know about his SA scandals. I didn't know he had called Mexicans "thieves and rapists." I just knew he could not be allowed to be president again.

Yet, when 2020 rolled around, I was only 14 years old and could not vote. I settled for watching anxiously as the votes came in - I didn't know much about Joe Biden, but he was clearly a better alternative. He actually believed the COVID-19 pandemic was real, for one. So I sighed in relief as the results came through four days later: Joe Biden had been elected president of the United States.

I kept watching. I watched as Trump incited insurrection, as terrorists stormed the Capitol. I stared in horror at the TV. How could this have happened? How were so many people so delusional?

In December 2021, for my sophomore year English class, I read 1984 again. I thought of January 6th.

My classmates thought it boring, confusing, stupid. It didn't make sense. What did it matter? Who cared whether or not we knew the significance of the character of O'Brien?

I kept watching. The summer before my junior year of high school, just before I entered a relationship with my now-partner, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I felt a sinking pit in my stomach. Six months later, a friend of mine read 1984 for that same English class, and he loved it - we had a few intense study hall discussions about the nature of doublespeak, of totalitarianism, of a surveillance state. My partner agreed, reading it with a terrified fascination.

I kept watching. I realized I was nonbinary, and I watched in horror as the Republican Party made their creeping advances to eradicate trans rights. Idly, I reread 1984. What the right wanted did seem a lot like Oceania's government, didn't it? I wondered if I'd ever be able to marry my partner, who, despite also being trans, was still the same sex as me. If Trump ran again, he'd probably win, and then what would we do?

Then, 2024. Trump won the primaries in a landslide. I turned 18 and registered to vote. In the meantime, I skimmed Project 2025's bits about banning pornography and thought of 1984 and its carefully curated sexless society, created to achieve perfect complacency. I went off to college and voted absentee, carefully bubbling in the circle next to Vice President Kamala Harris's name. I woke up on Wednesday, November 6th to see Trump had won the presidency.

It has been one week. Again, I watch as Trump proposes a Department of Government Efficiency, which sounds euphemistically horrific. I watch as he suggests Musk to head it, a man known for being as inefficient as possible. I think of the Ministry of Truth and how its entire purpose was to disseminate lies. I watch as people celebrate, mocking me and many others who had desperately voted against a fascist, a rapist, a convicted criminal, a man who would kill us and spit on our graves if he was elected to office. I think of Parsons and duckspeak, the practice of simply spitting out the "correct" propaganda the same way a duck quacked. People really did believe what they wanted to believe, didn't they? I realize Trump won because, deep down, people hated minorities more than they loved democracy.

I hope my loved ones and I will survive another Trump presidency. I hope those in Gaza and Ukraine will survive it too, along with so many others - Jews, POC, immigrants, students, disabled, Muslims. At the very least, I hope to live long enough to watch as the bigots are forced to eat their own words and come to terms with the fact they gleefully voted in their own downfall.

At the end of the day, 1984 taught me something I could not have comprehended at age 12, 14, 15, or 16, but can understand now: democracy dies not with a bang, but with a whimper.

[tanadrin]

A challenge: which unimportant US presidential election would you go back in time to change the outcome of? You can't name any of the top 20 genuinely history-defining elections; it has to be a relatively forgotten one.

It's sort of a contradiction, right? Like by definition elections that have outcomes interesting enough to change are excluded. Some elections which might feel like trivia to most people, like the 1876 one that ended Reconstruction, would probably still be rated as pretty highly consequential by historians. Elections like the 2000 election, which didn't seem like it would be extremely consequential at the time, are now widely agreed to be hugely consequential. And it's hard to know how very recent elections, which are important to us, might go down in history.

I am also assuming I only get to pick between the actual major-party nominees--that I don't get to fiddle with the nomination process at all, and very minor candidates don't have a shot. So depending on how you define the "top 20 most consequential elections" I might pick (besides 2000 and 1876)

1912, because Woodrow Wilson was a phenomenally racist son of a bitch (but this might be too close to World War I to not be "history-defining"), and a third-party win by Roosevelt would be fun.

1920, because Warren G. Harding was just a really bad president

1900 or 1896, because William Jennings Bryan winning would be a fun alternate history scenario

1824, because Andrew Jackson was also a huge asshole

1988, because I like Dukakis better, and to reduce the political weight of the Bush family name

1984, because I dislike Reagan, and it would be a huge upset (fun!)

1980, because again fuck Reagan, and I like Jimmy Carter (even though objectively he was not a terribly effective president)

1968, because Richard Nixon was kind of a disaster for how we think about the American presidency

1952, because Adlai Stevenson seems fun, and somewhat less of a paranoid anti-communist that most Republicans (including Eisenhower) at the time.

[beardedmrbean]

An instructor at the University of Kansas has been placed on leave after a video on X showed him suggesting to his class that men who won't vote for a female president should be shot.

"(If you think) guys are smarter than girls, you've got some serious problems," the man in the video said. "That's what frustrates me. There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don't think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them. They clearly don't understand the way the world works.

"Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don't want the deans hearing that I said that."

The university confirmed the video was recorded during a class this semester.

"We are aware of the video, which was recorded during a class earlier this semester," said Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, a KU spokesperson. "The instructor is being placed on administrative leave, pending further investigation. The instructor offers his sincerest apologies and deeply regrets the situation. His intent was to emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality, and he recognizes he did a very poor job of doing so. The university has an established process for situations like this and will follow that process."

In a similar statement on X, KU added that the comments "made an inappropriate reference to violence."

Who is the KU instructor in the video?

Barcomb-Peterson confirmed that Phil Lowcock is the instructor in the video.

Lowcock's name had been circulating on social media. His staff page on the KU Athletics website no longer exists, and at least one social media post by an athletics account that mentioned him — a staff highlight in April — has been deleted. As of Wednesday afternoon, he was still listed on the university's online directory as a lecturer.

The 2015 KU track and field media guide said Lowcock has taught at KU since 1984. As of 2015, he was an academic adviser for multiple athletics teams while doing support work for international student-athletes in addition to be an adjunct faculty member in the health, sport and exercise science department.

A request for comment sent to Lowcock's KU email account was not immediately returned.

Kansas Republican Party chair Mike Brown wrongly identified the speaker in a press release and now-deleted social media post as a journalism professor who retired in December 2019.

Kansas Regents oppose 'violent rhetoric'

The University of Kansas is under the Kansas Board of Regents, which oversees the state's public higher education institutions.

Blake Flanders, the KBOR president and CEO, said in a statement that he was aware of the video, and that the instructor was place on leave pending investigation by KU "in accordance with their established processes."

“The Board believes every American citizen has the right to vote how they see fit without fear of retribution or violence," Flanders said. "All of us, especially those in positions of authority, have a responsibility to respect and uphold that right. The Regents firmly oppose the use of violent rhetoric in our political discourse."

Free speech group calls for instructor's reinstatement

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that promotes free speech by students and faculty on college campuses, called for KU "to refrain from punishing faculty for protected speech and to restore this instructor to the classroom immediately."

"The First Amendment protects professors who tell brief, off-topic jokes in the classroom," said Graham Piro, FIRE program officer, in a statement. "It also protects hyperbole. In order to constitute a true threat, a speaker must communicate a serious intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a specific individual or a group of individuals.

"The viral video shows an instructor making an off-handed joke — not communicating a serious intent to commit unlawful violence. That's protected speech, and people advocating that the instructor be punished for his expression are advocating for the erosion of the First Amendment."

FIRE's 2025 college free speech rankings list KU's speech climate as "below average."

What Kansas politicians are saying about KU instructor's comments

The video was posted Wednesday morning by Ned Ryun, who works in conservative politics and is the son of former U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Kan., who was a KU track superstar.

"Seriously ⁦@UnivOfKansas⁩?" Ryun posted. "You're letting this be said in your classrooms? That men who won't vote for Kamala Harris for President should be lined up and shot?? ⁦@RogerMarshallMD⁩ ⁦@JerryMoran"

That post was shared on X by both U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach.

"KS Regents: We educate leaders, build communities, and make discoveries that change the world," Kobach said. "KU prof: Some males in our society will refuse to vote for a female prez, because they don't think females are smart enough to be Prez. We could line all those guys up and shoot them."

Marshall called for Lowcock's immediate firing.

"The University of Kansas must fire this professor immediately," Marshall said in a statement. "Anyone who says that people who don't vote for Kamala Harris should be 'lined up and shot' are completely deranged and shouldn't be around students nor in academia. This promotion of political violence should be met with quick action by KU."

In a post on X, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., called the video "disturbing and inappropriate."

"There should never be a call for violence anytime or anywhere in the classroom," Moran added. "We must cool down the political rhetoric and be respectful and civil to each other, & that is especially true for someone charged with teaching our young people."

“While healthy political discourse is paramount to our democratic society, violent rhetoric is never acceptable," Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement. "We must strive to make our classrooms a place where diverse viewpoints are respectfully discussed, and politics is not weaponized to make our students feel unsafe or demonized for having differing opinions. I appreciate the university’s swift action to address this matter."

[allhailthe70shousewife]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/12/southern-strategy-kevin-phillips-republican-party-trump/

Opinion The GOP’s ‘southern strategy’ mastermind just died. Here’s his legacy.

Greg Sargent

“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”

That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old. Phillips’s 1969 book, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” provided the blueprint for the “southern strategy” that the Republican Party adopted for decades to win over White voters who were alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights in the 1960s.

Phillips advised Republicans to exploit the racial anxieties of White voters, linking them directly to issues such as crime, federal spending and voting rights. The strategy, beginning with Richard M. Nixon’s landslide victory in the 1972 presidential race, helped produce GOP majorities for decades.

Though Phillips later reconsidered his fealty to the GOP, updated versions of the “southern strategy” live on in today’s Republican Party, shaping the political world we inhabit today. So I asked historians and political theorists to weigh in on Phillips’s legacy. Their responses have been edited for style and brevity.

Kevin Kruse, historian at Princeton University and co-editor of “Myth America”: Kevin Phillips was a prophet of today’s polarization. He drew a blueprint for a major realignment of American politics that is still with us. For much of the 20th century, Democrats dominated the national scene, because of the reliable support of the “Solid South.”

But the “Negro problem” of the 1960s, Phillips argued, presented Republicans an opportunity to take the South and Southwest, too, a new region he anointed “the Sun Belt.” All they had to do was appeal to the hatreds of White voters there, through racially coded “law and order” appeals.

Phillips, of course, proved correct about the regional realignment. Republicans won every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Today, Republicans dominate the region partly because they still employ Phillips’s polarizing politics of resentment and reaction, from complaints about Black Lives Matter to panics about “woke” education. Donald Trump’s continued dominance of the GOP shows that the underlying instinct to exploit division and inflame hatred remains.

Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”: Phillips helped shape how the Republican Party navigated the last 50 years of U.S. politics. His big contribution was the idea that White southerners could be potential voters for the GOP, because the solid Democratic South had become newly fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Phillips argued that the Republican Party needed to change the way it conducted politics to reach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.

Trump picked up this rhetoric. He launched his campaign on the ideas of Mexican migrant and Muslim criminality — that all these minority populations needed to be under much stricter surveillance.

The strategy that Phillips helped popularize worked just as well with some northern White voters as it did with southern White voters. It helped solidify the Republican Party’s base as almost exclusively White even as the nation has grown more diverse.

Bill Kristol, a former Republican turned Never Trump conservative: It was happening already in 1968, but Phillips’s book and his subsequent promotion of the southern strategy did have the effect of making that reaction to the civil rights movement more coherent. It gave politicians a way to think about shaping that reaction politically.

Newt Gingrich, who defeated lots of Democrats in southern House seats in the 1994 midterms, was in spirit a Phillips protégé. That culminated in 2010, when Democrats got obliterated, and in the red state-blue state divide today.

From Phillips to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, there is a through line. DeSantis, Abbott and others are operating in a world anticipated and partly created by Phillips. The reaction of much of the White working class and Republican politicians to Black Lives Matter and “cosmopolitan elites” is a close cousin of what Phillips predicted and helped shape.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner: I think Phillips was noticing what was happening rather than causing it to happen. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 49 to 50 percent of the popular vote in the South in 1952 and 1956; Nixon got nearly that much in 1960. When the national Democratic Party became more dovish, circa 1967, reacting against the Vietnam escalations of its own presidents, Southern Whites — always the most hawkish voters — turned away from national Democrats not so much because of civil rights but because of dovishness. It’s what Tom Eagleton later told Robert Novak: “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”

Corey Robin, political theorist and author of “The Reactionary Mind”: Phillips understood that the old Republican Party establishment could not begin to take on the New Deal and Great Society until it developed a mass popular base. He saw that the White working class — not just in the South, but in the North — was growing disaffected with the New Deal on economic and racist grounds, and that Republicans could turn that dissatisfaction into governing majorities.

Beginning in 1972 with the reelection of Nixon, Republicans built this majority in the spirit of what Phillips imagined. George W. Bush, the last Republican president to get a popular majority, was the last spasm of that vision. The irony is that, under Phillips, the idea was to expand the Republican Party into a permanent governing majority.

But once the White working class diminished, the electoral return of that resentment dramatically dwindled. As a result, instead of relying on robust electoral majorities, the Republican Party, to win power, relies on the electoral college and the malapportioned Senate. Phillips’s blueprint made the heyday of Republican power — and ultimately unmade it.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

The first presidential election in which every state picked their electors via statewide popular vote was 1868. Before that, at least one state had the legislature pick the winner (South Carolina was the last holdout). Back then, only white men over 21 could vote, but the electorate saw significant boosts in 1920 with the passage of the 19th amendment (white women) and 1972 following the civil rights movement (black men and women) and the passage of the 26th amendment (18 year olds).

The total number of eligible voters grows with the overall population of the country, and looking at the data since 1972 we can predict that there will be about 244 million eligible voters this year.

But eligibility is only half the equation. Actual voter turnout never even comes close to 100%. Since 1972, it has never gone above 66.6% (in 2020), averaging 57.2%

57.2% of 244 million voters would mean we'd see 140 million votes cast in November, but that's actually way lower than we would expect. Let's ignore turnout percentage (which fluctuates wildly between 50% and 60%) and look instead at the actual number of votes cast:

There were over 158 million votes cast in 2020, and given that we saw record turnout of 66.6% due to a number of simultaneous crises, it makes perfect sense that the total number of votes cast in 2024 would fall, but not all the way down to 140 million. Between 1984 and 1988, the popular vote dropped by 1 million. Between 1992 and 1996, the popular vote dropped by 8 million. Between 2008 and 2012, the popular vote dropped by 2 million. No polls seem to indicate an 18 million dropoff in voter turnout this year; that would be unprecedented. According to the line of best fit, it is much more likely that we'll see ballpark 150 million votes cast, probably closer to 151 million. That would indicate a voter turnout of around 62%, which is higher than average but more realistic.

Since 1972, the two major parties combine to win an average of 95.5% of the popular vote per election. Third party candidates do well in waves, with considerable showings (over 5%) in 1980, 1992, 1996, and 2016. Since Kennedy dropped out of the race and neither the Libertarians nor the Greens are making waves as spoilers this year, we can assume that the Democrats and Republicans will have a better than average showing. Looking at the trend lines for major and third party percentages, it would show Kamala Harris receiving 51.7% of the vote (about 78 million), Donald Trump receiving 45.0% (about 68 million), and third party candidates combining for 3.3% (about 5 million).

To scale:

I do not believe that the actual final results will be anywhere close to this prediction. I think that these extrapolations show Kamala Harris overperforming by a considerable amount. She will almost certainly win the popular vote, I don't doubt that, but I think she will win a plurality instead of a majority (under 50%). Donald Trump is not wildly more or less popular than he was the last two times, in which he received 46.1% and 46.8% of the vote, so I do not think it is unreasonable to assume he will receive a minimum of 47% this year, given demographic shifts among suburban voters, black men and Hispanics. He may even perform better than that, but not better than Harris. I would bet my life on that fact. Democrats have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 elections, and polls do not show Trump magically coming up from behind on his third try.

When we exclude years with exceptionally high third party turnout, the major parties average 98.3% instead of 95.5% since 1972, but we can't just pick and choose what data to include. At this point, I'm deviating from the hard numbers and am operating more on vibes. Third party turnout will be lower than in 2016 (5.7%), but probably higher than in 2020 (1.8%). If we take the 3.3% figure from the trend lines, that would mean Harris and Trump would receive a combined 96.7% (146 million votes). If we assume Trump has a floor of 47% support (about 71 million votes), then the best Harris could do is 49.7% (about 75 million votes). There is no conceivable scenario where Trump wins the popular vote, so his ceiling (and Harris's floor) is something like 48.35% (73 million votes each).

The only president to win two non-consecutive terms was Grover Cleveland, but he actually won the popular vote all three times he ran, 1884 (48.8%), 1888 (48.6%, lost the electoral college), and 1892 (46.0%). Trump is the exact opposite, having NEVER won the popular vote but still won the electoral college regardless. Franklin Roosevelt won four times in a row, 1932 (57.4%), 1936 (60.8%), 1940 (54.7%), and 1944 (53.4%). There was a major dropoff between his second and third bid, even though he was ridiculously popular. Trump is NOT ridiculously popular, but I don't think he's going to perform worse this time. Cleveland performed worse because there was a significant third party challenger, and FDR was the first sitting incumbent to run for a third term (at a time when WW2 was ramping up and voters were afraid of America joining). Trump does not have either of these disadvantages, so while it's possible he could perform worse than in 2020, I think Harris has so much baggage attached to her name (real and imaginary) that Trump will do better than he did against Clinton or Biden. A lot of voters are fed up with him, but that doesn't mean they will support Harris.

I have no real data to confirm these confidence intervals, but this what I would expect next month

47.0% to 48.3% for Trump (71 million to 73 million), I'd say 48.0% (72.5 million)

48.4% to 49.7% for Harris (73 million to 75 million), I'd say 48.7% (73.5 million)

Now, the electoral college is anybody's guess! Who fuckin knows?

[deadpresidents]

Has any state's electoral votes been won by the same party in every single presidential election since the beginning?

No state has, but following the ratification of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, the District of Columbia has been awarding Electoral votes in Presidential elections since 1964, and the Democratic candidate has won DC's votes in every election.

Alaska and Hawaii have been awarding Electoral votes in Presidential elections since 1960. Alaska has gone to Republicans every year except 1964 when Lyndon B. Johnson won the state. Hawaii has been won by Democrats every year, except for 1972 (Richard Nixon) and 1984 (Ronald Reagan). Nixon and Reagan each won 49 of the 50 states (but lost the District of Columbia) in those elections.

[simply-ivanka]

To Understand Trump’s Staying Power With the White Working Class, Look at Michigan Supporters remain loyal to former president’s policies, personality

Tuesday February 27, 2024 Wall Street Journal

By Jimmy VielkindFollow and Ariel Zambelich

DEARBORN, Mich.—At its peak, more than 100,000 people streamed in and out of the massive 

Ford Motor factory here along the Rouge River. In addition to cars and trucks, the behemoth plant helped mint the American middle class.

The thousands of people who still work here and at other factories across Michigan and other Midwest states helped forge those states’ politics. These blue-collar voters were for many years reliable Democrats, but in 2016 a big group of them, mostly white, helped Donald Trump capture the presidency—including an unexpected win in Michigan.

His supporters said they remain loyal to him thanks to a mix of economic policy proposals and a unique personality that they haven’t seen from many other Republicans, according to recent interviews conducted by The Wall Street Journal for its “Chasing the Base” podcast series.

His policies? They shined. They shined…I made more money than I ever had. My money went  further.— James Benson

I just love Trump’s enthusiasm and positivity, he’s positive, he’s  enthusiastic…But I like to see an American leader that says we can be great again, we can be number one.— Joe Pizzimenti

The United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden in January, but union officials acknowledge that a sizable portion of their members back Trump. More than 100,000 people in the Detroit metro area work in auto manufacturing alone. It is still home to the headquarters of marquee American auto brands such as Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

Trump lost Michigan to Biden in 2020. Democrats made up the difference in white-collar suburbs, including Oakland County northwest of Detroit. They made some inroads in blue-collar areas like Macomb County, northeast of Detroit, but Trump still carried the day.

So did former Rep. Andy Levin, a Democrat who won the portion of his district in that county by 36,000 votes. He said Democrats need to be bolder to blunt the GOP. (Levin lost his seat in 2022 due to an intraparty fight following redistricting.)

Republicans were able to peel off people over culture war issues like abortion and guns and LGBTQ rights… They wouldn’t have succeeded if Democrats had—if the average workingclass person could say, well obviously I know what side my bread is buttered on.— Former Rep. Andy Levin

There are other dynamics that will be important in the general election. Biden has dispatched foreign-policy and political advisers to meet with Muslim and Arab-American leaders upset with the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza. The mayor of Dearborn, home to a major Arab-American population, has said the Biden administration “failed to act to protect the lives of innocent men, women and children.”

John Sellek, a Republican political consultant, said a loss of support from Arab-American and younger voters over the Middle East conflict was as important for Trump as his continued hold on the white working-class.

Macomb County is a bastion of the latter group. It is home to strip malls, sports bars and massive auto plants that cropped up as people moved from Detroit to the suburbs in the latter part of the 20th century.

Trump brought many new voices into the Republican Party here, and that has caused a fight about who controls it at the state level. Stacy Van Oast, 59 years old, said at a monthly coffee hour held at the Macomb County GOP office that one result has been dysfunction.

Peter Kiszczyc emigrated from Poland in 1984 and worked for decades at area factories. He said it was great that the former president has broadened the party’s appeal.

He’s changing the party…He’s appealing to many blue-collar workers especially, not only [in] Macomb county, but Michigan So I am Christian, [a] patriot, and I support Donald  Trump 100%.— Peter Kiszczyc