My issue was the fact there was no movement. I still don’t believe that. It’s not just their guy had a bad debate performance, it was a train wreck. There would be some change. You make good sense but that horror show would have moved the needle a bit.
I had one of those BIG Delta 88 land yacht’s. Wonderful, that car was big enough to have its own zip code.
[My issue was the fact there was no movement. I still don’t believe that. It’s not just their guy had a bad debate performance, it was a train wreck. There would be some change. You make good sense but that horror show would have moved the needle a bit.]
Besides, when was the last time anyone stopped rooting for the home team because it lost big? Fact is - in elections -most people already have home teams.
For instance, blacks generally view Democrats as their home team. Whatever outlier polls indicate, I’d be surprised if final exit polls show much movement from 90% (D).
For blacks, supporting the Democrats is a matter of rational self-interest, not herd instinct. Democrats give blacks a lot of freebies Republicans do not. That’s why they get the black vote. Without quotas for school admissions, federal, state and private institutions, the black middle class would shrink massively and the vast majority of blacks would be clustered in entry level jobs. But a central plank of the GOP platform is the elimination of quotas.
Although black people are, on average, more socially conservative than white liberals, a significant break among black voters from the Democratic Party should be unlikely, because the Democratic Party treats black people collectively as an interest group it services, and the GOP does not.
Giving stuff to and doing stuff for black people is one of the main things the Democratic Party is about. Central to its messaging is that they do things for black people. That is why Joe Biden promised to nominate a black Supreme Court justice, and Gavin Newsom promised to fill a Senate vacancy with a black appointee.
The Republican Party’s messaging to white people isn’t as explicit, but the subtext is clear. They’re saying that the Democrats want to take stuff from “you,” their prospective voter who is probably white, and give it to “somebody else” who is probably black or an immigrant.
For black voters to switch in large numbers from the party that promises to give stuff to black people to the party that opposes giving stuff to black people, the Democrats have to err spectacularly. Basically, black people have to hate the stuff the Democrats are giving them.
One major thing the Democrats have been giving black people since 2020 is the Black Lives Matter agenda: Less policing, less traffic enforcement, less pretrial detention, less imprisonment, fewer police interactions with black men in areas where a lot of black people live.
It is possible that a lot of black people actually hate the Black Lives Matter agenda. It is possible that they are upset that people are driving sixty miles an hour down the street where their kids play. It is possible they blame Democrats for the rise in crime and disorder.
Black people bear the brunt of rising crime much more than white people do, so when white liberals believe crime is a conservative bogeyman, they think they’re being antiracist, but they’re actually dismissing the concerns of black people who are experiencing rising crime acutely.
The other thing that might be happening is that the GOP message that the Democrats are taking something from “you” and giving it to “somebody else” is appealing to black voters more than it has in previous cycles, because this time, the “somebody else” is migrants.
A lot of black voters live in large cities and a lot of migrants have flowed into those cities in the last couple of years, and black people in those cities are experiencing more negative impact from this than white liberals are.
The school gymnasium or the community center in a black neighborhood may have been turned into a shelter for migrants, or migrants may be congregating in a park in a predominantly black neighborhood. City programs that historically benefited black residents may be cut to defer funds to migrant services.
White liberals experience the migrants as, like, an unlicensed vendor selling cut mango in front of the art museum, and black voters experience the migrants as MS-13 selling fentanyl on their block.
I still have a hard time imagining that a lot of black voters are going to support Donald Trump, who, for better or worse, has successfully been tagged as a racist. But if black people are really fleeing Joe Biden, then it reveals a stunning disconnect, because the Biden administration has been more dedicated to “stuff for black people” than any Democratic administration in my lifetime.
If Biden is losing the support of black voters, then that means that crime and immigration are more important to black people than the BLM agenda, the appointment of black judges and executive branch officials, affirmative action and diversity policies, and student loan forgiveness.