The Game of Demographics 2020 Season

What has trump and the Republicans so terrified about 2020 to where they are threatening to disqualify entire ballots across battleground states?

Because it still all comes down to the Electoral College, and too many large-sized battleground states are basically toss-ups in the polling. Especially the large-sized states that leaned Red for the last 20-40 years.

It's telling that for 2020, the biggest states that went for trump - Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina - are either reliably Blue for Biden now or technically within margin of error (say, 3 percent) of going either way. There are good chances that Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan are going for Biden. Pennsylvania could go Blue but there are signs it's one of the states trump is trying to trash hundreds of thousands of ballots. The polling on Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida keep fluctuating. 

Also, trump's attempts to flip Minnesota do not seem to be going anywhere at the moment (Biden has a +10 lead on trump as of 9/24).

If we just count the states with double-digit Electoral Votes, and only count the ones we pretty much know are going for Biden or for trump, the map looks like this:

It used to be that the Republicans - the party of conservatism - had claimed Texas as theirs since the 1980s, along with strong holds on North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida all as part of their grand Southern Strategy. That was also true of Ohio and Arizona, both as part of Ohio as a centerpiece of traditional Republican origins and Arizona as part of the western conservative movement that held sway in California.

But a lot had been changing, especially by 2008 when it became clear that a demographic shift was happening, coinciding with a collapse in Republican dominance due to mismanagement, corruption, and foolishness under the Dubya regime. Florida, due to its ethnic and economic diversity, was no longer reliably Republican at the national level (going for Clinton twice in the 90s and for Obama twice in the 2010s). Virginia's cultural conservatism lost its grip and the state is pretty much Democratic Blue since 2010, and that shift is starting to drift into North Carolina.

What's shocking is the shift in voter turnout in once-reliably Red states like Texas, Arizona, and Georgia. These were cornerstones of Republican dominance, and yet they're now close enough to flipping Blue that Democrats are noticeably campaigning in them where they once avoided wasting any previous efforts in them.

For all the gerrymandering, voter suppression, and gamesmanship, the Republicans are losing to a generational shift away from Boomers (aging Far Right who are dying out) and Gen Xers (half -divided between Reagan worshipping believers to jaded Dem centrists) to Millennials and Aughts (rising in age to vote, and vote more aggressively than Gen X) who are more Progressive, burned out by failed Republican agendas (more of them are poor and in debt in larger numbers than previous generations at their age, and a lot of that due to Republican policies), and ethnically-mixed.

Also in the mix is the unintended consequences of California's housing crisis of the last ten years: where California had become a jobs Mecca drawing many young adults (mostly liberal-leaning) to the state in the 1990s and 2000s, the insane cost-of-living and overvalued house properties - mostly due to the conservative Prop 13's tax-limiting requirements to keep values overinflated - have driven Cali residents elsewhere... to places like Arizona and Texas. And those ex-Californians did not shift their political views when they moved, meaning they are shifting those states further Left than ever before.

Losing Texas in the Electoral College at the least would be catastrophic for Republicans: Where Democrats can rely on California, New York and Illinois to provide a foundation for Electoral success, Texas was the big one for the GOP. Florida may be almost as big on the counts, but unreliable. Ohio had been that way for both Obama elections. The next largest populated state that Republicans could rely on when (not if) Texas goes Blue would be Tennessee at 11 Electoral Votes. Just look at the battleground map above: If Texas can't be counted on, Republicans are starting with a guaranteed 32 EV compared to Democrats' 174. And there aren't enough small state Electoral Votes to catch up.

Combined with the noted shift in suburban voting habits, states like Florida and Ohio and Texas and Georgia and North Carolina - where most of their largest metros are suburban landscapes - are now honestly up for grabs for the Democrats to win or lose, not the Republicans. Granted, the Republicans can try again to gerrymander those states even more to retain control of their state legislatures and congressional delegations, but they are running out of room and running out of time.

This was a demographic shift expected to kick in by 2040 at the latest, 2028 by the earliest (I had hoped in 2016 that it was sooner than that, ah well). trump's toxicity with suburban families (women in particular) is accelerating the shift.

This explains the openness of trump's war against the voting methods like mail-in balloting, and his blatant call to dismiss ballots and delegitimize the results in the battleground states. This is desperation, not just for him but for the Republican Party as a whole. They can't solidify the corruption of their minority rule without a second trump term to complete the destruction of federal norms.

This is why it's so important for Democratic voter turnout in the states, especially the battleground states. Everything is at stake this 2020 cycle. The fate of state legislatures, Senate seats, census-based redistricting, everything.

Republicans may have the money and the guns, but Democrats have the numbers. And the future. They can win the future this November.

Ladies, Time to Represent

I've been saying for some time that women's votes are pretty important to win as a demographic.

I'm not the only one now.

From The Daily Beast:

The post-debate explosion of nasty proves that that Trump still doesn’t understand that this election isn’t a golf outing with a group of guffawing yes-men, and that women are finally facing the full extent of their electoral power.

Voting is one of the few arenas where the approval of men like Donald Trump doesn’t matter a lick. A voting machine cannot tell the gender of the voter and count it for only 77 percent as much as the vote of a man. A voting machine can’t pass over a female vote in favor of a younger male vote that reminds it of itself at that age. A voting machine can’t throw out the vote of a woman if she refuses its sexual advances. It won’t tell a female voter that she’s a New York City 6 but a Chicago 8. A voting machine doesn’t grope.

Women make up over 50 percent of the voting population in the U.S., and on November 8, any of them can imagine canceling out the vote of any man they’d like as they fill out their ballots. Donald Trump can’t insult them into submission.

From The Week:

It was inevitable that Chris Wallace would bring up the fact that in the last couple of weeks around a dozen women have charged that Donald Trump kissed them, groped them, or watched them undress (the latter in the case of pageant contestants, including at the Miss Teen USA pageant) against their will. So you might have thought that even an operation as obviously incompetent as the Trump campaign would have managed to prepare him for the question with a good response, one that didn't just discredit those charges but also made an attempt to reassure women voters with something more persuasive than his oft-repeated "Nobody has more respect for women than I do."

But he didn't have anything better prepared. Instead, he claimed that their stories have been "debunked" (not remotely true), and said, "I didn't even apologize to my wife, who's sitting right here, because I didn't do anything." It was enough to make you think that he has no idea how that sounds to women voters, like a man who tells them that what he did wrong is actually their fault.

What's most remarkable is that Trump either has no idea that he's bleeding women voters and can't win without them, or he thinks that what he's doing will actually win them back. How else to explain how he acted in Wednesday's debate?

From ABC News:

An ABC News poll released Sunday, and conducted in the days following Wednesday's debate, gave Clinton a 55 percent-35 percent lead over Trump among women. Among college-educated white women, the gap was 62 percent to 30 percent. Likely voters, by a margin of 69 percent to 24 percent, disapproved of Trump's response to questions about his treatment of women. In a Quinnipiac University poll conducted before that debate, Clinton led Trump among women by 52 percent to 37 percent.

Also, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released a few days before the debate showed women favoring Clinton over Trump by 55 percent to 35 percent.

The punditry early on talked a lot about the minority votes that the Republicans were kicking away by boosting an openly racist campaign that Trump ran from his first speech in 2015. While making it so that the Republicans could never regain the Black voting bloc they lost by 2008-2012, and while making it so that the Latino and Asian voting blocs turned away from the GOP in nearly the same percentages as the Black vote, nobody really commented on how sexist Trump was in a way that showed his greatest weakness. I think Nate Silver and his crew at 538 were the only ones who paid serious attention to it.

But I've said it before: Women during most election cycles are the largest voting bloc out there when you set them up as a singular demographic.

And Republicans as a party seem to keep going out of their way to drive women voters away, which gets to be a short-sighted gameplan if you're trying to win popular votes:

The Republicans have been campaigning since 2000 on a short-term agenda of pandering to White voters in general, and they're still going full-storm following that track despite calls from within that they really need to start attracting more diverse groups.  But how far are the Republicans going to get if their platform becomes so anti-woman that the treasured White Vote base gets splintered by gender and White women flee in droves to a more open-minded Democratic candidate?  Are there going to be enough Men voters willing to shift to the Republicans on such a harsh anti-abortion platform?  It's unlikely, because not enough men really think that way.

What Trump is saying about women in general is sexist and tends towards abuse and sheer cluelessness.  But he's not doing this in a vacuum: given the Republican Party's recent history of dismissing women's issues - and given the current attacks against birth control, women's health, and access to abortion - the GOP seems convinced they can win without women as much as they can win without Hispanics or Blacks or college students or lower-income families or pretty much anybody who are not Angry White Males over 50...

There's one other thing to note about alienating women voters: Those vaunted Republican gerrymanders aren't safe from gender votes. They only designed those "safe" Congressional districts based mostly on ethnicity and division of large (urban) population centers. They can't gerrymander against women because they don't live in segregated neighborhoods: Women live everywhere.

And women have experiences. And women have long memories.

And women vote.

I really hope this blows up every Republican safe district and Senate-held seat, that every conceivable competitive spot on the ballot flips to Democrat due to women voters.

Goin' to California With an Aching In My Trump

So in one of those developing stories where it comes out that someone you oppose politically does something reckless/foolish/both, there's this to say about Trump's apparent plan to campaign heavily in Blue (aka Solid Democrats) states this election cycle:

Dafuq?

Or, to quote from Gary Legum at Salon.com:

...California is too big, too Blue, and the state’s Republican Party has all the heft and impact of a Whiffle ball. The state hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since George H.W. Bush in 1988. It has a large Latino population, a group with which he polls very badly thanks to his outright racism. No polling operation that I can find has it on a list of potential toss-ups...

Lemme put it to you this way:

California's so Blue that when you drive past the Nevada/Cali border your radio starts playing the entire catalog of Atlantic Records' R&B artists.

California's so Blue the Blue Man Group can't perform there because they could blend into the background and never be seen again.

California's so Blue they have to dye the wines to their proper red color.

California's so Blue they haven't had a Republican win the Presidential campaign there since 1988.

And yet, a little like Legum notes in his first paragraph in the above article, there's something about this madness that you can't immediately dismiss...

To Legum, it's that Trump wasting his time in California would force Hillary to spend more time and effort in that state than she'd normally would: nowadays all serious campaigning up to Election Day are in the battleground states (which is why as a Florida resident I am going to need to stop watching television ads RIGHT NOW). Legum still realizes it's a "terrible strategy" because it also means Trump is wasting time and effort away from those same battleground states (while thinking it'd be a good move for Hillary because Trump can't afford to waste anything).

In my mind, however, I can't avoid the idea of this making sense because I'm one of those hapless True Believers in the American system of representative government. I'm thinking it's a good idea - and a terrible one - because I'm one of those who believe EVERY district - and every state - should be fought over, contested, brought into the arguments so that the value of those districts/states be validated rather than ignored.

I want all fifty states in the debate. I'm not a fan of the calculated "Battleground State" campaigns despite their effectiveness. Part of me wants Democrats challenging every inch of Red states like Texas and Georgia and Arizona and Montana and Kansas, just on the chance of winning over voters, winning enough voters to make Republicans NOT take those states for granted.

So to be fair, I've got no qualms about Republicans challenging every inch of Blue states like California and Massachusetts and Illinois and maybe Delaware... and for the same reason of making Democrats respond to keep "their" safe states on their side.

Just campaigning in Florida and Ohio and North Carolina and Virginia and Pennsylvania and Nevada - toss-up states with enough Electoral votes to make them necessary - seems a bit underwhelming to me.

I can see Trump making this kind of argument: That letting an Electorally-rich state like California - 55 electors, the most of any state - go straight to the Dems unchallenged is no way to break the electoral strangehold the Democrats have on the College right now. At some point, the Republicans have to make a play against the polarizing demographics within key states and balance the score.

While that is a valid argument to make, Trump is NOT the candidate to be making it. He's a walking disaster of demographic demonization, unable to stop himself from insulting entire voting blocs for longer than three days. There may be a need by the Republicans to campaign in ethnically diverse states like California and Florida to win over ALL possible voters, but Trump is NOT the guy to rely on getting that job done.

This isn't even the right party to make such a move: the Republican Party has been so antagonistic towards minorities and women and college-age voters for over three decades that any attempt now to woo any of those blocs back to them is a fool's errand. If the Republicans want to campaign and win in Cali, they're going to have to sincerely re-invent themselves to more moderate, reformer stances on immigration, education, and wages.

Trump's plan to campaign in California looks both foolish and wise at the same time. There is wisdom in recognizing that the GOP needs to start fighting back to win the states they need to stay in political power at the national level. But it's extreme foolishness on Trump's part to think he's the one who can pull it off.

Certainly there's a layer of full-bore bullheaded ignorance on Trump's part thinking he can "win" anywhere he wants to. He can't.

Just look at the current polling in select Blue states - California especially, then Illinois, and New Jersey where Trump also wants to compete - and you'll see Trump is very unlikely to win any of those voters over to his side, not without him performing radical surgery on his personality into someone who's not a complete less of an asshole.

Trump's losing Kansas: Granted, it's not a major electoral state, but the psychological impact of a key Republican stronghold falling this early to Clinton cannot be overlooked. Can he afford to ignore the Red states that are now toss-ups?

Trump can lose Arizona: once a conservative wingnut safe state, all because his anti-immigrant stance is stirring up the state's Hispanic voters something fierce.

Trump's not guaranteed to flip Florida, which is honestly a toss-up state but where Hillary regularly polls a winner.

And yet Trump thinks he can win in California: a hotbed of liberal tree-hugging socialist San Francisco-Hollywood hippiedom.

Yeah, good luck with that whole "mashing your head with a solid gold Trump doorknob" idea, guys.

There's Only So Much You Can Do With a Map: It's All About Voter Turnout

So you know I like messing with Presidential Electoral map generators.

270towin.com is kind of fun, but it's limited in that you make your own guesses as to which states are going to go for your candidate over the other one. It may be satisfying to have Hillary stomp the hell out of Trump in 47 out of 50 states (plus DC), but there's little actual evidence - unless you're Nate Silver and you have all the true numbers - to back you up.

I like how RealClearPolitics went and created their own generator based on the 2012 voter turnout. As you mess with the number variables on two columns - one for voter turnout favoring Republicans, the second for overall voter turnout - you get a better sense of how certain states are demographically aligned Red or Blue by four established blocs (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian), and a better idea of how voter turnout and support will actually create possible results.

Granted, it's still not accurate to predict for 2016 - demographic have changed over the last four years, and there are new variables each election cycle - but it's better than just your own guessing.

So it all comes down to how the numbers actually play out this election cycle.

One thing I've learned messing with the demographic calculator to that map is that while having Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all solidly line up in favor of Democrats is a good thing, any discernible changes in BOTH their support for Republicans and overall turnout doesn't swing any states. It's a combination of two factors: most minority voters are either residing in heavily Blue states or else are so alienated against the Republicans that there's little chance they can flip states one way or another.

Bumping up Black voters alone to favor Republicans doesn't really flip any states until getting to 12 percent for the GOP, and that's with Florida. And there's little sign the Republicans are going to do THAT well with Blacks considering the GOP's voter suppression efforts and other policy beliefs openly affect Blacks.

Florida flips to Republican if the Hispanic vote favoring Republicans go up to 32 percent nationwide support. Considering the anti-immigration stance of the GOP - Trump's horrifying stances are bad enough, but Cruz will be just as oppressive as a candidate - there's no way Hispanic support goes that high (most polling is showing Hispanic support dropping).

Asian voting population numbers are the smallest of the four blocs, as such any noticeable shift in Republican approval AND disapproval is meager at best. All that happens if they favor the GOP is that Blue states turn lighter and Red states stay almost the same color (I think Texas darkened Red a bit) up until the support gets to 50 percent, at which point Florida flips Red (damn, Florida, you're on the razor's edge here).

Things may flip quicker if all three minority groups do start favoring Republicans more, along with growing overall turnout, but neither factor is realistic to contemplate. We're facing an election cycle in which Republicans have pretty much alienated every voting bloc - Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Muslims, Women, Youth/College - outside of the Uneducated White Male category.

What I'm finding going by RCP's Map Generator is that the real difference-maker is the White voting bloc. Where shifting the minority blocs gives you plus or minus half-percentages, shifting the White voter approval for the Republicans can get you a full percent shift, and states change their colors real quick.

If all other things remain as they were in 2012, if Republicans bump up White voter support from 60 percent to 64 percent, they flip the Electoral College to their favor (this is 4 percent to flipping Black voters up 6 percent to 12). That may sound simple enough... except the current polling is showing White voter support for Republicans dropping, likely due to the fact that White WOMEN voters are turning against the GOP.

And that's IF you keep voter turnout as they were in 2012. The odds of that - due to depressed voter turnout thanks to unpopular candidates AND that aggressive GOP voter suppression effort - for 2016 are unlikely: Overall voter turnout is expected to drop this year. The question is by how much.

Ironically enough, the voter suppression effort against minority voters can become meaningless. I can drop the voter turnouts for all Non-White blocs down to 40 percent and STILL the Republicans will lose the Electoral count. That is if White voting numbers stay static: if turnout goes up or GOP support goes up, then the Electoral shift happens differently. But THAT requires White turnout going up around 70 percent while dropping Black voters to 42 percent and Hispanics/Asians both to 40 percent. The impossible factor there is getting the White vote count up: there is no way they can get to 70 percent turnout like that, and still retain 60 percent Republican support...

The Republicans are going to have to deny the Black voters down like crazy to flip the Electoral College in any way. Considering Black voters turned out at 66 percent (best among the four groups), forcing that huge a drop into the low 40s is unlikely: Republicans can't suppress the Black voters in Blue states for one thing, and they can't deny that many insistent voters when the time comes in November. If Black voter turnout drops under 50 percent, it's a clear sign of voter suppression, and no-one outside of the hater groups will ever accept that result.

It'd have to be a combination of both voter suppression efforts AND getting minority to show up in favor of Republicans. But that's a paradox: if Republicans - and they're the ones doing this, so none of that Both Sides crap - suppress the vote, there's no way they are appealing to minority voters to turn against their own interests.

What will hurt is the White voter turnout for Republicans: having built an entire Presidential electoral campaign around courting just that voting bloc is now due to blow up in the GOP's collective face.

There's been the gradual demographic loss of White voters as a percentage of the national population for one thing: there's the fact that Whites are not a uniform voting bloc the way Blacks are (and how Hispanic voters can become a solid bloc in the face of a massive anti-Hispanic outburst by the Far Right). There's a surprising number of White voters who are Democratic at heart and Liberal by belief: there is a ceiling where the Republicans cannot appeal strongly enough to get the White votes they need.

And making their appeals more Far Right than ever - trying to keep their base happy and eager to vote - ensures more moderate/centrist voters among Whites turn away as well. It's a Lose-Lose situation for the GOP: Republicans can't gain enough minority voters to overcome the Electoral numbers, and they can't afford to lose White voters the way they are this election cycle.

And when that is all said and done, the RCP generator still proves one point:

It all comes down to voter turnout, as always.

The only REAL way Republicans can win the Presidency - any election for that matter - is if Democrats and Left-leaning voters refuse to show up. Even the act of showing up fights the voter suppression effort because there's only so many voters the Far Right can try to stop.

Get the damn vote out, America.