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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Yeah, I don't know if Republicans are gonna abandon Trump like they abandoned Bush Jr. anymore. I think Trump has replaced Reagan as the new Idol of the party.
At least that's a positive to us; Republicans effectively abandon the Suburbs with Trump's terrible positions and offensive personality. But we're also gonna have to deal with a horrendous Cult of Personality.
That won't go away soon. Even if Trumnp is found guilty and is imprisoned there WILL be people saying it was all a set up and fixed trials. In Korea there still are people supporting park geun-hye even after she is in jail. I see same thing happening with Trump supporters.
Edited by doctor05 on Nov 1st 2020 at 7:02:53 AM
It’s amazing how stable - and bad - Trump’s approval ratings have been over the last four years and the whole election.
He’s never, at any point, had the support of a majority or even plurality of Americans. (There is no other president, since the start of polling, of whom this can be said.) On top of losing the popular vote in 2016 with 46%, his approval rating has remained below 46% for the entirety of his time in office (he hasn’t notably lost support either - it’s stayed between 40% and 45%), and Biden’s been ahead in the popular vote through the whole campaign.
This makes it very hard for me to believe that, in the event of higher-than-normal turnout, the additional votes would somehow be a groundswell of Trump support, because all indications are that he never expanded his support base beyond what he had in 2016. I have to think that high turnout is a good sign for Biden, even above and beyond that generally being the case for Democrats.
(Interesting historical fact - the absolute converse, of a president having majority approval for his entire time in office, has happened once: with JFK. Eisenhower was very close to the same, with a couple very brief dips below 50%, through his entire eight years.)
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:14:35 AM
Beyond Democrats being really pumped (as was also the case in 2018) Biden has also apparently managed to skim away some of Trump's support from suburban white women, white Catholics, and I think some working-class white people.
So that helps, last time he won because last minute undecided voters mostly swung his way, but that doesn't seem to be happening this go around.
It’s partly happening - Trump fell to a low of 41.9% after the first debate and catching COVID, but has since recovered to a more usual level, for him, of 43.4%. This is why Biden’s lead has narrowed by about 2 points, from its peak of 10.7 after the first debate + COVID to about 8.5 now. Some “undecideds” are standard Trump supporters who are looking for any excuse to vote for him; they briefly wavered, but reverted to form. He may gain a few more of those in the next couple days.
But the debate + COVID had the effect of increasing Biden’s support from 50% to 52%, and that has been stable so far.
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:20:36 AM
You can believe that a pile of undecideds broke for Trump at the last minute in 2016, or you can believe that at least some of them always leaned towards Trump and weren’t admitting it.
There is no evidence of the existence of Trump supporters who tell pollsters they’re voting for his opponent.
The interesting thing with the national polls for the last little while is that they seem to have diverged into two groups - those who think Biden is up by about 5-8 points, and those who think he’s up by double-digits. No matter how things go on election day, some pollsters are going to have wide misses (which is why an average like 538’s is so valuable).
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:30:01 AM
There is an article from AP News
and an older one from ProPublica
about the history of sundown towns ("places that, via policy, violence or both, barred black people from town after dark") in the US.
These towns were an open secret of racial segregation that spilled over much of the nation for at least a century, and still exist in various forms, enforced today more by tradition and fear than by rules.
Across America, some of these towns are now openly wrestling with their histories, publicly acknowledging now-abandoned racist laws or holding racial justice protests. Some old sundown towns are now integrated. But many also still have tiny Black communities living alongside residents who don't bother hiding their cold stares of disapproval.
They were called "grey towns," in some parts of America, "sunset towns" in others. The terms were used by both Black and white people.
Very often, especially in well-to-do suburbs that didn't want to be known as racist, they had no name at all. But they still kept out Black residents. There were hundreds of such towns, scholars say, reaching from New York to Oregon. Perhaps thousands.
James Loewen, a historian who spent years studying sundown towns, found them in the suburbs of Detroit, New York City and Chicago. He found them outside Los Angeles, in midwestern farming villages and in New England summer towns.
Sometimes, the rules were official policies, with signs at the edge of towns warning Black people to be gone by nightfall. More often, everyone - both Black and white - simply knew the unwritten rules.
In this area, near the borders of both Missouri and Kentucky, young Black people were raised to be aware of which towns they should avoid.
"It was something that was known," said James Davis, 27, a Black truck driver from the nearby town of Cairo, which is largely Black. "But also something that our parents taught us growing up."
In places still seen as sundown towns, many Black people now follow their own rules: Avoid them if possible, and lock your car doors if you have to drive through. If you stop for gas, look for a well-lit gas station with security cameras.
The article follows one such town in Illinois, Vienna, with the purpose of "tak[ing] a close look at systemic racism, trying to understand how something that is so crushingly obvious to some people can be utterly invisible to others." For example, from one such resident of Vienna:
I feel like no one is talking about independents when they talk about early voting. They're just saying more Democrats have voted than Republicans.
I'm an independent and voted early, so is my family, and they're not talking about how we voted. I wonder if they're underestimating independents right now.
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” - Lewis CarrollI remember hearing about Sundown Towns from a podcast about serial killer Dean Corll (not a misspell), though in that case it wasn't anything directly related to his crimes, just a bit of context for the time/place he was in, so they didn't go into much detail.
Regardless of how Independents vote, it's still true that Democrates are still early voting more than Republicans. Plus is there a way to know how Independents voted (in terms of D or R) until after the election?
Edited by sgamer82 on Nov 1st 2020 at 7:36:41 AM
This is not true. There was a brief period — about two weeks — at the very start of his presidency where his approval rating was higher than his disapproval rating, which would be a plurality of support if not a majority. This seems to largely have been people who were expecting him to grow into the position — to settle down and start acting presidential now that he was in the Oval Office — and were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until then.
People realized very quickly that this wasn't true, and his net approval has been negative ever since. Outside of those first few months, we haven't seen Trump's approval go above 45% or disapproval dip below 50% except for a very brief spike in March this year, which seems to have been a reaction to coronavirus where people didn't think it was that bad and credited Trump for it. But that was just for a few weeks and his approval rating dropped again when people realized just how disastrous his non-response actually was.
Edited by NativeJovian on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:36:47 AM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.![]()
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It's more that one side is basically the second coming of the Nazis and the other is the Democrats. Many DO NOT want to be labeled as an Independent this year, that's practically signalling you're partially okay with the things the Republicans did the past 4 years.
Edited by ScubaWolf on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:37:03 AM
"In a move surprising absolutely no one"Yeah, independents are the reason you can’t project the actual vote clearly from the early vote statistics. In Arizona and Florida early votes, Biden’s only up by a couple percentage points in terms of party affiliation, but if 60% of independents go for him (many polls are showing him winning independents by large margins), that could make the difference.
For the early votes where we have party affiliation data (only 45 million out of 93 million votes so far, since not all parties collect that data from voters), it’s 45.6% Democrats, 30.3% Republicans, and 23.4% independents. But that kind of data is frankly useless on that scale - it’s only when you look at i5 by state that you might be able to dig out some relevant information, and even then it’s iffy because you don’t know how the independents voted.
Nate Silver keeps pointing out that looking at polls is more reliable than trying to make predictions based on the early votes.
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:43:24 AM
Also voter registration is not necessarily indicative of the partisan lean of the actual voters. I've heard pundits describe it as a trailing indicator, as people often vote for another party for some time before changing their registration. So some counties have many more registered Democrats, 'ancestral Democrats', but they actually vote for Republicans.
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The only reason why I'm registered as independent is that I don't want to be affiliated with either party. I'm not really one who gets into the whole party ideology. I have my own views. I also live in a state that has a Republican governor who is very moderate and despises Trump, so I know of at least one Republican who has morals.
The great thing about Massachusetts is that we know how to work together.
Edited by Scarecrow4774 on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:41:35 AM
“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” - Lewis CarrollDo you need to pay to be a party member in the US?
(In Canada, you do. I need to donate at least about $10/yr to remain a member of my party. You join a party by signing up with then, e.g. on their website; you don’t register with Elections Canada as a party member.)
Edited by Galadriel on Nov 1st 2020 at 10:45:46 AM
Yeah, I don't know if Republicans are gonna abandon Trump like they abandoned Bush Jr. anymore. I think Trump has replaced Reagan as the new Idol of the party.
I think you're completely right. The problem is that the Conservatives have become deeply irrational in a particularly conspiratorial way.
This is a problem because normally the way a party moves away from past leaders is when they recognize that those leaders caused a backlash amongst the public which lead to their defeat. But the Republicans? They can't do that because their ideology actively stops them from recognizing any defeat as legitimate. They will see Biden's hypothetical Tuesday victory as a sign that the Deep State Pedophile Marxist Illegals are in place to seize the state. Which will only be strengthened if Dems get the opportunity to implement electoral reform which reduces the GOP's illegitimate power.
There is no credible path forward for the Republican Party as it is now to reform itself, anyone who tries will get primaried.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang~Galadriel No, in the US you're basically a part of whatever party you say you are. There's no penalty for joining and doing nothing else, nor joining and voting for another party later.
I think the cult variant of Sunk Cost Fallacy can probably be applied here, too. To admit the GOP has failed by falling to Trump means that all that time, money, and effort spent supporting Trump's GOP was a waste. It becomes less shameful to double-down.
Edited by sgamer82 on Nov 1st 2020 at 7:54:35 AM
I'm an independent, who may as well be a Democrat in practice because they fit my progressive sensibilities better, but who has no particular allegiance to the party or its elites. I'd gladly vote for a Republican who has a record of competence and who has established themselves to not be excessive authoritarianism (so, a RINO) over a Democrat I'm less certain about or who has other aspects I dislike.
The only reason I registered as a Democrat this cycle is because I wanted Warren/Sanders and my state's primaries are closed. Not that it really mattered anyway since Bernie already dropped out by then.
Yeh US parties don’t work like they do in other countries, you can’t be expelled, the government runs some internal party elections (primaries) and there’s no membership fee.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe main problem with the GOP trying to pivot away from Trump is that they and the right-wing media apparatus like fox news have conditioned their base to move in an increasingly extreme and anti-intellectual direction.
This is the same party that literally thinks that fact-checking is a form of censorship
and critical thinking doesn't have a place in schools
. When combined with Fox News and the rest of the media apparatus stoking white resentment and seething contempt for anything that isn't hard-right politics, it's no surprise their viewers would become radicalized to such an absurd degree that things like baseless conspiracy theories start to gain traction.
The GOP politicians might even want to pivot away from Trump, however I'm not convinced their base will allow them to do that.

hmmm and according to polls Biden leads in all Northeastern States INCLUDING contested Pennsylvania. Hopefully that's a good sign.