PBP: 2020 House and Senate Elections (Maybe even State level)

She deserves to go on account of stupidity. Forget the one confirmed and one alleged relationship. There's nude photos of her pulling hits from a bong with an iron (or possibly celtic) cross in her bikini area. Some stuff you just don't do in front of a camera.

 

Yeah, you never, ever record your crimes.

But, she is a millennial, so perhaps she missed that lesson.

 

I wonder if that district will flip back to gop.

 

It's unlikely, as it went for Hillary in 2016 and Romney only narrowly carried it. But it could happen.

 

Either way, third parties don't last long in a first past the post system with districts the size of those for our Congress. If our districts were 65-85k as they are in the UK, then all sorts of possibilities emerge. But it's very difficult to get something more than a centrist candidate out of a district of 750K in a large metro...unless we're talking about a few districts here or there in Chicago, SF, LA, NYC.

Realignment is inevitable but premature IMO. If we've learned anything, it's that the GOP's instinct is to run to the worst parts of its base despite all the evidence. That's why they ignored the strategy they put together after Romney's defeat to expand their base demographically. What will most likely happen is a bigger tent in both parties for the time being. On the GOP, that's not a tent that transcends racial lines, but one where socially conservative types continue on with business interests. It's going to hit a breaking point though. The electoral fundamentals GA, AZ, NC, FL, TX will be trending more purple to blue. MI, WI, and PA's results in 2016 were in large part a "fool me once" outcome. The GOP has a 9-1 Senate advantage in those 5 Sunbelt states. As that erodes, they're going to have a hard time in Presidential elections and in controlling the Senate. And regardless of how they manage to draw maps post 2020, they're going to have a hard time toward the end of that census cycle as people continue to migrate.

I think the alignment we're likely to see c2028 is one where the GOP gives up on socially conservative issues. Abortion, immigration, reluctance to impose firearms regulation, gay/trans issues. Those issues are becoming less important to the conservative cause with each passing year as those voters are on average older. It makes sense to risk a portion of that electorate to go after people with a kitchen table, don't mess with my finances, small govt fiscal message. That's probably the best bet IMO. Appeal to Xers/early Millennial retirement funds, try to peel away more Hispanic voters, win back some of the HW Bush/Ford Boomer type GOPers turned off by the current message.

I see the realignment more as a reversion. A modern version of the GOP pre-Nixon Southern strategy and a Democratic party that moves away from Clinton's Third Way that embraces New Deal/Great Society ideals. The median voter will be more of a Clinton Democrat and the socially conservative types are going to be forced to give up the ghost and pick a side based upon economics rather than their feelings on legislating social/religious norms.

The only way this occurs sooner than 2028-30 IMO is if the results are so catastrophically bad in the Senate in 2020 that they know there's no way to reasonably retake it until 2024-26. And that's not likely at all. Dems picking up 4-5 seats in 2020 while ousting Trump is probably their best case. The Senate map is more favorable for them to defend a majority in 2022, but the majority is razor thin and they'd be facing the normal party of the President mid term headwinds.

 

Yes they did. It was a moon shot and they landed. Just enough Boomers still around. Millennial and Xer turnout just low enough. Everyone overall just white enough. They had to go whole hog to do it. Not much meat left on that hog and there’s actually a chance they’ll control neither chamber or the White House in 15 months.

If the 2016 election were held today, not even with people knowing what they now do, Trump would have lost. The electorate has already changed that much.

 

If the GOP continues to grow its share of the white vote, it can survive the demographic trends for quite some time to come.

 

But it can’t really grow its share going forward. They got a good bump from the disenchanted in 2016. Can they keep them if they aren’t delivering them anything? How many more white folks sitting out elections are likely to jump in for the GOP?

Then there are groups who are voting. White seculars/non-Christians are the one white group whose electoral share is increasing. They vote like Hispanics and Asians. Evangelicals? Shrinking and many of the younger ones don’t care for the socially conservative views of their parents. Mainlines and Catholics? Shrinking. Those without a college degree? Shrinking. Rural vote as a percent of total vote? Shrinking.

Asking them to increase their share going forward is like asking coal to return. Two ways out: modify social and/or fiscal views closer to the middle. Or suppress voting.

 

I detest this usage. Baby Boomers decided that a word for living things, plants and animals had to be used for everything.
Can't Baby Boomers just die?

Well we are going to die anyway.

 

I don’t care for it either, but here I am typing with my thumbs quoting someone else using it too. It doesn’t really grate for me. Bigger pet peeve of mine...and it’s everywhere now...even NPR:

Lowering the amount/rate of something, like tax rates/revenue, interest rates/consumer debt, growth rates. Reduce is so much better.

 

A term I hate even more is "negative growth" If it's negative it's not ********ing growth.

 

It's shrinkage.

 

31% support for his actions and the story is “unshakable base.” Just wild. pic.twitter.com/KMFISWxztK

— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) October 29, 2019

Hardcore Trump base down to 26%. https://t.co/WpBEofl3Td

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) October 29, 2019

 

Against all political wisdom, Trump doubled down on his "please the base" strategy in October 2016, by increasing both his tweets and his vitriol. Like Hitler (I do love that comparison) after conquering France against his generals' advice, Trump is now convinced even more than ever that his instincts are better than what the experts tell him. He's gonna double down even more from here. Triple down. Quadruple down. It will be a storm of crazy the likes of which will be difficult to ever match.

 

The guy doesn’t understand how to build a broader consensus. He’s transactional and in an industry where he’s a relatively small player compared to the overall development market, everyone is a small player. So there’s always another opportunity somewhere with another potential sucker. He doesn’t need to play nice because he can run around making deals everywhere and it would take him several lifetimes to run out of suckers.

There’s only one electorate. 25% wont vote for anybody. 30-35% will never vote for him. 30-35% will always vote for him. That doesn’t leave a lot of marks, so he runs toward his base. He’s also consistent wrt how he courts foreign assets/assistance. When he ran out of marks in NYC, he went global. When he ran out of electoral options, he ran to places like the Ukraine for help.

His only instincts relate to financial leverage and business marketing—not political.

 

To put it in simple terms appropriate for much of his base, he can't count.

 

I went looking for this:



But found this beauty:

 

The guy's brand was -

1) Smart, he's an Ivy League billionaire
2) Shrewd deal maker
3) Outsider who was unpolluted by Washington

Instead, we got the dumbest President ever, who is terrible at making deals, because he doesn't learn the material (which bores him) and because he'd rather insult those on the other side of the bargaining table than do the work of negotiating. And while yes he is an outsider, he's also the most deeply corrupt of all Presidents -- almost (but not quite) too corrupt even to be a politician.

Zero for three.

 

Interesting take:

1189219354690379776 is not a valid tweet id

 

I suspect that is more wishful thinking than data analysis. It would be nice, though.

 

In one of my previous posts, polling shows that the irredeemable support for Trump is down to high 20s/low 30s, and hopefully we will also have a high turnout election, specially on the Dem side.

Damn... that's a lot of unsafe seats for the GOP, even red state senators...

 

The problem is that people have underestimated the timing to get there. Take an R+10 state moving to R+6 in about a 10-12 years. That changes the chance of a Dem victory from maybe 0 to 5% or 10%. The odds don't increase appreciably and it's not really a decisive state part of a strategy. As that state moves from R+6 to R+2, that is a huge difference. Even bigger, R+2 to D+2. That's been the story of VA. And it's basically the same story we're seeing in earlier stages in NC, GA and TX. AZ and FL are a little wonky because they keep adding old retirees to the mix.

Looking at the difference between under 45 and over 65 voters in 2016: the younger groups were 14 pts and 20 pts more Dem than the older groups in MI and PA. The youngers were actually more conservative in states like KY. In NC, TX and GA, the youngers were 33, 35 and 51 pts more Dem. That is a huge generation gap. And we have a pretty good handle on who is dying, so we know where things are headed without a significant realignment over the next 3 cycles.

Same with Evangelicals or any highly partisan subgroup. You can prime the pump to get a bit more from them. In 2016, Trump managed to gin up Born Again turnout and increase their margin. The effect was a 22.5 pt headwind the rest of the electorate had to overcome. In 2012, it was only a 20 pt headwind. So basically, they could offset 2.5 pts of demographic changes. The problem is there is a limit to what you can get from pulling that lever. How realistic is it to assume that Dems can get better than 90-10 from African Americans? Or that the Fed can go to the well and reduce their interest rate enough in a recession when the rate is so close to zero already? It's the same thing with Born Again turnout and the maximum margin you can get from that group of voters. And the problem becomes they can't pull out further stops here without alienating more of the other 3/4ths of the electorate.

So they've been moving toward these types of limits for quite some time, but they haven't reached that critical inflection point where the limits become a problem. It's kind of like debt. It's not a day to day or year to year problem until it hits a point where it is a big ass problem.

The issue here is that some of these things that allow them to increase the Born Again vote are the same thing that is undercutting them on the college vote. So you're going to lose some to gain the other. Things like climate change, immigration issues, abortion, the role of religion in politics. You can soften those things to win back more middle class college ed white voters, but there is at least a partially offsetting cost. And they could toss out the idea of a middle class tax break, but our deficit in an expansion thanks to the Trump tax plan makes this next to impossible. The only real way out in the short term is what you alluded to: Dems overplaying their hand.

And I haven't put that past them. But the one saving grace there is that if the Dems do control the Senate and House, there will be plenty of pols from middle of the road states and districts to claw back some of overreach on these plans. Dems have been much better about allowing members to do their own way than the GOP has.