Compare/contrast American Presidential elections

[pbrower2a]

I expect to have plenty of activity here once the 2020 Presidential election is basically settled. So far I see a variant on one of Obama's wins.

[pbrower2a]

Quote:At this point I can "retrodict" (yes, I coined that word for my use here) an election that once had a chance of happening and now seems unlikely. This is how the 2020 election looked in contrast to those of Eisenhower and Obama based on match-ups in the middle of May 2020. Since then the news for President Trump has all been bad due to his bungling of COVID-19 and of mass protests involving dissent at police brutality. Polling was stable in the first part of 2020, but it is not now in early June. I do not see things getting better for the President. Things are spiraling away from his best hopes.

This may be relevant to 2024 or 2028 -- but no longer 2020. It did not look good for Trump this year. Trump was going to lose his three barest wins of 2020, gain nothing that he lost in 2016, and lose Arizona. Anything shaky would be assigned to Trump, but I saw Biden winning 289 electoral votes and the election.

This map is not as neat as that of the original Eisenhower-Obama overlay.

Electoral votes can be ignored, as those are for 2008.   



gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice, Biden 2020
red -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice, Trump 2020
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once, Trump 2020
light orange -- Eisenhower twice, Obama never, Biden 2020
deep blue -- Republican all five 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, Trump 2020
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once, Trump 2020

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

   

Well, well, well. It turns out that that "retrodiction" proved about as accurate as anyone could have expected of the result. Trump really did get more votes in 2020 than in 2016 in total, but not enough to offset new Democratic votes in 2020.  This "retrodiction" is almost as accurate as anyone could have predicted. I got 17 electoral votes 'wrong' (Georgia and NE-02) in this model of an election that I thought that Trump was going to lose in a landslide.

Electoral votes can be ignored, as those are for 2008.   



gray -- did not vote in 1952 or 1956
white -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice, Biden 2020
yellow -- Eisenhower twice, Obama once, Biden 2020
red -- Eisenhower twice, Obama twice, Trump 2020
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once, Trump 2020
light orange -- Eisenhower twice, Obama never, Biden 2020
medium orange -- Stevenson twice, Obama never, Biden 2020
deep blue -- Republican all five 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, Trump 2020
pink -- Stevenson twice, Obama once, Trump 2020

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

[pbrower2a]

If anyone has any doubt that the Presidential Election of 1976 is ancient history for all practical purposes:

Carter 1976, Biden 2020  



Carter 1976, Biden  red
Carter 1976, Trump 2020 yellow
Ford 1976, Biden white
Ford 1976, Trump 2020 blue

[pbrower2a]

This sort of study can be done at the state level. Again, the site in which I posted this analysis uses the old red for Democrats and blue for Republicans:

In general I do not look at county-level voting, although this might be relevant in a state whose demographics are changing. This is definitely a legitimate study. It might explain the demise of a Party in a state. Let's see how that works with... well, Alabama is at the top of the list of states in alphabetical order.

1976:




Carter won 55-42, and he seemed an excellent match (being from rural Georgia) for Alabama, which is one of the most rural states in America. Carter lost Jefferson County, which contains Alabama's only near-giant city (Birmingham). 

2020:



Obviously the Democratic Party has long since lost the rural vote unless black. The "Black Belt" remains strongly D, but two counties went from Ford in 1976 to Biden in 2020. One of those counties is Jefferson, which contains Birmingham. But Birmingham isn't anywhere near the size of Atlanta, which is to Georgia almost what Chicago is to Illinois in politics.

[pbrower2a]

... and toward the bottom of the alphabetic order:

As a general rule, I do not predict trends. Who would have thought after the 1996 Presidential election that that would be the last election in which a Democratic nominee would win any one of Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, or West Virginia?

Let's take a look at West Virginia. This is how the state looked in 1980... forty years ago...



West Virginia voted against Ronald Reagan by 4% in a year in which Reagan won 44 states. Voting on the losing side against a President who gets nearly 500 electoral votes is a strong indication that the state is extremely partisan in its orientation. That is when the United Mine Workers could reliably get out the vote for Democrats on 'labor' issues because high wages in jobs that don't require college degrees and long commutes. Democratic pols didn't have to spend much on public works, education, or even public health (the miners and their families had good insurance thanks to union contracts).

Those jobs are mostly gone. The coal seams are largely worked out, and the coal that can be minded from the surface requires far fewer workers. The United Mine Workers Union can no longer turn out the votes of coal miners and their families.  The state was never rich, but Democrats left the state with few opportunities other than mining... and bad roads, bad schools, and bad public health.

Here's the last election in which a Democratic nominee would win West Virginia:

 

... and 2020:



Back in 1996, if someone showed a map of West Virginia that looked like the last one as a prospect for 2020, you might be asking whether the Democratic Party were dying. It most certainly is.. in West Virginia.

It is West Virginia that has changed, and oh has it changed!

[David Horn]

(10-31-2020, 08:34 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 12:21 AM)jleagans Wrote: Texas is going blue and is the future of the Democratic party.  When it goes blue its an earthquake, Democrat party officially becomes the "keep Texas blue party" and will move heaven and earth to do it.

And when Texas goes blue, the Republican party will IMMEDIATELY become the party of Electoral College abolition.  

If you doubt me, pull up the Texas election results in 2012 and 2016 and take a good long look.

Texas has been going Blue for decades, except it never does.  The only difference today is urbanization, which will push Texas above California in population at some point.  I just can't see it now, though I wish I did.

jleagans Wrote:To the topic, the degree of overlap between this era and the gilded age I just cant get out of my head.  There are 1896 comparisons, Roosevelt bull moose comparisons, pandemic comparisons, yellow journalism comparisons....in the end I think this is the 1896 election.  Not an often thought of election (though KARL ROVE wrote an amazing book on it explaining why history is remembering its importance wrong), but politics post-Lincoln was totally frozen and Mckinley in 1896 broke the frozen/polarized nature and basically "won" American politics until FDR.

There is movement ... finally!  I'm not sure 2020 parallels any previous election, because Trump is a oner.  But having a total miscreant in office has defined the terms in bold colors.  Trump will have followers in the future, just as he does today.  I can't say that's true for Biden, or any Democrat other than Bernie, perhaps.  

What will tell the tale, is how Trump takes defeat, if he even does.  In FDR's time, there was the Business Coup.  If failed miserably because of one man: Smedley Butler.  Who can play that role today, if the coup comes around again?  If there is an attempt, will it be Shay's Rebellion 2020?  The Constitution is broken.  There is no natural (i.e. legal) fix that's possible, so is it guns in the street again?

I came across this interchange today, and it's scary.  January 6th was only 67 days in the future.

[pbrower2a]

Well, it is only five states and one Congressional district away from the 2012 Presidential result, with the Democratic nominee losing Florida, Iowa, and Ohio but picking up Arizona, Georgia, and NE-02.

Of course 2012 is unique because of COVID-19 messing up much of the political process. Some of the changes implemented to make voting easier could be become permanent in some states. Whether some Republican state legislatures can get away with measures that make voting more difficult pass Constitutional muster is much in question.

[pbrower2a]

So if I am to look at a state that is in the middle of the alphabet, almost exactly middle in its position of acquiring statehood, and generally close to the national average in voting.... you guessed it, Michigan.

1976, Ford winning. He was the Favorite Son, and either got little effect from such or Michigan would have otherwise gone to Carter by about 5%.



Carter still did well in the UP (there was still much mining). Ford apparently did well in counties from Grand Rapids to Lansing. The Republican proclivity to win in the suburbs remains strong, with Ford winning Oakland and Macomb counties.

1984: Reagan landslide. Mondale won three counties in the Upper Peninsula but only one (Wayne) in the Lower Peninsula.  This is what 59-40 looks like for a Republican in Michigan.



Close to the opposite of the 1984 shellacking of Mondale in Michigan was 2008. Michigan was freakishly good to Obama that year, in part because of an economic meltdown that reminded people of the Great Depression at its start.



It is hard to imagine Michigan going as sharply for Reagan in 1984 or for Obama in 2008... ever.

Now for two very close statewide votes for President: 2016 (slightly more than 10,000 votes was the margin, and Trump won)



and 2020 (over 150,000 votes, but less than 3%)



Kent (Grand Rapids), Leelanau (a county that even looks a lot like coastal California except in the winter), and Saginaw Counties suggest the difference. Or did the larger margin of votes in Wayne and Washtenaw Counties?"

[pbrower2a]

We shall see in 2024 how the horrid behavior of Trump supporters will influence elections for a few years. The most obvious indicator is that Republicans made slight gains, all in all, in the House of Representatives. The Republican Party has become the dominant Party in the state and has established a statewide machine that makes the Democratic Party irrelevant statewide and relevant only in those limited areas in which that machine is offensive to a majority of the People. Florida Republicans may have gerrymandered Congressional districts from contested areas for Democrats into their sure losses. Florida is becoming a mirror image of Cuba in its politics, differing only in that the dominant clique endorses the extreme inequality and corporate power of Big Business that Castro excoriated in his revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.

I look at the difficulty that Kevin McCarthy had in winning the votes to be Speaker of the House. The GOP has its outright fascists with which the simply-authoritarian leadership must deal to get a majority anywhere. The House is going to pass some insane legislation that will either die in the Senate or face president Biden's veto pen. The House has the budgetary power, and I can imagine the GOP trying to force "reforms" of entitlements to ensure that they go through crony capitalists or that federal taxes get shifted from the rich to the poor. Such will not be popular in 2024. Maybe it will try to push a national right-to-work (for starvation wages) law to eviscerate labor unions, but that certainly will not pass the Senate.

Do I congratulate Kevin McCarthy? He won, which I can say of plenty of odious pols past and present. We have yet to know how odious he will be.

Donald Trump still has power as the effective leader of the Republican Party, which is unusual for a one-term President. Even if the Grim Reaper or the criminal justice system takes him out of the picture, his cause still exists as the vehicle for other right-wing campaigns. Demographics now disfavor Trump ideology and mannerisms, so I see Democrats winning big in 2024. If I am to see an election much like 2020 in 2024, then perhaps Joe Biden picks up North Carolina and loses Georgia. Since 1992 all elections involving an incumbent seeking re-election have involved exchanges of no more than five states. That pattern held true in 2020 (but Trump lost all five of those that changed hands, and he could not have lost three of those without losing the election.  Heck, 1980 to 1984 was five states going for Reagan from a 44-state win to a 49-state win.

It is the personality and performance of the incumbent that makes the difference.

OK, what went wrong in 1980? Carter had a troubled Presidency, 1992? Basically, the elder Bush was an offer in 1992 of more of the same that Americans had had in the Presidency from 1981 to 1992; "three-peats" are rare in American Presidential elections.

[Eric the Green]

Mr. Brower, are you still dependent on that one website which uses opposite colors to the usual to represent the Parties? Or is that your choice to still go for red for Democratic and blue for Republican?

I used that older scheme when I designed an election USA game in 1980. But now the colors have switched in everyone's mind, so it's confusing to use the older scheme.

Although red was a communist color, blue is a labor color. And in metaphysical models like the kabbala red represents strength or severity and blue represents compassion.

If you donate to any Democratic candidate these days, your transaction goes through an outfit called Act Blue.

[pbrower2a]

Here's one state that shows trends in America as a whole. The last time that a Democratic nominee for President won Texas was 1976:


TEXAS and its 256 Counties




Jimmy Carter did well in eastern Texas aside from the Dallas-Fort Worth "Metroplex" and Greater Houston, winning the part of Texas most like "Dixie", and in a way unlikely to be repeated for more than half a century (we are 46 years away from that) many heavily-rural counties of central and northwest Texas. I'm guessing that both Texas' "Dixie" and farm areas of Texas that much more resemble the Midwest still had plenty of voters over 50 who gave credit to the New Deal for greatly reshaping their lives all to the better.

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

...What a difference eight years makes (1984)! Texas is by default the biggest state in the Bible Belt, and Reagan got 63% of the vote despite having no ties to Texas. Younger voters (late-wave Boomers and early-wave X) were much more R than D -- probably about R+20. About 1.6% of the electorate, almost entirely over 50, passes into electoral oblivion each year, and older voters of 1976 who were about D+20 were about 12.8% less of the Texas vote. That explains about 3.2% of the difference. Another demographic trend was that Mexican-Americans tended to leave Texas for California, where economic opportunities seemed better. Most importantly, the Religious Right tied its claims to moral truth to unbridled capitalism, which pushed a conservative Democratic state toward the plutocratic wing of the GOP. This is particularly so in both the Deep South ancestral to most of eastern Texas and the Mountain South ancestral to central Texas to an extent not so true in, for example, New England.



OK, Ronald Reagan had a well-organized, lavishly-funded Presidential campaign; he had a personality far more ebullient than that of Walter Mondale, who seemed to win the Democratic nomination for President for "long and distinguished service to the Democratic Party"

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

Bill Clinton billed himself as "the Man from Hope", a town not far from the Texas state line in Texarkana. He was a near-Texan geographically, and it is telling that he won the Texas counties on the Arkansas and Louisiana state lines. Although not a part of the Religious Right, he was as good a cultural fit as any Democrat since Carter in 1976. He still lost Texas by 5% in 1996 (which has a lower vote share for Ross Perot and less influence of the third-Party nominee, and in which a former resident of Texas was not the Republican nominee) so I am using it. Clinton and Carter seem similar ideologically, but even though winning 377 electoral votes, Clinton did not win Texas.



Clinton regained some rural counties of central and western Texas and some counties holding some significant rural areas, like Cameron (Brownsville and Harlingen), Nueces (Corpus Christi), El Paso (El Paso), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin). The cultural shift toward the Religious Right and its reactionary agenda on economics and personal life was largely intact in Texas enough to make Texas straddle 400 electoral votes for the Democratic nominee. It was not enough. Rural Texas was shrinking, and the giant or near-giant cities of Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth were growing fast with the Democrats failing to keep up.

[pbrower2a]

I'm going to skip over the two elections in Texas involving Dubya, a former Governor except to say that Texas continued to straddle 400 electoral votes for a Democrat. In 2008 it still did despite the most ominous meltdown of the overall economy since 1929-1932 (those two were similarly severe for the first year and a half) and arguably the slickest campaigner in a Presidential election since FDR except perhaps Reagan. Obama got 365 electoral votes, which is a 'minor landslide'; as in 1976, 1984, and  1996 neither nominee had a tie to Texas.

Obama would have needed 400 electoral votes to win Texas in 2008, and he lost it by about 11%. The map looks uglier for him until one recognizes that he won Harris (Houston) and Dallas (Dallas) Counties. Those two giants in population went against Carter in his win of 1976. The largely-rural counties of central and "Panhandle" Texas were completely gone for Obama... but they on the whole were hemorrhaging population due to the consolidation of farms and ranches. The New Deal coalition was mostly dead and buried -- literally -- by 2008.

     

Demographics define the outline of elections. Conditions were at their nadir for Democrats in Texas in the early 21st century. Obama was winning much of the Northeast in blowouts.

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

Twelve years later we have incumbent Donald Trump ® losing closely to Joe Biden (D) nationally, but winning Texas by 5.57%. Texas straddles 350 electoral votes for a Democrat, which reflects the growth of an electorate better educated, more urban or suburban in a state becoming more of a microcosm of America. The map for Biden does not look so great until one realizes that he is winning the counties with Texas' six largest cities but also rapidly-urbanizing  Fort Bend (near Houston), Hays and Williamson (near Austin). For the first time since 1964 (the LBJ blowout of Goldwater) the Democrats have won Tarrant County, which contains Fort Worth. Significantly, Collin County, a fast-growing suburban county abutting Dallas County, was about even. 




The population growth in Texas is (1) Mexican-Americans, (2) Asian-Americans, (3) blacks, and (4) well-educated white people. All three are hostile to Trump-style populism, and if Republicans are to avoid losing Texas in close elections for the next ten years they need to abandon the extreme anti-intellectualism hostile to formal learning even of the sort necessary for churning out schoolteachers, accountants, engineers, and medical professionals. Wayward professors and artists have always been fair game for derision, but in general smart people form an almost-monolithic culture irrespective of faith and ethnicity. A white person with an IQ of 120 typically has more in common with an African immigrant with an IQ of 120 than with a white person with an IQ of 80. Should the GOP commit itself to the political style of Donald Trump, then it latches onto an electorate sure to lose in subsequent elections nationwide.