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ZooeyModeratorIt’s a long article. Here is the tl;dr. Not Hacksized, but edited for length.
…In 2016, the election that truly embarrassed the experts, Bitecofer was teaching in her new job and didn’t put together a forecast. She doesn’t pretend she saw it coming: She says she was as surprised Trump won as anyone else, but what struck her in examining the results, and what she saw as getting lost in the postelection commentary, was exactly how many people voted third party—for the Greens, the Libertarians or Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative who was running on behalf of the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party.
Hillary Clinton had run an entire campaign built around classic assumptions: She was trying to pick off Republicans and Republican-leaning independents appalled by Trump. So she chose a bland white man, Tim Kaine, as a running mate; it also explained her policy-lite messaging and her ads. But in the end, almost all of those voters stuck with the GOP. The voters who voted third party should have been Democratic voters—they were disproportionately young, diverse and college educated—but they were turned off by the divisive Democratic primary, and the Clinton camp made no effort to activate them in the general election.
As she delved further into the data on 2016, Bitecofer noticed something else. As much as the media had harped on the narrative that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, the election also signaled the first time that a majority of college-educated white men had voted for the Democratic Party. There was a long-term-realignment happening in America, and 2016 had accelerated it.
Part of Bitecofer’s job involved polling Virginia, and she saw a Democratic counterwave building there in 2017. She noted to Democrats in the state that they should spend resources in areas that had traditionally been off limits. Had they done so, Bitecofer says, they could have flipped the Legislature that year. (Instead it flipped in 2019.)
When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on fucking fire.”
It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting. From there, the model followed. She put out her forecast for the general election when there were still candidates battling it out in primaries.
Bitecofer’s view of the electorate is driven, in part, by a new way to think about why Americans vote the way they do. She counts as an intellectual mentor Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who popularized the concept of “negative partisanship,” the idea that voters are more motivated to defeat the other side than by any particular policy goals.
…she maintains that actual swing voters are a small percentage of the result, even in counties where the vote swing is as large as Wasserman describes. Don’t talk to people in the bleachers of rallies; check the voter file, she says. “It would be one thing if that county had 100,000 people in it who voted in 2012, and then it was the same 100,000 who voted in 2016, but that is not what is happening,” she says. “The pool of who shows up changes.”
…But still, the results bore out her theory: For Democrats to win, they need to fire up Democratic-minded voters. The Blue Dogs who tried to narrow the difference between themselves and Trump did worse, overall, than the Stacey Abramses and Beto O’Rourkes, whose progressive ideas and inspirational campaigns drove turnout in their own parties and brought them to the cusp of victory.
…But the electorate that elected Donald Trump in 2016 and the electorate that gave Democrats control of the House in 2018 might as well have been from two different countries, Bitecofer says. The first was whiter, had less college education and lived in more rural parts of the country than the second, which was more diverse, better educated and more urban than its counterpart from two years prior. That change had nothing to do with Democrats luring swing voters with savvy messaging, and everything to do with a bunch of people, who were appalled by the president, showing up at the polls, wanting to make their feelings known.
Once you know the shape of the electorate, she argues, you can pretty much tell how that electorate is going to vote. And the shape of the electorate in 2018, and 2020, for that matter, was determined on the night of November 8, 2016. The new electorate, as she forecasts it, is made up mostly of people who want a president named anything but Donald Trump, competing with another group that fears ruin should anyone but Donald Trump be president.
The first group, the Democratic universe of voters, now includes some very strange bedfellows, everyone from former Bush speechwriter David Frum to Susan Sarandon. It includes Al Sharpton and also the chief strategists for both Mitt Romney and John McCain’s failed presidential bids. It is Americans who are college-educated, who are not white or who live in or near a major urban center. This group turned out in force in the 2018 midterms, much the same way Tea Party voters showed up in 2010 to express their unhappiness at Obama. The more candidates talked about Trump and what a threat he was to their way of life, the more partisans were activated.
...Although the ranks of independents are growing, up to 40 percent by some surveys, Bitecofer says campaigns have spent entirely too much time courting them, and the media has spent entirely too much caring about their preferences. The real “swing” doesn’t come from voters who choose between two parties, she argues, but from people who choose to vote, or not (or, if they do vote, vote for a third party). The actual percentage of swing voters in any given national election according to her own analysis is closer to 6 or 7 percent than the 15 or 20 most analysts think are out there, and that larger group, Bitecofer says, are “closet partisans” who don’t identify with a party but still vote with one. (The remaining 6 percent or so of true independents, she says, tend to vote for whoever promises a break with the status quo.)
ZooeyModeratorWonk isn’t the right word. I do think Clinton’s intelligence contrasted with Bush Sr’s perceived muddled speech, and Obama’s intelligence contrasted with Jr’s buffoonery. I’m over-simplifying, and don’t mean to advance this as anything more than a “notion” I’ve had. There was an interesting article I read – yesterday, I think – about a political analyst who argues that policies don’t have anything to do with it, really. It’s about voter turnout. I think the main argument is that there is actually no such thing as swing voters. The idea of appealing to independents is just wrong. People are more motivated to come out and vote AGAINST something, than FOR something. I will see if I can find it.
ZooeyModeratorO Lord. This could make you vomit. Listen to Chris Matthews. Omg.
Bernie “is not happy, not joyous,” but Klobachex “finds a way to care about problems in a positive, empathetic way…”Klobachex is the NYTimes candidate — the new corporate-centrists great hope at this point.
What a corporate-country.
I am pleased to learn that Klobber cares about problems. I wish I had known that before I made up my mind.
ZooeyModeratorBernie Sanders is now the front-runner. And moderates may be too divided to stop him
By Sahil Kapur and Shaquille Brewster
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Victorious in New Hampshire on the heels of a popular-vote win in Iowa, Bernie Sanders has forced the Democratic establishment to reckon with a prospect it has been dismissing: He’s currently the favorite to win the party’s presidential nomination.The independent senator from Vermont has seen his fortunes rise since Iowa, leapfrogging Joe Biden, the struggling former vice president, as the front-runner in two national surveys of Democratic voters — ahead by 8 points in a Quinnipiac University poll and 10 points in a Monmouth University poll. At a jubilant election night party here, he told a cheering crowd that his victory in the state was “the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.”
The prospect was causing waves of anxiety in the Democratic Party.
“A lot of mainstream and moderate Democrats are growing increasingly nervous with the prospect of Bernie Sanders as the nominee,” said Jonathan Kott, a Democratic strategist and a former senior adviser to centrist Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
They have reason to be concerned. Sanders is consolidating self-identified liberal voters while moderate and conservative Democrats are split, attracted in similar numbers to the candidacies of Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and a rising Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire entrepreneur and the former mayor of New York, who is skipping the early states but blitzing the national airwaves in preparation for the crucial Super Tuesday contests on March 3.
The Monmouth poll found Sanders nearly lapping the field with 39 percent among liberals, ahead of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who finished third in Iowa and fourth in New Hampshire. Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Sanders split the support of moderates and conservatives, each one in the teens within a 6-point spread covering the four.
Lee Stempel, an attorney based on Long Island, said he’s torn among Biden, Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the New York primary — but he hopes the middle-of-the-road candidates consolidate behind one alternative in time to stop Sanders.
“I’m not voting for Bernie and I’m not voting for Elizabeth Warren,” Stempel said after attending a Biden event here in Manchester. “The two of them are like the kid that runs for high school president who promises pizza and ice cream every day for lunch and can’t deliver.”
{If I may impose myself into this article at this point, I must say I love this argument. Essentially – and old Lee Stempel is just one of thousands of people making this argument – what he is saying is, “I’m not going to vote for what I want because I can’t get it, so I’m voting for what I don’t want because I WILL get it.” Beyond that…I would like to just mention in passing that our high school cafeteria serves pizza and frozen yoghurt every day}.Nominating Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, would represent a sea change for a party that has spent a quarter-century picking moderates and institutionalists for the White House — from Bill Clinton in 1992 to his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in 2016.{Everyone should take a moment to savor that sentence}.
For the Democratic establishment, Sanders represents discomfort on substance and politics. Many lawmakers in the party prefer to pursue incremental change and are uneasy with his more radical and populist prescriptions for health care and education policy. They also fear that Sanders would alienate affluent and suburban voters who helped them capture the House majority in 2018.
“Congressional and down-ballot candidates will have a difficult time running with him on the ticket while they oppose his core policy positions like ‘Medicare for All,’ his version of a Green New Deal and free-everything government programs,” Kott said, adding that while Democrats agree with the need to address climate change and health care needs, “they disagree with him on the solutions, and you’ll see after tonight that nearly 75 percent of Democrats oppose Bernie’s plans.”
Or as Biden told New Hampshire voters recently: “Donald Trump is desperate to pin the label of ‘socialist’ on our party. We can’t let him do that.” {Cuz remember how being called a socialist destroyed Obama}.
Sanders rejected those concerns in an interview Tuesday before the New Hampshire polls closed, suggesting that Democratic establishment figures are wrong about what “electable” means.
“The world has changed,” Sanders told NBC News. “Now whatever you may say about Trump and — you know, I think he has been a disaster for this country and the most dangerous president in the modern history of America — but whatever you can say about him, he is not conventional. And I think we’re going to need an unconventional campaign to defeat him.”
The Sanders theory of the case is about mobilization. His advisers point to the estimated 100 million Americans who were eligible to cast a ballot in 2016 but sat out the election, arguing that many of them are disaffected voters who believe neither major party represents their interests — and that Sanders is uniquely well positioned to activate them.
“I like his consistency. I like how he stands up for the working class. I’ve got a wife with student debt. I’ve got kids. I’ve got unexpected medical bills. So he speaks to me on that,” said Raphael Fraga of Andover, Massachusetts, who came to see a recent Sanders rally in New Hampshire.
“I think we have the most loyal, die-hard supporters,” Fraga added. “It’s kind of a perfect counterbalance to what Trump did last election.”
Buttigieg, the runner-up in New Hampshire, has an overwhelmingly white base — facing a major obstacle in subsequent states that are more diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire. Despite an impressive Iowa showing, his support among black voters nationally was a mere 4 percent in the Quinnipiac poll, and his support among nonwhite voters was just 8 percent in the Monmouth poll.
In the hours after Iowa, the Sanders campaign openly worried about Buttigieg’s surge to a close finish in that state’s mixed-result caucuses. They shifted their strategy from one that was Biden-focused to one that was Buttigieg-targeted, hitting the former mayor for his high-dollar fundraising.
It helped that Klobuchar, who finished a surprising third place in New Hampshire, spent the closing days before the primary pillorying Buttigieg as a neophyte who lacks the heft for the presidency.
“It sure helped stop his momentum,” one senior Sanders aide said of Buttigieg. He “pulled into a tie late last week, so it was Bernie’s effort on Friday, followed up by the debate and Biden’s ad, and the sustained collective effort versus him over the weekend.”
After decades where the party’s left wing has been forced to play second-fiddle to moderates, some Sanders supporters are thrilled to see the former vice president sinking.
“He is the problem,” Dan Declan of Londonderry, New Hampshire, said. “Not a lot of things make me happy these days. This does make me happy. This brings a little smile to my face.”
ZooeyModeratorI would have to do some homework to support this theory, but it occurred to me a couple of decades ago that voters tend to go for candidates who are strong where the disagreeable predecessor was weakest. You don’t like a Quisling, you vote for a Hawk. Don’t like a dumbshit, you vote for a wonk. A kind of dialectic thing.
The opposite of a wildly erratic, bullshitfest guy is a consistent, no-nonsense guy.
Sanders 2020.
ZooeyModerator
That Rand Paul frame, though.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorHunh. I was unaware anyone cared very much about this. It could be because I didn’t get served a lot of meat as a kid, and was a vegetarian altogether for a few years, but went back a long time ago to eating meat here and there. I don’t care about it very much either way.
When I encounter a vegan, my only thought is that it’s a damned inconvenience at times, but…that’s their problem. Kinda like gluten free. Or nut allergies. I mean…I’m just glad I don’t have to spend energy worrying about what I don’t eat.
ZooeyModeratorI saw only three of those movies, and never heard of most of them. I happened to see Marriage Story on Netflix with my wife one night. It was a forgettable movie, imo. It was okay, I guess, but I never really cared about any of the characters. I thought Dern did a good job, but I thought it was a standard-issue professional performance. I was surprised to see she was even nominated.
I was also surprised to learn it was Pitt’s first Oscar. He’s done some good work, and while I liked his performance in this, I didn’t think that if I was looking at his filmography, I would point to Once Upon a Time and say, “Now THAT was a film where he just nailed it.”
That’s your Hollywood minute from me, the guy who finds himself less and less interested in watching moving pictures the older he gets.
ZooeyModeratorWow. Dore just ran over Carlson a mile a minute and didn’t let him say a thing. A lot of that stuff has to be counter to the message Carlson would like. Wow.
ZooeyModeratorBilly: It’s not that “they” are angry over people getting health care or student debt relief. It’s that they “believe” they will have to pay for it-either in tax increases or in losing their own private doctors and care. It doesn’t matter that they may or may not be right but that is how the Trump machine will force them to look at it-his way. I keep harping back to Kennedy’s innauguration
Throughout this thread, W, you keep wringing your hands over how OTHER people will perceive it.
Take a stance.
And work to make people understand it.
ZooeyModeratorGiven ‘that’ ugly situation, I think Sanders is a prime candidate to lose his life to a Lone Wolf.
February 7, 2020 at 6:38 pm in reply to: the one-shot tweets thread (diff'rent stuff, funny angry interesting) #111066ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorAlso…I will say…W has a point about the difficulty of getting Sanders over the finish line. The DNC will align against him. They already have. And they aren’t going to grudgingly support him, or even stay neutral if he somehow manages to win the nomination outright.
They will try to “McGovern” him. Sanders is a bigger threat to the Clinton/DNC money machine than Donald Trump is, and if Sanders loses, they will take a short term hit, but be able to wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years. I fully expect that.
The only question is whether Sanders can overcome the complete opposition of the system, including the entire MSM, and win anyway. Well…Trump did. So… we will see (if he wins the nomination, that is).
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorWell, W, there are a lot of media outlets building the parallel between Trump supporters and Sanders supporters. But…how are they meaningfully similar?
Trump supporters are being fed a diet of anger and resentment. While I think Sanders was guilty of yelling at the billionaires too much in 2016, he has changed the tone of that rhetoric, and what I read online by Bernie supporters is really a passionate hunger for economic and environmental justice. They are fired up by a drive for inclusiveness, and support for complete strangers. I don’t think that’s comparable to your characterization of Trump supporters “coming down from the hills,” or whatever you said.
And…I think I understand your fear of the vulnerability of a self-avowed socialist. I see that as a Cold War holdover, though. I’m a teacher. I haven’t seen a kid in 20 years say anything about socialism one way or another. To them, it’s about as scary/dangerous as the Boston Tea Party. Nobody under 40 is worried by the term.
Sanders ranks as the #1 most popular senator in the country.
In all the polls, Sanders fares better against Trump than any other candidate.
IMO, all the hand-wringing over Sanders is caused by a widespread nervousness that he is unleashing the kraken. He is organizing the riff raff, and as president, he will openly encourage union membership and growth. That scares everybody. Honestly, I think the fear that Sanders will beat Trump is generally more widespread than the fear he will lose to Trump.
ZooeyModeratorSo all of the left is ablaze in hand-wringing over this, and smelling conspiracies, and so on. I am taking the position that this isn’t that big of a deal. I mean…we shall see how it all comes out whenever they get around to it, but I don’t think this is a conspiracy, and here’s why. There are paper records. There are many, many witnesses. I mean…it’s a CAUCUS. Everybody is out in the open. This isn’t secret ballot. There are multiple eye witnesses in every single precinct to what happened. Right? If they were going to fake this thing, Iowa is NOT the place to do it. You can’t fake these numbers in any way and expect to get away with it. Everybody was THERE, watching it happen in front of their faces. You can’t fake that by one single vote without risk of getting exposed for cheating.
What I think happened is the run-of-the-mill, corrupt bullshit the Dems have become known for. They are all in the business of getting rich, and making their friends rich, and this was a “make our friends rich” scheme by buying a $1.00 App for a million dollars, or whatever it was. And they fucked up the app. So now they have to go through all the paper that they did not plan to go through, and weren’t prepared for. And then they are comparing that to the app, and the Bernie people are there with their results, and the Biden people are there, and the On and On people are all there scrutinizing these numbers, and it’s taking time. And Pete…he’s a kid. He hoped for victory, and he declared it too early, and that’s what happened. Now…I don’t trust the DNC, and we all know they will do everything they can to prevent Sanders from winning…but i don’t think this is a Thing in Iowa.
So now Perez has announced the count is starting over. And the left is all ablaze saying that this is motivated by the desire to keep it under the lid that Sanders won until after the debate tomorrow. I don’t think that’s likely, either. It’s pretty clear that Sanders got the most votes, and he is now declaring that openly anyway. I’m guessing they finally recognized that they have a “perception problem,” and they want to get this thing fucking right. There were a few problems with the numbers, all against Sanders…or so it seems.
Anyway…all this does, in fact, deprive Sanders of a headline. I think everybody is overblowing the importance of the “momentum” coming from that, but whatever.
The other thing it does is bury the bigger story that Biden got clobbered, and is coming out of Iowa empty-handed.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorEnh.
It is a Fail, and it’s embarrassing, but if nothing else happens the rest of the way, it will be forgotten.
ZooeyModeratorMy thoughts:
1. Trump IS formidable, and the election will be close unless the Dems screw up everything somehow with a debacle of some kind in the primaries/convention.
2. The GOP accused Obama of being a socialist. They are going to throw everything they can at the nominee, no matter who it is. And some of those things will be real, and some of them will be made up.
3. The difference, imo, will be voter turnout. And the enthusiasm is deeper and wider for Sanders than for any other candidate. I know he repels a lot of people, and that will cost him some votes. But the early indications are that he will bring in a lot of the Obama voters who sat out 2016, and his popularity among the largest voting block (the youngsters) outstrips every other candidate by a wide margin. And that is a tough group to get to the booth.
4. Trump is going to get all the deplorable ignorants out of their beds, into their trucks, and down from the hills into the voting booths no matter what. We have to outvote them.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorhttps://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=495738147989841
I hope this link works. It’s an ad made by supporters, so it’s not an actual ad.
January 27, 2020 at 8:43 pm in reply to: “You want the government to pay for everyone’s healthcare” #110777ZooeyModeratorThat Frum article is something else.
I awoke to that on my phone this morning, and I read it.
The idea that Sanders – who is hated by every person with political power in this country – has not faced serious inspection is the worst take I’ve read.
But…just 2 hours ago, The Hill published a piece arguing that Sanders is Too Establishment. Seriously. Sanders is part of the Swamp…in addition to being too radical to be Electable.
But back to the Frum piece…that’s what Sanders looks like to people inside the bubble. They just literally cannot see any appeal to a guy who thinks people care about healthcare, education, and working wages. Like…nobody I know is worried about this…WTF?
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorI had no idea the song was from that far back. I heard it for the first time in the 80s when Peter Gunn hit the charts in England.
January 25, 2020 at 12:59 pm in reply to: “You want the government to pay for everyone’s healthcare” #110689ZooeyModeratorI didn’t realize the Rogan thing was such a big deal. I’ve listened to only one Rogan podcast (it was with Graham Hitchcock…really interesting), and I had no idea Rogan is such a Big Deal. Apparently he has a massive, massive audience, and a lot of it is working class Trump territory (UFC fans, etc), and his endorsement is actually kind of a thing.
ZooeyModerator
ZooeyModeratorBut what about older white women or black men or women. Why white older men ?
I speculate that it is because Trump addressed the unique grievances of the older white males. Conservative media has spent 30 years nurturing resentment of PC culture, and Trump pushed those buttons. The PC culture is a questioning of white patriarchy. Older white women to some degree, and black people of both genders, are not as likely to be annoyed by messages of inclusion.
ZooeyModeratorApparently the Times interviewed all the candidates and released the videos (or parts thereof, I dunno).
Here’s a 39 second Bernie bit. Enjoy the body language of the editors.
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