Smerconish had a researcher on the show today who had conducted an in depth study of non-voters in the "battleground states" for the Knight Group. His researchers surveyed 12,000 non-voters. These are citizens who do not bother to vote for some reason satisfactory to them; disillusionment with the system, contempt for the forces in power, laziness, etc.
The head researcher said that he, like most people, had assumed that the non-voter group (now 100 million qualified adults in the US) was overwhelmingly a reservoir of people who would vote Democrat if they bothered to vote.
The data developed in the research project indicated otherwise. The data indicated that the non-voters were divided by political preference into thirds; one third leaning Democrat, one third leaning Republican and the other third unaligned but persuadable.
If this is so, then I suspect that a goodly number of the masses who show up for Trump rallies are folks who do not usually vote at all.
The data also suggests that Sanders also appeals to non-voters, not his Marxist creed, but Sanders himself.
Assuming for the argument's sake that all this is true, then it follows that the Democratic Party candidate the Republicans should want is Bloomberg, not Sanders. pl
I’ve been hearing that a substantial proportion of those attending Trump rallies are Democrats that are either switching sides or are at least Trump curious.
This article says something like 20% meet the profile
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/20/surprise-report-20-of-the-audiences-at-trump-ralli/?utm_source=GOOGLE&utm_medium=cpc&utm_id=newsroom&utm_campaign=TWT+-+DSA&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIiLKC69nl5wIVCZSzCh2sgwXWEAMYAiAAEgLGMvD_BwE
Obviously, whoever can get the perennial non-voters to actually vote for him/her, will probably win. Hard to imagine anyone other than Trump or Bernie motivating them. The rest are too boring and fake – exactly the types that failed to motivate them in the past
from matt taibbi:
“Either Bloomberg is a lousy campaigner who doesn’t understand the need for preparation, or he thinks he doesn’t need to prepare for live performances because he’ll just buy PR elsewhere.
Both explanations bode badly for a theoretical general-election campaign against Trump, an expert at ad-libbing cruelties and generating free media in amounts exceeding even what Bloomberg can buy. If Bloomberg can’t handle being asked by Warren how many NDAs he’s had signed, just imagine when Trump offers him a box to stand on and asks him how it feels to have to spend $4 million per friend…”
I vote all the time. I am in a caucus state, and I attend caucuses. I am a registered Republican now, having once been Democrat several years before.
I know several people who have attended Trump rallies, people who do indeed vote.
I don’t know about this guys’ research. It seems to me that somehow he “baked” some of his personal prejudices into his research questions.
In my life I attended Democratic caucuses and felt that many there were self-righteous snobs. I have also attended caucuses as a Republican. And in fact my precinct chair person first invited us to her house for discussions before the caucuses were held. The discussions were thoughtful; and people engaged in good back and forth dialogue.
I know my experience is simply one person’s out of millions. But my experience totally contradicts this researchers’ conclusions.
I also spent three years working for the County Clerk and Recorder counting ballots. If ballots had to be thrown out for fraud and people called in to be told they would be charged if they committed voter fraud again, the ballot in question was one sent to a college student at his/her home address. The parent had filled it out and signed for the student. The signatures on file did not match and the parent was caught in voter fraud.
There were quite of few of those cases during my years working on vote counting.
We have a very lazy, entitled population of young people who feel they are smarter than older people (AOC?). But a large group of those young people just can’t figure out how to participate in voting because they are too busy doing whatever they do except actually becoming involved in the elections.
I love those on-the-street interviews by people asking young students mostly in university towns questions about our country’s history. It’s clear they don’t know much about it and don’t feel really very embarrassed that they do not know much about it.
Why is it that If Republicans don’t vote, so many of them camp out overnight to get into a Trump rally? If they do that, I am pretty sure they will be voting also.
If you think about Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” statement, you should also remind yourself about the baked in sense of being the elite, the intelligentsia, the vanguard–or whatever Marxist term you want and associate that with the Democrats.
The people who attend Trump rallies will indeed be voting and part of their reason for voting will be to give the Democrats a symbolic slap in the face for their arrogance. In addition, Trump has been doing what they have wanted a politician to do for many, many years.
Our own Republican Senator got a big boost this week being at the rally in Colorado Springs. There is another rally scheduled close to my town soon. I just can’t see that Republicans will not show up to vote. Instead, I believe it’s the younger college-aged people who will decide too late or will assume that all they have to do is show up without getting registered in the first place who will be the ones who do not vote.
Dear Colonel, My guess is a lot of them would vote populist rather than than the two royalists parties (R & D) . . . . i.e., they dont care which faction of oligarchs feeds at the tax payers’ trough for the next four years as it doesn’t really change their lives noticeably (in their eyes).
BTW, the rise of populism is global and thus its causes are almost certainly global in scale – rather than the peculiarities of one or country or another.
ISL
Which is the populist candidate?
Who are these people? One’s that know something is still very wrong in this country. Ones still tracking down the great CrowdStrike Hoax, just like this recent piece in American Greatness who ties many of the loose end together.
Why did DNC refuse the let FBI search their computers? Because DNC knew the FBI would not find anything had been hacked, but Clinton Podesta were desperate to get ahead of the hack of their private emails- follow the saga one more time: https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/22/the-monstrous-lie-behind-crowdstrike/
Never forget it was Trump’s Ukrainian phone call favor request about Crowdstrike, that Democrats needed to deflect when they chose to impeach him. CrowdStrke – the story that will not die.
Sir
IMO the best contest for the general election would be between Trump and Sanders. Both are the only candidates that can get substantial numbers to attend rallies and generate enthusiasm from their supporters. They are also the “populist” candidates.
It will be interesting to see what the delegate counts are after Super Tuesday in the Democratic primary. It seems no candidate can win on the first ballot at the convention. So the question is how the pledged delegates who will be released and the super delegates vote in the second ballot. If Bernie is denied after accumulating the largest number of delegates then we’ll see many of his supporters not vote in the general handing Trump an easy re-election. This may be what the Democrat establishment prefers.
But do people really believe that Bloomberg is more electable than Sanders? Isnt this nothing more than projection?
There is a lot of interesting data in the poll. Community involvement, or lack thereof, is highly correlated to not voting. (If they aren’t involved I certainly don’t want them voting). Ownership of current residence for 18-24 year olds seems rather high at 52% It looks like amongst voters (as defined in the poll) the Democrats were overcounted by 8% and the devil is definitely in the details on the 18-24 range:
“National young adult sample (n=1,035 +/- 3.1%): Consisted of 1,035 respondents nationwide, ages 18 to 24. ” Just which states/municipalites are these folks in?
https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-100-Million-Full-Topline-PDF.pdf
Colonel,
I concur and I’m even more worried.
I consider the risk of a Bernie win pretty high and getting higher. He is in many ways like Trump. Disliked by most of his party and discounted as a joke candidate that can’t win.
But a lot of the swing state voters will find appeal in that just as they did Trump. And, like Trump, if he gets the nomination which 538 now has him at over 50% likely, the Dems will coalesce around him just like the never Trumpers did with DJT.
Adding to this is the coronavirus induced supply chain breakdowns that will probably occur well before the conventions and election. Shortages cause price increases and the Fed doesn’t have any tools to deal with that. It’s not a money supply issue. It’s a goods supply issue. And Bernie / Dems will blame Trump.
Bernie as “Chief Law Enforcement Officer” scares me.
Dear Colonel,
Trump and Sanders (and Gabbard, except she has been blatantly shut out). Bernie vs Donald would be an argument over who is more populist – drain the swamp, ensuring that our health care system stops screwing voters, generating good (not Uber) jobs, etc.). Bernie would make the case that MAGA hasnt and Trump would make the case that it has.
Which, is why, I think Tulsi was shut out. She has argued that MAGA means dumping the Saudi’s – i.e., not prostituting the US military for MBS and by extension the US. Trump does not have a response, and her return insults hit hard. I also expect that Tulsi would stand up to the Izzies, who IMO, need some tough love.
strong and/or winning populists: Johnson in England, Salvini in Italy, Putin in Russia, Le Pen in France……
Warren tried to run as a populist, but her retelling of her past seems poorly correlated with reality and she seems as sincere as Obama (hope and change and 26 trillion dollars of socialism for the banks who selected his cabinet !)
Dear Colonel,
I may have answered your question too literally. Take 2.
Who is more able to make the populist case is a harder question. Sanders on economics is uphill but not impossible. On health insurance Sanders’ populist arguments are strong (under Trump, our dysfunctional system* remains dysfunctional). On immigration, the Dems are losers. On foreign policy, Bernie could be the populist if he is willing to go there, but he generally doesn’t.
This analysis neglects “black swan events” such as an Iranian proxy igniting a ME conflagration that kills many US personnel, or a recession, from, for example, Covid 19.
*https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/dashboard/ has tons of data and plots, though I note data and facts have nothing to do with elections.
I think Steve Bannon in his PBS interviews in January identified the populist candidates. They were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
What is a populist politician? It is someone who offers you a wee bit of someone else’s wealth, and offers someone else a wee bit of yours.
I much prefer a nationalist politician. Someone proud of a culture and heritage and willing to maintain and improve on that heritage.
A Johnson, Le Pen, Salvini, Putin, Xi, Orbán, Bolsonaro and Trump all nationalists first. Some of them may be populist as well and a few may be socialists too.
Compare that short list to this one: Sanders, Merkel, Macron, Löfven, Trudeau, Junker ( replaced by von der Leyden). These are the leaders who wish to open their borders to all comers.
The following may be read as snark or sarcasm or as a picture of tomorrow:
It strikes me that allowing only those illegal alien non-citizens resident here to vote themselves goodies is very unwoke. Just because someone in another country desires to stay in that country is no reason that they should not vote here too. It is obvious that Israelis no matter how much they love and respect Israel have as much right to vote for president of the USA as any American has; maybe more of a right considering the holocaust. And the Ukrainians considering the Holodomor, and the Mexicans considering the Gadsden purchase, and the Japanese considering Pearl Harbour ( oh sorry Nagasaki ) and the list goes on. 7.7 billion voters voting themselves a wee bit of your wealth. Don’t like those numbers, projection is that there will be 17 billion by 2100.
So on the good side, maybe that number will not be reached. Novel Corona virus appears to be very deadly to north east Asian males and not so deadly to other groups, the coming ice age will certainly diminish the amount of potential American voters in other countries especially those that have decided that fossil fuels and nuclear energy are “bad things”. There are numerous ways to cool off if one is too warm, many fewer ways to warm up when one is freezing. Sex is one of those warm up ways but it just leads to more freezer pops in the end; but it is also one of those cool down ways too and thus leads to more voters in the end.
Sometimes when I am feeling a wee bit down, I like to contemplate the sense of humour of the Creator. But not too often.