Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

A post that I made in Leip's Election Atlas. The respondent's name (that person apparently does not post here) is of course excised. In response to this article, someone posted some sarcastic critique, which I sought to shred:

Quote:Here's what I took away from this:

1. Only a woman can defeat Trump.

2. We don't need another Trump (presumably the author means male nominee).

From this, it seems to me that the author believes all men are Trump, even if he's a Democrat. But wait, does this mean Hillary isn't a woman?

Most men are not Trump. Maybe some have a secret admiration for rogues who get away what they dream of doing but can't get away with. Trump admitted to saying that he grabbed women by their... which I as a juror would treat as criminal sexual conduct if the facts so stated in a criminal trial in Michigan.    

Quote:All joking aside, the reason you were all so surprised with the 2016 results is because you were too busy drowning each other out with your hate-filled rhetoric and your defending of cop killers and city burners that you didn't notice everyone else quietly rolling their eyes at you.

Which of us so-called Leftists used hateful rhetoric? Which of us defended cop-killers and city-burners? We kept our language clean until Trump debased everything precious in America. I have never used so many censorable four-letter words in my life before Trump became President. 

Quote:Spoiler alert: Warren will be the nominee. Not because she's the best, but because she's a woman. You see, the Democrats have this strange notion in their heads that they NEED a woman to run so she can play the female card, as Miss "I'm With Her" did so successfully in 2016. They don't want to leave any votes on the table, right? What they fail to realize is that they're not even gaining any votes by doing that because anyone who would vote for a candidate simply because she's a woman wouldn't vote for Trump even if he went against a man. You gain nothing. I hope she gets the nomination. All you Never-Trumpers can high five each other over the incredible awesomeness of having another female candidate. Everyone else will scratch their heads while she explains how she's going to take away their private health insurance, and later vote for Trump.

Let me reduce the 2020 Presidential election to the basics as apply to every Presidential election as  those basics have applied to every re-election bid by an incumbent President. Those Presidents who have convinced us through legitimate achievements who successfully convince the People that a second or later term is a good thing have typically been re-elected. It is hardly surprising that Presidents reasonably similar in achievement and temperament get re-elected. Example:

Quote:When all is said and done, I think that the Obama and Eisenhower Presidencies are going to look like good analogues. Both Presidents are chilly rationalists. Both are practically scandal-free administrations. Both started with a troublesome war that both found their way out of. Neither did much to 'grow' the strength of their Parties in either House of Congress. To compare ISIS to Fidel Castro is completely unfair to Fidel Castro, a gentleman by contrast to ISIS. 

The definitive moderate Republican may have been Dwight Eisenhower, and I have heard plenty of Democrats praise the Eisenhower Presidency. He went along with Supreme Court rulings that outlawed segregationist practices, stayed clear of the McCarthy bandwagon, and let McCarthy implode.


 
gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice
deep blue -- Republican all four elections
light blue -- Republican all but 2012 (I assume that greater Omaha went for Ike twice)
light green -- Eisenhower once, Stevenson once, Obama never
dark green -- Stevenson twice, Obama never
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once 

No state voted Democratic all four times, so no state is in deep red.

The electric eel is loose! What?  Republican Eisenhower and Democrat Obama? They did win much the same states in their elections (Obama not getting the High Plains states or the Intermountain West aside from Colorado and New Mexico). OK, the political culture of America in 2008 and 2012 is far closer to that of the 1950s -- it is just that the partisan match to the political cultures of the states are mostly opposite in partisan identity. 

So what changed in in American politics between 1952 and 2012? Let's start by saying what did not change. Eisenhower cultivated the Mormon vote for the GOP to get it to start identifying with conservative politics. Trump has some chance of blowing that. Ranch country is as strongly R now as it was in 1952, I do not want to go into the details on how ranch-area and farm-area politics differ; Iowa has voted D in all but two Presidential elections beginning in 1988, and Kansas has voted R in every Presidential election since 1968. Demographic realities have given California, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico large Hispanic minorities, and such now favors Democrats in statewide elections.

But note well: Eisenhower and Obama did very well with well-educated people, winning decisive majorities among both. Stevenson, McCain, and Romney did well with not-so-well-educated people -- and such makes a big difference. People with much trust in formal education as a necessity for the Good Life voted for Ike -- and Obama -- at least as the states suggest. The states with the lowest standards of formal education went for Stevenson (D) but against Obama (D). Ike won three states usually tough for Republicans even in good or great years, winning the states (Massachusetts and Minnesota) that were the sole states that hapless McGovern and Mondale won in 49-state landslides for a Republican, and Rhode Island, the only Northern state other than Massachusetts to vote against Herbert Hoover in 1928. Ike won all three twice, and no Republican has won all three once in any other election since 1924.     

OK, what about the Hispanics? Sure, many are poor, and recent immigrants might be ill-educated people who hold onto cr@ppy jobs. They insist that their kids do well in school so that they don't become a permanent under-class in America. In the 1950's such people would have gone for Ike. Today they hold Trump in contempt for an anti-intellectualism that reaches far beyond the usual wayward professor to the K-12 teacher. Note well that the Catholic Church has no use for the young-earth creationism that so many Protestant fundamentalists endorse. "Believe it or burn!"

...Donald Trump has done nothing to change the core beliefs of anyone. If you thought that unions  are the workers' best friend, formal education is a necessary key to personal success, rational thought is a good thing, women are equals of men, the environment needs protection, tax cuts for the super-rich aid only the super-rich, science is more trustworthy than superstition and corporate propaganda, and that ethnic divides are peril back in 2016... it is highly unlikely that Trump has convinced you otherwise. If Trump told you something that sounded good in 2016 but proved to be something not so desirable, then you are likely to vote against him in 2020.

Trump has thrown away the usual advantages of an incumbent President and gotten no new ones. How does that look on the map?    

   
 
gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice, the Democrat in 2020
deep blue -- Republican all four five elections
medium blue -- Republican in all elections except 2020
pale blue -- Republican all but 2012 (I assume that greater Omaha went for Ike twice)
light green -- Eisenhower once, Stevenson once, Obama never, Trump 2020
dark green -- Stevenson twice, Obama never, Trump 2020
medium red -- Stevenson twice, Obama once, the Democrat in 2020 
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama never, the Democrat in 2020
orange -- Stevenson once, Obama never, the Democrat in 2020

No state is in deep red because every state has voted for a Republican at least once. If things go really bad between now and November 2020, then there could be more states going from deep blue to medium-blue... This is what I see with Trump being held to 100 electoral votes or so. That is just short of how Ike beat Stevenson. America's political culture is more like that of 2008 or even 1952 than what the Presidential election of 2016 showed. Yes, I see Trump as a failure as a person, a politician, and a leader.  

Quote:Also, when Warren closes her speeches with how expensive tuition is, remember how she takes a six digit salary to teach a single course, and also remember that she has mentioned no plan to lower the actual cost of college. She only offers bribes. Take it, if that's the kind of person you are.

She must be one highly-valuable professor. But I could tell tales of why college education is so expensive, and it has nothing to do with quality of the teaching. It ain't the college teachers. Colleges now hire large numbers of 'assistant' and 'adjunct' professors to teach such courses as survey courses, especially in the Humanities, and can never get tenure. They are paid less than K-12 teachers despite being better educated. College administration was once full of college professors who had tenure but could not teach because they had failed to keep up with the subject or they were simply incompetent lecturers. Nobody wanted to be such. Now the college administrators are paid far more than the college professors and have roles much like those of corporate executives. 

I will say this: the traditional purpose of college was to take a promising kid with some intellectual promise and good character and make him better. A good liberal-arts school refined a kid's intellect and taught him that there was more to life than sex, mass culture, material gain and indulgence, and bureaucratic power. Such was not so exorbitant as it is today. 

................................

Oh by the way -- has there ever been a successful politician who hasn't made glowing promises of  better lives for voters so long as he gets elected (or re-elected)? At that Donald Trump is no exception. Nobody succeeds by promising that things will be worse for most people. Nobody says that he will raise your taxes, cut expenditures on public services, and give the public sector away to profiteers -- or take away basic freedoms -- and gets anywhere near winning an election. OK, maybe one makes promises to do horrible things to social pariahs who have gotten a raw deal for a long time. That is not to say that there have not been electoral disappointments who took away liberty, gutted public expenditures, robbed people blind, and started disastrous wars.  Heck, even Hitler promised peace, freedom, prosperity, and national pride... obviously we need take care to avoid electing demagogues with mean streaks or barely-hidden rage. 

One thing is certain: Donald Trump has given us all a hard lesson in civics that some of us slept through in high school... and one that many of us wish that we could sleep through if we got it right the first time.