I’ve gotten one of my partners into watching the Young Justice cartoon. (We’re on the last season and they’re enjoying it, although it’s not her “go to” show.) We’ve long ago noted that Lex Luthor seems a far more rational and stable person than Trump, and indeed, some other actual elected officials.
At least some of it is the idea of Evil vs. Stupid: you can have a rational discussion with Evil, and they are often willing to negotiate alternative actions. Stupid will go ahead with their plans because they simply cannot grasp the idea of consequences … or at least not ones that don’t directly affect themselves.
I want to believe that (re: nails in the coffin), and want to believe that coverage like the Newsweek piece might matter, but isn’t this the second or third time just since the convention that Trumps campaign has fallen apart and/or gone down the shitter?
Trump, in the 2005 video, reminds me of the people in high school that made me want to graduate from high school – i.e. so I could put distance between myself and them. Unfortunately things were worse in college, what with more easily available alcohol.
Like I said our current level of gerrymandering is both unprecedented and new. Around a decade old. GOP voter suppression efforts pre date it, as does our high polarization and the GOPs narrow demographic coalition. And their racist exclusionary shit has been around pretty much for ever. The new voter suppression laws proliferated after the GOP stacked and backed Supreme Court eviscerated the voting rights act. Safe districts exist with or without gerrymandering. Like those districts in Philly where not a single person voted Romney. There just aren’t any whites or republicans living there, whatever shape the districts are massaged into. Gerrymandering is just a tactic to ensure you have more of those than the other guy. Gerry meandering enables this, particularly where it has given the GOP disproportionate control of state legislatures. But GOP control of state legislatures is also what allowed them to gerrymander, as these things are usually instituted at state level.
But the original question was about how Trump can be doing so well in polls. None of this effects polling, or can explain Trumps level of support. Polling isn’t voting. Researchers take a representative sample of the gen pop or electorate. Calibrate it to past electorate demos. Or predicted electorate based on demographic shifts. They don’t account for voter suppression, And since congressional districts aren’t a factor in national level races (mostly). The effects gerrymandering had on them are limited to is indirect influence on turn out and electorate make up.
The answer here is partisanship. Around 48% of the country identifies as, and reliably votes GOP. Trump only hit less than half of GOP primary voters, And before he stood alone he was mostly floating around 1/3. And those are actual votes. But in national polling he mostly floated some where around the low 40’s of the entire population. Closer to most Republicans. Less than the minimum 45-50% we expect any major party candidate to garner. But far more than we expect some one who more than half his own party voted against in primaries would be getting. People are voting party first. We’re in a situation where party success has become more important than the well being of the country. And it’s gross.
That’s different from Gerrymandering. Which has no direct effect on voter registration. All that is is shaping congressional districts to group those voters in the way that is most advantageous for the person or group doing the redistricting. It doesn’t change the numbers of voters. Its just blocks them together
Voter ID and other suppression tactics are a different story. But they still don’t have effects on pre-election polling. Pollers make a determination of who is a likely voter based on registration, whether a person has voted before, and demographic models based on past elections. So far as I’m aware no polling org is currently factoring in voter ID for their model as a separate, additional factor. Unless they’re specifically studying the effects of voter ID. That’s because voter ID laws don’t typically restrict people from registering, nor do they change their past voting history. They require an extra step at the polls, when a person goes to vote in order to deny them their vote. Like wise restrictions on extended voting, mail in voting, and same day in person registration. Where these people meet the definition of “likely voters” they still do in the face of voter suppression laws. Where these people didn’t (same day registration for example), they still don’t.
That’s part of what makes it so pernicious. Many of the biggest examples people point to as horror stories of voter suppression involve people who have voted in every single election they’ve been eligible for. Exactly the sort of voters polls like to look at.
You aren’t looking at a situation where the polls are skewed Trumpwise due to voter suppression efforts, even as you have a situation that may be generally skewed towards the GOP in terms of actual voting. And remember gerrymandering doesn’t have an effect on actual votes cast, it just means you get more out of the votes you get. Disproportionate representation.
Meanwhile not all polls are modeling likely voters. Some simply run off last rounds confirmed numbers on the electorate. Which may not include the same voter suppression elements. Like this year when some many have been invalidated by the courts. Some are polling the general population. And so on. Polls are generally not meant to be predictive. They are snapshots of where support stands during the period they were conducted. Taken together they can be fairly predictive, assuming the overall models were accurate enough. And state level polls of likely voters are in fact the gold standard in terms of prediction. But fundamentally you can’t know or predict if a particular voter will be turned away from the polls until that voter is turned away from the polls. If you drop all voters without ID, you likely under represent the same sort of voters that are disproportionately effected by these laws to a much greater extent than they’ll be actual denied their votes. And how do you account for changes? If you set your model back before a law was ruled unconstitutional do you change your model now? How do you tell how much of the shift is the model change? How much of it is legitimate increase in support. How much of the shift, and which side of it is more reflective of how the vote would actually break on election day? Can’t answer those for the most part.
And finally. Although voter suppression efforts have a real effect on the vote. And its certainly enough to swing a close election. The effect is rather slight practically speaking. Voter ID as just one example. On a state by state basis hundreds of thousands of people are technically disenfranchised by these laws. But most of those people aren’t planning to vote. In terms of practical effect you have an added bar to expanding the electorate in the future. Actual effect in real voting is hard to determine. Five Thirty Eight predicts it could be .8-2.4% of voter turn out being denied they’re right to vote. And that sort of the big dangerous voter suppression measure.
That’s absolutely awful. But even if this did skew polls as much as it did actual votes. It isn’t enough to explain why Trump is still sitting at ~43% in national polling averages Even if you assume voter suppression is already reflected in polling. He’d sit at ~40%. Which still begs the question why the fuck are so many people supporting him?
@d_r is referencing a BBS meta joke where there were some 5 or so competing posts on the topic (both from BB staff and BBSers) happening all at the same time when news of Ford’s passing hit.
The joke became, “hey did you hear Rob Ford died?”
I still find it distasteful. Maybe it’s just basic distrust of human nature, but I don’t think that it would have been treated quite so lightheartedly if it had been Prince’s death that had spawned the five topics. Or Robin Williams’.
The way I’ve always seen it is, we’re laughing at ourselves for five threads and all the cross-talk, not at the poor man who died. But you’re right, I definitely don’t want to be disrespectful to the man or his family.
Robin Williams and Prince were beloved artists and entertainers.
Rob Ford was a basically a walking punchline.
That aside, the jokes were more along how the news was percolating through the BBS. It was absurdity fitting a man who had made his mark on the world through a series of absurd events.
I always saw it as the kind of dark humor I would expect to see here, as opposed to reveling in the man’s death or anything like that. More laughing at ourselves than anything.
I am embarrassed. I am so embarrassed by this whole circus. I am honestly thinking about moving out of this country. Canada? Maybe. And that’s regardless of the outcome…
And…did anybody count how many times “The Donald” pointed (rudely) at Hillary? Nobody respects women more than “The Donald”!
My posts are kind of screwed up here, so I think I’ll just keep it to this.
The LA Times published an article today about the effects of gerrymandering have had on the GOP nationwide.
In the effort to secure the House and state legislatures from voters who would hold their feet to the fire, they’ve basically created a self-destructive climate of voters who want to take the party further and further right. And it’s also prompting the GOP to continuously find new ways to disenfranchise and suppress the vote of those who don’t fit the ideals of their carefully selected voting bloc as the old white men who vote for them slowly die off and are replaced with an increasingly diverse population.
The people who support Trump have always been those who live in this self-created, gerrymandered bubble. It’s one that doesn’t seek coalitions, or facts, or concerns itself with the negative consequences of its actions. It doesn’t matter what Trump does to shit on those who oppose him. His support does not and never did contain those people. Thus his numbers don’t go down with any new revelation about him.
Sure. Right. But the issue is that current gerrymandering and voter suppression laws post date that GOP base and extremity. So they can’t be blamed for Trump or explain his support in polling for this election. Voter ID and other popular GOP suppression laws made their first appearance during the bush years, but only proliferated after the court gutted the voting rights act a few years back.
Current gerrymandered districts were drawn after the 2010 census. Though the districts after 2000’s census got gerryed up pretty well it was nowhere as extreme as the current situation.
The current iteration of the GOP first came to the fore with G-Dubs in 2000, as an out growth of all that 90s nonsense. Though the coalition itself (fiscal conservatives with religious right social conservatives ideologically but also their demos) we’re set in stone by Reagan. And have their roots with the Nixon campaign and administration.
The GOP’s anti-democratic policies certainly allowed them to push everything to far greater extremes ideologically. But most of that ideology, a fair bit of that extremity, And an awful lot of the people involved vastly predate the policies in question. Hence chicken and egg. Did their extremity lead them to push the policies, or did the safety that gives them push them to larger extremes.
In terms of Trump it’s harder to pin down. The GOP’s coalition of ideological and demographic block has been contracting. But it’s still not just the older, white, racist working class voters fueling Trump. Even if they’re a hefty chunk (like 30-40% of the party). So if your asking the question “how is Trump polling so well/garnering so much support?”. You’re really asking why the other groups that tend to run GOP are supporting him. That can’t be explained with electoral manipulation.
