08-09-2016, 12:36 AM
(08-07-2016, 03:53 PM)Anthony Wrote: No way Hillary wins Texas.
The Cleveland Browns have a better chance of winning the Super Bowl this year.
No, maybe the Detroit Lions.
In 2008 Texas was about as far from being an Obama victory as Pennsylvania was from being a Democratic loss.
I figure that in 2008 and 2012 the white suburban vote in Georgia and Texas went anomalously well, in contrast to the white vote in other suburban areas. Maybe it was that the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta are enough newer than those of such cities as Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia that they still have some rural characteristics and have yet to have obsolete infrastructure in need of Big Government to expand or rebuild at great cost.
But know well: those suburbanites in Georgia and Texas are well-educated, and if Georgia is swinging Democratic this year, then such is because educated white suburbanites in Greater Atlanta are showing signs of rejecting Donald Trump. Educated people hold demagogues even of their own side of the political spectrum in deep disdain.
I can't see Hillary Clinton doing much better in 2016 than Barack Obama did in 2008 in states that Obama won by 10% or more. Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election by 7.26%, which borders on a landslide. (Since 1900 there have been close elections with the winner getting 58% or less of the electoral vote -- Truman in 1948, and Kennedy was close to that in 1960, 65% or more of the electoral vote --Taft in 1908, and 2012 -- Obama was close to the median, and had he lost Florida he would have had about 57% of the electoral vote). Obama's win by 7.26% in a binary election is hard to distinguish from the margin in popular vote from the wins of FDR in 1944 (7.50%) or the elder Bush in 1988 (7.72%).
If Hillary Clinton is ahead of Donald Trump by 10% or so, then she is already near the max-out levels for Barack Obama in 2008 for about 20 states including California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Her gains must be elsewhere.
I have seen recent polls showing that Arizona, Georgia, and Missouri might be on the margin of Clinton victories. At that point, Indiana gets iffy. Texas of course has the largest reservoir of white educated voters who could in theory swing toward Clinton. Hispanics (largely Mexican-Americans) are more conservative than Mexican-Americans elsewhere in America, which probably reflects that Mexican-Americans in Texas avoided the catastrophic meltdown in the real-estate hustle of 2007-2009. (Texas had such a crash in the 1980s very similar in cause and effect, and its politicians then -- Democrats and Republicans -- reformed the lending system to make liar loans and second mortgages more difficult to get). Such Mexican-American conservatives as there are in Texas are going to find Donald Trump as offensive as do Mexican-Americans elsewhere. Texas has thus two large groups of potential Romney-to-Clinton voters.
I have seen polls before the Party Conventions suggesting that Donald Trump would lose Texas by high-single-digit margins instead of the mid-teens or more that we are accustomed to seeing.
But even if Hillary Clinton does not swing fully enough for Hillary Clinton to win the state, then Texas will give her the biggest absolute swing in popular votes (it's Texas!)... and one of the largest (if not the largest) swing in electoral margin. Educated suburbanites in Texas may still be conservative -- but they aren't crazy. Remember: educated people hold demagogues even of their own side of the political spectrum in deep disdain. Donald Trump is very much a demagogue.
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.