These questions, and many others, will be answered in the next episode of “That’s so Rudy!”
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Altered state?
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Problem on that front (for the GOP) is that that core of Trump true believers is rather small, proportionally. There’s no way that block can drive election wins on their own. The more Trump, his people, and prominent GOP members show up on TV foaming at the mouth about trans dimensional Bigfoot colluding with Obama, the greater chance they have of alienating everyone else.
But on the other side. That cuckoo bananas lives deep in all their largest and most reliable voting blocks. Especially the Evangelicals. So even as its not a big enough chunk of the country, or even their own membership to drive national elections. These people vote as a unit and they are big enough to split votes and drive primary challenges. So they need to pander to them to keep that turnout and engagement.
It seems like there’s an ever escalating level of bullshit is needed to do that. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. It isn’t bringing anyone new to the table, and overtime it seems like its gonna drive off a whole hell of a lot of people. But the question is if those things come to a head by November.
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That point cannot be made often enough.
It’s not knocking on doors and getting one and two individuals to come out and vote. It’s getting an organized activated group to mobilize and all go vote as a huge block. If the percentage of eligible voters that actually vote was higher, this would have less impact too. But, since it’s not, and because Republican efforts are to depress that percentage, these blocks that do vote have an oversized impact.
It’s hard to tell what the actual impact here is. If it’s really driving people to vote D instead of R, to just not vote at all, or if those voters are so stuck in the R bucket that they’ll vote that way no matter what without thinking. I have a feeling the last group is still sizeable, and I’m not sure what insane level of crazy it will take to move them to the middle group. For a large chunk, I don’t think they’ll even change to the first group.
We need a major voting process overhaul to eliminate the two party hold first past the post problem. That may be the only long term way out of this mess.
All it takes is voter turnout. Head-to-head, all eligible Dem voters greatly outnumber all eligible Rep voters. In turn, eligible non-voters are a roughly equal number as both combined, and heavily favor the Democrats demographically. The difficult part is getting them motivated to vote.
At 55% voter turnout, it’s an even race. At 60%, Dems win. At 70+%, Dems win overwhelmingly.
That’s why Republicans hate Motor Votor (registration) and Vote By Mail. It’s why they love to purge voter rolls (especially if they can target it to blue districts like they did recently in Georgia and Wisconsin), close polling places, and generally anything to suppress the vote.
ETA: Though long-term I personally would prefer to get rid of FPTP and party duopoly, but that’s definitely a longer project.
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I think the purpose of any election campaign is mostly two, and some of three. I would guess that the number of people who switched from R to D (or vice versa) because of campaign activity might be nonzero, but also insignificant. The real purpose is to alienate, annoy, and/or exhaust so many people that a significant portion stays home and does not vote at all. This leaves the reliable R or D voters who can be more-or-less counted upon to vote no matter what.
I tend to think that’ll impact turn out rather than drive people to the DNC. If it changes people’s votes then 3rd parties and split votes rather than changing affiliation.
It’s definitely hard to gauge the impact. There’s some evidence of people dropping or changing their party affiliation, and suppression of new GOP registrations. And on recent polling, especially on impeachment it looks a lot like they’ve lost independents. Those recent increases in support for impeachment have mostly been driven by a huge shift in independents. True independents barely exist but they may well have lost the chunk of independents that reliably vote GOP. And there’s the ongoing suburban shift against them.
But at the same time they don’t appear to have lost anything in terms of party members and their regular voters, regardless of which block they come from.
So you have this weird situation where the party at the very least isn’t growing, and they’re losing that small middle ground. But they’re currently holding support among members. So turnout becomes the thing. And that gets weird, cause turn out in these big key blocks is already high. Like Evangelical turnout is already 90%. So you aren’t neccisarily going to bump up turn out in the Trump base. If catering to that suppresses turnout among the rest of their voters, there isn’t neccisarily anything to compensate with.
And the path they’re on now seems custom designed to do exactly that. It’s definitely not a good place to be long term. But can they keep the plates spinning till the next election? There’s certainly plenty of opportunities for the DNC to fuck it up in a way that moots the whole thing. It’s hard to tell when this causes them a problem.
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This point always gets me too. It always feels like the Republicans just run better campaigns.
Not better policy, just better campaigns.
It feels like it should be easy to Democrats to put out all kinds of ads showing Republicans being totally batshit crazy and doing stuff that’s nonsensical. They should be able to show them doing stuff that’s illegal with messaging around it.
But, instead, the Republicans will set the stage, control the narrative, back Democrats into a false position and then Democrats will waste time trying to defend that crazy thought as if it was a genuine concern or had any value to begin with. And the DNC will just let this happen with no counter strategy at all. 
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Have I posted this in connection with Guiliani threads here before? Can’t recall, so here it is (again?)
Stop your messing around
Better think of your future
Time you straighten right out
Creating problems in town
Rudy, a message to you
Rudy, a message to you
Stop your fooling around
Time you straighten right out
Better think of your future
Else you’ll wind up in jail
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State of delusion.
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I dunno that I see that. Obama’s campaigns were legendarily well run, and revolutionary in how they were structured (to the point that a failed attempt to follow that model is probably Clinton’s biggest fuck up). The 2018 election was very well run under Pelosi. And it’d be really hard to say Trump’s campaign was well run in the least.
But the particular problems in terms of recent DNC campaigns, and the tenor of the primary so far are really concerning because of this turnout question and the messy transition the party is in the middle of. And the DNC did not run an up and down the ballot, long term election strategy until 2018. Where as the GOP made hay on that front starting in then 80’s.
That’s a different problem, and its been the state of things independent of campaigns. That’s been changing a bit recently, but it’s part and parcel of the short term outlook on the election. We’re hearing very little about attracting younger voters, seeing very little in terms of long term movement building, and hearing very little about turnout and voter suppression. And absolutely no one in the DNC seems to have any sort of plan for judges.
There’s all that triangulation going on in terms of who older, whiter, more conservative Democrats will vote for based on received wisdom about what worked in the 90’s. And Biden is even floating that he wouldn’t pursue a 2nd term. There’s very little in the way of movement building going on, and I don’t see anyone on the field equiped to do that.
And that’s exactly the sort of short sightedness that’s lead to the big failures. And sounds very much like a recipe for dropping the ball on turnout.
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maybe in your zip code but in relatively rural texas they surround me.
in many other zip codes they have institutionalized voter suppression to the point that it takes a supermajority of democratic voters to make any appreciable change in legislative composition whether on the state or the national level. this is not said as an excuse to give up but as a realistic appraisal of the cirscumstances.
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I live on one of the rare areas where Trump had dominating primary support from minute one. Lee Zeldin is our representative, and the GOP apparently considered putting him on the Intelligence committee to defend Trump during the hearings. But back off at the last minute because he’s too rabidly pro-Trump.
But looking at the voting record from primaries, and the past two elections. Well Trump never broke 30% among GOP voters nationally during the primaries until he won a couple contests and other started to drop out. Plus a bunch of polling since, and his approval rating. It seems that Trump’s base. The people who specifically support Trump, not the GOP in general, tops at at around 25, maybe 30 percent. And even with hardline GOP voters who will sport Trump just cause he’s their guy, looks like 40% max.
You are not reliably driving wins nationwide with just that. Best we can estimate that sort of thing that’s sort of the peak.
2018 brought a bunch of ballot initiatives doing away with such things. There were a couple of states that reinforced voter ID, but far more did away with it (and gerrymandering). And although there have been some set backs in the courts, the trend for the last 4 years has been towards voting rights. Especially in state supreme courts. On top of that the DNC took full control of more state and local governments than they’ve had since Carter, and gained control of at least one branch in even more.
So 2020 looks to be about the fairest playground we’ve had since Bush took office and the GOP manipulation campaign began in earnest.
I’m also not aware off to many places where you need a “supermajority” to get up over the bias. There are some really extreme examples of individual district. But on the whole the shift for the GOP is across the board and in most spots equivalent to less than 10% shift in votes. Turn out can get up over it in most places, and we watched turn out do that in 2018. And we’ve seen that keep going, with this years state and local elections, and the special elections (even the ones the GOP ultimately won). We got narrow races in places that were once blowouts.
My own rediculously small town, safely GOP controlled since the early 90’s ultimately stayed that way this past November. But the race came down to a couple hundred votes, and we had record turnout at 8000 ballots cast. That’s more people then were even registered in 2016.
how about the state of wisconsin? look at the percentage of the popular vote for the state legislature going to democratic candidates compare to the percentage of democratic candidates who won their elections–
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(Apropos of nothing, I keep reading that as “Yoyonovich”)
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Holmes and YoYo seem to know each other well.
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Didn’t say they didn’t exist. Said there weren’t many. That’s a 10 point disparity between vote and representation, expressed that way IIRC the max nation wide is 16 points (don’t recall where)
But there’s this:
The Democrats swept in all of the statewide elections, unseating three incumbent Republicans, including two-term Governor Scott Walker, and winning the open race for State Treasurer.
Wisconsin was one of those notable places where the DNC took control of at least one branch of government. Which makes it possible to push back on this kind of shit. It’s the sort of place where we should expect a fairer election in 2020. It’s also one of the places where federal court cases on it’s gerrymader have stalled out though.
Also please don’t pull unlabled graphs out of context. For all we know that’s from 1972 or David Icke. It appears to be from here.
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See also: Michigan, North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia, Utah…
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I’ll point ou that a 10% disparity between popular vote turnout and proportion of representation doesn’t equate to needing a “super majority” which even in the Senate definition means 2/3rds to take control.
It’s not as simple as that because of how districts impact thing. Since within a given district all you need is a simple majority, and gerrymanders often involve a whole bunch of districts that are relatively close. If safe for the gerrymandering party. It tends to take a lot less margin increase than the disparity to flip control.
How much margin you need to get closer to proportionality is a different question. And a less important one, since you aren’t hitting parity by margin alone. And all you need to correct the problem is to flip control. Impacts are also magnified down the ballot, vs house elections. Since there’s a hell of a lot more in state legislative districts than there are house districts.
Places where you genuinely need 66-75% of the vote to get a majority of seats are rare.
Michigan the DNC swept state wide offices including the Governor’s office, gained two house seats, and gained five seats in the state legislature.
North Carolina a bit more of a wash. Most of it stayed the same. But they kept their Democratic Governor, and put a voting rights attorney on their Supreme Court flipping control of it. Though they did pass a ballot initiative instituting voter ID. They’re currently being forced to redraw their districts and the map from 2018 can not be used in 2020.
Pennsylvania was conducted under a new map after their more extreme gerrymander got tossed out in court. The DNC gained 3 house seats. Reelected a DNC Governor. Gained 11 seats in the state house, gained five in the state senate.
Most of the southern states you’re listing are places where popular vote goes heavily for the GOP, and the GOP comes out ahead. So gerrymandered or not it’s not exactly on topic in regards to Democrats being denied control.
Texas the DNC gained congressional and state legislature seats even though popular votes break towards the GOP.
Maryland is gerrymandered to all fuck. But in favor of Democrats. So its not an example of the GOP rigging elections in their favor, or gaining seats in excess of their support.
