Posted on 05/12/2015 7:15:04 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Like the proverbial general waging the last war, Americas pundit class has dug in around a Maginot Line of conventional wisdom erected around President Barack Obamas electoral coalition in preparation for the next engagement.
In a May article for Politico Magazine, the University of Virginias Center for Politics crew took an admittedly early look at the electoral map ahead of the 2016 contest and came up with some disappointing conclusions for Republicans. While its true that its too early to make any concrete assumptions about how the race for the White House will develop, its fair to note that the seven tossup states will give readers a sense of déjà vu.
Its effectively the same map we featured for much of the 2012 cycle, and it unmistakably suggests the Democratic nominee should start the election as at least a marginal Electoral College favorite over his or (probably) her Republican rival, they wrote. However, at the starting gate it is wiser to argue that the next election is basically a 50-50 proposition.
Politicos Dylan Byers chose to ignore that last sentence. Lets be honest with ourselves for a second: This is Hillary Clintons election to lose, he declared.
On Nov. 8, 2016, Clinton will start start with a minimum 247 of the 270 electoral votes she needs to win. If you give her Colorado and Virginia which many political strategists would, given the Hispanic population in one and the rising influence of the northern-centered population in the other shell start with 269. That means Clinton doesnt need Ohio or Florida. She just needs one small state like Iowa, Nevada or New Hampshire to put her over the edge. And because shes got a boatload of money and no viable primary challenger, shell have plenty of time and resources to lock up at least one of those states.
Sure, Florida and Ohio are, as they have been for the better part of a half-century, must-win states for Republicans if they hope to secure 270 Electoral College votes. But Democrats have seen their firewall states in the Upper Midwest teeter over the course of the Obama presidency. Whats more, Virginia, North Carolina, and Colorado three states in which the coalition of the ascendant were supposed to deliver a generation of unbroken Democratic governance are pure tossups or GOP-favored states at this early stage of the race.
Byers fatalism is not sitting well with statistics guru and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. In his latest piece, Silver took a dive into the historical data from 1992 to today and determined that electoral locks are made to be broken.
[W]hen commentators talk about the Democrats blue wall, all theyre really pointing out is that Democrats have had a pretty good run in presidential elections lately, Silver wrote. And they have, if you conveniently draw the line at 1992 (it doesnt sound so impressive to instead say Democrats have won five of the 12 elections since 1968).
He performed a series of tests to see how the Electoral College would swing with relatively minor shifts in the popular vote. A universally applied 5-point swing in popular vote results in a number of states shifting from one camp to the other and an Electoral College landslide. Its a pretty fascinating dive into recent electoral history and fully worth the read.
Hey, look: I can get carried away, too. If the 2016 election turns out to be close, well be sweating the small stuff by October and November. The difference between a 50 percent and a 55 percent chance of victory for Clinton or Marco Rubio or whomever because of Electoral College dynamics will seem like a pretty big deal.
But for now? The Electoral College just isnt worth worrying about much. If you see analysts talking about the blue wall, all theyre really saying is that Democrats have won a bunch of presidential elections lately an obvious fact that probably doesnt have much predictive power for what will happen this time around.
Im not saying Clinton is doomed. Rather, I think the fundamentals point toward her chances being about 50-50, and I wouldnt argue vigorously if you claimed the chances were more like 60-40 in one or the other direction. But Clinton is no sort of lock, and if she loses the popular vote by even a few percentage points, the blue wall will seem as archaic as talk of a permanent Republican majority.
If there is smart money on the 2016 election, its still in the bright gamblers pockets. Its far too early to begin making pronouncements about either partys viability based solely on either the Democratic Partys advantage with minority voters or the historical headwinds that will hinder Democratic prospects and benefit Republicans in 2016. Its foolish to ignore the lessons of the last war, but no one ever has the fortune of being able to refight the battles of the past.
Your FR “About” page is a must read for all true Patriots. Very well done sir! And you’re obviously a lot smarter than that low-life leftist, Nate Silver.
What about Vermont? It must be 99% White there. Or how about Oregon? Perhaps 90% White.
That’s a tougher one to quantify.
My guess is the total number of fraudulently documented foreigners is over 30 million, not the 11 million they like to lie about. Hard to know how many are fraudulently registered to vote.
I hope it’s not too many :)
Put Rubio on the ticket and you lose my vote.
Completely untrustworthy after scheming with Schumer against the citizens.
“I dont get whats so impressive about him. He predicted a handful of swing states. Big whoop. “
In 2012 Nate Silver was only able to predict 50 of 50 states for President and a lowly 31 of 33 US Senate races.
I could force myself to accepting Walker as VP. Rubio? I dunno. I’d have to do some extreme math/soul searching on that one. He is garbage and proved it with his collaboration. He did it before, he’s solid GOPe and he WILL do it again.
Vermont is California with cows and maple syrup.
It will come down to how much vote fraud the democrats can get away with.
Walker as VP would be acceptable. He’s been talking to Jeff Sessions and gotten up to speed on immigration.
Rubio, Bush, Huckabee, Perry or any other cheap labor importer as VP is a deal breaker, even with Ted Cruz at the top of the ticket.
I’m expecting the RNC to work their magic and nominate Jebster. They owe the Cheap Labor Express an amnesty candidate.
Jebster vs Hillary = lowest turnout election ever.
I’d rather see President Hillary of that match-up. that way we can get the collapse over with in a couple months instead of several Either way it happens within a year.
This premise also is that minorities are going to come out again in 2016 like they did for Obama.
Anybody think the black community and latinos are gaga for Hillary?
“But Clinton is no sort of lock...”
Silver is right about this. She’s doing a far worse job this time than she did in ‘08.
And I actually heard the snarky girl on the Sirius POTUS channel describe the current Republican field (except for Bush, whom she was criticizing) as being filled with new and interesting candidates. She might just as well have been speaking about Hillary too, and I think she’d be the first to admit that, except for maybe the “woman president” angle.
Of course she’ll pull the lever for “D”, but still I was pleasantly surprised to hear her remark.
I’m sorry but Hillary and Jeb give old hats a bad name.
and yet completely right on 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014 in the US
He may well be ‘for the rat’ but his analytics have proven to be accurate. He has been much better than Sabado or Rove or any of a dozen others
I think we need to worry a lot about Virginia and Colorado. in 2014, a huge republican victory year, we lose the governor’s race in Colorado, and the Senate in Virginia, and we lost the Governor’s race in Virginia in 2013. A republican can win those states, but they will need to be a particularly compelling candidate.
His days of being the great guru predictor of things are over. Go back to doing sports Nate.
All politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.
Posters on this thread and conservative pundits on the radio blandly assure us that the problem in losing the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections is that we have failed to run a red-blooded conservative causing the conservative base to stay at home. These assurances are worth nothing. Equally useless are assurances that Nate silver is a has been. The question is where are the data?
The data in Ohio, for example, are not at all clear that the loss was due to Romney being unable to excite the conservative base. It is apparently equally likely that Romney's cyber game and ground game were so pathetically inadequate that he was simply swamped, a real indictment of someone running as a manager and a turnaround artist at that. Michael Barone has published on this problem and even he is not clear about the root of the problem for Republicans.
I support the most conservative electable Republican and have supported Ted Cruz for quite some time. I would be content with Scott Walker but my enthusiasm falls off radically thereafter. I argue for a very conservative candidate not by assuring desperate conservatives that the nominating a conservative is a sure path to victory-it is not because media will see to that-but John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have taught me that electing Rinos is at best masturbatory, it might feel good but it avails nothing.
If one accepts that the Republic is marching headlong toward the cliff, the result of an election between Democrats and Rinos means only that a light or a heavy foot has been put on the accelerator but the breaks will be left untouched. We either save the Republic or we descend into chaos and tyranny and the only way to save the Republic is to revert to conservative constitutional values. I do not believe I exaggerate danger either to our fiscal well-being or to the ever-increasing tyranny of our government.
That necessity however is not the equivalent of inevitability. We lose elections because we run top down paid media election campaigns against a bottom-up, race-based, campaign in which the electorate has been thoroughly conditioned by institutions such as the educational establishment which are funded by the federal and state governments. The media moves in for the kill. Race is determinative. The African-American "community" is about as open to reason as the Arab Street. As to the Hispanic vote, bottom up operatives are toiling away in the barrios, Alinsky style, to achieve the same result with that demographic. These demographics are not amenable to television ads run 90 days before an election, their culture has already been set. Republicans try to re-make the culture in their own image but Democrats simply harvest the crop, often with demagoguery and always with unpaid media.
This may be the last election in which Republicans have any chance of electing a national candidate because amnesty will have rendered the prize beyond our reach.
So long as they see her as holding the big ladle at the perpetual soup kitchen, well, yes.
“What about Vermont? It must be 99% White there. Or how about Oregon? Perhaps 90% White.”
Reagan did win them in the past...and I’m not so sure they’ve changed much since. They could come into play again. One thing that I don’t mention is the need for a national election effort, rather than dumping all our money into the same handful of states. If you have a national campaign, you may not win states like Washington...or you just might, but at the worst, you make them tighter, so the Dem can’t ignore them either. It will keep them off balance a lot more and one or more of those states could even end up being a surprise for us and putting us over the top. You can never be sure where your message will be received best unless you actually give people a chance to hear it.
“Your FR About page is a must read for all true Patriots. Very well done sir! And youre obviously a lot smarter than that low-life leftist, Nate Silver.”
Thanks...though he’s actually not that far off. I’m more into specifics. Running a national election, as a Republican, means ignoring the state-by-state calculations and looking at who you need to fire up your natural base - and the Republican natural base is white voters (and by white, I also mean a decent percentage of Hispanics, and possible even a majority of Asians, if Republicans bothered to make an effort for Asians).
I am ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that is the real fear in the Democrat Party. If they ever see the 70+ percent of the country that is the natural base of the Republican Party unifying against them (as happened throughout the South in 2014), they know they’re toast.
...and that is EXACTLY why they telling us that we need to ignore those 70+ percent of the voters and figure out ways to reach the rest (i.e., blacks and Hispanics that can’t speak English)...and that we can’t win without them. And the Dems have many people on the INSIDE doing this, which is why half (or more) of Republican ‘advisers’ wind up coming as gay. It is unreal...but Republicans not only trust these people, THEY PAY THEM too.
Cruz seems like the one candidate that has figured this out...he clearly is not listening to that bunch of ‘advisers’...if any.
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