Trump has tremendous charisma. You don't see it because you aren't a piece of shit.
Maybe you're right.
I've been thinking that charisma is something he had but lost as he descended into incoherency. That he transitioned from charisma to straight up fear-mongering over the past four years.
Actual human beings favored Trump's opponent in 2016 and 2020 by roughly the same margin. Between those elections, Trump demonstrated massive unsuitability for office by any conventional standard.
Maybe you don't want to call it "charisma," but Trump's success as a politician, such as it is, is entirely a result of him selling his persona. Lots of people like arrogant, no-responsibility-for-anything bullshit.
My thought is that he can make the conversation about what he wants to make it about.
There's none of the phenomenon that voters like progressive policies, but not progressive candidates.
Weren't there a bunch of cases this time around where progressive referenda passed with much higher margins than the Democratic candidates--or even the Republicans won? It seems like there are people who like progressive ideas and will vote for them individually, but find the Democrats toxic.
I think Trump's charisma is what gets him past what McCain got. Wholly. IMO, a whole lot of people voted Republican who don't have the least interest in Republican policy. Trumpismo isn't just about Trump the man, though. It's also about not having to take orders from women, people of color, or anyone who would listen to women or people of color.
Which, in the parlance of interviewed Trump voters, is known as "socialism."
If Trump had followed through on his 2016 hints, and offered a health plan that covered everyone and everything, his cult would be all in favor of it. If he proposed an infrastructure plan on the scale of the WPA, they'd call him the savior of the forgotten man. These folks couldn't offer a single coherent thought on the difference between socialism and anarchism.
5 No one thinks Steve Bullock is toxic. He's just not on Team Manliness, but instead was going to do whatever that AOC says, up to and including taking everyone's guns away.
I don't remember whether I've shared this particular theory here yet, but I think a not insubstantial number of votes the Republicans got here -- and, I suppose in other rural areas (and maybe south Florida?) is a direct consequence of getting rid of ballot secrecy. Not in general, but within a family group. Many fewer wives off-setting their husband's vote when they're filling out the ballots together. Youth turnout was way up and, apparently, way Republican in other parts of the state, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a lot of this too. Along with Covid policy, where a lot of youth are definitely on Team Stop Telling Us We Can't Have Fun.
6- I remember the story about 2016 being that Trump got less than McCain got. He's supposed to have gotten more this time. Last I heard it was more Black and Latino votes. Toxic Masculinity anyone?
I have really wondered about the effects of vote by mail not being secret. This election, it was necessary for pandemic reasons, but it gives me the willies a little in general.
Along with Covid policy, where a lot of youth are definitely on Team Stop Telling Us We Can't Have Fun.
I think this was huge. It turns out there is a huge pro-Covid vote out there and Trump mobilized the hell out of it. People say Covid-19 hurt Trump's chances for re-election, but I think its the opposite.
7: This is my only real concern about mail-in balloting. The system itself is pretty secure but I cannot imagine if I'd been at home in PA with mail-in balloting that I wouldn't have had my dad looming around while I tried to vote. And the Intermountain West is exactly where I'd expect that dynamic to be prominent.
5: And then there's California, which is apparently the opposite. Complacency-palooza, at least among people like me.
If you all think the pandemic helped Trump, what specifically accounts for his defeat?
The instance of 5 I'm aware of is Florida's $15/hr minimum wage, which passed with 60% of the vote. I don't know enough about Florida to suss out who would be the 15 percent or so who voted for Trump, their favorite Republican House candidate, and that amendment.
Along with Covid policy, where a lot of youth are definitely on Team Stop Telling Us We Can't Have Fun.
A lot of it is Team Stop Telling Us We Can't Go To Work.
5: It's about abortion, taxes, and tribalism.
17: Lots of people on that team seem to assume that their business would be busy as normal if the government had no restrictions, but I don't think that's right fit most bars and travel-related things.
4: He can, at will, make the conversation about him, which, okay, is all he wants the conversation to be about.
13.2: Seriously, I don't think the pandemic overall helped Trump. I think it was a wash.
I think 2020 was more or less a replay of 2016 with the biggest differences being that this was a highly energized electorate on both sides, so there was a high turnout. In 2016 there were people that were sure that Hillary would win and also hated her although they preferred her ultimately to Trump. Some of them voted 3rd party and some didn't bother to vote at all. Those people voted for Biden in 2020, and maybe that was the difference.
Popular vote for president, 2020 (so far) vs 2016:
* For the Democrat: 11.8 million more
* For the Republican: 9.4 million more
I think the Dem increase is the anti-Trump outrage we're all familiar, to which COVID outrage added, and the GOP increase is revving up of culture war antagonism, to which COVID also added. Hard to say whether the pandemic helped one side more than another. Maybe otherwise it would have been +6m and +4m with the same net result.
Oh, and votes for the Libertarian dropped 2.7m.
Oh, and votes for the Libertarian dropped 2.7m.
That should account for about 2.6m of the additional Republican votes.
It's hard to top the excitement of Gary Johnson.
how can I find so many contradictory comments all seem to be hitting some ultimate truth? You are all right.
When will these people ever learn. Don't lick the shared sex doll during a pandemic unless you wash it.
I'm going to need to take the remedial "Reach out to the other side" course.
At this stage, the virus is a mark of honor and distinction The question is: Why hasn't Pence gotten it yet? Is he secretly anti-Trump?
One of the Nates was saying on twitter that the final results are strikingly close to the pre-COVID polls. The claim being that COVID affected the polls (by making Biden voters more likely to answer the phone), but didn't actually affect the vote itself at all.
I answered the phone because people were calling from unknown numbers to confirm volunteering shifts.
How does Trump produce the level of turnout he did in the absence of something like Covid? If he were just chugging along with a middling economy, fielding tax scandals, and going on incoherently about Hunter Biden, he wouldn't have been able to raise the kind of passion that brought people to the polls.
But if you put the population under the stress of coronavirus pressure cooker for eight months, that's really a very different scenario.
Trumpism thrives on an angry, insecure, and brutalized populace, who have a lot of fear and not a lot of faith in institutions, and Covid delivered that in spades.
35: Seems easy enough to me: racism, sexism, bullying, BLM protests. He'd have loved to have stuck to those themes but stupid Covid kept interfering.
racism, sexism, bullying, BLM protests
Sure, but an audience that isn't stressed out by 8 months of missing brunch and college football would be less receptive to these things.
Then they'd be thinking "Things turned out okay under Trump - the economy is humming, etc". Wouldn't he get the normal encumbency bump then?
7.first: That's what I meant by toxic. The Democrats are not to be trusted. Even if you agree with some of their policies, even if the existence of people like Manchin make clear that they're a big tent that's not particularly unified.
7.second: The wives-forced-to-vote-with-their-husbands issue is why I was arguing (it must have been years ago?) we need to preserve the secret ballot as much as possible and why I have mixed feelings on mail voting in general. Increasing turnout is very much a good, but it has tradeoffs in terms of the independence of voters from their social unit that might be systemic, and we need to be at a minimum honest about that. There was a rather strident commenter here who was convinced that anyone who was concerned about this was a fool, didn't give a shit about fighting the Republicans, and anyway, it's fine because California's fine (because they were comparing CA to AL or wherever, not CA to CA under different rules). Still think that was a dickish way to act about it, we're all on the same side here even if we have different concerns.
Wouldn't he get the normal encumbency bump then?
What's a "normal encumbency bump"? I don't think that's a thing. If you look at the most recent model is Obama, who lost popularity in 2012 as he was no longer a novel new face in the Presidency.
That's kind of the scenario I was expecting from Trump, but what actually happened is that he mobilized way more people than I thought he would.
I don't think those people who came out for Trump would quite so mobilized under more benign conditions. People would be complacent and wouldn't bother to come out. But its a great way to galvanize voter turnout if your base is all angry at the libs for making them wear a mask at the hockey game.
40: If it's not a thing, how come I said it?
What's a "normal encumbency bump"? I don't think that's a thing.
Like what Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Nixon all got?
If you look at the most recent model is Obama, who lost popularity in 2012 as he was no longer a novel new face in the Presidency.
I think there's an argument that more polarization means the incumbency bump is done for, but the mere fact that Obama got 2% less in 2012 than in 2008 isn't conclusive evidence for that. (2008 was weird.)
Sending giant fucking checks for cash to people with the president's name on them is not normal but it has to help.
34: same. I never answered unknown numbers before I realized that was a necessary part of Pandemic-era campaigning. Holy shit I have a lot of cars missing a lot of warranties.
Our check came in the form of a mysterious pre-paid credit card from a bank in South Dakota that we had never heard of before, which was only saved from being thrown in the trash with the junk mail because of the hilarity factor that it was addressed to a strange combination of my name and my wife's name. Then a week later we saw some report on the news that you should watch out because some of the checks are coming in the form of mysterious pre-paid credit cards from "MetaBank" that look like obvious scams.
I did get a separate thing in the mail from Trump announcing his munificence, which would have backfired if too many other people got the "check" in the form we did.
Probably that should be "debit card"
I have a psycho unrepresentative social network sample but I saw a lot of UMC business owners who were super angry about how the "liberal media" and "scientists" slowed down business and leaned hard into Trump basically *because* of the Pandemic. Including Black, Asian, and Latinx folks. The thing is there are not that many UMC business owners period, and there are way more workers who were angry about being literally spit on by maskless customers and the like. So didn't help him more than it helped Biden.
35 Here, I think it's even simpler. We sent everyone ballots in the mail. We got a 20% jump in the number of votes (compared to both 2016 and 2018). No covid, a whole lot of those people continue their pattern of non-voting.
Did your mail-ins tilt blue, or not-so-much?
48: CharleyCarp is right. Biden got the largest number of votes ever, but Trump was second. Turnout is all, and more non-voters voted for Biden than Trump. To be fair to Trump, he got more votes than he did in 2016.
49 I haven't seen figures on that, but I doubt it was materially different. Lots of red counties were hitting huge return rates before election day, as was our blue county. We've had vote by mail for years, and over 70% of voters have done it in the last few cycles. But you had to ask -- just sending out ballots got a whole lot of people who'd never voted before.
Mail-ins aren't counted separately, so I don't know whether you'd know. One might be able to guess: Counting began on Monday morning, and I expect that most counties' announced totals on Tuesday at 8 pm didn't include day off in-person voting. But then I am sure that in my county, that number also didn't include everyone who'd mailed or dropped either.
Did I miss out on these Trump bux? How much was it?
My county is at 81% of registered voters voted, up from 67% in 2016. And they're not quite done counting ballots yet.
52: $1,200. You can still get it, but you got to move quick. Usefulness.
Oh thanks I did get that one he got to put his name on it if you didn't file taxes.
There was just 1 disbursement of 1200 right?
I'm going to need to take the remedial "Reach out to the other side" course.
Sam alito worried that Amy Barret was going to beat him out for worst justice* gave one hell of a speech to the Federalist society. PArtisan, bitter, railing against science, mischaracterizing cases and other facts, laughable definition of free speech. A complete steaming pile of shit.
*My undying take is that Harriet Miers would have been a less bad justice than Alito. (And she would have most assuredly sucked.)
59. What a weird speech. Won't there be calls for him to recuse himself on any case that might involve his stated opinions?
I'm not sure Miers would actually have sucked that much. The right took her down fearing that she'd possibly end up as another Souter.
60 Conservative don't ever have to recuse, because *they* have principles. And only apply the law as written and intended. How could there ever be an appearance of impropriety?
61: I suspect she would have been all in on the Conservative big business/no regulations agenda but on the other I agree may not have been too bad. It was interesting to see the "big brain" Federalist contingent go ballistic because she wasn't necessarily a total hack. And of course the credential stuff gave them a lot of cover.
I think the lack of diversity of education/judicial experience has been a problem on the court for years.