Wednesday, September 02, 2020
The Conventions Did Not Change The Presidential Election
The chart above is from the Morning Consult Poll of swing states in this election. It compares the race in each swing state before and after the party conventions. Pre-convention polls were done between August 7th and 16th of 16,485 likely voters. The post-convention polls were done between August 21st and 30th. The margins of error for each state is between 2 and 4 points.
Trump's View Of Suburban America Is Out-Of-Date
Trump knows that he is in trouble in the suburbs. The 2018 election, and many recent polls, show the suburbs have turned away from him (and the Republican Party that has supported him).
Trump has decided that he can win suburban voters back by trying to scare them. He has told them that he will not allow low-income housing and apartments to come to those suburbs. He is trying to scare suburbanites by telling them he will keep minorities away from them.
There's a problem with that approach though. It supposes that the suburbs are White bastions. That may have been true back in the 1960's, but not anymore. Suburbs now have a diverse population, and are becoming more diverse all the time. If Trump didn't live in his bubble surrounded only by the rich, he would have known that.
Here is how David Byler, in The Washington Post, describes the flaws in Trump's suburban strategy:
Give President Trump this much: He has finally realized that the 2020 election will be lost and won in the suburbs. The question is whether his realization comes too late.
In recent weeks, Trump claimed that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wants to “abolish the suburbs,” tweeted that he would preserve the American Dream for “Suburban Housewives of America” and bragged that his repeal of Obama-era housing regulations intended to prevent segregation would prevent suburbanites from being “bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
It’s another step to stoke racial anxiety, this time among voters who moved leftward in the 2018 midterms and will be crucial in November. Other Republicans have tried it in cycles past. But the scare-the-suburbs tactic has flaws in 2020.
First, demographics. These communities are no longer all-White bastions where fathers work and mothers stay home with the children. These neighborhoods are racially diverse: According to a 2018 study, only 68 percent of suburbanites were White, 14 percent were Hispanic and 11 percent were Black. And no matter where they live, Pew Research Center found that the share of mothers who stay home with children declined from 49 percent in 1967 to 27 percent in 2016. The audience Trump believes he’s targeting — White stay-at-home suburban moms — may be smaller than he thinks.
Playing the race card is more likely to backfire now than in any time in a generation. In 2019, the libertarian Cato Institute found that 52 percent of Americans who live in the suburbs favor “building more houses, condos and apartments” in their community while 46 percent oppose the idea. According to YouGov, 50 percent of suburbanites think Biden would be better at handling race relations than Trump, and only 28 percent prefer Trump to Biden. And though it’s too early to tell whether this is a fad or a permanent trend, some suburbs may move left as city-dwellers, some of whom fear disease, have fled urban covid-19 hotspots.
Finally, Trump’s suburban pitch is off-key in an election dominated by the coronavirus. According to Gallup’s long-running “Most Important Problem” survey, concern about economic issues is at an all-time low, despite the economic impact of the pandemic. As of August, a 35 percent plurality thought that “coronavirus/diseases” was the most important problem facing the country, 22 percent believed it to be “the government/poor leadership,” and 10 percent named “race relations/racism” as most pressing. With voting set to begin in a few weeks, Trump’s handling of the virus and the broader recession are more important to voters than the specifics of housing policy.
It’s understandable that Trump would want to shift the narrative away from the virus — less than 40 percent of Americans approve of how Trump has handled the pandemic. And it makes sense to target the suburbs. Voters there make up roughly half of the electorate, and many still remember pulling the lever for tax-cutting Republicans since 2000. Trump needs votes and he needs them quickly, so he is playing on suburban voters’ basest fears to win back former Republicans and overcome Biden’s strength in cities.
But Trump may discover that, with kids going back to schools and colleges, voters in the suburbs have far too many other fears to worry about the homogeneity of their neighborhoods.
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Texas Had A Bad Month In August Due To COVID-19
The following numbers are from The COVID Tracking Project.
In August, Texas had 5,967 new deaths from COVID-19.
In August, Texas had 192,023 new cases of COVID-19.
The following charts show the daily totals for August:
In August, Texas had 5,967 new deaths from COVID-19.
In August, Texas had 192,023 new cases of COVID-19.
The following charts show the daily totals for August:
An Impossible Task
Active-Duty Military Does NOT Support Trump's Re-Election
The charts above of from Military Times -- the magazine for our active-duty troops. They did a poll of 1,018 active-duty troops between July 27th and August. The poll had a 2 point margin of error.
Normally, the Republican presidential candidate can count on winning the majority of military votes, and Trump did lead Clinton by nearly 20 points among the military in October of 2016. But 2020 is a different matter. Currently, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 5.7 points.
Trump has had a serious drop in his favorability among our troops. In 2016, he was viewed favorably by 46.1% and unfavorably by 37.0% -- a positive rating of 9.1 points. That has now flipped, and currently, he is viewed favorably by 37.8% and unfavorably by 49.9% -- a negative rating of 12.1 points.
The Arguments For Trump's Re-Election Are Ludicrous
That's where Donald Trump is in trouble. There are no rational reasons for his re-election. He has done a terrible job, and there's no reason to believe he would do any better if given another four years.
In fact, it's just the opposite -- that he has damaged our democratic institutions, and with another four years he might damage them beyond repair. His love of authoritarianism might even be the end of our democracy.
But his campaign, and the Republican Party, are trying to justify voters giving Trump another four years. They have come up with five basic arguments. The problem is that those arguments are deeply flawed and fall apart under inspection.
Here is how Jennifer Rubin describes those flawed GOP arguments in The Washington Post:
He will give us law and order:
If public safety is the concern, the unnecessary deaths from covid-19, which might exceed 200,000 by Election Day, and the anxiety over leaving our homes for fear of joining 6 million infected Americans surely make Trump’s tenure the most dangerous for ordinary Americans. Each week, we have been losing twice the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11.
No wonder Trump loves to highlight any domestic scene of disorder, mayhem and looting he can to frighten White Americans, arguing that if law enforcement “dominates the streets,” we will have public order. This is preposterous. We cannot go to war with millions of demonstrators. That’s simply impossible, not to mention morally objectionable. The demands of the protesters, among them police reform and voting rights legislation are entirely legitimate. But so long as Trump denies the legitimacy of these concerns and the presence of systemic racism, we will not have domestic tranquility.
Trump celebrates violence, encourages police misconduct, honors Whites indicted for brandishing guns at marchers and tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. . . .
He has vanquished the pandemic:
The level of delusion necessary to sustain the fiction that Trump has handled the pandemic well is unfathomable. We have more deaths due to the disease than any other country on the planet, many more deaths per capita than many advancedcountries and no national testing-and-tracing program. We remain cloistered at home and children cannot attend school in person in most places after weeks of shutdowns, largely because Trumped egged officials into reopening prematurely. He has hawked dangerous and unproven remedies and pressured government health experts to weaken or change guidelines to minimize dangers and restrictions on activities. As he did Thursday night, he gathers large crowds without masks and social distancing, creating his very own potential superspreading events.
He has been great for the economy:
Multiple fact-checkers have repeatedly demonstrated that the economy under President Barack Obama’s was stronger by multiple measures than the economy under Trump. This disparity was due in part to tariffs Trump imposed, which amount to a tax hike for U.S. consumers. If Trump falsely thinks he inherited a rotten economy, it’s inarguable that it got worse even before he crashed it by attempting to ignore a pandemic. It is now evident that some jobs lost will not return when — and if — the coronavirus is vanquished. Hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses have closed. Companies will not all emerge from bankruptcy. Trump ends his four years with record unemployment and debt — and without a plan to reduce either.
Joe Biden is a socialist:
Not even the Republicans have the nerve to make that argument. Instead, they argue that Biden will be tricked or led around by the nose by forces on the left. This is entirely speculative and ignores Biden’s decades-long record in office (remember the 1994 crime bill?) and policy choices during the campaign, among them his opposition to Medicare-for-all. Moreover, we have yet to see in American politics a situation in which the wing of a party defeated in the presidential primary magically controls the executive branch after their rivals from the same party assume office.
Moreover, if “conservatives” are worried about the expansion of government, then Trump’s widespread abuse of executive power, meddling in investigations and enforcement actions to benefit cronies and punish enemies, threats to harm certain companies (as in his call for a boycott of Goodyear), protectionism and capitulation to illiberal regimes, as well as the mammoth debt he’s run up, his indiscriminate use of federal forces against protesters, his misuse of government property and government employees to serve his personal interests, and attacks on the courts and free press make Trump the least conservative president ever (if that word has any meaning anymore).
“Life”:
One can respect those deeply opposed to abortion in evaluating the candidates, but by the same token, a president who prioritizes the economy over preventing a pandemic, rips children from the arms of their mothers, refuses to denounce killings of unarmed Black Americans and willfully declines to protect the lives of our troops on whose heads Russia placed bounties is not respectful of human life in any meaningful sense. Indeed, Trump has turned the party into a vicious death cult that trivializes the nearly 180,000 deaths caused by covid-19 to date. When you create superspreader crowds to soothe your ego, you are endangering human life.
When one party willfully ignores a pandemic and treats Black lives as expendable, it loses any moral authority regarding the sanctity of human life. In refusing to be guided by scientific facts (be it on air and waterquality, climate change or covid-19), Trump puts at risk the health and lives of millions of people here and around the world. Those who value the essential worth of every human being should be repulsed by this administration.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)