The 2020 presidential election IS NOT A NATIONAL ELECTION! It will truly be contested in anywhere from about 5 to 20 states depending on who is the Democratic nominee, what is happening with the economy, and what else may or may not be going on in October and November of 2020. The national polls are nice in the feel good sense, but they are not and cannot tell us anything important about what is and is not going to happen in the 2020 presidential election. Ignore them lest they lull you into a fall sense of safety and security.
Check your own voter registration. Nag all your friends to check their voter registrations. Nag all your friends to nag their other friends to check their voter registrations. Vote up and down the ballot for every office and referendum and initiative. Nag all your friends to vote up and down the ballot for every office and referendum and initiative. And nag all your friends to nag their other friend to vote up and down the ballot for every office and referendum and initiative. Turnout, especially in the states that will decide the presidential election in the Electoral College, is all that matters. Turnout, to keep the House and flip the Senate is all that matters. Turnout to take as many governor’s mansions and state legislative seats ahead of the next round of congressional and state legislative reapportionment is all that matters. And these only happen with overwhelming turnout!
We now return you to your regularly scheduled existential dread.
Open thread!
Mnemosyne
Also, CONTINUE CHECKING YOUR VOTER REGISTRATION. Maybe make a habit of checking it every other week. A lot of the 2016 ratfucking was about throwing people off the voter rolls without notice, and the sooner you find out, the sooner you can get reinstated.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
And for another reason to be skeptical of national polls; Talking Points Memo did an interview with Gallop over their poll last week and they said it was better than normal for Trump because of some good news from Trump and his likely voters were less embarrassed to admit they would vote for him.
Ah, yes, “likely voter feels less embarrassed”, feel the Trumpmentum. Even his own voters don’t like him, but they are so brain dead they vote for anything with an “R” after it. Zombie politics.
randy khan
@Mnemosyne:
A fine idea.
On the broader topic, a poll today is not that useful for November in any event; as noted in the previous thread, right now the polling for the Dems v. Trump largely is based on name recognition (which should give him some pause).
That said, the national polling is not totally useless. It can serve as a good gauge of the likelihood that the Electoral College will contradict the popular vote. There are various measures of this, but it is absolutely true that the likelihood of a candidate winning the Electoral College despite the popular vote declines as the popular vote margin goes up.
khead
I’m not moving to Wisconsin or Michigan.
Major Major Major Major
national polls are utterly devoid of signal. got it.
jonas
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Ah, the old Bradley Effect.
Kent
Yes, this. I live in Washington State which went for Hillary 54 to 38 with the Libertarian Johnson picking up 5% of what were probably mostly Republicans. If WA is remotely in play in 2020 then we are all fucked beyond belief. But we do have the WA-3rd which is the last district in the Continental US touching the Pacific Ocean that is still held by a Republican. So that is what we are working on here. And there are local legislative seats that we could flip that would help beef up the Dem majority in either state house.
I’ve never lived in a swing state. In my adult life I have voted in OR, WA, TX, AK, and DC. It is really depressing to think how damn few Americans really decide all of this for the rest of us, and where they mostly live.
Zzyzx
It depends if you think that the states are completely independent or if they’re linked. Does a 5 point move toward Warren/Biden/Yang/etc mean a clump of people in California finally got over the primaries so they’d win the state by 35 instead of 30 or does it mean that the toss ups now are more safe? 538 at least leans towards the former and they have some evidence for that.
debbie
@Mnemosyne:
Now that they’ve announced it was the Chinese military who hacked into Equifax, I’ll be checking more often than that. And not just my voter registration.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Adam, do you think the 2019 nCov pandemic will have an affect on the election?
different-church-lady
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Don’t dismiss this phenomenon. KA Conway referred to it in the middle of the 2016 campaign, and I thought she was bullshitting, but in the end she was dead right.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: @randy khan: That’s why I have the Vote Save America website as my URL on Balloon Juice.
Anybody can click on my nym and get to the Vote Save America site where you can check on your registration – there’s no having to find your state or local site, just enter your street address and zip code on the VSA site and they tell you if you’re registered and where.
I am in Illinois with a DEM governor now, so I probably won’t check it every month, but even I will check it again a few times.
Adam L Silverman
Have they voted at Dixie’s Crotch yet? is the NH primary over? I must know!
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Presidential elections are not national, they’re state by state.
BellyCat
Seriously crazy graphic — will confess that I’m glad I’m not prone to seizures.
Seriously, I would think about taking that autoplaying thing down for those who are.
WaterGirl
@Adam L Silverman: I don’t think they get to do their midnight voting there anymore because someone moved away or died, so they don’t have the requisite number of people to be “official”.
Adam L Silverman
@Zzyzx: My understanding is that you’d need a better than 8 point national lead for the Democratic candidate over the President for the national poll to have any predictive value on the outcome of the Electoral College, which is a state by state contest.
WaterGirl
@BellyCat: I didn’t want to say anything, but now that you have said it, I will totally agree with you.
I have never had a seizure but I do have trouble with flashing stuff, and I know I am not alone. I had to move that off the screen in a hurry.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Depends. Honestly, it will depend. The Chinese economy is starting to get hit hard. That will have economic repercussions. The one place the President is doing well in public opinion is on the economy. If the economy goes, then it’ll have an effect.
His ability to leverage it for fear purposes to motivate his supporters is also something that has to be watched for.
Marcopolo
Also too, find a D candidate & campaign at any level, Prez, US Senate/House, State Senate/House, Mayor/Alderman/DA, etc.. near where you live that really gets you saying hell yeah and do some work for them. Every voter we get out to vote for a D/progressive at any level should help up and down the ticket.
I’ll be working my butt off for Jill Schupp in MO-2 and Helena Webb in MOH-100.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Cool ya jets, Doc.
Adam L Silverman
@BellyCat: @WaterGirl: Done
debbie
If I can ignore the polls, can I ignore those goddamn tax cuts?
Roger Moore
@different-church-lady:
No, she wasn’t. The polls got the popular vote just about right. There’s no real indication that Trump voters were reluctant to tell pollsters who they were voting for. What there is evidence for is an enthusiasm effect. When recent events favor one party over the other, there is an effect on how likely people are to respond to polls. People who favor the candidate who got favorable news are enthusiastic and want to tell the pollster that they’ll be voting. People who favor the candidate who got bad news are less enthusiastic and are less likely to respond. This explains why there can be substantial swings in the polls even if very few people are changing their minds about who they want to vote for; they’re changing their minds about whether or not to vote.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Hey, finally read that email you sent me about the Justice League movie. Your observation about Synder not knowing how to write the characters is spot on from what I’ve read of other takes. His take is a cynical and pessimistic take on the DC universe and superheroes in general. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this view.
If I lived in the X-Men/Marvel universe, I’d probably be anti-Mutant, tbh. Absolute power and all that.
However, you can’t do this with iconic characters like Superman, at least outside of an Elseworlds comic. That’s partly why Watchmen works so well imo
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
The economic consequences will be brutal, whether the Wuhan coronavirus is Captain Trips or not. A lot of supply chains are already disrupted and many factories in China are closed.
Do you trust the numbers that the Chinese government are releasing? It’s encouraging that there are very few confirmed cases and even fewer deaths outside of China. However, IIRC, Beijing has gone into full lockdown and 400 million Chinese citizens are under quarantine. These seem like drastic measures
kindness
Every Democrat will beat Trump in November. Every one of them. So the whole Democrats are in Disarray is just the MSM feeding it’s own desired meme. It isn’t true. Even the best media outlets out there are still profit making devices who want to make more profit.
Jeffro
Agree about checking your registration, and urging others to do so a.s.a.p.
Other than that…man, are we going to Crush Orange or what?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@kindness: Wish I shared your optimism.
Baud
@kindness:
I’m kind of feeling in disarray today.
WaterGirl
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you, thank you.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Why don’t you feel optimistic?
@Baud:
Don’t we all sometimes?
dm
To make checking your voter registration easy, go to votesaveamerica.com
They also have links for getting involved, and promise to have ways of “what you can do right now that will do the most good” advice in the months to come.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I’ve seen sure things go to shit too many times and I’m not convinced that many of our candidates are prepared for the shit storm that will be the General Election against Trump.
kindness
You can focus on those 3 states Hillary should have campaigned in more but didn’t. But that ignores stuff that I’m reading that Texas may swing to Democratic. Let’s assume we will win a couple more states because not every Republican is a base troll.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@kindness:
Progressive Russ Feingold lost in Wisconsin in 2016. That didn’t have anything to do with it
BlueDWarrior
I honestly think some people simply must be in state of perpetual panic to feel ‘alive’, like a non-sexual fetish.
Most of the remaining Democratic candidates have a more than good shot to beat Trump, but only if we do what we did in fall 2018.
So we all better be ready to get to work regardless of who gets the proverbial crown in Milwaukee.
MomSense
@Adam L Silverman:
Hahahahahaha!
Martin
@kindness: You’re missing the point. Clinton beat Trump by 4.2 million votes in 2016 just in California. That was the margin.
Trump only got about that many votes total (not margin, but total) from Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
That’s 48EVs sitting just inside the California vote margin. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Trump could lose CA by 2M more than in 2016.
That is, if Trump is losing to a Dem by 4% in the national poll, and you subtract out California, then Trump is probably ahead in the other 49 states.
Consider the shift in just 2 states:
2016: CA D+30.1, TX R+9
2012: CA D+23.0, TX R+16.
Trump gave up 2 million votes in just those two states, with no change in EVs. CA is such a big state and has moved so severely to the left that you need to knock off the top 3%-4% advantage that the Dem has in the national poll, because that’s all surplus Dem votes that won’t change the election one bit.
In 2016, Trumps strongest state in raw votes was 800K in Texas. Clinton won CA by 4.2M, NY by 1.7M, IL and MA each by 900K.
If the blue states get bluer and even if Texas gets bluer (by fewer than 800K votes) then the popular vote gap will open up a LOT, and the EV landscape will not change at all.
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
There was some weirdness here in California where the voter rolls didn’t get printed properly and it might have been due to hackers so … check anyway.
Adam L Silverman
@kindness: Texas is not going Democratic statewide in 2020.
Kent
As a former Texan, YOU should probably ignore the stuff you are reading about Texas swinging blue, at least in 2020. We keep having that sort of wishful thinking year after year and it never comes close to happening. I can pretty much guarantee it won’t happen with Bernie on the ticket. Or if it does, it will be due to such an epic Trump meltdown that the election was already over by 100 electoral votes before they got around to counting Texas.
Adam L Silverman
@MomSense: You’re welcome.
Mai naem mobile
@Martin: I think Arizona is in play this year. Yeah,yeah I’ve said this the last few cycles but this time i really think there is a decent chance because there is no Mormon like 2012 and no favorite son like McCain in 08. I have no explanation for 2016.
Kent
Russian Fuckery? Comey? Media malpractice? Voter supression? Did all that combined account for the 3% margin?
Martin
@Kent: I will simply note that Trump’s raw vote margin in Tennessee was almost as large as his vote margin in Texas. It’s not a state Dems can get, but it’s a state that Dems are getting. Gains can be made in House races and state legislature, even if statewide isn’t in reach yet.
But 800K votes in a state that large isn’t huge. It’s a place that would be nice to start forcing the GOP to start spending money in.
Bill Arnold
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Put it this way; many people are emotionally discounting the real possibility of a blowout loss by D.J. Trump. Why?
Some of it is the unrelenting gloom porn/scare scenarios peddled by various, including people selling or employed to sell eyeballs and influence operators.
Bill Arnold
BTW, for those perturbed by the Coppins Atlantic piece[1] about disinformation in the 2020 election, this is an update of Bruce Schneier’s earlier “Toward an Information Operations Kill Chain”. It is compact (and tightly written) and the links are worth following.
Influence Operations Kill Chain (Bruce Schneier, August 19, 2019)
(He has a computer security background, which makes it an easy read for me. I’ve read some of the more traditional literature (maybe about 10% of the papers) and find this more actionable. )
[1] The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President – How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election (McKay Coppins, March 2020)
Brachiator
@jonas:
The Bradley Effect, like Bigfoot and Area 51 Aliens, is a fairy tale that just won’t die. From the Wiki article you linked:
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Wasn’t that mainly Los Angeles County? And I didn’t read that hackers were clearly demonstrated to have been the problem.
I was one of the people whose registration was mysteriously dropped. I got a provisional ballot and a later check “confirmed” that my vote had been counted.
I seem to be back on the rolls for now.
ETA: I also like that in Los Angeles, people can begin voting on February 22, and there are some places where they can vote if they cannot get to their regular polling place. It will be interesting to see if these measures help increase turnout.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: This can’t be fixed with a computer/IT/cyber security because it isn’t simply an influence operation leveraging the cyber domain and cyber power. Rather it is the elevation of political warfare to interstate war because of technological improvements and advancements. It requires a whole of government approach across the DIME-FIL. And the only way to stop it is to attack the adversary networks.
Bex
Thanks for this post, Adam. I read the insane Bloomberg Curious post above first. Sorry that people on this blog have gone off the rails despite your best efforts. Keep up the good work anyway.
Adam L Silverman
@Bex: Bloomberg is pulling from Biden. Despite being in his 70s, he presents as in his 60s, he’s competent, and he’s taking it right to Trump, which is what people want to see. The cross cutting issues are his positions on gun control in a lot of states and what he had the NYPD in New York with voters of color. Both of these are likely to hurt him with voters in different places that he’d need to beat the President in the Electoral College in the general election.But he’s competent and he’s got so much money he can’t be bought. He can also be ruthless both in general and ruthlessly efficient.
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
Skim the article. Yes.
Bex
@Adam L Silverman: I do understand Bloomberg’s strengths and weaknesses. I don’t understand the shiny object mania and the jumping to conclusions that infects some of the posts here.
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
That was a little terse. From the article by Bruce,
That is, we need a framework that also works against grey-area domestic political influence ops. Attacking domestic propaganda networks is dangerously close to attacking domestic political operations. But frankly I don’t think the Democrats can afford in 2020 to not be fully in the game, if we truly care about our country.
BruceJ
Gee, thanks, another reminder that again, as usual, my vote counts for fuck-all.
Bnad
Hoping the proud Trump voters crawling out from under rocks is what’s made PA pull almost even in Trump approval in the past month on https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump-2/ .
Adam L Silverman
@Bex:
People are stressed. And this is a somewhat safe place to vent that stress. It is also part of the influence operation. The President’s goal, and those both foreign and domestic who are invested in having him remain president, is to overwhelm everyone with information. This allows him to dominate the news and news cycle. But it is also intended to make it so that everyone is so overwhelmed that they can’t process. All they want to do is tune out. To make it go away. To just get through their days rather than have to suffer through a warped, reverse panopticon. And the pressure from the information overload is what you’re seeing.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: I read it when it was first published at Foreign Policy last year.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: I cannot tell you how many pages I’ve written on this that a senior contact working within US domestic politics has forwarded to all the candidates and/or senior campaign officials he has contacts with with the recommendation that they follow up with me. They have never followed up about this with him or me.
Adam L Silverman
@BruceJ: Sorry bout that. I can lie to you if you’d prefer?
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
Ugh. Your writings here have been excellent; I’ve been hoping(/assuming) that they at least were read.
Our republic will be eaten alive and transformed to poo if we don’t collectively improve our abilities to address this.
J R in WV
Adam,
Thanks for pointing this out one more time. Trying to be optimistic, contributing to the BJ Senatorial fund, to SP Warren, going to hit up Amy K too. Tired of tired old white guys trying to run everything, even as I am an old white guy.
Best wishes to you, and all the jackals!
me
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: It is what it is. The problem is we’re smack dab in the middle of an interstate war being waged against us by multiple hostile and peer competitor states, and at least two statutory allies, being fought largely with non-military power even when the military is involved, and everyone here thinks it’s just Monday.
Adam L Silverman
@J R in WV: You’re welcome.
Bill Arnold
@Adam L Silverman:
Names if you dare? E.g. IL and SA?[1] I feel like I’m missing one or two.
[1] Do natsec people use ISO 3166 country codes?
Ruckus
Adam, it’s like you read my mind.
@Adam L Silverman:
I like to think in terms of this.
If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is.
If it sounds like it would take a hundred dump trucks to haul away that much bullshit, it probably would.
Plans with no backup, no process, nothing past a title or nifty phrase, fit into that hundred dump truck rule.
The world won’t end any time soon. Anyone telling you that needs help. People telling you that democracy might end may have a reasonable point.
Adam L Silverman
@Bill Arnold: Israel and Saudi Arabia. UAE most likely as well.
janesays
@randy khan: Yeah, this. National polling is not a reliable indicator, but if the national polls show a candidate leading by ten points a week before the election, you have every reason to believe that candidate is probably going to win. While we’ve got lots of painful recent data proving you can lose the popular vote and still win the presidency, there’s a limit to how large the popular vote margin can realistically be in that situation. Clinton beat Trump by 2.1%. Given that, I could potentially see a gap as wide as a 4% popular vote victory losing the EC. But a 6% or 7% popular vote win coupled with an EC loss? Not gonna happen anytime in the near future. If the country ever becomes so polarized that such a thing is even mathematically possible, we’re probably on the brink of literal civil war.