Fed up talking videogames? Why?
-
Squinty
- Member
- Joined in 2009
- Location: Norn Oirland
The problem I have with this thread is that it doesn't take into account regional variance. It's well known that Black and Latinx voters tend to skew more conservative generally so this change has been a long time coming, but there's still a large regional variance to how these people tend to vote. Same as there is with white voters - it's not generally helpful to class voters by race at this point because that variance is starting to become more important. Other factors are at play here.
For example, the border communities in Texas are largely Latinx, and they tend to favour immigration as their key election issue. They also tend to favour Trump because of his strong anti-immigration stance, but ultimately it doesn't actually matter that much how they vote because Texas is not a swing state. It
will vote Republican on November 5th, whether the Latinx voters go red or blue. Likewise Florida is no longer a swing state, so the Cuban American population of Miami isn't going to make a difference to the election outright when they vote red, and the largely Democrat-voting Puerto Ricans of New York City won't tip the election if they go blue.
The other thing to note is that there is a lot of angst about poll data at the moment, but Biden has done almost no campaigning yet, he hasn't really been out on the campaign trail before the last week or two, and all the scrutiny has been on him rather than Trump. That will change once campaigning begins in earnest, and the Biden administration begins to zero in on some of Trump's more out-there promises.
What this information
does bring across well, is that there are one or two surprises in the data that the Democrats need to start tracking and working on. The main one is young, Black, inner-city men. This is where a lot of the statistical change in that area is coming from, as there has been a massive drop off against the Democrats and specifically Biden in that particular category. A few different reasons could be offered to explain this - the continued deprivation of the inner-city under Biden, the failure of the student loan relief legislation which has been (slightly unfairly) blamed on Biden.
The thread author here suspects that fading memories of Civil Rights is important as well, and I guess it might be a small factor but the economy is king in an election year. For me, the administration needs to have a strong economic plan for his second term, which focuses on Democratic heartland areas - the Blue Wall, the Rust Belt, and the big cities. This is a turnout election, and he needs to focus on making sure people turn out. What I think you'll see is a campaign that focuses jointly on painting Trump as unstable while pushing Biden as a solid economic choice for the future, ramming home that he's one of the most prolific Presidents since Johnson at getting legislation over the line (I think, don't quote me on this as I haven't had time to double check the stat).
I also don't think it's overly surprising that the realignment has continued to gather pace with Trump's Republicans. For me, the key marker for polls is college education - Trump has continued to have a
massive lead with non-college-educated Americans and there are reasons for this. He sloganises, he uses dirty tricks and siege-mentality politics that appeal to people on lower incomes, who feel like they've been let down. A cult of personality doesn't let things like facts get in the way of the message, and this is very much being borne out in Trump's support base. There's boatloads of reading on psychological tactics for election support that I could recommend on this front, and Trump is, frighteningly, doing a very good job of following the playbook.
The final thing to remember is that national polling is great, and very interesting, and tells us something about trends more generally. But actually, we already know how the vast majority of states are going to vote. There are 6-8 states that are going to be under significant scrutiny. Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia are the places to focus your attention - look at their polling. Trump currently holds slight polling leads in all of those states, or did when I last saw the stats a couple of days ago, but they're all very much there to be won by Biden. Expect these numbers to tighten and swing pretty wildly over the next eight months.
This campaign is gonna be long, and it's gonna be horrendous to watch from the outside. Polling tells us a little bit about what's going on for now, but it won't give us a truly accurate dataset until much closer to the final event.
