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People keep bringing up these counties, particularly Starr, but one of the things that made swings easy is they're not especially populous any amount of change in absolute numbers will more easily affect the percentages. That third county down, Kenedy County? It has a population of 404 people. That's not voting population, that's total population.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:25
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Compare that to how many people a similar swing in, say, Harris County (Houston) would represent, with a county population of 4,713,325. e: eh let's just look 'em up. 1. Starr, TX +55.2 ------------------------ 64,454 2. Maverick, TX +46.3 ------------------------ 58,216 3. Kenedy, TX +40.0 ------------------------ 404 4. Jim Hogg, TX +39.0 ------------------------ 5,202 5. Zapata, TX +38.3 ------------------------ 14,322 6. Duval, TX +32.6 ------------------------ 11,273 7. Brooks, TX +32.0 ------------------------ 5,202 8. Reeves, TX +30.9 ------------------------ 15,281 9 Webb, TX +28.3 ------------------------ 274,794 10. Edwards, TX +26.7 ------------------------ 1,953 So only one county in the 100,000s (Webb). Texas has five counties in the millions, and a dozen over a half-million. Pick fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 05:27
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Something to consider is that the CBP has tons of Latinos. Like half of the border patrol are Latino. These are people who likely view the Democratic Party as a threat to their jobs, and Trump was actively pushing for more agents. A lot of those counties are on the Mexican border. It doesn’t take much to realize why Latinos in those counties swung hard for Trump.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:42
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Pick posted:People keep bringing up these counties, particularly Starr, but one of the things that made swings easy is they're not especially populous any amount of change in absolute numbers will more easily affect the percentages. Yeah, I was going to post, but deleted, an aside about potentially being able to convince every voter in Kenedy County yourself. Beto O'Rourke visited every single county in Texas, to try to prove that he was going to represent all Texans in the Senate, and while he didn't, he could have, in theory, spoken personally to every single registered voter in Kenedy County, and that's not even the smallest county in Texas. I don't think I can draw many useful statements from that set of ten counties, aside from 1) "maybe we should just depopulate Edwards County and have the entire thing be undeveloped space for the benefit of the Edwards Aquifer", and 2) major premise: we are unlikely to convince people who saw 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 and said "gimme more of that!" minor premise: nine of the ten counties in the US that voted more for Trump than they had in 2016 were rural, overwhelmingly-majority-Hispanic Texas counties conclusion: flipping Texas is not going to revolve around outreach to rural, majority-Hispanic counties To be clear, I'm non-Hispanic White and I've only lived in Texas for about twelve years. My guesses about what flipping Texas would revolve around are worth very little. But since it's at least possible that Kaufman County went from "hugely overwhelmingly Trumpian" to "very overwhelmingly Trumpian" simply by being next to Dallas's media market, focusing on major metropolitan areas not only has more potential in terms of voters gained, it has the potential to reach voters elsewhere too, while appealing directly to rural voters only appeals to them. I mean, what do you say to the people living around, and working for, the world's largest private prison, to get them to vote Democratic? And if you have an immediate answer to this question, is it something that won't actively turn off voters everywhere else in Texas? And if it is, and boy, am I curious if it is, is it a) not an outright lie b) not going to make everyone else in the country run screaming? It's the same problem as with voters who have no viable careers outside of coal without leaving their community. Democrats say "we'll find you something else", Republicans say "we won't take your job", and then in ten years when the job is gone anyway the Republicans say "well if they'd had their way, your job would have been gone sooner, keep voting for us or else more bad things will happen!" Bird in a Blender posted:Something to consider is that the CBP has tons of Latinos. Like half of the border patrol are Latino. These are people who likely view the Democratic Party as a threat to their jobs, and Trump was actively pushing for more agents. To be fair, all eight of those counties that are directly on the border still voted hugely for Biden! My guess, and see above about the value of my guesses, is that because those counties are so small, the pool of eligible-but-nonvoting residents is also very small, and very little was likely to convince them to vote except the possibility that Trump was actually an avenging angel from the future or possibly the past or potentially the past and the future. (The Texas Politics thread, two or possibly three food derails back, discussed how there was a lot of q-anon/q-adjacent nuttery in Spanish that went completely uncountered because nobody was looking for it.)
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Dec 28, 2020 05:58
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zonohedron posted:To be fair, all eight of those counties that are directly on the border still voted hugely for Biden! My guess, and see above about the value of my guesses, is that because those counties are so small, the pool of eligible-but-nonvoting residents is also very small, and very little was likely to convince them to vote except the possibility that Trump was actually an avenging angel from the future or possibly the past or potentially the past and the future. (The Texas Politics thread, two or possibly three food derails back, discussed how there was a lot of q-anon/q-adjacent nuttery in Spanish that went completely uncountered because nobody was looking for it.) Could you link this? I'd like to learn more about it.
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Dec 28, 2020 07:10
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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/14/florida-latinos-disinformation-413923 https://www.vice.com/en/article/epdngk/spanish-language-qanon-accounts-spread-pro-trump-misinformation-in-florida both specific to florida cubans but who knows what RGV facebook meme groups we're not a part of are like
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Dec 28, 2020 07:14
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Pick posted:People keep bringing up these counties, particularly Starr, but one of the things that made swings easy is they're not especially populous any amount of change in absolute numbers will more easily affect the percentages. Hidalgo and El Paso counties are both around 800,000 and Trump outperformed 2016 by 23% and 8% respectively, so it isn't exclusive to rural areas with tiny populations. The county level percentages really exaggerate how big it was though: Trump's absolute margin improved by 31,000 votes across those ten counties, but there were six individual counties where Biden's absolute margin improved by more than that. Intuitively I think that's a problem with looking at things on the county level, the vast majority of counties are rural so there are many more opportunities to get a surprising looking result in a rural county than an urban one. Anyway, for what it's worth: The Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin metropolitan areas combined are about 2/3 of the population of Texas, and growing faster than the rest of the state. Biden won those by 5% (Trump 2016 by half a percent, Romney by 10%). Trump won the other 1/3 by 30% (Trump 2016 and Romney both by 28%). The third of Texas that isn't in those four metropolitan areas is still not majority rural, and there are places like the border counties that shifted to Trump this year where Democrats can gain. But I don't see any reason to focus on getting votes in rural areas in general, when they represent a small population that votes overwhelmingly Republican, show no real signs of changing their votes, and Democrats would only have to win those four metropolitan areas by 10% or so to win the state.
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Dec 28, 2020 07:22
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I didn't mean to suggest those areas are insignificant, just that it is generally easier to see those huge 40% swings in a county with far fewer people. For me this was more of a statistical aside than about the why. I think you're right though that the strategy still makes most sense to be urban-focused. I guess some of it is that discussion of Starr County has swamped discussion of El Paso, which as you noted is probably a more important story.
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Dec 28, 2020 07:31
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Pick posted:I didn't mean to suggest those areas are insignificant, just that it is generally easier to see those huge 40% swings in a county with far fewer people. For me this was more of a statistical aside than about the why. I think you're right though that the strategy still makes most sense to be urban-focused. This prompted me to look up the El Paso County results from 2016 and 2020, and my immediate impression is that I can't draw an immediate impression. Yes, Trump's percentage improved, as did his absolute vote number, but Biden's absolute vote number increased more than Trump's. Trump gained 28,819 votes from 2016 to 2020, and Biden gained 30,283 (sources below). Gary Johnson got 7,607 votes in 2016, which probably went somewhere (I'd assume more to Trump than Biden, but that's pure speculation). (Also looked up Kenedy County while I was at it, and Trump's massive improvement between the two elections was a truly hilarious 43 votes.) https://abcnews.go.com/Elections/2020-us-presidential-election-results-live-map/ https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/president
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Dec 28, 2020 17:04
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chitoryu12 posted:Those darn working class POC. Why don't they realize that they're actually hard left socialists like we keep saying they must be? Sanguinia posted:I believe the theory is that the working class POC that are hard left socialists didn't vote because they were not appealed to or actively discouraged by Biden/Harris while the working class POC that are hard right dipshits voted because the Trump campaign actively pursued them and thereby won them over in spite of his past rhetoric which kept them away, e.g horrible racism. Since this is the wonk thread, do you have any polling or data to back that theory up? SA has been invested in this theory of a secret left wing working class for years and there seems to be little evidence that it’s true.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:35
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I thought it was a given that poor nonvoters were to the left of the electorate as a whole, just not significantly and not militant
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Dec 28, 2020 18:58
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i say swears online posted:I thought it was a given that poor nonvoters were to the left of the electorate as a whole, just not significantly and not militant It was taken as a given, but that assumption is beginning to be challenged in large part because of the voting patterns of new voters who appeared in 2020.
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Dec 28, 2020 18:59
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maybe one side made a play for those disaffected voters and the other side did not I'd love to see demos of the dregs who stayed home since there are still 75m of them. I'd still posit it's a given that turnout decreases with income/net worth and [controversial!] that as wealth decreases, potential issues shift closer to immediate material concerns like the "healthcare pls" meme I have a feeling that the "poor nonvoters coming out for trump due to conservative issues" is a fairly tapped out bloc i say swears online fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 19:04
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i say swears online posted:maybe one side made a play for those disaffected voters and the other side did not Which side did and how?
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Dec 28, 2020 19:08
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Most voters don't vote on policy. The second most republican group of donors, by percentage of donations to either party, were people on disability. Homeless camps are overwhelmingly trump-supporting judging by the people who went to talk to them there. Trump would have homeless people shot on sight if he could.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:11
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whydirt posted:Which side did and how? the one piece of memorabilia from this administration I'll keep is a signed letter from the president saying the government can be used for direct payments to its poorest citizens. I lived off that $1200 for 6 weeks
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Dec 28, 2020 19:12
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I think it isn't as much whether high turnout favors one party, as that the claim that Republicans have hit their ceiling in any given place because Republican voters always turn out is wrong. The Democratic turnout increase was bigger but Republicans got more votes out of heavily Republican rural areas across the board. (probably also wrong to assume that Democrats have hit their ceiling in suburbs because Trump was uniquely bad)
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Dec 28, 2020 19:28
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i say swears online posted:I thought it was a given that poor nonvoters were to the left of the electorate as a whole, just not significantly and not militant I think polling shows that this is true but only in a vague way, like the way M4A polls well until you talk about needing to pay for it with taxes and so on. The nominally left leaning poorer electorate is very shy when it comes to the supposed risks associated with leftist policies. -GND? "It's nice to have more social programs and jobs programs but what about the Debt?" -Raising taxes? "The rich should pay more of their fair share, but it shouldn't hurt job growth." -Immigration? "Oh yes, it should be reformed. But Why can't they follow the rules like my parents did?" -Climate change? "Something should be done, but we shouldn't hurt the economy to do it." -Fraking/GHG/oil/fossil fuels: "What about my coal job that I work at that pays well, that my dad worked at, and his dad also worked at? No I don't wanna code, I wanna do MANS WORK." You'll get right wing talking points and concerns even from people who nominally seem to support leftist policy because its very deeply ingrained and internalized. And leftist responses or solutions to those concerns opens a  to the other responses and concerns which is entirely inextricable.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:29
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Polls have shown that nonvoters tend to be more democratic-leaning than voters. There are two problems with this: 1) It's pro-democratic, not pro-leftist 2) This may be an artifact of the same issue that caused the 2020 polling error: that there is a certain group of pro-trump voters that are not picked up by polls for one reason or another, so you're getting a biased sample of non-voters. Number two is the key one here: given the 2020 polling error there is a good reason to believe that nonvoter polls have a systemic polling bias that undercounts potential republican voters, at least with respect to the 2020-era republican/trump party.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:34
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Also on a random other note: I used one of those donation links to donate equally to Ossoff and Warnock. Same amounts for both. Since then I have gotten relatively relentless outreach from the Warnock campaign - enough to wish I'd given them a fake number (I do not live in Georgia, so the outreach is just basically "thanks for the money, can we have more"). I have gotten zero outreach from the Ossoff campaign. None whatsoever. Think it's pretty clear the Warnock campaign is working harder - though I bet that Ossoff winds up with sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiightly more votes despite it, because I bet every voter who votes for Warnock votes for Ossoff but there is some tiny group of people who will vote for Ossoff but not the black preacher. But if they were running on different days I'd expect Warnock would blow Ossoff out of the water. Will be interesting to see the results.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:39
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evilweasel posted:Also on a random other note: I used one of those donation links to donate equally to Ossoff and Warnock. Same amounts for both. I know someone who lives in GA and has been getting 10-20 mailers a day, including micro targeted mailers from Ossoff and Warnock in Vietnamese for his non-English speaking parents. The level of outreach in GA is insane.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:42
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evilweasel posted:Also on a random other note: I used one of those donation links to donate equally to Ossoff and Warnock. Same amounts for both. I have had the exact opposite experience and get nonstop emails from Ossoff and none from Warnock.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:24
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I've gotten emails from both
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Dec 28, 2020 22:36
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evilweasel posted:Polls have shown that nonvoters tend to be more democratic-leaning than voters. There are two problems with this: i think with the rise of qanon and the way it sucked in a lot of covid truther and anti-vaxxer types this year, that there ended up being a significant population of unpollable, low-propensity trump voters; you can't poll someone who refuses to pick up the phone because they think the feds use it to spy on them or whatever insane bullshit, but these people make up a few percentage points of the general public the question is whether or not these people still turn out if trump himself isn't on the ballot, or if there's another candidate who can turn out these voters; at least so far in georgia, compared to this point in november's early voting, turnout is significantly lower in the exurbs and white rural areas while black georgians and the suburbs that swung hard to the democrats over the past decade are casting a higher share of the vote, so this'll be an early test
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Dec 28, 2020 22:46
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Well, the half a billion being spent on this race has to go somewhere.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:47
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dem emails: Ditch McDumbell is TOAST! Help us imprison the republican party for life with five dollars! five minutes later: [name], Kamala, AOC, and Hillary Clinton are disappointed in you. You've let them down. They'll die without five dollars. Democrats will go the way of the Whigs. Why won't you give, [name]? it's a crazy whiplash that their algorithms tell them works, but it's not great
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Dec 28, 2020 22:51
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Repeat that 10 times a day. I’d be curious to see how many people respond to that much spam.
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Dec 28, 2020 22:57
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I mean given the fundraising numbers a hell of a lot of people do
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Dec 28, 2020 23:43
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aight tom perez, hear me out: donate $20 to the DNC and receive a digital box or 'crate' that contain extremely rare twitter checkmarks
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Dec 28, 2020 23:47
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https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1343193423889772544 https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1343193425789784064 So, can Rasmussen now be "officially" kicked out of the reputable pollster roster?
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Dec 29, 2020 00:34
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I think people are also underestimating just how far and deep the reach of right wing media really is and how pervasive it's become. Being Black or Hispanic doesn't make one immune from advertising and propaganda and a ton of minority voting blocs have very conservative social views, especially among their more religious types. On paper (or however you want to word it) sure, it makes sense that minority voters should skew left and vote democratic but there's also a lot of regressive thinking that goes on in some of those communities, specifically in the areas of homosexuality, race mixing, gender roles and abortion that I've absolutely witnessed first hand. Viewing "non whites" or however you categorize them as some monolithic entity that all think the same way is a huge mistake and would seem to fly in the face of how liberals like to think they view the world.
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Dec 29, 2020 01:25
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Propaganda, works really, really really well. Social media has poisoned US culture. I regularly see people with leftist gang tags spend pages defending right wing talking points. People will simply rationalize the lies into their own ideology.
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Dec 29, 2020 01:40
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Jaxyon posted:Propaganda, works really, really really well. Social media has poisoned US culture. Yeah, it's basically advertising plain and simple and it's remarkably effective. I'm kicking around an OP for thread dedicated to it because I think it rules our lives more than we think. Every year I see people camp out and line up around the block to hand Apple $600 for a slightly better phone and it just blows my loving mind. The "Black Friday" shoppers and things like that is stuff I'll never understand and, yeah, social media too.
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Dec 29, 2020 01:55
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I'd totally support some kind of advertising, marketing, propaganda, etc. thread. That'd be interesting as hell.
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Dec 29, 2020 02:49
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Propaganda isn't the same thing as advertising; the methods and goals aren't the same unless you're broadening its definition to persuasive messaging writ large.
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Dec 29, 2020 03:40
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Gabriel S. posted:I'd totally support some kind of advertising, marketing, propaganda, etc. thread. That'd be interesting as hell. I know of at least a couple goons who have studied communication science, we'd have our own thread experts
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Dec 29, 2020 03:40
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I am one of those goons. DnD does not currently have the moderation necessary to handle discussion of this subject. It will go very bad, very fast.
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Dec 29, 2020 03:45
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I think communications studies have suffered from being long undervalued and we're reaping the consequences. Anyway, to me it relates to some notions in this article from WaPo: quote:Thick packets have been delivered regularly to President-elect Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, providing meticulous details on each potential Cabinet member’s strengths, weaknesses and possible areas of conflict. Biden has been conducting virtual interviews with final candidates, focusing on their values and life stories nearly as much as their approach to the departments they would lead.
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Dec 29, 2020 03:50
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Anyway, I post that because I find it very interesting, because one thing I like about Biden--a lot--that I don't think a lot of people do, at least not here, is that I think Biden is first and foremost a salesman. He sells the product that is the party. I think he has exceptional sales skills, and that politicians often suffer for not having better sales skills. But almost everything Biden does could be ripped out of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" (which I think of as a sales book) and any of the other sales go-tos. They're old-fashioned sales skills but they got him that initial Senate win and they seem to have carried him to the Presidency, so it's hard to argue that they've seen him through. e: If you want to see Statesman v Salesman, here's a video to demonstrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0WvFPNEpMc
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Dec 29, 2020 03:53
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Discendo Vox posted:Propaganda isn't the same thing as advertising; the methods and goals aren't the same unless you're broadening its definition to persuasive messaging writ large. True I guess but I think there's a strong argument to made for considerable overlap.
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Dec 29, 2020 13:01
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