Who Bleeds Less Wins. Hoping It's Harris.
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
At RealClear Politics is a piece on what Democrat operatives think it will take for Harris to win today.
In this close race between two historically terrible choices, I'd summarize the whole piece and say it's the same thing it will take for Trump to win today, but in the other direction: Who loses less support than the other among voters who would normally vote for that candidate's party?
Well, duh, Gus! you might say. All elections are about winning more support than the other guy.
Sure, except in this election, we have one candidate running a negative, fear-mongering campaign and the other failing to run a convincing positive campaign. This is occurring against a backdrop of each party being controlled by its worst elements and choosing its candidate accordingly: Republicans ran a foreshortened campaign schedule so no one could gain traction against Trump and the Democrats hastily chose Harris when it became clear Biden would lose on fitness grounds alone.
This leaves each party having given short shrift to persuadable voters and taking its usual bases for granted, while seeing votes from those bases migrating. To the operatives, it looks like this:
[T]hough polls show Trump set to make historic inroads with voters of color, several longtime Democratic pollsters are dubious that it will show up on Election Day.What's going on was summarized quite well yesterday by Objectivist philosopher Gregory Salmieri, who was commenting on a common meme, pictured below:
"It could well prove to be a mirage as Black voters rally down the stretch around Harris's historic candidacy," said Roth Smith. "Frankly, I have seen this mirage before in my own polling for campaigns that thought they were making gains among Black voters, only to see those voters coalesce decisively behind a Black candidate on Election Day. Harris could also stymie any improvement Trump was hoping to see among Latino voters, helped by the moronic "island of garbage" comments Tony Hinchcliffe made about Puerto Rico, which activated an entire new set of Latino voters and prominent figures against Trump in the closing week of the election. Holding her ground among those two voting blocs is probably enough to deliver Harris a win, full stop."
And Roth Smith added there was another key demographic, one that has received far less attention that others this election season: college-educated white men. From 2016 to 2020, white college-educated men moved 11 points toward Democrats, with even more dramatic gains in critical swing states. They were the most-improved group for Democrats both nationally, trending 11 points more Democratic between 2016 and 2020, and in key swing states, including jumping eight points into the Democratic column in Nevada, 14 in Michigan, 15 in Pennsylvania and Arizona, and a whopping 43 points in Georgia.
"It is one of the craziest and least-discussed stories of what happened in 2020," Roth Smith said. "Nearly half of the college-educated white men in Georgia switched their vote from Trump to Biden. If she can keep moving in that direction and not lose ground elsewhere, I think she will win. Actually, I take that back. Not 'I think.' She will win."
So, in addition to the two terrible candidates, we have something like a political realignment going on and making it hard to predict what will happen.These two memes make the same mistake. They assume that there's some single left-right spectrum along which people (or the country) are moving. There isn't. What's happening is that the loonier elements in each of two opposing tribes are becoming more prominent and alienating others who then turn to the opposite tribe.
The author believes his use of this image to be protected as fair use under U.S. copyright law.
Also worth reading are Salmieri's thoughts about the rioting after the last election. He adds:
More specifically re this election: Harris is beneath contempt. She's attempting to straddle every fence -- including most despicably the question of whether to support or denounce Israel's war of self-defense against the Gazans. She's flirted the worst elements of mainstream leftist politics when she thought it was expedient and drifted away from them (without denouncing them) when it became clear how unpopular they are. But her form of viciousness is (disgustingly) par for the course today. It's just one more small dose of the poison that's been sapping America's vitality for decades.May the lesser evil win.
Trump is something different. The dominant features of his political career have been emotionalistic outbursts against the separation powers and the free press, going weak in the knees over dictators, indulging in arbitrary flights of fancy, and brazenly evading easily established facts. All of this did enduring damage to America during his tenure in office -- damage that can't be measured on the scale of one or two election cycles. And he's only gotten worse since. Such a man's return to the Oval Office is a serious and unique threat to American freedom. [bold added]
-- CAV
2 comments:
Last Friday, during early voting, the temperature here was five degrees cooler than the day before. I expected it to be even colder, given that Hell froze over. For the first time in my life, I cast a ballot for a Democrat.
When I look at what has become of the Republican party, I see everything I have always despised about the crazies on the far Left.
I remember 2009, when large numbers of Republicans stood up against Obama and his populist "ends justifies the means" implicitly authoritarian rhetoric and agenda. But where were those same people when an "ends justifies the means" populist who is EXPLICITLY authoritarian in his rhetoric and agenda came to prominence and took control over the Republican party?
I recall Tea Party groups talking about Saul Alinsky and how the Left followed the playbook of his "Rules for Radicals." Some groups even offered courses and lectures about it to expose and help people defend themselves from the Left's methods.
Who would have thought that some among them would make Alinksy's playbook THEIR playbook? Google Alinsky's "12 Rules For Radicals." Every last one of them rings true with the behavior of Trump and his surrogates.
Of course the Soviets used such tactics long before Alinsky. They are what enabled a backward, Potemkin country with a 3rd-world economy like Russia to project power far beyond its military capabilities. And they are what Putin is using today. In the 1930s-1980s, the Russian cultivated "useful idiots" and outright traitors who sought to undermine the country's institutions were on the Left. Today, they are on the Right - i.e., Trump, Tucker "Duranty" Carlson, RFK Jr., Elon Musk and many others.
From now on, my litmus test for even CONSIDERING a Republican candidate will be their 2023-2024 position on military aid to Ukraine. The price of such aid is such a tiny drop out of Federal expenditures that any argument demonizing it as wasteful spending is disingenuous. Anyone making that argument is shilling for Putin and a country that still glorifies and perpetuates its long history of barbarism and murder. And those who cry "World War III" are merely propping up the paper Russian tiger and its many Potemkin villages.
The USA has been under constant assault by the Left for decades. During that time, the "Right" has mostly been a coalition of those who oppose the Left, some for valid reasons, others less so. But Trump's Right is different - it is similar to the explicitly statist, nationalist/fascist parties that dominate the Right in Europe. The thought of such an assault coming with equal intensity from both the Left and the Right at the same time terrifies me.
Peikoff's arguments are mostly why I held my nose and voted Trump in 2020. Since then, we've seen his attempted coup d'état and increasingly authoritarian rhetoric. I am not as frightened of Trump as much as I am of the sorts he has emboldened to come from under the rocks and into the mainstream. With Trump you get RFK Jr and his evil anti science craziness. You get Tucker Carlson, who recently claimed that human beings could not possibly have invented the atomic bomb, that it could only have been created by demons. He also talks about UFOs and mystical space aliens controlling world events and how our government covers it up. And he interviewed a Neo-Nazi hack who claims that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War” and writes off Nazi mass murder as mercy killings because Germany lacked the resources to feed its victims. Carlson introduced this man to his vast audience as “best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” And Elon Musk tweeted a link recommending that interview to his 203 million followers.
This isn't the same old Left vs Right. It is a different and scary Right that does not oppose the Left as much as it sees the Left as a rival for power.
Agreed on all of that. Vance frightens me, and ever since he was picked, I knew I was abstaining or voting Democrat for President.
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