Tired of the back and forth, inconsistent polls? Then enjoy this.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/09/in-post-trump-era-four-battleground.html

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost the election by failing to overcome razor thin Republican margins in the "blue wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. There was too much counting on tradition, and too little money spent and campaign time devoted to those three states that had been reliable for Clinton's predecessor, and for Democrats going all the way back to 1992. A couple of rallies, a few campaign offices, and she would have been the first female President of the United States.

So it is no surprise that the focus, in 2020 and now again in 2024, is on those three states, along with four others that have flipped their past tradition and supported Democrats in recent election cycles, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.

There's a lot of talk about this election coming down to razor thin margins in these "battleground states" because of how close they were in 2016, and then again in 2020. But really? When it came down to it, Biden campaigned in all of them, and won Pennsylvania by over 80,000 votes, and Michigan by over 100,000. Wisconsin was close, just over 20,000, and that was the closest one that he actually needed to win the election. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada were closer, but he didn't really need them after Pennsylvania put him over 270.

The media is doing a lot of hollering and pointing attention to this microscopically close race in seven battleground states that will make the difference in who is elected President of the United States. "Razor thin" is the common phrase. And of course, they have their polls, those eternal polls, which, somehow always manage to fit the media's narrative better than they do the outcome of elections. They have their apologists, who will fine tune the numbers and twist the rhetoric to make it sound like the way to know how an election will turn out is to listen to them.

I have a slightly different take. It's based on reading between the lines, on data that we have and know how to interpret, on past voting patterns that polls often use to adjust their own numbers and it also contains some common sense. You're reading this as it is, a guess by an amateur who has a background teaching high school students government, economics and American History and who has watched, and observed trends and elections for 40 years. Take that for whatever it's worth

[GreenWave]

1. Or if Comey had kept his nothing burger mouth shut...

[displacedvermoter]

2. Or if Mitch McConnell had allowed the Justice Dept

to make known the extent to which Russia was involved in support of Trump to fuck with the election. Instead he threatened to call it all politics, which he knew was not true.
He is as traitorous a US Senator as there has ever been.

[lees1975]

5. There are a lot of ifs...

If Jill Stein hadn't run, and on.........

But, how much money, time and effort would it have taken to flip less than 50,000 votes across three traditionally Democratic leaning states? A three-stop visit to each state and some radio and TV ads would have done it.

[crud]

3. Worth the read

Makes sense to me. They are saying that Harris will win all the battlegrounds and they have good reasons to believe it. State by state breakdown, not based on polls but based on history.

[Metaphorical]

4. All Elections Are Unique

A great deal of the assumptions being made both by the media and by the pollsters is that 2024 will be 2020 redux. This was a reasonable assumption until the end of July - after all, it was a rematch between two old men, both of whom were somewhat damaged politically, and of course, Biden being the older of the two was ripe for the "He's too old" narrative. The pollsters built their models on Biden vs. Trump 2020.

Biden stepping down as candidate after a masterful handing off of the torch to Harris completely wrecked those forecasts and models and changed the dynamics completely. Harris is a protege of Biden, but she is not Biden, meaning that she's that rare bird - politician with little baggage but a lot of name recognition. This was Trump in 2016. Harris is barely 60, compared to Trump's nearly 78. She is an engaging liberal woman of color to his frankly Nazi-adjacent vitriol. Finally, in 2020, the country was still reeling from Covid and political unrest , and the economy was fragile.

I think people are tired of Trump, not just as a president but as a person. They distrust the media, and they see him as a media creation. Those convictions carry a lot more weight than I think anyone in the MSM wants to admit, and Harris has done a good job of painting herself as the prosecutor vs. the convict. I also think that the reputable pollsters are picking up on this, and are beginning to recognize that they will lose a lot of legitimacy if they do skew the numbers too heavily, especially if Harris wins.

[lees1975]

6. They're looking at old models and ignoring more recent results.

Biden eked out a win in Georgia in 2020, along with two senate candidates. Then those senate candidates turned around and won a runoff weeks later. Then one of them, Rafael Warnock, won re-election when his two year term was up. That says a lot of work was done, and there's a system and a network in the state for doing it. And guess what? Harris is using that same system and network, and has, obviously, added to it. She's linking up with a strong Democrat in Arizona also using the network there that elected Biden and then swept the statewide offices in 2022.

You can't do much about gerrymandered districts. But in addition to Georgia and Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania all have Democrats in every statewide office, won by strong support within the last election cycles. Clinton didn't have that in 2016. Biden didn't have it anywhere in 2020 except PA and MI. Harris is linked with the networks, using them, and using the politicians who won those races as surrogates.

Even without adjusting their models since Biden stepped out, Harris has surged in the polls. That's what makes me think she's further ahead than they are indicating. All of the surrogates running for office seem to have double digit leads in the same polls. Do they think that many people will split tickets with the top of the ticket getting fewer votes? That never happens.

The polls will "rescue" themselves a couple of weeks before the election with more accurate numbers. And then they will remove data from their sites, write stories about how right they were, along with their supporting news media, so that next election, we can still have people insist that the polls got it right when they weren't even close.