The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(12-04-2019, 09:51 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-04-2019, 01:30 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-03-2019, 01:16 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-01-2019, 01:32 PM)Snowflake1996 Wrote: The overwhelming bulk of support for Donald Trump and the GOP lie in non-rural areas. These include exurbs, suburbs, small and medium sized cities, and even large cities.

Just looking at large cities alone:

• Los Angeles County had more Trump voters than the entire state of Kansas.
  
• Cook County IL had more Trump voters than the entire state of Idaho. 
  
• Brooklyn + The Bronx combined had more Trump voters than Wyoming.
  

This isn’t to say Trump voters don’t have actual legitimate grievances. But in terms of raw numbers, the vast majority of them are not living in rural areas or small towns below the size of 20k people. Most live in metros the size of 50k-100k people or more.

You're comparing pumpkins and grapes.  Sure, there are a lot of Trump voters in highly populated areas, but the percentage is what's important -- not the absolute number.  Likewise, low population areas can only have so many voters, by definition.  I live in the exurbs, and it's Trump, end-to-end.  That's true of low and high education individuals, I might add.  The two closest cities are small-to-medium size, with one being Purple (~80,000) and the other solidly Blue (~110,000).   Their burbs are both very Red.  I think that's typical.

Right, and in our electoral college system, the Trump voters in big blue cities and counties do not matter. The Trump voters, with their overwhelming majority in rural and small-town areas, turn states red that do not have big blue cities in them, and they have far more clout in the electoral college, because it's set up to favor smaller states. So, the source of the power of Trump and Republicans today, in the Senate and in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and 2016, is the rural and small town and small city areas that vote Republican by overwhelming margins.

What? Absolute numbers don't matter to the liberals anymore. What are the liberals going to do when Trump gets the majority of the vote in 2020, wins  the majority of the electoral college, regains the majority of the House, strengthens the  majority of the Senate and has the majority of the Supreme Court too? Right now, I'd say that those unpleasant realities are more likely going to happen at this point.

Go into mourning, knowing that the United States has become an Evil Empire, a plutocratic equivalent of the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.  But that is if things go as you expect. I realize that people who know you who happen to be liberals know enough to avoid discussing politics with you, so you might be clueless about how Americans think.

Here are the facts. The only ones in Trump's favor are, first, that Donald Trump can win an essentially-binary election with a mere 45% of the popular vote (that is how the Electoral College now works), which means  that  Donald Trump could get a smaller share of the popular vote than someone who won only 111 electoral votes (Dukakis, 45.62%  of the popular vote in 1988) and get re-elected. Second, the Master Class that seeks to maximize profits through monopoly pricing and Third World wages, can open the spigots for political campaigns as it did in 2010  and 2014. Third, America is not in a recession or  a war going badly.

On the other hand, the perception that Donald Trump is an obnoxious, abrasive, cruel man remains. It sickens me that he got nominated for president and then elected after he was exposed as saying  "I grab  'em by their p---ies" and after mocking a reporter on the autistic spectrum. Grabbing women by their crotches without their consent is "criminal sexual conduct" in Michigan, and rape should there be penetration. I'm not going to compare the offense that ridicule of people for handicaps  is to ethnic slurs, but I will say this about religious slurs: I am on the autistic spectrum and I often have been attacked for being Jewish on the Web... both hurt. (I fit three Jewish stereotypes  very well). 

Demographic change does not help Donald Trump or the GOP. Figuring that the electorate is mostly aged 25 to 85 and the over-55 part of the electorate is about 5% more Republican than Democratic and that the Millennial generation  is about 20% more Democratic than Republican, about 1.67% of the electorate turns over due to death and debility. That is about a 1.67%  shift from R to D in the popular vote. The GOP has nothing to offer young adults except crony capitalism that yields below-average opportunities for young adults in return for greater inequality of economic result.

Approval numbers for Donald Trump have been poor, and disapproval numbers have been even more ominous. Eleven months the 2020 election, Trump is losing every state that he lost in 2020 with approval numbers in the thirties and disapproval numbers in the high fifties and higher. Trump is being crushed in all giant cities and is losing many of the suburbs that used to go R as late as 2004. This should be little surprise, as Suburbia has a majority of adults with college educations.  Trump still wins under-educated white people, but that will not be enough in 2020.

The current President is monstrously corrupt, and he is not getting away with it. OK, the Senate might quash an impeachment, but the damage to his credibility is not going away. The negative ads practically write themselves. Certain deeds, including bribery and extortion are so vile that the attempts to commit them are themselves crimes.  (See also murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, espionage, theft, and arson).

I see a catastrophic failure of this President by historical measures, and I thus see him losing.