05-15-2020, 10:53 PM
(05-15-2020, 10:16 AM)LPDec63 Wrote: As we get deeper into this Covid Crisis, it's starting to feel like the same old same old Culture War.
Maybe at this point we are going to find that some parts of the Culture War will fail because those parts will prove contrary to needful solutions to a genuine Crisis. The Gun Cult certainly has proved irrelevant.
Quote: At first it did feel like we were headed toward the Regeneracy of consensus, and to some extent we are making progress.
... I couldn't resist. Nobody expects the Regeneracy that shakes a recent climate of indulgent depravity -- what I call the Degeneracy as the opposite of the Regeneracy. We get a Regeneracy because of degenerate behavior in the 3T -- devouring of capital in speculative bubbles, a mindless "celebrity culture" from which nobody can learn anything, under-investment in job-creating plant and equipment, short-changing the public sector to support tax cuts for people who have bought political power...
Quote: For example the popularity of the Governors, especially those who have implemented strong measures vs the continued unpopularity of Trump. But the thing is that the poll numbers always seem to come back to the 44% Red Minority vs. the 56% Blue Majority. That toxic paradigm persists even as the Pandemic rages on.
Trump support has been eroding. Remember that he got only slightly more of the popular vote in 2016 than did Mike Dukakis in 1988. Trump's 45.93% of the popular vote was good enough for election because Trump got the 'right votes' in certain states. even though it is only slightly higher the 45.65% that Dukakis got in in 1988 (with only 111 electoral votes). Trump did worse than Romney in 2016 and Kerry in 2004, and not much better than McCain in 2008 -- all of whom lost both the popular and the electoral vote. If Trump fares less well by 1% in 2020 than in 2016, then he loses his re-election bid.
Demographics of the electorate, with younger voters tending sharply Democratic replacing older, more Republican-leaning voters dying off or going senile, alone suggest a Trump loss. The youngest voters in 2016 and 2018 were about 20% more Democratic than Republican, voters over 55 (the generations have voted much alike from early-wave X to the Silent) have been about 5% more Republican than Democratic in 2016 and 2018. Even without a shift among voters among the elderly in their partisan identity, Trump loses. About 1.5% of the electorate, typically people over 55, dies off every year. In four years that means that Trump loses because a 1.5% shift in the vote gives him about 43.5% of the vote. He wasn't going to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with those numbers, and if Florida didn't get him then Arizona or North Carolina would turn enough against him to ensure a defeat.
OK, we are all accustomed to two-term Presidents. Since 1980 we have seen only one incumbent President (the elder Bush) defeated in a re-election bid. Even that one reflects that two terms for an agenda is usually enough before people crave a change in direction. The elder Bush wasn't awful; he simply went stale. What he did well his challenger promised to repeat... and Bill Clinton stayed with the Bush 41 foreign policy. Bill Clinton, Dubya, and Obama got re-elected much as they were first elected, with five, three, and two states, respectively, changing sides between the first election and the re-election. Before that, Reagan won a 49-state landslide re-election following a 44-state repudiation of Jimmy Carter, which is itself a change of only five states.
So we expect much the same in 2020 as in 1984, 1996, 2004, and 2012 with the incumbent getting re-elected with a switch of perhaps five states or so. So Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania but picks up Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. No -- not this time!. It is still early enough for me to see a range of possibilities for the 2020 election from a smashing rejection of him as happened to Jimmy Carter to a bare win. As time passes the range will shrink. Either a smashing victory by Biden (a forty-state win with Trump winning electorally-small states in the South, Great Plains, and the Intermountain West but nothing else) to a bare win (all wins by Trump in 2016 except for two of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin -- if he loses all three, then he is defeated).
In basically a two-way Presidential race, 39% is the floor for an incumbent President in a re-election bid in the last century (that is Hoover in 1932).
Quote:So, I think this is all coming to a head Nov 3. And no matter what happens, there's going to be trouble.
Trouble only if the mass perception is that the winner cheated or induced others to cheat to get elected.
Quote:If there are obvious problems with the election, will the Blue states accept another sketchy Red win? If there is a Blue Wave will the Red staters accept it peacefully? I'm thinking No.
Trump support is loud, firm, and fervent. So far there are no mass anti-Trump rallies because Trump-haters are not going to appear in mass rallies while such is unsafe due to COVID-19. This said, 80 thousand deaths from something that seemingly never happens in a country advanced as ours: 80,000 deaths already (and who knows how many more?) from a respiratory disease of the sort that seemingly happens only in the Third World.
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.