2024 US Presidential Election

[JWeinCom]

SanAndreasX said:

JWeinCom said:

I would take that with a very large grain of salt. The article's source is a "journalist" from Newsmax, so I would not put it past him to lie.

Moreover, they specifically mention Nevada as one of two states. The problem with that is that Nevada is not typical. While Democrats usually win big in mail in/early voting, Nevada is a state that is almost all mail in voting. So, you would not expect the mail in vote to lean much one way or the other. It's also important to note that in Nevada, most of the vote, and most of the Democratic vote, will come from one county, Clark County, so who is up or down will likely depend on which counties have counted most at this point.

The other big issue is that of course, 2020 was a very different time cause of the whole Covid thing. It is quite possible, and I'd go so far as to say likely, that many Democrats who would have otherwise voted on election day voted early or by mail. I would not expect the same kind of gap we saw in 2020. That said, Democrats have been outvoting Republicans substantially so far in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and it is somewhat telling that those states are not mentioned in the article. 

I would not be too concerned by that article. There is a definite effort my Republicans to create a Trump is winning narrative so if he loses they can make another case for a stolen election. I think this is part of that. 

Arizona is another state where most people vote by mail, thanks to the fact that the state is very sparsely populated outside of five or six urban areas. Trump is up by 2 there in overall polls, yet Gallego is up by 8 points over Kari Lake. I don't get the disconnect. The majority of voters clearly understand that Lake is not fit for office, yet they don't apply that to Trump. Lake has deliberately made herself a female carbon copy of Trump (TV personality, conspiracy theories, and baseless claims of election fraud.) She was also a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago and received numerous Trump endorsements both in the governor's race and the Senate. She lost by a razor-thin margin to Katie Hobbs in the 2022 gubernatorial election and is getting curb-stomped by Gallego after two years of claiming widespread voter fraud. Yet they still vote Trump. 

I've thought about that and here are a couple of suggestions. 

1. The polls are wrong. We know that there are a lot of Republican pollsters putting out a lot of Presidential polls, but not so much in the Senate races. If we assume that the presidential polls are being skewed, or at least less skewed, then we would expect to see Democrats looking better in those races. It is worth noting that as far as I can tell in the 2020 election the results for the Senate races almost all were very close to the presidential results. When there was a difference, the Senate candidates generally outperformed Trump from what I can tell.

2. The second hypothesis is that it is easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled. Once people have voted for Trump, in some cases twice, they feel obligated to defend that position. Even if they otherwise would be opposed to the Maga bullshit, they just can't admit they got conned, so they rationalize. But they don't feel like they are committed to the Senate candidates in the same way. 

Time will tell. But I feel like the Senate race numbers and the presidential numbers cannot both be right.