Donald Trump: polls of approval and favorability

[pbrower2a]

(11-15-2020, 11:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(11-15-2020, 10:46 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Will try naming those states most likely to divide amongst themselves. I would say Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas. Who else?

I think so.

It would be hard keeping far-northern CA and southern OR blue, since they have already named themselves "The State of Jefferson." One guy put a big sign on Interstate 5 on a barn facing the highway near Yreka CA with that name. Some of the eastern rural parts of the west-coast triad of states might join in this "state." I guess the capital of the State of Jefferson would be Redding (now in CA). Roseburg OR would be a regional capital.

I can hope that the northern Ohio coast from Toledo to Cleveland would join the northern mid-western blue states, so the eastern part of them would be contiguous. Georgia and the Carolinas as well as Virginia might divide territories between urban/coastal and rural/inland territories. It might take a commission to redraw all these boundaries.

I can also imagine the polarization which intensified late in the 3T and so far in the 4T can reverse. It will do so at some time, and late in a 4T is as good as any time for such. Shared experiences become the norm in a 4T. I expect shock-jock rhetoric of any kind to become stale and tired, and 1T political discourse to become more placid.  To be sure, American politics became placid early in the last 4T as Americans were in dire need of solutions early in the Crisis and weren't in such dire need (for long) in this one. 

We could be in for a political alignment.  

Fully thirty-one states were decided by 15% or more in 2020!  It is possible to say that the Trump Administration flooded some farm states with farm subsidies to distract voters in those states from the damage that his trade war with China caused.  How the states have voted beginning in 2000:



all six for the Republican
5 R, 1 D
4 R, 2D  
(white - 3R, 1D)
4 D, 2 R
5 D, 1 R
all six for the Democrat

That is six elections and the biggest changes since then have been 

(1) that several states that once favored Democrats in Democratic wins and that even voted twice for Bill Clinton in the 1990's have swung completely to the GOP and haven't gotten close
(2) the West Coast went from the fringe of competitiveness for Republicans to out of reach for them 
(3) Virginia went from the sort of state that never voted for a Democrat except in a landslide (from 1952 to 2004 it had gone D only for LBJ in 1964) to strongly D; New Mexico went from shaky D to strong D; Colorado went from iffy in D landslides to solid D. 
(4) the fast-growing Mexican-American vote in the southwestern United States is making Arizona and even Texas shaky for Republican nominees for President.
(5) The Republican Party has lost its appeal to the educated part of the urban middle class.

(colors reversed from what you would usually expect, but this map is taken from another site in which I do much posting).

...Since when has America had such stability in voting as a pattern between the states? Twenty states have not voted for a Democratic nominee for President in the last six elections, and fifteen states and DC have not voted for a Republican nominee for President in the same time. It is not so much the North-South divide as the one between urban and rural America. If I am to use two states that voted only once one way, Atlanta votes more like Detroit than the more rural parts of Michigan and Georgia, and western Michigan votes more like southern Georgia than like southeastern Michigan. In states that haven't voted any but one way in the last twenty years and six Presidential elections, there are very R-leaning areas in New York state (rural areas): Memphis and Nashville are very D cities, but the rest of Tennessee is strongly R.       

Quote:Would the two nations be hostile and unable to trade with each other? Red America likes tariffs and walls now. Tributes and tolls would have to be paid to cross the border between red and blue. Also, I doubt Red America would stay in NATO, even though it has the lion's share of US military bases. It definitely would not join the United Nations, and probably not the Organization of American States. It would withdraw from NAFTA and world trade organizations and banks. They would have to decide how much of its natural heritage and parks to destroy. What would they do with Mt. Rushmore?

Is there much effort to revive Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, let alone something so messy as the Austro-Hungarian Empire? 

Quote:I doubt Red America could survive for very long. It would have so much poverty that its population would decline and its industry and commerce stagnate. With its poor and black population moving to Blue America, and immigration from Latin America and Africa to it prohibited, it would have a severe labor shortage. Most of the border states with Mexico would probably be blue though, so most immigration would be to Blue America anyway.

Red America would have a severe lack of high-quality labor, which is even more troubling than a lack of labor suited for sweatshop labor.  Figure that much of Texas would rather join Mexico than become a part of a fascistic "Red" America. "Red America" is rich... in opiates, meth, and fentanyl. "Blue" America has the bulk of the creative activity in the creation of software and highly-marketable intellectual property. The only place in "Red" America that seems to be a big creator of intellectual property is Nashville, center for the recording industry.