Two recent polls have showed Hillary with a lead in Georgia. I’m not big on the fantasy football aspect of elections — you know, the “we’re only 8 points back in deep red Idaho” stuff — but I am genuinely curious about what’s going on politically in the southeast these days.
I can’t find the crosstabs for voting by ethnicity in these polls but in 2008, white voters in Georgia went 73% for McCain (that’s not quite as high as places like Mississippi). I wonder if what’s happening right now is that Trump is losing college-educated whites in places like Georgia, and that’s what’s dragging him down.
I’ll admit that I’m quite bullish on the medium-term political future. There’s a lot of talk that Republicans can stay afloat by getting a higher percentage of the white vote while the country becomes less and less white. I’m skeptical because I think the race-baiting and scapegoating that the Republican party relies on tends to turn off certain segments of the white voting public.
Seanly
I can only hope that not all of my fellow white, college-educated males are complete f’king idiots.
And yeah, I don’t think we will Dukakis-type electoral college numbers for Trump.
Roger Moore
My understanding is that two things are going on in Georgia:
1) Trump is losing ground with college educated whites, just as you thought
2) Whites are a declining percentage of the population. There’s been a substantial movement of African Americans back to the Old South, and Atlanta is a major center of the movement. There’s also an increase in Hispanic and Asian American population. The net result is that non-Hispanic whites are barely a majority in Georgia.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
College educated whites – male and female – are breaking for Hillary. Both categories went for Romney. Trump is hemorrhaging everyone else. Pollsters still for the most part haven’t accounted for the changes in the demographics since 2012, where whites accounted for about 2% more of the voting pool.
dedc79
I was wondering when you’d get around to this.
MCA1
I’ve always assumed it’s a pretty simple story for Georgia – Atlanta’s the biggest city in the South (excluding Texas, of course).
That said, I think I read somewhere in the not too distant past that Georgia has a higher percentage of Hispanics than the rest of the SEC other than its neighbor directly to the south. Maybe they’ve been slowly moving up from FL.
MattF
Apparently, 538 shows Hilz ahead in SC. ! Makes me wonder whether we’re getting into fantasy-land here.
Mary G
I know a couple of women from the South who say all their old friends are planning to vote for Hillary without telling hubbie, so I think the gender gap in polling is part of it. Southerners don’t like rudeness. You can be racist af, but don’t go talking about it.
Fair Economist
Several states in the South are only Republican due to absolutely overwhelming margins among white voters. This includes GA, and also SC and MS. If Hillary can make significant inroads among white women and/or white college grads she could potentially win any of them. Unlike many other states, there are simply no white non-college grads or white men for Trump to potentially gain. They already vote almost exclusively Republican.
Villago Delenda Est
The BIG FOOT strikes, and promptly goes though the rotten boards of the deck.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
The last poll that compared Trump in Clinton in SC was from last November, so that’s based almost exclusively on her doing so well in recent national polls. Color me skeptical until there’s some reliable polling data.
p.a.
TPM has an art today that Trump is (of course) helping borderline Dem Sen candidates. But it also says the ‘Big Dem ’16 Advantage’ meme is not working out to the extent hoped. As usual, it seems crappy state Dem organizations are crappy.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: This, oddly enough, does not make me look at any given candidate in a different light, so much as it demonstrably proves that people don’t learn jack shit in college and the worth of the entire institution needs to be called into question.
Trump isn’t going to do anything awful that Romney didn’t also have lined up to do as well. If you think Trump is worse it’s only because you find him gauche and embarrassing – that GOP platform hasn’t changed one damn bit since Romney ran, now has it?
Fair Economist
@MattF:
Unlikely-land, but not fantasy land. The polling swing we’ve seen in NC is similar to Romney’s margins in SC. 538’s projection is based on no more than that, though – no polls this year. 538 marking SC light blue really only indicates it’s plausibly possible.
Wouldn’t it be great, though?
MattF
@Roger Moore: Makes more sense that way. Silver seems to be getting unreliable, IMO. I’m not happy with polling that requires additional analysis to make sense of it.
raven
@MattF: There ain’t no way she’ll win here in Georgia.
scav
Internal migration might also begin to increasingly kick in as a factor, as it’s not entirely a given that all the people moving into the state are going to adopt its “traditional” voting patterns, especially as the proportion moving in from non-southern states increases. That’s over and above changes due to migration from other countries.
TooManyJens
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I don’t know, Romney wasn’t going around inviting Russia to invade its neighbors and asking “If we have nukes, why can’t we use them?” It’s true that the GOP’s been trying to stir up racial resentment to their advantage for a long time, and Trump’s just the logical end result of that. But in other ways, he truly is sui generis.
patroclus
538 hasn’t updated at all since the emergence of the Evan McMullen threat.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
It’s that Romney appears to be white and sane. Donald appears to be orange and a psycho. Uneducated whites apparently don’t care about either the orange or sane part, so chalk one up for college, and the fact that college educated people have investments and 401ks that just finished recovering from the last crisis – very little appetite for chaos exists among anyone with half a brain.
Anoniminous
If Georgia goes for Hillary then it’s a 400+ EV blow-out and we’re off to political LaLaLand.
JPL
Although I think GA unlikely, my neighbors who normally vote Republican, will not vote for Trump.
The one surprise for me, though is the President’s approval rating in GA is at 50 percent.
sukabi
I’d like to start the hashtag #NotAllHonkeys
OWW
Roger Moore
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Except that this misses a few important points. The Republican platform is only one part of what a given Republican president would do. One part is to act as the country’s chief representative on the international stage, which Trump would be far, far worse at even than Romney. Also, too, the President is head of state as well as head of government, so being gauche and embarrassing is a genuine negative. He’s also Commander in Chief, and the idea of Trump giving commands to our military should be much scarier than Romney.
Anoniminous
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
As I said the other day, “college educated whites” has been a trailing demographic due to the almost impossibility of non-whites and women attending college – never mind graduating – before 1970 (to pick a date.) We should see that demographic flip this year and then move steadily and ever-higher into the Dem column over the next several election cycles.
sukabi
@Fair Economist: now to be fair S. Carolina knows crazy when they see it, Drumpf is a step too far for even them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think Molly I used to say, I don’t know how seriously, that Ann Richards won the TX gov’ship when her opponent refused to shake her hand.
MattF
@Roger Moore: And this, IMO, is the big reason why establishment Republicans will never persuade Trump to withdraw from the race. As long as there’s a chance, however small, that he’ll get his finger on the nuclear button, Trump will not withdraw– and there’s no offer that the establishment can make that will change that.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Yep, and the more openly and obviously Republicans engage in racebaiting & scapegoating, the more typically Republican secretly-kinda-racist-but-don’t-wanna-be-seen-that-way-or-admit-it-to-themselves white voters it turns off.
p.a.
I find it hard to believe a Dem, especially Hillary, will take any deep South state, unless the polls stay so horrible for Trump, say ~+15% nationally, that R turnout is way down. Of course a ‘sure thing’ may hold down Dem turnout too. The it’s GOTV scare tactics: we may lose Pres but vote to hold Congress vs we got this but lets make a wave election.
Joel
@MattF: The 538 model probably incorporates peripheral states. There’s almost no polling in SC so I wouldn’t bet the over on that prediction.
amorphous
@patroclus: I’m willing to bet he can pull at least 3% of the vote where he is on the ballot solely from voters who misread his name as Egg McMuffin.
I’d vote for Egg McMuffins. They fucking rule.
Roger Moore
@amorphous:
No way, man. Sausage McMuffin with egg every time!
cokane
Georgia has a bit of a growing Latino population, this is the same with North Carolina and was the same thing that helped pushed Virginia to being safely blue.
low-tech cyclist
@Fair Economist: I’ll believe a Dem wins SC when it happens, because I lived there for 5 years, and it just ain’t happening. And yeah, I’ve seen 538: polls-plus gives Hillary a 20% chance of winning SC, polls-only 40%, and now-cast 50%. I’m thinking more like 0.2%. The Atlantic coast may be blue in November from Maine to Florida – except South Carolina.
JGabriel
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
A lot of pollsters don’t do the kind of demographic shaping anymore that, say Rasmussen, was known for. They do a likely voter screen – some as simple as “Do you intend to vote?” – and the demographics they get between randomized calls and the likely voter screen are what they assume will be the electoral demographics.
There are good arguments to be made for either method, though I think modelling the demographics too heavily is probably more open to abuse than just working with what you get.
Johnnybuck64
Well, from my corner of Georgia I am noticing an interesting phenomena in that the usual cheer-leading for whichever douche bag the GOP coughs up is strangely missing. I suspect that most of them are embarrassed to admit which candidate they are supporting, particularly if they are leaning toward Hillary.
Scarcelight
@CONGRATULATIONS!: A huge number of people that polls are calling college-educated are people with business or marketing or communications degrees. We’re not talking about academics here…we’re talking more about “high school plus”.
David Lowe
Most of the people in Georgia now live in metropolitan Atlanta, and most of those live in the suburbs. I think of the Atlanta sprawl as being pretty conservative — I went to high school in Dekalb County — but maybe Trump is just too stupid for many of those otherwise conservative voters.
hovercraft
Here’s the link to the PDF. In this poll of Georgia she’s up 7.
Mike in NC
PoliticsNC has been saying lately that both our incumbent GOP governor and senator are vulnerable. So it all comes down to getting people to the polls.
Chris
@Fair Economist: You’re a NC person too? There are quite a few NC juicers….I think a meetup is in order soon. Its been 2 years maybe since the last meetup in Durham. I live out in the hinterlands but since spawn (ht Suzanne) is moving to Raleigh to attend NCSU I will be up in the triangle more regularly.
OldDave
@Roger Moore:
Now available 24/7 for all your cholesterol needs! (And yeah, they are perfect breakfast road food.)
C.S.
This is purely an anecdotal theory, and I’ve got nothing to back it up other than my personal observations of Atlanta as an outsider visiting there on occasion for business and family. One thing I’ve noticed is that far more than other areas of the South, Atlanta appears to have significantly more African Americans in positions of authority and trust. African-American doctors, African-American lawyers — even in the bigger, more conservative firms, African-American businessmen sitting on local community boards and school boards, etc. And there’s a thriving entertainment industry there that is dominated by African-American musicians and producers and Tyler Perry. They have three of the best schools in the South right there in the city, one of which is one of the finest historically black colleges — Emory, Georgia Tech, and Spelman — and the opportunities in Atlanta means that a lot of those educated people stay in Atlanta, and also means that you have a high concentration of extremely educated (and locally educated) African Americans. And you’ve got three sports teams which — whatever their faults as community-friendly businesses — have been bringing very wealthy African-Americans to the city for many years. At some point, there’s got to be an effect. The old racism is still there, but it’s got to work a lot harder to get the job done when every local magazine constantly runs features about Andre Benjamin or Tyler Perry or Steve Smith looking handsome and shaking hands with everyone and making big donations to local charities. It’s just harder to keep wealthy, educated people away from the polls. It’s even harder to get the all of the white people to vote en bloc against the party of the black people when there’s a whole lot of rich black people who are quite obviously working to make the city better. Sure, you can gin up resentment against the rich, or against people not knowing their place or something, but it just doesn’t stick and resonate quite like the old stereotypes. And it’s just really hard to keep up the stereotypes when so many of them so obviously don’t fit. It’s not a path that Alabama or Mississippi are likely to replicate, but it seems to be the direction that Atlanta is going.
Oh, and the Mayor of Atlanta has been Democratic since time immemorial, and is currently a young, handsome, smart African-American whose first name is Mohammed (yeah, he doesn’t go by Mohammed, but whatever).
Iowa Old Lady
I love these polls. I just can’t let myself believe them yet. They’re too good to be true.
Geez, I sound like a Democrat.
raven
@C.S.: Atlanta is not Georgia, Dawg.
C.S.
@C.S.: Dammit — I forgot to mention Morehouse as another great school in Atlanta. Also, there’s this:
Homeowners vote. People who are invested in the community vote. People who have money vote. Businesspeople vote.
raven
But my football tickets just came!!!! Go Dawgs!!
raven
@C.S.: Tech Sucks!
Betty Cracker
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I don’t think Romney repeatedly retweeted white nationalists, characterized an immigrant group as rapists and criminals, proposed turning NATO into an extortion racket, called on a hostile foreign government to hack State Department emails, etc. I get that the regular old Republican agenda is/was awful. That doesn’t mean Trump isn’t also uniquely horrible in ways that previous standard-bearers were not.
hovercraft
@Iowa Old Lady:
We unlike republicans are skeptical when the polls look good, they on the other hand are skeptical when the polls are bad.
C.S.
@raven:
Georgia population (estimated): 10.2 million.
Atlanta Metro population (estimated): 5.7 million.
Atlanta might not equal the state it is in, but it comes as close as any city not named “Chicago” does.
aimai
@C.S.: Very interesting. I had to go to Atlanta a bunch of times while I was dating Mr. Aimai, who was teaching at Georgia Tech. It sounds like the city has come into its own over the last (gulp) twenty years.
raven
@C.S.: Talk to me the day after the election. The fucking redneck ass christians will RIG the system.
The Ancient Randonneur
Obama lost Georgia 53%-45% in 2012. No way Georgia goes for Clinton this cycle. She may close the gap a bit but in order for her to win it would require too many things to happen all at once. Demographics have shifted slightly but not enough to account for a change. I don’t see GOP being down because of Trump and I certailny don’t think you have enough people willing to vote for the Gary Johnson to make up the difference. Sure it looks pretty good now but in 2012 a lot of Dems were excited when a couple of polls in Georgia showed Obama closing the gap late in the race. Then the election happened and it wasn’t close.
C.S.
@raven: Oh, well, certainly. I much prefer R.E.M. to . . um . . . whatever band or musician ever came out of Tech. But the ACC and the SEC can both eff the hell off, so what’s the point?
C.S.
@raven: Whether or not she wins, my bet is that this will be one Southern state where she does better than Obama did. And it will keep inching towards the Democratic Party as long as Atlanta keeps growing.
raven
@C.S.: Better ain’t winning.
enplaned
@Mary G: Yeah, I have often wondered about this. I wonder how many women quietly intend to vote for Hillary (or at least not for Trump) once they get into the voting booth. Especially older women. Once a woman gets to middle-age, she is often taken for granted, ignored or even straight-up disrespected by our society. It ain’t right.
chopper
metro atlanta has been growing like a tick on a cock for a while now. way faster than the rest of the state overall. this is having a notable effect on voting demographics for the whole state.
C.S.
@raven: You’re right. It’s probably better just to write the state off completely.
Calouste
@C.S.: Las Vegas metro has about 70% of the population of Nevada.
sam
Even if these polls are outliers and she doesn’t end up winning, just making the state competitive, and forcing the GOP to spend time and money that they don’t really have (not to mention their severe lack of volunteers) in a previously uncompetitive state is a nice problem to have.
Dadadadadadada
@sukabi: I’ve been banging on about this for weeks: Trump supporters are orange, not white. Clinton supporters are white.
Calouste
@The Ancient Randonneur: Obama lost Indiana by 10% in 2012. He won it in 2008 when he put effort into the state.
Obama won by 4% in 2008, At the moment, Clinton is up by about 8%. That plus some concentrated effort could get her Georgia.
C.S.
@Calouste: That’s true. I was thinking more of states with about the same number of electoral votes as Georgia, although I wasn’t clear since it was a tossed off comment. I imagine Honolulu, Baltimore, and Denver would like a word with me as well.
catclub
@Fair Economist:
my wild ass guesses are that registered voters are something like 80% of all adults, and voter turnout for the presidency is 80% of registered voters.
which means there are still LOTS of unregistered voters and LOTS of people who still don’t bother to vote. How to turn them out at 100%
is a mystery to me . So there are plenty, but they are effectively impossible to get to vote.
Dadadadadadada
@The Ancient Randonneur: I think the gigantic pro-Clinton swing among female voters can erase just about any gap.
Dadadadadadada
@C.S.: Surely Arkansas fits that bill? You know? The state where her husband was governor?
The Ancient Randonneur
@Dadadadadadada: Any thing is possible but I don’t think that big swing in Clinton’s favor is as real as Democrats would like to believe. It will be part of what closes the gap in Georgia but it probably won’t be enough. A perfect storm can happen in Georgia, and the the Clinton campaign should put on the pressure, but I don’t think it will happen.
Anonymous At Work
@David Lowe: Georgia is basically Alabama with Atlanta added on. As Atlanta grows and hosts, for better or worse, more hispters and college-educated types, it’ll blue-up the state to varying degrees. And as Georgia grows, East Tennessee will also become a exurb.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
And metropolitan Providence has a population larger than Rhode Island.
EriktheRed
Damn right!
Thankfully there are plenty of race traitors such as myself voting, too.
rikyrah
@MattF:
Black people account for 30% of the voters in South Carolina.
I don’t know the percentage of White voters that Hillary would need to get to 50%+1 in South Carolina, but I don’t think she needs even 30% of the White vote.
Maybe someone better with numbers can help me out about South Carolina.
Now, in Mississippi, I know Hillary’s Magic White people Number.
I believe polls in Mississippi. I think Hillary could win in Mississippi.
all she needs is 16% of the White vote.
You read that right – only 16%.
There are a lot of White women that voted to defeat the Personhood Amendment in Mississippi. Dare I hope that there are enough to get Hillary to 16% of the White vote. That 16%, combined with the Black vote, is enough for her to win in Mississippi.
Fair Economist
@Chris: No, not in NC: I’m originally from the South but I live in California. I just follow Southern politics because – well, there’s always hope.
I keep missing my local meetups for frustratingly rare reasons. I missed the last one because it was on the ONE night in the ENTIRE year I actually had a ticket to a concert. The previous one was during a vacation. Stinks.
Miss Bianca
@rikyrah: If I had to bet, I’d bet that HRC takes NC, Georgia *and* Mississippi before she takes SC. And that she might even take SC before she takes Alabama.
EriktheRed
@Dadadadadadada:
Methinks these days the attitude in Ark. is a bit more hostile to anyone with a D after his/her name, former Governor or not.
Fair Economist
@The Ancient Randonneur:
Clinton doesn’t have much reason to put pressure on Georgia, unfortunately. She almost certainly won’t need the state if she can get it for her own election. There are no gettable districts – as is typical for red gerrymandered states, there are no even vaguely competitive districts. The most flippable (least unflippable?) district is R+9; it’s not going to matter. The only thing that could matter is the Senatorial contest.
Fair Economist
@Miss Bianca:
Those are all pretty good bets. SC before Alabama is basically a certainty. SC before MS is the only one which is really even possible.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@catclub:
Like I’ve said in a previous thread, I find it impossible to believe that there’s a heretofore untapped pool of white voters who will all wake up on November 8 thinking “oh no, I forgot to vote for my racial self interest in 2008 and 2012”. Even if there was, there are more non-white voters and Trump isn’t going to find a huge pool of those voters breaking his way.
C.S.
@Dadadadadadada: Mmmmmmaybe. I don’t know. Obama lost Arkansas by 23 to Romney and by 20 to McCain. Big as those numbers are, I think it’s about in the realm of what HRC will do there.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
I’ll be curious to see which way white women in Georgia will swing. I think a lot of white dudes seriously underestimate how much middle-aged white women hate Trump.
Mnemosyne
@shomi:
Awww, is baby getting cranky because the adults are talking and not paying attention to its nonsense babble?
Time for your juice box and cookie before you go down for your afternoon nap.
Feebog
A couple of things about GA. First, that nationwide two percent reduction from 72% to 70% white vote is likely even greater in GA. Second, Johnson/Weld offer a real alternative for Republican voters while Stein will not attract many on the left side of the spectrum. Third, 53/45 may sound insurmountable, but in reality you are talking about a 4 to 5 percent swing. Still a heavy lift, but certainly not impossible.
Dadadadadadada
@rikyrah: Spitballing here: 30% is the Black vote, in the bag. 70% remains. Assume every single person in that 70% is a white voter (though of course there are other ethnic groups in SC, likely not favorably disposed to Trump, but let’s be conservative). Clinton needs 20%+1, out of 70%, to win the state. 20/70=.2857…
That’s comparable to the Crazification Factor! With 28.58% of the white vote, Clinton wins Georgia!
ETA: South Carolina, not Georgia. I got so excited I forgot what state I was talking about.
tybee
@shomi:
you need to drink some more ball juice.
Cal D
@DougJ
Ummm… if you scroll down on the page at FiveThirtyEight that you linked to, there’s a table of poll results, and if you click the links for each poll you can often find crosstabs. There are actually three polls there now showing Clinton ahead in Georgia. One of the links for those three goes directly to a crosstabs sheet. The other two link to articles that have links to more detailed poll results, including top-line crosstabs.
Spoiler alert: Trump’s share of the White vote in those three looks to be 52%, 60%, and 65% respectively (newest to oldest). Of course you need to adjust those up a little when comparing to exit polls, since there are no undecideds on election day. That would bump up the totals just a skosh, but I doubt it would get you to 73%.
sukabi
@Dadadadadadada: lol
Priest
Obama lost Georgia in 2008 52-47; if Hillary can get 47% that should be enough to win with enough non-Trump Republicans Feeling The Johnson.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: Not at the moment… but if they ever did show Clinton ahead in SC it was probably the “now-cast”, which is basically a fantastical attempt at extrapolating state results from the latest national polls, and tends to badly overshoot when adjusting for time variations. That was the one that had Trump winning the electoral vote a couple of weeks ago. Pay it no mind.
agorabum
@The Ancient Randonneur: Obama losing 53 / 45 in 2012 means that ex military, women, and others that might be angry at Trump just need to flip 4%. Plus, Trump is a damn Yankee from New York City.
Ian
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
dww44
@CONGRATULATIONS!: A ground game is what is needed here. The totally politically unknown, Jim Barksdale, who’s running against Isakson for his Senate seat and who really is self-funding his campaign is asking for campaign volunteers cause he’s hoping to ride HRC’s coattails. This poll has just been released by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
P.S. I live here and Georgia is more than Alabama outside the huuge Atlanta metropolitan area. Indeed, areas south of Atlanta are more liberal voting than areas north. That’s because we have more African-American voters than the mountains north of Atlanta have.
Revrick
Not to get to deep into the weeds here since a Clinton triumph in Georgia wouldn’t change the outcome of the Presidential election. That’ll be decided in the places that the late Tim Russert identified — Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. If she wins Georgia, the big three would already be in the bag. But what a Hillary victory in Georgia would portend is the Democrats recapturing the Senate and it greatly increases the possibility of them also taking the House. And that is the outcome for which we really ought to aspire. With ticket-splitting almost a thing of the past, Ayotte of NH, Toomey of PA, Portman of OH, Rubio of FL, Burr of NC, Grassley of IA and McCain of AZ suddenly become vulnerable Republican Senators (Kirk of IL and Johnson of WI are likely dead men walking already).
J R in WV
@Calouste:
Nevada is a fucking blasted wasteland, a scorched desert, worse than black asphalt in the summer sun. There’s nothing outside Las Vegas but Reno and the mines. Because there’s … nothing there…
ETA: Oh, I forgot, Area 51 and associated AFBs and testing grounds, located there because if something bad happens, that’s OK, because there’s nothing there… nothing.
J R in WV
@shomi:
You know why Alabama exists?
To keep Georgia and Mississippi from slamming into each other!
The first time we drove through the deep south I was a little boy, so around 1960. We were going to Florida for the Xmas vacation, I think Daytona with a brief pause in St Augustine. This was before Interstate highways existed as a network.
There were big pieces of Interstates, but they weren’t connected, so you drove on tiny rural roads to get over to the Federal Highway, a 2-lane blacktop road with tiny rural towns every 20 miles or so.
On the tiny rural roads, we drove past sharecropper shacks, formerly slave quarters. We saw filling stations with extra “bathrooms” for the black customers, little privies out back. Whites Only signs on water fountains.
The first day we saw that shit, I asked Mom about what that meant, and she whispered to me to hush for now, we could talk about that later, not wanting to start a race riot there in the parking lot.
WV was segregated, a little. More now than back then in some ways. But there weren’t Jim Crow laws, and I never saw a sign like that until we were down south in my life. It changed me.
It’s part of why I’m a Yellow Dog Democrat. I would vote for the yellow dog over there, before I’ll vote for a Republican. Not to compare our real Democratic candidates, it’s just an old saying about here about real Democrats, versus fair weather Democrats.
Achrachno
@J R in WV: No!!! Nevada is a really beautiful and interesting state, except for LV which is weird and disturbing. I’ve spent a few weeks in NV over the years and would never miss a chance to go back. White Pine County is about my favorite part: high mountains and great sweeping valleys. They put Great Basin Nat. Park there for a reason. But, I like the desert parts in the south and west too. It’s true that much of the state is very sparsely populated, but is that really a bad thing? Elbow room!