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Thread: Almost As Many Voted Democrat in Midterms as Voted For Trump in 2016

  1. #1

    Almost As Many Voted Democrat in Midterms as Voted For Trump in 2016

    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...e-isnt-enough/

    And midterm turnout is typically lower than in a general election though this was one of the highest midterm voter turnouts.

    There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put 2018 a bit ahead of most other modern wave elections, such as 2006 and 1982. Your mileage may vary.

    In another important respect, however, the 2018 wave was indisputably unlike any other in recent midterm history: It came with exceptionally high turnout. Turnout is currently estimated at 116 million voters, or 49.4 percent of the voting-eligible population. That’s an astounding number; only 83 million people voted in 2014, by contrast.

    This high turnout makes for some rather unusual accomplishments. For instance, Democratic candidates for the House will receive almost as many votes this year as the 63 million that President Trump received in 2016, when he won the Electoral College (but lost the popular vote). As of Tuesday midday, Democratic House candidates had received 58.9 million votes, according to the latest tally by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. However, 1.6 million ballots remain to be counted in California, and those are likely to be extremely Democratic. Other states also have more ballots to count, and they’re often provisional ballots that tend to lean Democratic. In 2016, Democratic candidates for the House added about 4 million votes from this point in the vote count to their final numbers. So this year, an eventual total of anywhere between 60 million and 63 million Democratic votes wouldn’t be too surprising.

    There isn’t really any precedent for the opposition party at the midterm coming so close to the president’s vote total. The closest thing to an exception is 1970, when Democratic candidates for the House got 92 percent of Richard Nixon’s vote total from 1968, when he was elected president with only 43 percent of the vote. Even in wave elections, the opposition party usually comes nowhere near to replicating the president’s vote from two years earlier. In 2010, for instance, Republican candidates received 44.8 million votes for the House — a then-record total for a midterm but far fewer than Barack Obama’s 69.5 million votes in 2008.
    In a predictive sense, what it means is less clear. Sometimes — as was the case in 2006, 1974 and 1930 — midterm waves are followed by turnover in the presidency two years later. But most presidents win re-election, including those who endured rough midterms (such as Obama in 2010, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Ronald Reagan in 1982). Nor is there any obvious relationship between how high turnout was at the midterm and how the incumbent president performed two years later. Democrats’ high turnout in 1970 presaged a landslide loss in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.

    This year’s results do serve as a warning to Trump in one important sense, however: His base alone will not be enough to win a second term. Throughout the stretch run of the 2018 midterm campaign, Trump and Republicans highlighted highly charged partisan issues, from the Central American migrant caravan to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And Republican voters did indeed turn out in very high numbers: GOP candidates for the House received more than 50 million votes, more than the roughly 45 million they got in 2010.

    But it wasn’t enough, or even close to enough. Problem No. 1 is that Republicans lost among swing voters: Independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin, and voters who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 went to Democrats by 13 points.

    Trump and Republicans also have Problem No. 2, however: Their base is smaller than the Democratic one. This isn’t quite as much of a disadvantage as it might seem; the Democratic base is less cohesive and therefore harder to govern. Democratic voters are sometimes less likely to turn out, although that wasn’t a problem this year. And because Republican voters are concentrated in rural, agrarian states, the GOP has a big advantage in the Senate.1

    Nonetheless, it does mean that Republicans can’t win the presidency by turning out their base alone, a strategy that sometimes is available to Democrats. (Obama won re-election in 2012 despite losing independents by 5 points because his base was larger.) In the exit polling era, Republicans have never once had an advantage in party identification among voters in presidential years. George W. Bush’s Republicans were able to fight Democrats to a draw in 2004, when party identification was even, but that was the exception rather than the rule.



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  3. #2
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

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  4. #3
    there was a blue wave
    maybe not a huge one...

  5. #4
    Colored people, women, migrants, illegals and weirdosexuals turned out in force to vote against Trump.

    This is news why?

    But it wasn’t enough, or even close to enough. Problem No. 1 is that Republicans lost among swing voters: Independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin, and voters who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 went to Democrats by 13 points.
    Pffft..."swing voters" and "Independents".

    Those are nothing but democrats too lazy to sign up.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    Colored people, women, migrants, illegals and weirdosexuals turned out in force to vote against Trump.

    This is news why?



    Pffft..."swing voters" and "Independents".

    Those are nothing but democrats too lazy to sign up.
    You can't win an election if you lose the middle. Blame it on whatever you want but registered Republicans are only a third of all voters.

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    You can't win an election if you lose the middle. Blame it on whatever you want but registered Republicans are only a third of all voters.
    You can't win an election appealing to reason, logic, liberty and high ideals.

    You win elections, or at least more votes (understanding that until the changes being demanded by the Bolshevik left get put in place, results are not purely democratic in the US) by pandering to grievance and identity groups.

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Anti Federalist View Post
    You can't win an election appealing to reason, logic, liberty and high ideals.

    You win elections, or at least more votes (understanding that until the changes being demanded by the Bolshevik left get put in place, results are not purely democratic in the US) by pandering to grievance and identity groups.
    True. Fear sells much easier than facts. Terrorists. Mooslims. Ferrieners. Socialists. Communists. The other party. "Vote for them and you may DIE!"

  9. #8
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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Zippyjuan View Post
    True. Fear sells much easier than facts. Terrorists. Mooslims. Ferrieners. Socialists. Communists. The other party. "Vote for them and you may DIE!"
    So the questions I have are these:

    All those "fears" you listed, are all directed at "scaring" what's left of the white middle class.

    Yet middle class whites routinely vote in directions in opposition to, what would appear anyway, the policies that would allay those fears.

    So obviously, the fear campaign doesn't necessarily work all that well. (Unless perhaps they are just more afraid of being accused of being an "-ist" or harboring an "-ism" than of being invaded)

    So what fears do you think the leftists are using to motivate the grievance mob groups?

    Old fat white guys in golf pants are coming to take yer jerbs, and oppress you?

    Or perhaps is it simply because they appeal to the identity groups to vote their identity (along with the universal appeal of free $#@! paid for by stealing from your neighbors)?
    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 11-26-2018 at 02:44 PM.



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