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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Electoral Politics and Political Strategies
 
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drawkcab si eman ym
Jan 2, 2006

 Nate Silver had an interesting post on his Substack yesterday:

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Democrats usually assume that they win elections though turnout rather than persuasion. It’s not a crazy proportion, by any means. But it looks like a losing approach for 2024.

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Meanwhile, with their base becoming increasingly college-educated and politically engaged, it’s now Democrats who overperform among higher-propensity voters. – but at least as a default, Democrats should probably root for lower rather than higher turnout in November, a big change ...(In a bit of good news for Biden, this also implies that he’ll probably gain ground when pollsters shift over polls of registered voters to polls of likely voters.)

With so many Independents, they might not be the populist party anymore.

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Nevertheless, this is a bad data point for White House. In the poll, only 83 percent of voters who say they chose Biden in 2020 plan to vote for him this year, whereas 97 percent who voted for Trump plan to vote for Trump again.

These are swing voters, in other words — people who are explicitly stating to pollsters that they are switching their vote from 2020. There are a substantial number of them.

But these vote-switchers largely do not come from the core of the Democratic base. Among the roughly half of Biden 2020 voters in the Times poll who described themselves as Democratic primary voters, a relatively healthy 91 percent said they plan to vote for Biden again. People who vote in primaries tend to be more politically active and more loyal to their party. But if Biden is retaining only 83 percent of his 2020 vote overall, that implies he’s doing quite poorly with people who voted for him in 2020 but who are not loyal Democratic primary voters. Only about 75 percent of this group say they’ll vote for Biden again.
Joe is losing 10% of his 2020 voters to Trump.

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It’s only March, and this is only one poll. The White House is within its rights to take some comfort in the fact that Biden won in 2020 when all the chips were down.

But if they want to maximize their chances of winning in November, Democrats ought to focus on this group of vote-switching swing voters first, and the base second. Why do these Biden 2020 voters now prefer Trump in 2024?

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Is it Biden’s age? All the evidence points toward age being a major factor. Is it to the point where Democrats ought to pull the emergency lever and nominate a different candidate instead?

Is it general disgruntlement with the direction of the country and the declining incumbency advantage? That might also argue for replacing Biden.

Is it that the White House’s messaging is often targeted at college-educated progressives? This is perhaps the easiest thing to fix.

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Is it that Biden's support in 2020 came from voters who thought that Trump mishandled the COVID pandemic — an issue which has now faded from public view — and voters see a country that still has a lot of problems? That could be a hard problem to solve, because it stems from a sort of Faustian bargain that Biden made in 2020, overpromising what might be possible with new leadership. Nevertheless, Biden does have a lot of substantive, bipartisan accomplishments that he can tout. The White House often doesn’t focus on this, instead devoting a high percentage of their bandwidth to the dangers of Trump.

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Or is it the decreasing loyalty of Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters to the Democratic Party? In the Times poll, nonwhite voters were considerably more likely to switch from Biden to Trump. There are many theories for this apparent shift. Some are frankly quite bearish for Democrats, implying that they’ll need to rethink their entire coalition, not something easily done in the next eight months.

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Biden can still win – to repeat myself, the calendar just turned to March, and likely voter polls may have better news for him. But the widespread assumption among Democrats that they can just run back their 2020 strategy or take a page from the Obama 2012 playbook appears to be flawed. There are still plenty of swing voters, and they’re swinging toward Trump.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/bidens-problem-is-with-swing-voters

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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Electoral Politics and Political Strategies