The axiom that victory has a thousand fathers has an oft-unnoticed corollary: defeat has a thousand deadbeat dads. To an anti-incumbent-governing-party cycle, we can add indeterminate (maybe indeterminable) quantities of misogynoir, forgetful voters, low/no-informatuon voters, complacent voters, epistemically closed voters, manospehere influencers, social-media deployment of disinformation campaigns from Trump's domestic and foreign allies, the safety-valve of abortion referenda that probably allowed some state-speciric ticket-splitting, etc. etc., on to infinity. The heartening sign for me is that, in five of the six swing states in which there were significant statewide down ballot races (PA, NC, MI, WI, NV, AND AZ), Ds performed well. They won four vigorously contested Senate seats (AZ, MI, NV, and WI) and control of all statewide offices in NC.
As of today there are still ~ 7M fewer voters in the presidential race than in 2020. To me, that is confounding. We need to know what these folks decided to do (or not do) and why they did/didn't do it. (Not including, of course, Biden and Trump voters who passed away since 2020.)
Seth, congratulations on the book deal. Now the question is: are you going to post chapters of the book here as they are written (we don’t need the edited final version for publication to get the thrust of your findings)?
Professor, I look forward to your book! I gather that the Ds were hurt the least in the list of defeated parties, as well. I notice the AP presidential vote continues to narrow. The current count is 50.1% vs 48.2%. I thought I saw a comment from Jonathan Bernstein that it looks likely Trump will finish behind Clinton's margin in the popular. Yet, I have seen many claims that there was a shift of 5% or so away from the Ds. Do you have any thoughts on that?
My own estimate is that Trump will end up with 49.9% of the vote, which is almost 2 points more than Clinton ended up with. But yes, there was roughly a 5-point shift in the R direction since 2020.
The axiom that victory has a thousand fathers has an oft-unnoticed corollary: defeat has a thousand deadbeat dads. To an anti-incumbent-governing-party cycle, we can add indeterminate (maybe indeterminable) quantities of misogynoir, forgetful voters, low/no-informatuon voters, complacent voters, epistemically closed voters, manospehere influencers, social-media deployment of disinformation campaigns from Trump's domestic and foreign allies, the safety-valve of abortion referenda that probably allowed some state-speciric ticket-splitting, etc. etc., on to infinity. The heartening sign for me is that, in five of the six swing states in which there were significant statewide down ballot races (PA, NC, MI, WI, NV, AND AZ), Ds performed well. They won four vigorously contested Senate seats (AZ, MI, NV, and WI) and control of all statewide offices in NC.
As of today there are still ~ 7M fewer voters in the presidential race than in 2020. To me, that is confounding. We need to know what these folks decided to do (or not do) and why they did/didn't do it. (Not including, of course, Biden and Trump voters who passed away since 2020.)
Yes but I doubt it would hurt if Dems decided to actually start running on something besides "we aren't Republicans" too
Seth, congratulations on the book deal. Now the question is: are you going to post chapters of the book here as they are written (we don’t need the edited final version for publication to get the thrust of your findings)?
Professor, I look forward to your book! I gather that the Ds were hurt the least in the list of defeated parties, as well. I notice the AP presidential vote continues to narrow. The current count is 50.1% vs 48.2%. I thought I saw a comment from Jonathan Bernstein that it looks likely Trump will finish behind Clinton's margin in the popular. Yet, I have seen many claims that there was a shift of 5% or so away from the Ds. Do you have any thoughts on that?
My own estimate is that Trump will end up with 49.9% of the vote, which is almost 2 points more than Clinton ended up with. But yes, there was roughly a 5-point shift in the R direction since 2020.