Well, I dunno about everyone, but quite a few people.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating : Trump does not need to swing 10 million votes to become President, he needs to swing about 300,000, maybe less. Trump lost Wisconsin (10 EC Votes) by about 21,000 votes. Trump lost Michigan (16 EC votes) by about 160,000 votes. Trump lost Georgia (16 EC votes) by around 12,500 votes, Trump lost Arizona (11 EC votes) by around 11,000 votes, Trump lost Pennsylvania (20 EC votes) by around 80,000 votes. Add all of those up and 300,000 votes swings 73 Electoral College votes Trump’s way. He doesn’t even need that many if the other states hold true to 2020 results, he really only needs 3 out of the 5 to swing his way and it’s enough.
Guess where the GOP is hardest at work trying to pass “election security” legislation that will suppress votes from traditionally Democrat-voting areas? Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin…hmm…I sense a pattern. Then, just yesterday, the Conservative-heavy Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s new limits on voting do not violate the Voting Rights Act.
The table is being set for Trump to claim those 300,000 votes he needs to win 2024 easily despite losing the popular vote by 7+ million. Even if someone hits Trump with a major criminal indictment that disqualifies him from becoming a candidate in 2024 (pretty sure you can’t run if you’re up on felony State or Federal charges) the table is still set for whomever the GOP nominates to try to win the handful of states Trump narrowly lost in 2020 and thereby claim a 2024 victory.
A record number of people turned out to vote in 2020. An even larger record number of people are going to need to turn out to vote in 2024 if we are going to overcome the fuckery the GOP has set in motion and win the Presidency again, no matter who runs.
He needs to swing a few hundred thousand in exactly the right places, without really knowing in advance where those places are.
They’re in the same places they always are.
Like…Georgia and Arizona?
Exactly. It isn’t a mystery where things are contested. It might be a list of a few places, hey is this the year for NC like Georgia was in 2020? But you can list off the entirety of the relevant states in a list of less than 10 states.
Changing votes in California, Oregon, or New York are irrelevant to the GOP.
It’s been the trend for years, remember in 2016 when Hillary spent time in Arizona as a potential swing state. Georgia has been on trend for a while. It wasn’t a surprise it was possible. It was a pleasant surprise it happened this time.
If Trump somehow managed to win the usual suspects, he still loses in 2020. He got lucky in 2016. You can’t plan for lucky, or build a strategy for lucky.
Yes, that’s why Trump had the plan to swing a few tens of thousands of votes there. Oh, wait, he didn’t, because he didn’t know he would have to. That’s my point.
Good thing for them they’re focused on swing states that have close margins then.
Not just that, apparently we know exactly what those margins will be! And, oops, sorry about Arizona and Georgia, somehow we didn’t quite predict the margins there.
Hey remember in the run up to 2016 when Hillary lost the primary to Bernie in states like Michigan and some people pointed this out and identified this as a potential weakness as certain economic messages were not resonating with critical voters in a specific type of state that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania fit?
Like what is your point, that each election is a blank slate that we can’t use past performance and indicators to predict what states are in play within a certain percentage swing? Because that’s daft.
Yes, pre election nobody is 100% certain which states will be the tipping point. But you can very clearly populate a list of ~10 states or so which have the potential to be the tipping point.
Did we know in advance that Georgia would be the closest pick up? No. Would any reasonable person have looked at the data in advance and postulated Georgia had the potential to be a swing state given the circumstances? Yes. Just like North Carolina is another one that is plausible. It was very tight in NC, but fell short. But if you were to pick a candidate for most likely dem pickup from 20 to 24, it has to be on the short list. Just like if you were to frame out the most likely GOP swings in 24, then Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are on that list.
It isn’t saying we know what the margins are in which state. It is simply stating we know Kansas is as irrelevant as Washington for EC purposes.
I mean if you’re going to play stupid, I’m not going to engage with it.
Sure, he has to get lucky, but not, like, 100:1 lucky. Also there are so many X-factors. Biden could easily have health issues; he’s pushing 80. Either a Harris run in '24 or a fractious Democratic primary could open up new opportunities.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Is all I want to say to you. But that’s my theme generally.
Nobody could look at the 2016 results and predict where they would have to win votes, and exactly how many votes, to produce victory in 2020. Similarly, nobody can look at the 2020 results and predict exactly where Trump has to win votes, and exactly how many, to win in 2024. I mean, I think that’s bloody obvious.
My point is exactly what I said it was; that this:
Is almost certainly wrong as a strategy to win. We don’t know how many votes Trump has to ‘swing’, and we don’t know where he has to ‘swing’ them.
Never mind that we don’t even know that he’ll be the nominee.
If Trump is alive and not in jail he will 100% be the nominee. There’s nobody else who comes close to beating him in a primary right now.
45,000 more votes for Trump in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona would have resulted in a tie in the electoral college. In addition, Trump would have needed to win at least one more of the districts in one of the split states, or Pennsylania, which would have required another 80K votes. So something like 125K targeted votes would have flipped the 2020 election. However, Scott is right it’s imposssible to predict the targeting with any precision.
But what multiple of that 125K is enough to account for the imprecision of the targeting? There is a number of votes swinging to Trump, probably something like 3-5X that 125K number (in swing states) that put Trump into a winning position in the electoral college.
Basically, a swing of half a million votes or so in the “right” states is a real danger. Under our screwed up undemocratic system, Trump simply doesn’t have to worry about lowering his 5 million vote loss tally in CA.
That said, a swing of half a million votes in those states is actually a pretty big task IMO. I’m more worried about election subversion at the State Legislature and Congressional levels (if the GOP takes over Congress).
I think this is flat wrong.
Looking at 2016, and projecting 2020, it was blatantly, screamingly, obvious where inroads needed to be made to beat Trump.
You needed to flip some subset of the following: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia. You also had to retain Nevada. Long shot pick ups for Texas and Florida. The Kansas and Maine at large district votes also had some relevance, but limited.
And guess what, you would have been correct. You don’t know what the exact margins will be, but that’s imprecision. You do know where they broadly need to be, and with things like Facebook you have a pretty good idea who those people can be. Granular targeting at your most receptive audiences in a handful of key spots, that’s all you need.
You don’t need a message to resonate with a broad base of voters. You just need a Cambridge Analytica operation to find specific targets and push messaging there, and hope you get the right ones.
this isn’t a formula with inputs X,Y,Z you are trying to calculate for and out comes victory. But it isn’t this broad unknowable thing either. You have a rough guess of where the outcome is within changeable distance, Georgia sure as hell is as is Arizona. You figure out a rough idea of the required magnitude of change. And you find a message and audience in those locations.
Is the above hard? Sure. Is it guaranteed to work? No. But if you are trying to allocate resources, you have a very good starting location, and idea of what you need to do. Victory may elude you, but the ask is a lot easier than your blank slate postulation.
Except all the people who did?
You’re acting like Trump might win California in 2024 or something. The reality is that basically every election revolves around 4 or 5 states and those states are always close, which is why they’re the ones that decide elections. If Wisconsin was +20 R no one would give a shit about Wisconsin, much like no one gives a shit about Indiana despite it having more electoral votes.
You’re acting like every state reboots and an RNG selects it’s population every 4 years.
Biden won not because he ‘swung’ handfuls of votes in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Georgia, but because he attracted the votes of 17 million more votes nationwide for a Democrat, swamping the 9 million vote gain of Trump, and those votes were naturally distributed such that they produced sufficient margins in states like Pennsylvania, etc.
Any Trump strategy to win would be focused on that: how to make a big enough difference nationally that it produces the lift you need in a handful of states that are mostly not possible to predict.
If you don’t want to read my actual words, that’s fine, but making up your own argument to ridicule is, itself, ridiculous.