"In fact, a recent poll released by the New York Times showed that nationally, Biden was only winning the support of 66% of registered Black voters, compared to Trump's 23%."

It is worth mentioning that this would be a colossal shift from four years ago. In 2020, Biden got 90% of Black voters and that was down from 93% for Clinton in 2016.

Really? Biden has lost a quarter of his black supporters in four years? Biden is going to get fewer black votes than any Democratic candidate since segregation? (See chart here)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/

If so, it would be an upset of a kind that hasn't been seen since the Civil Rights Act. And it would all have been triggered by... by what, exactly?

I don't have links to prove it handy but in 2016 I really remember throwing cold water on people being overly optimistic in 2016. In the weeks leading up to the election, Nate Silver (we seem to hate him now, but his methods still seem more reliable than most) gave Trump a 30-40 percent chance of winning, which isn't really that low.

Conversely, at the moment when everyone seems to be dreading a Trump/Biden rematch, personally I'm looking forward to it. Biden and Democrats have overperformed every expectation in the past two years, Trump is clearly losing his mind, and every bit of good news Trump has had recently amounts to delaying his criminal trials until the middle of the election. Like, it's good news for him because he wants to delay them forever, and if he gets elected he'll just go full dictator and ignore them, but replacing the usual debates with trial footage of January 6 makes it less likely that he gets elected. As for downticket races, the Trumps are pillaging the RNC, so those don't look good for Republicans either.

Maybe this is just contrarianism or denial, and it would be irresponsible to be complacent or overly optimistic, but still, that's where I am at the moment.

That particular shift definitely seems oversold. The Black subsets are going to be small enough to vary a lot more than the overall subsets. My understanding is combining multiple polls there is still a negative trend for Democrats among non-whites, real but not as pronounced. It's also a subset a few trolls could be significantly influencing. Finally, to the extent it's real, I suspect Black people inclined to Trump will have a lot less propensity to vote than Dems - more young men strongly motivated by sexism - so poll results not reflective of voting results. But even if they're 80% Dem instead of 90%, that's going to be a problem in the election.

But even if they're 80% Dem instead of 90%, that's going to be a problem in the election.

That's my sense as well -- I expect Black voters to still be strongly Democratic, but there could be enough of a shift to matter in close states.

I think a lot of the Black shift towards Trump is among very low propensity voters (young men who are into conspiracy theories).

Even losing 10% of black voters sounds pretty major. The drop from Obama (candidate is actually Black) to Clinton (candidate is not only white, but went up against Obama in an extremely nasty primary) was 3%. The drop from Biden (white bloke running against Trump) to Biden (same white bloke, running against Trump again) should not be three times as large. It certainly should not be eight times as large.

It looks like in Pew's better surveys (less trollable), from 2018 midterms to 2022 midterms, Black voters went from 92-6 Dem to 93-5. But of course those are higher propensity voters.

Same four years, Hispanic went from 72-25 to 60-39. Bigger problem since bigger population.

The drop from Obama (candidate is actually Black) to Clinton (candidate is not only white, but went up against Obama in an extremely nasty primary) was 3%.

Roper has the Democratic vote share among African Americans going from 93% (2012) to 87% (2020), so another 3% shift is certainly possible (84:16), but I agree with you that 80:20 doesn't seem believable.

Same four years, Hispanic went from 72-25 to 60-39.

That's a huge shift!

Turns out demography is not destiny.

8. Nayib Bukele is pretty popular with Salvadorans, among expats here and apparently there also. Dominicans are aware of what's happening in Haiti-- no idea how representative, but Haitian forums mention him favorably.

That also looks unreliable, though. The Guardian said "In December, a CNBC All-America Economic Survey also revealed a significant shift in support among Latino voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Trump now holds a five-point lead with Latino voters, erasing Biden's previous seven-point lead in October"

Latin voters swung 12 points in two months? No, of course they didn't. But the sample size on these polls is small enough to give a ten-point MOE!

Yes, that's why you don't elevate each poll that comes in over the transom. The Pew surveys had an N of about 7,500 per election. That CNBC one is about 1,000.

(And even then, Pew only found 89 Hispanic men in their 2022 survey, enough to put an asterisk on that figure.)

14: good lord.

I have no idea where U.S. voters in 2024 are getting their information about the election. Literally no idea. It's embarrassing. I read a strange op-ed in the NYT about Xwitter getting a bigger share of eyeballs that were formerly going (directly? at all?) to right-wing websites, but I would love to see real information about the media environment. This is my most impressive comment yet.

I feel better about Wisconsin than the author of the linked piece. The Dems have done a good job on several fronts in recent years, and one hopes that third-party voting will be less than in some previous races. You have an opinion on that, lurid?

Georgia in 2020 wasn't just a Biden win, but then also both senate runoffs. I don't know whether organizing can pull this off again, but I don't think conventional polling captures the effects of this kind of thing, especially so far out.

Very short answer is that I don't know. Talking to my family is not always a reliable source of information, because they exist in a bubble with varying degrees of doominess, but I'm not aware of any big game-changing events or trends in WI in particular. It's historically not a state that is particularly sensitive to immigration panic, but there is a bloc of ardent Catholic pro-lifers (the descendants of immigration panics past, I suppose). So that might add some unpredictability.

Some ships are now moving for Port Joe: https://twitter.com/CavasShips/status/1767627572735619498

Weirdly everything so far belongs to the bit of the US Army that has boats.

18 The Wisc Supreme Court election a while back went right, and it looks like the gerrymandering of the state lege is getting dialed way back.

The link's analysis seems fine but I have a hard time imagining Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin not all going the same way.

The genocide in Gaza might result in that.

I'm assuming that Michigan has a bigger Muslim population than the others and that most people in Wisconsin just figure life without bratwurst isn't really living.

As a kid, I basically thought of bratwurst as the gross hot dogs. They were okay, but why would you ever eat one if there were hot dogs on offer? Maybe if coarsely chopped tendons are your thing or whatever?

Bratwurst grills much better. Hot dogs are for boiling or steaming.

I'm assuming that Michigan has a bigger Muslim population

When I was in Michigan, I was told that Detroit has the largest Arab population outside of the middle east. I don't know if that was true in 1997, let alone now, but that doesn't stop me from announcing it self-importantly.

24: In revenge for the pain my own tendons have caused.

When I was in Michigan, I went to the Henry Ford museum where they didn't mention antisemitism but did serve Coca-Cola by spooning the syrup into a glass and stirring in soda water.

Michigan does have the most substantial Arab-American population in the US but it's still not huge relative to the overall size of the state, and as the link in the OP explains it's slightly more Dem-leaning than WI and PA for other reasons.

Arab population by state. Michigan is at a little over 2%.

Tom Bonier at TargetSmart (I think basically a Dem pollster) said the following on Twitter today in response to someone mentioning the 20% number.

Fwiw, we recently fielded a large sample (>4,000 respondents) survey across the battlegrounds and and found Trump at 11% with Black voters. I don't know what is happening in these media polls, but we can't replicate it. The sample of Black voters was 624, far larger than the media polls showing Trump at 20%+.

He is someone who was righter on 2022 than many. Butwho knows, the coalition it is fragile.

They map really bothers me because it turns coastal states into interior states and vice versa.

Sources vary, but there are 1.5 to 4 million Arabic speakers in France, and more people who'd identify as Arab in some sense.

I bet that's way more than French speakers in Michigan.

Excepting the Detroit airport, which is nice, I've never been to Michigan as an adult. Except very briefly by accident when my brother was at Notre Dame.

As one would guess from the name, Detroit was founded by French speakers. I've been surprised as I track the Quebecois diaspora just how many folks moved from Quebec to the upper peninsula in the second half of the 19th century. The French has been pretty much washed out by now, of course.

I was told I've been to Wisconsin, but I have to memory of it.

I have never been to Michigan or Wisconsin in any sense.

Michigan looks like Indiana in parts.

Lot of French speakers settled in Eau Claire, and especially Somerset WI.

My dad lived in Milwaukee for a year. He said the street cars were great. Unless anything has changed since 1949, you could give it a try.

I have actually been considering a trip to Wisconsin to see the effigy mounds and the Milwaukee Public Museum. Probably not any time soon though.

When I was in Ohio, people tried to get them to build a new bridge with a replica of the Serpent Mound over it. But Ohio was dedicated to sucking even then and made a stupid, boring bridge.

In looking up which mound they wanted to copy, I learned my new favorite word - astrobleme.

Wow, there are way fewer Arabs in the US than I would have though! Canada as a whole is 1.9% Arab, almost the same as Michigan. Quebec is 3.3%. Paris definitely has a lot more Arabs than Detroit, but I'd bet Montreal and Toronto both do as well.

The single biggest country of origin-- by quite a bit-- is Lebanon. Partly as a result, 1/3 of Canadian Arabs are Christian.

There are a lot of Lebanese Christians here in Pittsburgh, but I don't think they identify as Arab. They are mostly 3rd or more generation Americans. My favorite Greek restaurant was run by Lebanese people.

45 et al: It's true that as both percentage and numbers, Michigan doesn't have that many Arab residents. However, Dearborn, MI is the only (waves hands at appropriate qualifiers) Arab-majority city in the US. The population is pretty diverse - everything from Chaldeans (who mostly don't consider themselves Arab AFAICT) to Lebanese, Egyptian, Palestinian, Yemeni, etc. Michigan isn't really a state with Detroit as the single major metro area (unfortunately for statewide voting) - it's several medium sized metro areas with weird politics.

Apparently, one of the first things Michigan did as a state was to try to build a canal across the lower part of the lower peninsula. This was after trying to take Toledo by force.

It would have been cool to have the Island of Michigan though.

Anyway, I don't know about the polls. My hope is that the Republican Party falls apart before it can pull apart America. Things like Trump taking over the RNC and laying off staff are good signs.

48: Links please!

Anyone think Haley is gearing for an independent run?

Things like Trump taking over the RNC and laying off staff are good signs.

Trump just blatantly looting the RNC is honestly pretty hilarious.

Nobody has ever deserved anything as much as the RNC staffers deserve what's happening to them now.

I think Haley is gearing to endorse Trump.

The RNC is going to be a burning husk by the time the Trumpies are done with it.

Some ships are now moving for Port Joe

At first I thought this was a euphemism for big donors who were on the sidelines now showing more public support for Biden after the SOTU speech.

I keep coming back to this point the author made about "racial depolarization", how that is something growing more and more prominent. And ..... I remember the salience of immigration and demonization of immigrants, in MAGAt rhetoric. And of course the racism that's been so central to MAGA since its inception. And I just can't square these two. If I am to believe this author, we're screwed as a nation: if the key driver and grieevance of MAGA is in fact something that doesn't faze its intended victims, why, what's the point? Might as well lay down and expose our bellies to be gutted.

Just generally, Biden winning should be the way to bet.

Historically, incumbents win, and incumbents with a strong economy a year out always fucking win, it's one of the most bettable propositions in US politics. Further, if you wanted to design a political coalition that turns out reliably, "Black churches and institutions in the Upper South + middle-class women across suburban America + organized labour, especially the United Auto Workers, in PA, MI, and WI" is like the platonic ideal of that. It's completely nuts that people are talking as if strength with likely voters was a bad thing. You know what you hear a lot from losers in US politics and really any electoral politics anywhere? "We'll turn out the nonvoters."

Also if you wanted a US politics thesis to run a mile from, "the youth vote will flip this based on their passionate moral convictions about foreign affairs" would have taken your money so, so many times.

And, looping it back to 1, "our models show that Trump could manage a narrow win if he somehow caused the greatest upheaval in black voting patterns since FDR, and even then it would be close" - that doesn't sound good for Trump.

Historically, incumbents win, and incumbents with a strong economy a year out always fucking win, it's one of the most bettable propositions in US politics.

With one exception: in 2020, Trump was the incumbent, and the economic models said he should have won. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-05/what-economic-models-say-about-the-2024-presidential-election

I keep coming back to this point the author made about "racial depolarization", how that is something growing more and more prominent. And ..... I remember the salience of immigration and demonization of immigrants, in MAGAt rhetoric. And of course the racism that's been so central to MAGA since its inception. And I just can't square these two.

As our current government shows, demonising immigrants comes very easily to the children of immigrants. "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as a permanent object of abuse, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt and look at what a bunch of pricks we are".

51: The canal and the Toledo War.

Attn. (esp.) teo:
https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/antarctic-ice-explains-dip-in-co2-levels/

Thanks Moby!

Inland waterways are great.

My Soviet history lecturer would crack jokes about comrades falling out of favor and being redeployed to run internal waterways and I would think, "But those are really important!"

Right, but digging them was a job for the gulag.

Point.

Was it even feasible c.1840 to build boats which were both big enough to survive the Lake Michigan and small enough to fit through the biggest canal Michigan could afford?

I assume there would be transfers involved.

Ok, but how does that work when the alternative is a fraction the man-hours on a much bigger ship going via Mackinac? Winter maybe?

It didn't work is the thing.

I assume the time factor was paramount. I will admit the value proposition for many inland canals seems questionable to me--even aside from the just over horizon railroad death knell.

A somewhat similar thing to me are hard rock tunnels that just cut a few miles compared to following the winding river .

I think the idea was not just a bypass, but also to connect the middle of the state to either side.

Yes. Belatedly reading the article, water access for the interior was an important goal.

C & O canal did get built, was not easy to do, didn't make money for long. https://www.nps.gov/articles/cno-canal-workers.htm

Yeah, but you can still bike along the tow path. I saw the D.C. end last year. There's still water.

If I enjoyed cycling and was full of free time, I could pedal from my house to Georgetown.

I guess if I had free time, I could do it and just but enjoy it.

If you hadn't fixed your sump pump, you could have paddled.

The canal doesn't go the whole way to Pittsburgh even though the bike trail does. My basement is in the drainage basin for the Gulf of Mexico.

Intracoastal Waterway.

I remember the salience of immigration and demonization of immigrants, in MAGAt rhetoric. And of course the racism that's been so central to MAGA since its inception. And I just can't square these two.

Because plenty of non-white people do not identify with immigrants and are even receptive to demonization arguments.

There was a meme out there with two of those horrid wojak faces, both colored to look Latino, one with a US flag shirt and another with a Mexican flag shirt, the American saying "Go back to your country, we don't want your kind here." Someone I actually follow quoted it and said "Wow, it'll be like most Latin American immigration politics."

The cool kids portage over the mountains near Altoona.

As I have mentioned here before I grew up in a small city which developed entirely due to its location on an inland canal. canal was relatively short-lived, and rapid growth came decades later, but it' (and the name of its carved out county) came from being located at the high point of the canal. Some of the water engineering done for the canal did aid some subsequent development--locks can be transformed to water mills.

I remember flying into Miami in the company of a Costa Rican and a Venezuelan. They were both traveling on diplomatic passports, but were like "better avoid the immigration lines that have Latino officers.... they always give us a harder time." Their theory was that Latinos who have "made it" to the United States look down upon those who have not. I don't know if that's true, but that's the perception.

I'm feeling it'll be an enthusiasm gap election, and Trump is on the losing side of the gap.

Heading into Super Tuesday, Trump had underperformed the published polls in every big primary contest. In New Hampshire, surveys ahead of the primary showed the former president beating his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, by nearly 18 percentage points; he won by 11. In South Carolina, he was polling 28 points ahead of Haley, but he won by 20. In Michigan, the polls said 57, but he won by a "mere" 42. [...] Virginia [...] ahead of the vote, Trump was consistently 60 points ahead of Haley, who was the preference of only about 15 per cent of Republicans surveyed. Instead, Haley finished with nearly 35 per cent of the vote, pulling to within 30 points of Trump. The feat was repeated all over the Super Tuesday map. In some states, the difference was eye-popping. In Vermont, the final big poll published before Tuesday's vote had Trump ahead 61-31. Instead, Haley won. In other states, such as Texas, the Trump slump between pollsters and voters was barely 5 percentage points.

At least 80% of Haley voters will ultimately vote for Trump. Maybe 90%.

This Tiktok thing is an abomination, and as passed by the House, designed to F Biden with the youngs.

64: The Ruddiman Thesis! Doesn't seem to have broken through to historians yet but it's taken more seriously among climate scientists than I would have expected. Thanks!

I hope all the beetle killed trees aren't going to limit that.

It sounds like the RNC has been having some success with its minority voter outreach program. Naturally, the new MAGA leadership is shutting that down.

designed to F Biden with the youngs.

I have to say, pretty slick of Trump to backtrack on supporting the TikTok thing right after Biden said he would sign it.

87: The John Sayles movie Lone Star is really great, in part because it deals with complicated ethnic resentments.

Oh, did Biden say that? Yuck.

Once you have the cult established, your freedom of action increases greatly.

Getting queasier about how this all going to come out.

"Look, its ok for social media companies to shower you with propaganda and build a profile of you by tracking everything you watch, but only if they are owned by capitalists."

See for instance credulous mainstream writeups on abortion and his supposed less strident invocations of Jan 6. Normie bait.

I don't want to devolve into LOL NOTHING MATTERS, but in some areas like the feelings of his true cult it approaches that. (I think enthusiasm/turnout is the one arguable lever left for that group.)

The youngs in my class today think TikTok should be shot into the sun, but they didn't like the House bill because of the perceived authority overreach.

This TikTok thing is hypnotic. The ByteDance stakeholder who met with Trump, Jeffrey Yass (who is probably getting yassified on social media as I type) has also been financially supporting right-wing Israeli politics in general -- and in particular, the cause of Netanyahu's judicial coup -- for years. The U.S. right in general seems to hate Facebook now, which I guess I knew but forgot, because who doesn't hate Facebook? I have no idea how real the security threat posed by TikTok is. Yass has apparently thrown money at a string of losers in U.S. elections, including many Trump challengers, before coming to Jesus at last, but he still has money to burn. This is not the textbook "role of social media in elections" case study.

Yass literally coming to Jesus would spice the story up even more, but here, as in so many American contexts, for Jesus read Trump.

Donald Trump is obviously a bigger threat to security than TikTok, but I don't see why we shouldn't get rid of TikTok just to remind people we can kill a social media company.

The ByteDance stakeholder who met with Trump, Jeffrey Yass (who is probably getting yassified on social media as I type) has also been financially supporting right-wing Israeli politics in general

This is interesting, because so much of the expressed concern about TikTok is that it propagandizes the youth with pro-Palestinian content.

I don't see any tea leaves to read here. Trump, first, opposes whatever Biden does, second, does whatever the last person to talk to him says. First time round that was Ellison, this time it's Yass.

103: Pro-Palestinian or anti-Biden?

The concern is that it's anti-Israel, the stuff that leaks through to me (on a different social medium) is anti-Biden.

The expressed concern, that is. Not my concern.

I had been a little concerned that the RNC was finally going to get its shit together with mail-in voting, but new MAGA leadership has put a stop to that too.

I will admit the value proposition for many inland canals seems questionable to me--even aside from the just over horizon railroad death knell.

They probably seem more valuable when you compare them to roads, and remember that the relative costs of things was very different back then - compared to now, stuff was expensive, food was expensive, labour was cheap. A canal means that your horse can pull, roughly, ten times as much payload twice as fast as on a road. For the same input of horse fodder (which is expensive) you can deliver twenty times as much stuff to market (where it will sell for a lot of money) per day, and all you need to build it is a lot of navigators with shovels (who are cheap). You can charge quite a lot in lock fees and tolls and still have everyone making money. And there's no public consultation requirement, no EIA requirement, very little planning approval needed.

I think the alternative wasn't so much roads as using the existing rivers and not bothering to farm the land that was too far from an existing river.

Or using the corn to make whiskey or the land to grow cows.

110 is interesting because I am thinking of this from a UK perspective, where you build a canal between two towns that already exist to allow easier travel and bulk transport between them. Canals in the US were different?

There might be all sorts of reasons why a canal is worth building even if there's an existing river...

Not least because rivers can be pretty high-maintenance as well. The town I live in was once one of the biggest ports on the North Atlantic trade because of its river. That river is currently about eighteen inches deep - ocean-going ships could only use it because it was incessantly and laboriously dredged.

109: I'm not sure factors of production were weighted like that in c.1840 Michigan.
110: How do cows free one from logistics requirements? Salt beef/cheese/butter is less bulky than equivalent values of grain, but you still need transport. Plus you have to bring in barrels and salt.
113: Yes. Multiple dynasties found it easier to build canals parallel to the Yellow than to navigate the river itself..

I'm not sure factors of production were weighted like that in c.1840 Michigan.

Compared to present-day Michigan, they definitely were. (Probably not compared to 1840 UK.)

Cows can walk to market.

Anyway, in 1840 Michigan had just over 200,000 people. It was basically empty (of white people) compared even Ohio, not just Britain.

And Ohio doesn't even have people. Except peep.

Apparently they are just now getting around to catching up on maintenance of the infrastructure on the Ohio and its tributaries. The rivers are still being used but becoming clean enough for residential development and such.

It is quite strange that English has decided to use completely different Latin roots for the singular and plural of "person". Person, from persona; people, from populus.

Almost as odd as the plural of "cow" (Germanic) being "cattle" (Latin, via French). Presumably because peasants had exactly one cow; only the Norman nobility could afford multiple cows. /s

People do say "cows". It's not just me.

They just got a Starship into space btw. Didn't make it back though, broke up on re-entry. Booster didn't make it back either. Still, significant step forward from just blowing up on launch.

Yeah. The trick to success is having really low standards.