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Eric Cantonese posted:I usually wouldn't get too hung up on CNN, but it's tied to a J. Ann Selzer poll and I believe she's still respected in her methodology.
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Sep 24, 2021 15:39
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Eric Cantonese posted:I usually wouldn't get too hung up on CNN, but it's tied to a J. Ann Selzer poll and I believe she's still respected in her methodology. Not to sound conspiratorial. This poll is bad for Joe Biden...in Iowa but CNN is trying to use it to make things are a burning disaster nation wide. Biden's approval rating nation wide is something like 45% if you believe 538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/?cid=rrpromo Which isn't to say its great but normal range for a 1st term president.
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Sep 24, 2021 15:41
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Eric Cantonese posted:I usually wouldn't get too hung up on CNN, but it's tied to a J. Ann Selzer poll and I believe she's still respected in her methodology. Iowa isn't a swing state. Those fighting to keep its first in the nation Caucus status have great PR pushing that narrative, but it is a solid red state just like Missouri and Arkansas.
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Sep 24, 2021 15:45
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I wonder why Democratic politicians always show huge polling impacts from mistakes/corruption/scandals, but it seems the needle barely moves for Republicans when they gently caress up.
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Sep 24, 2021 17:19
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Crows Turn Off posted:I wonder why Democratic politicians always show huge polling impacts from mistakes/corruption/scandals, but it seems the needle barely moves for Republicans when they gently caress up. Because knowledgeable people with serious concerns can recognize errors and be critical of them? Where as people living in a fever dream just want their dream?
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Sep 24, 2021 17:28
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Murgos posted:Because knowledgeable people with serious concerns can recognize errors and be critical of them? Where as people living in a fever dream just want their dream?
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Sep 24, 2021 17:42
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Eric Cantonese posted:I usually wouldn't get too hung up on CNN, but it's tied to a J. Ann Selzer poll and I believe she's still respected in her methodology. Iowa is loving chud central now. I hope to hell they lose their first in the nation status they represent no place in America anymore with as white and rural as they are.
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Sep 24, 2021 18:30
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Crows Turn Off posted:I wonder why Democratic politicians always show huge polling impacts from mistakes/corruption/scandals, but it seems the needle barely moves for Republicans when they gently caress up. The needle generally regresses back to the mean after scandals fall off coverage. Trump basically topped out at like 43 points and went as low as 37 IIRC. I think the important point here is that at no time did his presidency seem salvageable for a second term, certainly not after COVID. Also it should be no surprise whatsoever that any Democrat is polling horribly in Iowa, Chris Cilliza is an idiot and that article contains almost no historical analysis. Iowa is also in danger of losing its "first" status because the infrastructure there is simply incompetent. Name Change fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Sep 24, 2021 |
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Sep 24, 2021 20:02
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Mooseontheloose posted:Not to sound conspiratorial. This poll is bad for Joe Biden...in Iowa but CNN is trying to use it to make things are a burning disaster nation wide. They are. Oh, you meant poll wise. Crows Turn Off posted:I wonder why Democratic politicians always show huge polling impacts from mistakes/corruption/scandals, but it seems the needle barely moves for Republicans when they gently caress up. Democrats will disapprove of an ineffectual or horrible dem. For Republicans, you basically have to gently caress a child or strangle a puppy on live television to move the needle 2% points. BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Sep 24, 2021 |
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Sep 24, 2021 20:36
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Which state most closely represents the country as a whole in demographics and politics? I think I heard Nevada was pretty close? Let them go first.
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Sep 24, 2021 21:30
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FCKGW posted:Which state most closely represents the country as a whole in demographics and politics? I think I heard Nevada was pretty close? Rotating regional primaries really seems like the best idea with the most consensus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_Regional_Primary_System
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Sep 24, 2021 21:42
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Kaal posted:Rotating regional primaries really seems like the best idea with the most consensus. This seems like a good idea except for keeping Iowa and New Hampshire as the first primaries. The first few elections in a primary are hugely important for narrowing down the field and determining who has momentum and who doesn't. Those determinations shouldn't be based on to two rural states that account for about 1.5% of the population.
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Sep 24, 2021 23:45
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FCKGW posted:Which state most closely represents the country as a whole in demographics and politics? I think I heard Nevada was pretty close? Illinois is very close to the USA overall race demographics, but I’d kill myself if we became the first in the nation primary. At least we’d get a lot more influence since no one pays attention to us now. White not Latino IL 60.8% vs. US 60.1% Black/African-American IL 14.6% vs. US 13.4% Latinos/Hispanic IL 17.5% vs. US 18.5% Asian Both are 5.9%
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Sep 25, 2021 01:40
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Seph posted:This seems like a good idea except for keeping Iowa and New Hampshire as the first primaries. The first few elections in a primary are hugely important for narrowing down the field and determining who has momentum and who doesn't. Those determinations shouldn't be based on to two rural states that account for about 1.5% of the population. Oh definitely agreed. That idea is decorum bullshit that the governors retained because otherwise you have to unpack decades of nonsense just to talk about the central idea which is to create a functional primary system that has a shred of legitimacy.
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Sep 25, 2021 05:28
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FCKGW posted:Which state most closely represents the country as a whole in demographics and politics? I think I heard Nevada was pretty close? FiveThirtyEight looked at this and IIRC Illinois and New Jersey were the top two.
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Sep 25, 2021 06:07
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Bird in a Blender posted:Illinois is very close to the USA overall race demographics, but I’d kill myself if we became the first in the nation primary. At least we’d get a lot more influence since no one pays attention to us now. Racial demographics are obviously important, but I'd argue urban vs. rural is even more important since that is the primary divide in our politics today. That's why I like the regional rotation idea since each area encompasses both rural and urban states.
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Sep 25, 2021 14:37
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Seph posted:Racial demographics are obviously important, but I'd argue urban vs. rural is even more important since that is the primary divide in our politics today. That's why I like the regional rotation idea since each area encompasses both rural and urban states. Agreed, and I also think it's pretty tricky to try and "balance" voter regions in anything but the most general of terms. You see this in a lot of different attempts where people try to get the regions all politically balanced, or rural/urban balanced, or whatever - and even if you managed it that's just something that's never going to last. To my mind it's best to divide it out by contiguous geography and by reasonably equal population. Four to six groups seems manageable, so just split it up and then run a random lottery each election for the order.
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Sep 26, 2021 03:58
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Seph posted:Racial demographics are obviously important, but I'd argue urban vs. rural is even more important since that is the primary divide in our politics today. That's why I like the regional rotation idea since each area encompasses both rural and urban states. If you think Illinois doesn’t have rural areas you’ve never been south of I-80. Most of the state is rural. We’re like always one of the top three soybean and corn producing states and the number one pumpkin producing state.
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Sep 26, 2021 04:07
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https://mobile.twitter.com/williamjordann/status/1441903005083779072 A- from 538  The California recall polls were pretty bad.
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Sep 26, 2021 04:18
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Oracle posted:If you think Illinois doesn’t have rural areas you’ve never been south of I-80. Most of the state is rural. We’re like always one of the top three soybean and corn producing states and the number one pumpkin producing state. The Illinois population was 88% urban in 2010. Even in a country that is 80% urban, it's one of the more urbanized states in the union. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
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Sep 26, 2021 04:34
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James Garfield posted:https://mobile.twitter.com/williamjordann/status/1441903005083779072 The polls assumed that every registered Republican in California would show up to vote, and more than half of registered Democrats would stay home Which sounds incredibly stupid in hindsight, but that's definitely what it looked like from the ground level
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Sep 26, 2021 04:34
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Toaster Beef posted:FiveThirtyEight looked at this and IIRC Illinois and New Jersey were the top two. Let NJ be the first presidential primary and then I would finally have a primary vote that mattered. New Jersey has always been dead last or close to it.
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Sep 26, 2021 09:54
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Interestingly, late arriving votes in the California Recall election seem to have been more strongly in favor of recall than those cast early. Any theories here? Republicans are very eagerly trying to limit access to voting under the theory that those voters are more Republican-leaning, but perhaps that was solely a Trump 2020 thing (I don't recall such an effect being there in 2016)
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Sep 26, 2021 11:05
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absentee ballots having a republican lean is historically due to them only being used by the olds. If the absentee population has changed to look more like the general population, and that stays that way, then who knows what kind of shenanigans could be done to strip people of the right to vote.
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Sep 26, 2021 12:09
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Oracle posted:If you think Illinois doesn’t have rural areas you’ve never been south of I-80. Most of the state is rural. We’re like always one of the top three soybean and corn producing states and the number one pumpkin producing state. This is the same logic Republicans use when they post a map of election results and 90% of the land mass is red. Land mass doesn't matter, what does matter is the proportion of people living in cities vs the proportion of people living in rural areas. So while you're correct that Illinois has a ton of farm land, it also has the third biggest city in the United States which dominates all of the people living in the rural areas. California is another example. If you've ever driven from LA to SF or gone into the Sierra Nevada, you know there's a ton of empty land there. But despite that, 95% of the population in California lives in cities, which is why it's such a reliably Democratic state. Where the urban/rural divide gets murky is in the suburban areas since those are a transition zone and may not be reliably D or R. Some states that have a high percentage of urbanity like Texas aren't reliably Democratic because a large part of that population is actually suburban rather than urban.
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Sep 26, 2021 14:31
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Kaal posted:The Illinois population was 88% urban in 2010. Even in a country that is 80% urban, it's one of the more urbanized states in the union. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States You have to decide between a racial balance or urban/rural balance though. Even the states close to 80% urban are way whiter than the overall average. Illinois is 10th in urbanization if I counted right, which isn’t awful given the alternatives.
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Sep 26, 2021 15:38
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Bird in a Blender posted:You have to decide between a racial balance or urban/rural balance though. Even the states close to 80% urban are way whiter than the overall average. Illinois is 10th in urbanization if I counted right, which isn’t awful given the alternatives. To my mind, this isn't so much about trying to judge Illinois, so much as it recognizing that no single state should be granted a special status. Trying to pick out the "perfectly-representative state" is never going to achieve a consensus result, and would never last in any case, which is why grouping states in other ways is the way to go. Geographic regions are reasonable and reduce the amount of offensively wasteful cost and travel that occurs when states all over the country are having primaries at the same time.
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Sep 26, 2021 15:56
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Yea that's true, I'm getting hung up on the one state idea. I feel like the first primaries should be 4 states at the same time so no one state gets so much extra sway over the results. Even though Iowa hasn't really selected the winner lately.
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Sep 26, 2021 16:06
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You could trade Iowa and New Hampshire for like Wisconsin and Massachusetts and it wouldn't be perfect, but you would keep one state from each region and the first primaries wouldn't be small rural 95% white states. Also no loving caucuses in the early states.
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Sep 26, 2021 16:37
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The problem is that the presidential primaries in America are heavily skewed towards rural America just like the whole rest of the system, by shutting any of the states with a major city out of the early going. It is true that one problem is that states with a major city are so much larger than the states we currently have early in the primaries that their primary result would essentially negate all the New Hampshires and Iowas. But we've chosen the opposite problem by kowtowing to white rural populations at the expense of the the majority of the country. Huge states like CA or NJ have historically been essentially shut out of the process because the outcome is often determined by the time they vote.
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Sep 26, 2021 16:40
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Zwabu posted:The problem is that the presidential primaries in America are heavily skewed towards rural America just like the whole rest of the system, by shutting any of the states with a major city out of the early going. It is true that one problem is that states with a major city are so much larger than the states we currently have early in the primaries that their primary result would essentially negate all the New Hampshires and Iowas. But we've chosen the opposite problem by kowtowing to white rural populations at the expense of the the majority of the country. This is the beauty of the regional system. Both rural and urban states vote together so one isn't favored over the other.
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Sep 26, 2021 17:26
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It kind of makes sense not to have the first presidential primaries in very large states, it allows a less well funded campaign to get recognition by winning somewhere where campaigning is less expensive. I don't know if the tradeoff is worth it but it's something. (Also Las Vegas might not count as a major city but Nevada is nearly 100% urban)
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Sep 26, 2021 17:35
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With a couple clear exceptions (looking at you Wyoming and Rhode Island) I don't think you can really classify states as "urban" or "rural" because there are rural and urban regions in pretty much every state. Texas has the fourth largest city in the US (Houston) and tons of emptiness, for example. The list of 50 most populous cities in the US includes places like Albuquerque NM, Phoenix and Tuscon AZ, and Oklahoma City OK. The rotating regional plan isn't bad, but I'm not a fan of the idea that a party might lurch around just because a different region went first. A fully national primary where all states vote at the same time makes more sense to me.
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Sep 26, 2021 17:42
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Epinephrine posted:With a couple clear exceptions (looking at you Wyoming and Rhode Island) I don't think you can really classify states as "urban" or "rural" because there are rural and urban regions in pretty much every state. Texas has the fourth largest city in the US (Houston) and tons of emptiness, for example. The list of 50 most populous cities in the US includes places like Albuquerque NM, Phoenix and Tuscon AZ, and Oklahoma City OK. Urbanity is not a binary classification, it's a spectrum from 0-100%. Also, as stated upthread, it's not measuring land mass, it's measuring where people live. So a state with a bunch of empty land and one big city (i.e. Nevada) is considered very urban because most of its inhabitants are in a city. Whereas states like Maine or West Virginia with no major cities and tons of little towns are considered very rural. The idea of doing a regional system rather than the entire country at once is that it gives smaller campaigns a better chance to compete. For instance Obama might never have been nominated if he had to campaign against Clinton in every state at once. I think the trick is balancing the regional system such that the regions are small enough to be manageable for small campaigns, while also being large enough to be somewhat representative of the entire country.
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Sep 26, 2021 17:56
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Seph posted:Urbanity is not a binary classification, it's a spectrum from 0-100%. Also, as stated upthread, it's not measuring land mass, it's measuring where people live. So a state with a bunch of empty land and one big city (i.e. Nevada) is considered very urban because most of its inhabitants are in a city. Whereas states like Maine or West Virginia with no major cities and tons of little towns are considered very rural.  Dollars gives you doughnuts that we can do this for most every state and find the same relationship between red-blue and population. My point is that trying to sort states by how urban or rural they are doesn't really capture that the cleave is within states. And a regional system, defined in terms of states, wouldn't capture that well either. quote:The idea of doing a regional system rather than the entire country at once is that it gives smaller campaigns a better chance to compete. For instance Obama might never have been nominated if he had to campaign against Clinton in every state at once. I think the trick is balancing the regional system such that the regions are small enough to be manageable for small campaigns, while also being large enough to be somewhat representative of the entire country. Epinephrine fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 18:25
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Epinephrine posted:So I understand what urbanization is, but the political cleave isn't urban vs rural states, it's urban vs rural areas independent of state boundaries. To use WV, here is Trump's margin of victory in each county (he won every county) plotted against total votes cast (I used that because it was easier to get than actual population, but given the orders of magnitude difference in population that doesn't matter too much for this) [EDIT: the source for the data is this wikipedia page]: Yes. The divide between red states and blue states these days is the divide between states with majority rural and states with majority urban populations. Basically, states where the big cities are big enough to overrule the rest of the state and states where they aren't. Also, using official stats for urban/rural isn't really helpful in this respect because until last year's census, the US Census Bureau defined urban areas as anything over 2,500 people, which means the vast majority of Americans are judged to live in urban areas. But you can bet that most towns with 2,501 people in them are voting overwhelmingly for Trump (in 2020 they proposed a change to 10,000 people or 4,000 households, which is slightly better).
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Sep 26, 2021 18:44
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Epinephrine posted:So I understand what urbanization is, but the political cleave isn't urban vs rural states, it's urban vs rural areas independent of state boundaries. To use WV, here is Trump's margin of victory in each county (he won every county) plotted against total votes cast (I used that because it was easier to get than actual population, but given the orders of magnitude difference in population that doesn't matter too much for this): I don't think anyone is arguing that urbanity is homogenously distributed within a state. I agree it would be more accurate to consider things at the county or town level rather than the state level. Unfortunately our entire electoral system is based on the way states vote, so state boundaries matter. Also, it's important to note that we shouldn't be targeting primaries with a specific demographic over the other - we should be targeting primaries that are the most representative of our electorate. A regional system wouldn't be perfect but it would at least smooth out the state-to-state variation in demographics.
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Sep 26, 2021 18:49
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Seph posted:I don't think anyone is arguing that urbanity is homogenously distributed within a state. I agree it would be more accurate to consider things at the county or town level rather than the state level.
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Sep 26, 2021 20:31
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Epinephrine posted:I think I see the idea . . . building on it is there any good reason for the states to be contiguous, or even to rotate between states? It might be possible to find a mixture of small states that matches the net demographics, political lean, and urbanization of the country well enough that still allows for Iowa-sized campaigns. So the biggest reasons for contiguous geographic groups are practical and environmental. When campaigns (as they do now) need to compete in multiple states all over the country then they do a lot of wasteful and costly travel - candidates and staff bounce back and forth all over trying to be everywhere. It also allows primaries to feature and engage with regional issues (like drought in the West, housing in the Northeast, infrastructure in the Midwest, or immigration in the South), in a way that gets lost when the only focus is either hyperlocal or zoomed out to the national level. Grouping into geographic regions is a prudent step, particularly in an age of climate crisis and intersectional politics. Rotating between states and avoiding the siren-call of Iowa-style Potempkin primaries is more of an issue of principle and legitimacy. Choosing one state, or a handful of states, to always be the only citizen elite that get real access to politicians is inherently unjust. There's no legitimacy to be found in a system where every American leader must first be vetted by one group of chosen people. That's nothing more than oligarchy cloaked in ritual. An egalitarian society demands a political system that values and celebrates everyone's equal role in choosing leadership.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:28
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While we're talking about better representation it's important to remember that primaries are just an ugly hack around the sheer madness that is First Past the Post voting.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:35
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