03-29-2020, 06:47 AM
If you wonder why I have not been posting on this thread, then it has been because
Quote:(1) most of the polling has related to a contested Democratic set of primaries, and (2) polling has been remarkably stable.
Then the securities markets tanked (yes, the eleven-year bull market has come to an end), and COVID-19 has started killing in large numbers. I posted this on the Forums (now called "Talk Elections") on what is still Leip's Atlas of Elections. Many of the assumptions that have been reliable since about 2000 may no longer be so -- except for the ideological polarization of the American electorate.
Good question. Things are going wild. This virus is a confirmed killer. Assuming close splitting of the electorate, how this virus ravages the population will shape the election. If it should kill poor non-whites selectively then it could put such states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back within the range of Trump victories. If it should selectively kill low-information white voters in rural areas then it favors Joe Biden. Unlike HIV/AIDS (the most infamous "new" lethal infectious disease of the last fifty years before this one that has killed tens of thousands of Americans) it kills fast, so many people generally considered likely voters might not be voting. One has no ability to cast a ballot from six feet under. Someone with HIV/AIDS could be voting for several years after diagnosis. Someone with COVID-19 could die in a week.
So far people most at risk are those who have done recent traveling, and that tends to skew toward well-heeled, well-educated, urban and suburban voters. But how do we know that it will not spread to rural areas with poor, ill-educated people with bad habits such as smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol abuse -- maybe some oxy and meth on the side?
Assumptions about the 2020 electorate can be rendered completely absurd! If people in large numbers are undergoing medical treatment then they might not be reachable by pollsters at the time.
Add to this -- the securities markets are in chaos at or after the end of an extended bull market, and Americans are being laid off in large numbers. To be sure most Americans own no stock even through a 401K plan, but any reduction in consumer demand will result in mass layoffs. If your retail choices get reduced to Dollar General, Family Dollar, Wal*Mart, Aldi, Kroger, Big Lots, Target, Walgreen's, CVS, Rite-Aid, Home Depot, gas station-convenience stores, auto parts stores, and maybe some regional box stores then you have lost much choice of what you can buy. As a group those are not high-end marketers, to put it lightly. So let us suppose that you are in the business of manufacturing high-end audio equipment. People just do not buy that sight-unseen...or sound unheard.
Maybe you buy books, audio recordings, or recorded video sight-unseen from the Big A, who should be doing well enough now. But such people know what they are looking for. (Closure of public libraries might be a boon for the Big A, but that is likely to be short-lived). Much marketing depends upon bored people going into a store and finding something to pique their interests. That is over for a while. Need I go into a long discourse on how reduced sales lead to reduced production and that higher unemployment leads to a less sympathetic view of the leaders most influential at the time?
I may have expected the long bull market to come to an end, but I could not say when. COVID-19? Nobody predicted that until it happened, and nobody can predict how it will shape the electorate.
I have made assumptions on how approval and especially disapproval ratings either ensure re-election of an incumbent President (Obama 2012 is obvious), make it shaky (Dubya in 2004), or doom any re-election bid (Carter in 1980). COVID-19 is the wild card not supposed to be in the deck that somehow found its way into the deck and is now in play.
Contrary to what you may have learned in high-school civics in the 1990's or earlier, electoral politics is not so much about politicians convincing people to vote for them, but instead (in most states) the ratification of the demographics of the time. Thus states similar in economics but not ethnic mix (let us say Arkansas and New Mexico) can vote very differently. COVID-19 can change the demographic mix depending on who it kills. Not since 2001 have so many Americans died of the same cause in one day, and I do not see that ending soon. One month of such deaths can give a death toll higher in one month alone as the total number of combat deaths in the wars in Korea or Vietnam in a much shorter time.
COVID-19 has shattered some of my core assumptions about this Presidential election. I might hold off on new maps unless some poll is 'juicy'.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.