Biden approval ratings thread, 1.0

[pbrower2a]

Insurrectionists Trump should not be back as Prez, Rs still want him back, naturally he wants to be back on TV but he won't

He still has support within the GOP, but that would seem to be about it now. He craves publicity, but he no longer gets it and has no control over its content when he gets it. 32% of 45% is still over two-thirds.  Whether even that sticks is much in doubt, and I am not going to make any speculations upon any legal troubles that "45" might have.

I obviously can't speak for the 8% of adults who have gone from having a positive image of Donald Trump to those who no longer do, as I despised Donald Trump from long before he became President. I'm guessing that people on the Right side of the political spectrum are starting to discuss the insurrection and its political consequences.   

[pbrower2a]

States for which I would love to see polls:

Colorado
Indiana
Iowa
Maine
Minnesota
Ohio
Pennsylvania

,,, and then the fifty-state polling (if it was interactive) that we used to see much of.

[pbrower2a]

As mentioned previously, I don't usually post about Rasmussen or other daily trackers unless they do something interesting.  However, today's Ras is amusing.  They've mixed up their columns, creating the following rather odd result:

Approve 30
Disapprove 41

Strongly approve 48
Strongly disapprove 50

approve and disapprove -- but of what?

[pbrower2a]

CO (Keating Research):

60% approve
38% disapprove

Also:

The KOM Colorado Poll from Keating Research, OnSight Public Affairs and Mike Melanson shows 56% of Colorado voters say they have a favorable opinion of Biden, who completed his 100th day in office on Thursday, while 42% give the president thumbs down.

Biden's favorability has ticked up slightly and his unfavorably has dropped in the six months since the firms last surveyed state voters just before the November election, when candidate Biden polled at 53%-46% favorable.

https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/poll-shows-majority-of-colorado-voters-like-biden-but-most-republicans-think-election-was-stolen/article_57eb389c-a95b-11eb-9d0b-27724baab898.html

https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/coloradopolitics.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/f/10/f10d7ff4-a982-11eb-9b87-9b437846510b/608bad7452ed0.pdf.pdf

Do you remember when Colorado typically voted R in Presidential races? It split on Bill Clinton, voting against him when Bill Clinton got 377 electoral votes.

That is over. Oh, is that over!   

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York Rhode Island or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

A poll for Pennsylvania showed a significant edge (high single digits) for Biden in favorability.

[pbrower2a]

President Biden has done a fine job dodging ideological controversies. He may not be verbally confrontational. When one has been in the US Senate from ages 30 to 66 and Vice President for the next eight years as the understudy of an above-average President, you learn some things.

There are no knock-down drag-out fights as there was on Obamacare, and over 100 million people have herded themselves into inoculation sites to get herd immunity. There is pent-up demand for plenty of goods and services. We are seeing fundamental changes in the relationship between management and labor, with the 40-year habit of overworking and underpaying workers so that investors and executives can live like princes while others scrape by despite their efforts likely at an end.

The Republican Party has to use dirty tricks to have a chance of winning elections in many places that suddenly got close. I'd rather have take the chances of winning with integrity than trying to win by cheating. This is the closest thing to a halcyon time for a President since perhaps JFK. The main difference is that Ike left the Presidency with his integrity intact.

I did find the old article from Rollin Stone by Sean Wilentz:

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty — and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression’s onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Dubya was awful. He got us into a war in Iraq when we should have been finishing off the one in Afghanistan. Just imagine Afghanistan as a central-Asian Switzerland, at least for ski resorts heavily used by rich Chinese and South Koreans who have money to burn at ski lodges.  OK, that may be an excessive expression of contrafactual optimism, but that is something that I cannot rule out.  Maybe Saddam would have done something incredibly stupid while Obama was President... and ended up quite seriously dead because Obama doesn't mess around. I fault Dubya for sponsoring a speculative boom much like that of the 1920's which, unsurprisingly, ended up much the same way.

Bad as Wilentz could see Dubya, Trump has been far worse.

  How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Trump is far worse. Trump never got the second term in which he could have had the chance to do even greater destruction to civil liberties, to the rule of law, and any modicum of social justice. We will never quite know what would happen in a second term of Donald Trump. Let's put it this way: I have gout attacks, and I can assure you that you are better off not knowing how those feel.

How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/george-w-bush-the-worst-president-in-history-192899/

Donald Trump has sunk lower -- much lower -- than Dubya  and in less time except for not starting a speculative that leads to a financial panic such as in 1929 or 2008. . Before him we had a President who did what was right for bringing a country together, at least to the extent that a hostile Congress allowed. America was severely divided and facing an economic meltdown threatening to be as bad as that that began the Great Depression. We got the Obama recovery about a year and a half after the start of the stock market peak of 2007, in contrast to at least three years (when Hoover was a lame duck)  after the Great Stock Market Crash. Trump stoked religious and ethnic bigotry, saw anything other than his agenda as treachery, and went on an erratic course in foreign policy. Toward the end of his disastrous administration we had indications of a secret police responsible to the President that could bust any dissidents who got in the way.   

Joe Biden starts with a severely divided country, one in which extremists had plotted to kidnap a Governor, in which racist violence became severe and commonplace, and in which the President with only two weeks left as such had fanatics attempting to nullify an election that he lost, and in which a dangerous infectious disease that we thought that countries with advanced economies killed on the scale of a bad war in a short time. About every eighty years America goes through a particularly dangerous time, and we are going through one. We have yet to see how well President Biden does.   
   
I see Joe Biden getting re-elected if his body doesn't give out on him. Maybe he can't dodge all controversy.

[pbrower2a]

He hasn't Eradicated Covid and he hasn't Prosecuted Trump like the base wants leaving Trump able to monkey with the 2022 Election, all the Justice Dept did was raid Guiliani Apt with copies of Hunter Biden probe on the Laptop they retrieved.

It's now up to people to get vaccinated, and they are fools if they don't get the inoculation that can save the quality of their lives, let alone their lives.

The President does not do prosecutions, but there is much to prosecute involving Donald Trump. The collateral damage to the Republican party is hard to predict. Between the January 6 insurrection and the Michigan plot (the ideology is much the same) there will be much to prosecute. Organizations that coordinated anything criminal will likely vanish.

The President seems to keep a safe distance from the investigation and will do so in the prosecution, which is the safest thing to do.   

A wave can come but there is alot of work still left with Covid

All the Swing state D's are pretty much against PR Statehood and Crt packing, because they know Crt would Federalize SSM, but I'd they get the Trifecta again, they are gonna pass DC Statehood but if it's not a Constitutional Amendment it can be overturned by SCOTUS

What do the people of Puerto Rico want?

Same-sex marriage is a done deal. The only way in which to undo it is to get a Constitutional amendment either outlawing same-sex marriage or allowing states to have the option to outlaw SSM and even homosexuality. America has made its adjustments.

Transgender rights were passed by H recently, you know if it's a 7/6 D Crt they would approve LGBT rights and that's what swing states D's are running against

I saw a legal code of Michigan from the post-Obergfell v. Hodges era , and I noticed that several sections were missing. I was referred to a commentary on why those sections were missing; they involved the outlawry of homosexuality. In practice in Michigan, police forces left homosexuality alone unless it involved adults and children (that ban remains, but it applied to heterosexual acts between adults and children, too.   

[pbrower2a]

So far all of the elections beginning in 2000 look like variants of each other. The last big change that looks permanent is that Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia have gone D and stayed D (although after two elections, Nevada looks shaky as a D state). The second newest is in 2000, when Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which generally went D in Presidential elections went R and have stayed that way (although Missouri was shaky R in 2008, it voted against a D nominee who won 365 electoral votes that year).

I do not consider two votes in a different direction from what one is accustomed (Florida. Iowa, and Ohio in 2016 and 2020) definitive indications of "permanent" change. That could be that Donald Trump successfully hit the right notes in his campaign there for those states.

The closest thing to a landslide was Obama in 2008.  I'm calling a pattern from 2000 or 2008, but not 2016. Bounce-backs happen.

I see no powerful indication of trouble for Democrats in 2024. Obviously their hold on the House majority is on "double-secret probation" due to its small size. Then again, winning Presidents usually have coat-tails leading to House wins, and the House result looks much like what one would have expected in the Trump win that he claims to have gotten but supposedly was cheated of. Republicans have plenty of weak holds in the Senate, especially in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  

Republicans have yet to realize how toxic former President Trump is. Maybe the polarization of American politics allows people to find themselves in narrow circles in which they know nobody willing to admit that they think differently on politics. If everyone that they know thinks that Democrats cheated their way to victory, then to them such must be so. Statistical samples (and polls are statistical samples) don't faze them.

Presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 have been anything but boring. That of 2012 was boring only because nobody could see Mitt Romney winning. 2008? It had its surprises. After all, Democrats just never win Colorado except in blowouts and just never won Indiana, North Carolina, or Virginia. 2000 and 2004 were close all the way until Election Day... and 2000 remained close after Election Day. So did 2016.  

What is boring is the landslide that everyone sees coming, as in FDR elections, 1956, 1964, 1972, or 1984. Collapses might have their fascination. We have no idea yet of the character of the 2024 Presidential election. International disasters and an economic meltdown cannot be ruled out. On the other side... Trump is toxic, and generational change generally favors Democrats. The incumbent President does much to shape the political perceptions. As the incumbent, Trump could benefit from last-minute pushes that suggested that even if one loathes him, Democrats remain a risk of abandoning economic policies that have been somewhat successful and share some common threads of ideology with shady regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.

The 2024 Presidential election is three and a half years away. Much can and will change before then. President Biden has been able to dodge having to do anything really unpopular to an inordinate degree. He follows a disastrous Presidency, so repudiating the follies of a dreadful predecessor is an easy and effective course of action  for now. His popularity rides generational trends, with voters under 40 about 20% more Democratic than Republican while voters over 55 are about 5% more Republican than Democratic.

 

[pbrower2a]

Almost everything looks inevitable once it happens, but until it does everything is in flux.

We rarely see a state take a 10% shift in the vote unless something unusual happens. That could be a perfect storm on the state's economics (consider Indiana in 2008: its RV industry got hit all at once by an economic meltdown that gutted demand for all big-ticket items, a credit crunch that made buying anything big on credit much more difficult and expensive, and a spike in oil prices that doubled the cost of driving an RV.  By 2012 all those problems were gone, so a critical industry in Indiana politics was no longer troubled. Indiana could then go back to its old ways of voting in 2012.

Appearance and disappearance of a Favorite Son can have its effects. Just look at this sequence of elections:

Georgia

1972  75-24 R
1976  67-33 D
1980  56-41 D
1984  60-39 R

Democrats did very well in Georgia because the presidential nominee was Jimmy Carter, a man well suited to Georgia's political culture. To say that George McGovern was a misfit in Georgia's political culture  is an understatement. McGovern was a poor match for any part of America. Mondale? Again a poor match. 

[pbrower2a]

So far all of the elections beginning in 2000 look like variants of each other. The last big change that looks permanent is that Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia have gone D and stayed D (although after two elections, Nevada looks shaky as a D state). The second newest is in 2000, when Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia, which generally went D in Presidential elections went R and have stayed that way (although Missouri was shaky R in 2008, it voted against a D nominee who won 365 electoral votes that year).

I do not consider two votes in a different direction from what one is accustomed (Florida. Iowa, and Ohio in 2016 and 2020) definitive indications of "permanent" change. That could be that Donald Trump successfully hit the right notes in his campaign there for those states.

Not sure how you call Nevada a "shaky D" state while waving off Florida/Iowa/Ohio as outliers. He didn't win, but who's to say he hit the best notes a GOP candidate can hit right now in Nevada?

Losing the state by less than 3% twice?

If COVID-19 is off the scene as a clear and present danger, and if the economy strengthens enougb (especially in the casino  and warehouse businesses*

To win states in red, a Republican needs a diplomatic disaster or an economic meltdown. To win states in blue, Biden must change the political culture so that people give up right-wing values. The second is much less likely than the first. 

We shall see how the absence of Trump, or a politically-crippled Trump,  changes the political scene.

*California has a significant inventory tax, and for medium-to-high-ticket items such as tires and appliances, many California retailers rely heavily upon Nevada warehouses to keep the inventory tax down as a cost of doing business. When California has good times, so does Nevada. Your lawn mower might be a day's shipment away in Nevada.

[pbrower2a]

In rather few times is Congress more popular than the President. I can think of 1931-1932, 1951-1952, 1972-1974, 2007-2008, and 2019-2020. In all of these cases I think of a President in trouble (Hoover, second term of Truman, Nixon-Ford in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Dubya as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started to go bad and especially as the economy melted down, and Trump, who made so many faux pas that he made a sick joke of himself outside of his cult. The President can run against Congress if Congress is under the opposition party, but that does not always work. A President such as Obama might want to keep the Congress that he has, but well-heeled special interests may decide otherwise.

Usually a Presidential nominee who gets the clear majority of the popular vote does so in a wave year when first elected and put up some low-hanging fruit for the opposing Party to pick off easily. Republican s picked off some low-hanging fruit in 2020.

[pbrower2a]

We now know pbower2A Approvalls are debunked TX and NC aren't voting R anytime soon

R plus 0/10 Seats in H net gain and a 51/49 Senate and we can have a divided Congress again since 2018

Just like we had in 2010 and Investigatons into Hunter Biden probe will happen and an impeachment proceedings can start leaving guess who as our nominee in 2024 Kamala Harris

I knew this was gonna happen it was easy to blame Trump to not Eradicate Covid but it's tough to do it as Prez


As I said before, I never seen a non rosey Approvals from pbower2A 2016 was obviously wrong, he predicted Hillary to win, and so was 2018 and 2020, with TX going D

All the Rs needed was a Neutral Environment to claim the H not a R favored and they have one

We do not know what the political climate of 2024 will be, A ten-point shift against Biden much like that against Carter allows Arizona, Georgia, Maine at-large, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to swing to the GOP. Such will take some combination of an economic meltdown and international disaster. Heck, Carter was popular at first, too. A ten-point shift against the GOP causes North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa to swing D. That is about the swing from Reagan 1980 to Reagan 1984.

States are too culturally polarized for now for really-large shifts of 15% or so. Oregon isn't going R and Indiana isn't going D without major changes in the overall attitudes by region. Republicans seemed to have put rural areas at risk for a while due to high tariffs but then opened the floodgates on farm subsidies. The rise of the Religious Right explains how Carter could win all but one (Virginia) of the former Confederate states in 1976 and Hillary Clinton lost all but one of them (Virginia) in 2016. If you can see a phenomenon like the Religious Right changing the political culture between now and 2024  as it did in the late 1970's in strongly-D states, then tell me.   

I was amazed to see Iowa and Ohio spiraling away from the Democrats while Texas seemed to drift D. This said, Texas, which used to be more rural, poorer, and less-educated than the USA as a whole, is becoming more of a microcosm of America... and that does not help Republicans. Meanwhile, Iowa and Ohio both have some shrinking medium-to-large cities while the rural population remains stable. As a Democrat I have some concerns about Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which might not quite have the same urban hemorrhaging as Iowa and Ohio. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will account for 44 electoral votes and Texas for 40... that would be a wash.   

Donald Trump had his strongest support in rural America, with few exceptions.

...It is easy to see 2010 as a likely analogue for 2022 because both are the first midterms following a Democratic win of the Presidency. Most obviously, the Hard Right still has huge backers among plutocrats who believe exactly the same thing -- that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it enriches and indulges those elites and that the power of those elites be enforced with whatever brutality is necessary. Donald Trump is the preposterous conclusion to that ideology, and preposterous conclusions to ideology have won at times in what seemed unlikely places. Those elites have the money with which to buy political support from reliable stooges. Second, new Presidents typically run on platforms of change even if such is little more than the repudiation of the predecessor. Obama repudiated Dubya (if selectively), and Trump repudiated Obama and Biden repudiated Trump completely.* Repudiating an above-average President for something other than style (JFK rejected Eisenhower's style and could get away with that) is a bad idea. Repudiating the faults of a failed President, as Biden does, is wise. The only question about Joe Biden is whether he will bring about some not-so-desirable characteristics. We just do not know that yet. 

Good reason exists for the Party not in the White House winning some seats in the midterm. No President fully gets his way; most make promises that get contradicted in meaning between what some voters thought they heard and what they mean in implementation. Unintended consequences are the norm and not the exception. Winning Presidents usually have gains in the House with them, and some weak politicians or politicians who don't quite fit the demography of their constituents. Say what you want about the Republican hack in my district (Tim Walberg), but he fits a district with an inordinate share of the sorts of "low-information voters" for whom Donald Trump professes love. In 2010 he defeated a one-term Obama acolyte. The low-hanging fruit that reach the House in wave elections or avoid losing as their districts stave off their eventual defeat in normal elections as the districts change  get picked off in later elections.

This time it may be Republicans who have the low-hanging fruit in the House. Add to this, some Republicans who have done outrageous stuff in support of Trump (mine tried to undermine the majority vote in Michigan against Trump) will be up for re-election in 2022 if they do not retire.  One big difference between 2022 and 2010 is that the GOP could distance itself quickly from Dubya but will bot be able to do so so effectively with Donald Trump. Demographic change that results from new voters being much more D than R and starting to vote in huge numbers also bodes ill for the GOP as it is now composed among elected officials. 

I see cause for 2022 being different from 2010. Patterns applied too rigidly can fail. Of course one thing else is different: Democrats do not have much margin for losing a House majority.       

*Dubya was poor; Obama was above-average, and Trump is certifiably putrid. The most recent ranking of the Presidents recognized in Wikipedia comes from 2018, so we do not have the whole story on Trump in any ranking ... yet... that gets the whole picture of the Trump administration.     

[pbrower2a]

The Difference between picking up seats in a Biden Midterm and picking up seats in Trump midterm is that Prez party it goes by their approvals, it's showing a 51/49 Approvals the Ds aren't gonna have a plus 8 Midterms it's gonna be more of a Neutral cycle.

We have the MO plus 15 R poll and the TX 06 that should tell you right there how South is Trending fast R.

2010/2014/ we didn't lose Northern sears we lost Southern seats

We are gonna probably have a 51/49 Senate Herschel Walker beating WARNOCK and D's winning WI, PA and NH

D's can indeed lose the H in 2022/ based on TX and FL Redistricting but not lose Prez Election in 2024 based on WI, PA and MI

Democrats can expect to have Congressional seats in Missouri -- only in greater Kansas City and St. Louis. Missouri's two largest metro areas are not growing, at least on the Missouri side. Springfield seems to have a little growth, buit it is a reactionary community. In other states, redistricting may have strange results.  Of course I expect Republican majorities in several state legislatures to try to consolidate Congressional districts of two Democrats. where the number of Congressional seats shrinks.

At this stage redistricting is a matter of rumors. Know well, though, that in 2010 Dubya was slightly toxic but irrelevant; in 2022 Donald Trump is more toxic and highly relevant. Dubya faded from the limelight, but Trump remains a publicity hound.  Republicans made their biggest House gains in Florida, where the GOP tried to equate Joe Biden to the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Nicolas Maduro.

Except for the Trump cult, Republicans cannot rely upon any other votes in 2022 and 2024 -- yet. Can President Biden have problems? Sure. The economy can overheat, which leads to inflation and shortages. There's always the possibility of some international disaster that the opposition that Republicans can pin on him.

We are all ahead of ourselves, are we not?   

[pbrower2a]

I do not predict that Democrats will hold the House. The same front groups (ALEC, National Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, FreedomWorks!, etc.) are still in existence. They are extremely polished at what they do, which is to smear anyone who fails to believe in pure plutocracy in which 95% of the people are obliged to suffer for 1% of the people. Meanwhile the Republican nominee does his plain-folks imitation while running against a harried Democrat, wins, and then shows his loyalty to the Economic Royalists behind the front groups.

This is what I see in the American Hard Right, at least on economics and politics.

To the Deutschlandlied:

Profit, profit, over everything!
Damn the public, give 'em the shaft!
We don't need excessive government,
all we need is plenty of graft!
Make the government a mere rubber stamp...

(the next line would probably be deleted or modified as excessive hyperbole. The rhyme with "stamp" is "camp", and that does not refer to getting some exposure to nature or laughable travesty in entertainment. 


I know how they work. Will they be as effective in 2022 as in 2010? Probably not. I am predicting that the midterm effect will be much less than usual due to the steady growth of Democratic voting due to younger voters voting heavier and more often, and being about 20% more D in elections. I see 2018 as a portent of that trend. In 2006 Democrats saw a two-stage wave that reversed in 2010 because the young voters of 2006 and 2008 didn't go out and vote in 2010.   If I am to make a bet it is on Democrats losing their narrow majority in the House. 

Some people seem to believe that "free enterprise" depends upon "enterprise" being free to do anything irrespective of the human cost. Such people also believe that he who owns the gold makes the rules. That has been the reality for over forty years. Regrettably they have the most important currency in politics, which is the money to lavish upon their chosen political stooges.

I have no delusion about America's tycoons and executives and their ability to find intellectual whores to fool people easily duped.
 

[pbrower2a]

University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll
(4/16-4/22; 1392 RVs)
Texas:

Biden:
44% Approve
46% Disapprove
11% No opinion

Crosstabs

Georgia: AJC/UGA, April 20-May 3, 844 RV

Approve 51
Disapprove 45

Strongly approve 28
Strongly disapprove 37

Gov. Brian Kemp: 45/49 (strongly 14/29)

Kemp's numbers will go down once Mr. Trump holds rallies in GA to primary him out. Unlike govs like DeWine, he can't rely on some Dem-leaning voters to cross over and save him.

I thought that the early number for Biden's  approval was unrealistic.

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York Rhode Island or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

A poll for Pennsylvania showed a significant edge (high single digits) for Biden in favorability.

[pbrower2a]

It is easy to gerrymander out a member of the opposition Party in a reapportionment that results in fewer seats for the state. Republicans controlling the Ohio State legislature were able to combine a D district in greater Toledo with a similar district in Cleveland (the cities are a little over 100 miles apart), paring off people in both districts to dilute their votes in rural strong-R districts so that two incumbent Democrats ended up opposing each other for the same seat. Ordinarily it is far easier to reapportion a district in which an incumbent retires between several other districts, but Ohio Republicans knew what they were doing.

It is not so easy if a state gains Representatives, especially if the population growth is in the (then) minority Party. Pack-and-stack goes only so far before it gets overstretched to the point that the majority party of the time starts to have thin margins vulnerable to demographic change.

Some states have bipartisan commissions which make partisan efforts to hurt the opposition party more difficult.

[pbrower2a]

University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll
(4/16-4/22; 1392 RVs)
Texas:

Biden:
44% Approve
46% Disapprove
11% No opinion

Crosstabs

Tilt R Texas in 2024.

I wish...

The Republicans absolutely, positively must win the electoral votes of Texas in 2024 to win the Presidency.

2020:

That would be 303 D, 235 R.

Now take away the states that voted for Biden by less than 3% (or for that matter by less than 7%, as there were no states in that range:

...and the Democrat is stuck with only 226 electoral votes.  Texas puts the Democrat at 266, which is itself short of a win.

As a practical matter, any state in yellow would still put the Democrat over the top. It is hard to see any way in which any Republican could lose Texas but still win every state in yellow. Those states are different enough in politics and demographics that aside from electioneering that successfully wins a landslide (which would of course lock down Texas' 40 electoral votes) at least one of those would still go D. And then one might still have to sweat  Florida and North Carolina.  Texas is has demographics somewhat similar to a composite of Arizona and Georgia.

     

[pbrower2a]

OH is gonna be close, it was an 8 pt state but Trump and Boehner isn't there Ryan was tied in a PPP I change my mind, OH can swing D, and if Jeff Jackson is nominated not Beasley we can win NC too

We must look out for IA too if Sand runs for Gov or Senator

COVID-19 may have aided Trump in 2020 by ensuring that Democrats did not do their usual last-hours canvassing for votes in some states. This is especially so with a state with an aging population such as Ohio full of retirees who might ask for a ride to the polls.

The Trump campaign was much more competent than the level of performance that one would expect from the  Trump Presidency. It was less scared of going out to get the vote... with canvassers and potential voters alike being subjected to the risk of contracting an infection by COVID-19. Trump is much more ruthless than the usual American pol, which shows in his business practices. Ru8thlessness is often an excellent tactic for winning.

Two elections do not prove a trend. Ohio has typically been close in Presidential elections. If you want other examples of this rule, then look at the Eisenhower wins of Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island in 1952 and 1956. Ike won all three states twice, and he was the last Republican to win all three states since 1924 and none of them since 1932. Republican nominees for President have won only five times since (Nixon MN and RI in 1972, Reagan MA in 1980, and Reagan MA and RI in 1984). Note that Ike won a raft of states that had gone reliably for FDR and Truman between 1932 and 1948 but that would go R in all Presidential campaigns except for 1964.  Three losses in a row, each getting worse? When Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia all went against Obama by 10% or more I was fully convinced that these states which had once been wins for Bill Clinton were in no way available to Democrats in Presidential elections.

As for 2024 -- I expect the Democrats to exploit the insurrection of January 6 as fully as possible to the detriment of any Republican who did not condemn it.

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1391512709787701252

AP/NORC, April 29-May 3, 1842 adults (1-month change)

Approve 63 (+2)
Disapprove 36 (-2)

Strongly approve 34 (+3)
Strongly disapprove 25 (nc)

Also, 54% say the country is moving in the right direction vs 44% who say it's on the wrong track.  This is the first time in at least four years this has been above water (last month was tied 50-50).

These are "Ike" numbers. Solve seemingly intractable problems, and you get re-elected in a landslide. Was the GOP going to break?

[pbrower2a]

I'm surprised you guys still trust polls so much after how badly they were off in Nov 2020

Some of us have our own models of how approval connects to electoral results.

The model that I have suggests that the bulk of voting activity is on Election Day and that Democrats go all out to convince undecided voters in the last month or so before the election. Well, COVID-19 got in the way of that, and Republicans had no problems in last-minute vote drives even if those put canvassers and potential voters at risk of the disease. Republicans decisively won the Election Day result, which was unusual. Republicans got huge early leads in the margin in Michigan and Pennsylvania that did not evaporate until the expanded early vote, especially concentrated in the Detroit and Philadelphia metro areas, got counted last.

The model badly fit reality in 2000. It might fit reality better in 2024.

[pbrower2a]

Definitive solution for drop-offs and early voting: free postage for all mail-in ballots in all federal elections. In effect every post office becomes a drop-off point.

Note some possible effects:

1. Many acts of electoral fraud would fall under mail-fraud statutes.

2. Caucuses might become irrelevant.

3. Intimidation of voters at a post office would be a federal offense as interference with the mail.

4. People would much less rely upon appearing in person to vote except for same-day registration and voting.  

5. Cost to the USPS could be covered in an inexpensive allocation by Congress.

6. Governments would save much money by not needing so many electoral devices on Election Day.

7. Voting would be good for getting people to buy postal services, especially postage stamps.

[pbrower2a]

Florida. Iowa. Who knows -- maybe some state in the Mountain or Deep South or the Great Plains.

[pbrower2a]

Some theory on why Presidents make their choices. Going back to Harry Truman for successful Presidents:

1948: Alben Barkley. I'm guessing that Barkley was good for ideological consistency, as the states have much in common despite having only a small border. To this day there is no direct bridge crossing from Missouri to Kentucky. Truman was able to win the states of the Mountain South, and he needed them.

1952: Richard Nixon. Nixon was an avid Commie-hunter -- far more effective than Joseph R. McCarthy. Ike had been the typical military contact between the US and the USSR during WWII, and if he was going to put an end to the Korean War without selling out the fledgling South Korea he was going to need those contacts. Nixon was good cover. As a Senator, Nixon could do wome of his own politics on behalf of someone never elected to any political office.

1960: Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was probably more useful to the Democratic Party in the Senate than as VP... until you-know-what happened.  Oddly, JFK and LBJ were from states that Ike won... twice... and in landslides. Geographic balance, I suppose, mattered greatly, and Texas was critical.

1968: Spiro Agnew. Yes, we know that Agnew would eventually implode for corruption, but not until he and Nixon would be re-elected. Agnew served as a sort of pit-bull type. Maryland was supposedly on the margin, but Nixon/Agnew lost that state.

I think that even without the corruption, we are best off if we never have someone like Agnew as a VP nominee again. It is best that candidacies be positive, at least toward fellow Americans.  

1976: Walter Mondale. Mondale was squeaky-clean, and he could appeal to organized labor in the northern US. Such may have been critical to two of Carter's barest wins in Ohio and Wisconsin. Michigan was not going to go to Carter (Favorite Son). Note that Carter still fell short in a raft of states that have not gone R except in Democratic losses since 1976: Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, New Mexico, Michigan, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.  In 1992 some Democrat similar in ideology (I will get to that) won those states.

1980: George Herbert Walker Bush, and I assume on his skills as a political administrator if not as an elected pol. Reagan was going to win against a President whose bad luck dogged him, including the stagflation with no obvious, painless solution. (The solution to stagflation was getting people to work harder and longer for much less, creating more stuff and selling it while being unable to buy it themselves. No Democrat would offer that, but Reagan did and forced it upon youth who might have had college degrees but had to work in fast-food places or shopping malls, doing real work that would not support them unless they did two or more such jobs).

1988: Dan Quayle. Probably for geographic balance more than anything else. Quayle's Indiana was anything but critical, having gone D only once since 1936. Maybe the elder Bush thought that he might groom a young politician for the Presidency. 1988 wasn't close, as Dukakis collapsed as a nominee, and it is hard to understand what role Quayle had in that.

1992: Al Gore. If you are from the neighboring state as the Presidential nominee, then you are probably being selected for ideological consistency and for having a complimentary office to that of the Presidential nominee.

2000: Dick Cheney. Formerly a Congressman from a sure R state with three electoral votes, he wasn't going to win any key state for such. Dubya may have been suspect as an administrator, and Cheney was more an administrator than a politician. This could have gone badly in the closest Presidential election ever. More on that below.

2008: Joe Biden. Reputedly Barack Obama chose a fellow Senator from a sure D state with three electoral votes because Biden was the poorest member of the US Senate, which implied that he could not be linked to anything corrupt. I'm figuring on ideological consistency, a freedom from great controversy, and political savvy. Obama ended up winning by a comfortable margin in the popular and electoral vote.

2016: Mike Pence. On the surface, Mike Pence seemed likely to lose a re-election bid as Governor of Indiana. He's not a great speaker, and Indiana is a small state that almost never goes D in Presidential elections. Here's the point: Donald Trump needed the votes of fundamentalist Protestant voters because Trump is about as amoral a politician who won a Presidential nomination by one of the two main Parties... as America has ever known. So Trump chooses a self-righteous, certifiable reactionary to consolidate the fundamentalist-Protestant vote. It may be hypocritical but brilliant. Trump is not a brilliant man, but sometimes a mediocrity has what might look like a stroke of genius.

2020: Kamala Harris. I see no critical consistency that she brought over to Joe Biden. Sure, California had 55 electoral votes, but it hadn't gone R since 1992 and wasn't going to in 2020. Ideological consistency and a keen legal mind honed in prosecutions? That might be good for reinforcing prosecutions of some corrupt figures from the Trump era. Joe Biden likes to be seen as a nice guy, but he knows hat it takes. Hatchet woman: do the crime and do the time.

Now for failures, not counting incumbents.

1952: John Sparkman. Well, his Alabama was 11 of the 89 electoral votes that he and Adlai Stevenson won. Stevenson did win back the states that went from Truman to Thurmond, but little else.

1956: Estes Kefauver. Good man, but he could not even win his own state of Tennessee. Ike would have won this election if he had picked up a factory worker with no political experience and a clean personal record as a Veep candidate.

1960: Henry Cabot Lodge. Talk about geographic balance (California and Massachusetts)... the home state advantage is far bigger for the Presidential nominee than for the Veep nominee. Ouch.  For that I see Lodge, whatever his virtues, as a political blunder. Close as that election is, any blunder could have made the difference. Usually I have ascribed the advantage for Kennedy of being a war hero (a big thing back then) and being much more telegenic than Nixon. Nixon was physically ugly, and that also had to hurt him.

1964: William Miller. A moderate supposedly chosen to create ideological balance, but not relevant with a nominee that made just too many gaffes. I doubt that it would have mattered whom Goldwater chose as a Veep running-mate. He selected a Representative, which is typically a bad idea (it worked with Cheney and might have worked with Kemp, but certainly not with Ryan).

1968: Did Humphrey-Muskie really have a chance when Wallace took his racist splinter faction from the Democratic Party? Nixon got 301 electoral votes and Humphrey got 191... but it is not so difficult to see why Humphrey lost. I'm guessing that Humphrey chose Muskie to consolidate the Catholic vote and otherwise for ideological consistency. Chaos at the 1968 Democratic National Convention had bad optics. but the Wallace secession destroyed whatever chance Humphrey had. Muskie did deliver four electoral votes from Maine...

1972: Unless one was sure that the Watergate scandal was the ruin of Nixon, Nixon had no chance to be defeated. I don't have to go into the theater of having to replace Thomas Eagleton with Sargent Shriver. Enough said.

1976: This was close. Bob Dole   had a strong reputation and was a savvy pol. The Veep was not the difference here.

1984: Geraldine Ferraro, a Congressional Representative was a long-shot choice as the first female nominee for Vice-President.

1988: Bush ties to Texas mattered more than Bentsen ties. Bentsen was one of the strongest Senators ever, but that was not enough.

1996: Kemp was about as good as one could be as a Congressman. He was not going to be elected to the US Senate in New York. But he was running with Dole against a slick pair of politicians.

2000: Al Gore wanted to solidify the Jewish vote in Florida. Joe Lieberman was the wrong Jewish fellow. Sure, I am a Michigander and I have even met Carl Levin... he might have helped pick off New Hampshire or Ohio. Targeting Florida? Not when the Governor is the brother of the Presidential nominee.

2004: John Edwards. This came close. Edwards did not win his home state. This was a dicey election.

2008: Joe Biden. Ideological consistency and no potential for conflicts of interest? Such is worth choosing someone from a sure state for one's Party that has only three electoral votes.

2012: Paul Ryan. Yes, I know, some things looked good -- potential swing state, and the Catholic vote can decide an election. Unfortunately he is a Congressional Representative, and when the election started getting away he ramped up his effort to keep his House seat. OK, it is tough to win against an incumbent who is doing most things right and nothing badly, and is one of the savviest pols ever known.

2016: Tim Kaine. Not really a mistake, so far as I can tell.        

[pbrower2a]

https://twitter.com/nick_field90/status/1392950872548777990?s=20

Twenty-five states now, and the most interesting addition is Pennsylvania. If I saw a map like thiws going into November 2024 I would expect President Biden to win 358 or 375 electoral votes (depending on Ohio)... 415 if Texas goes D. Trump may have been an excellent match for Iowa and Ohio  in 2016 and 2020.  We do have Montana and West Virginia for calibration.

Of course we have the possibility of electoral shenanigans in 2024 that could render strong approval numbers for the President moot in those states.  

Key:

30% red shade: Biden up 1-5%
40% red shade: Biden up 5-10%
50% red shade: Biden up 10-15%
60% red shade: Biden up 15-20%
70% red shade: Biden up 20-25%
80% red shade: Biden up 25-30%
90% red shade: Biden up 30%+

50% green shade: tie

30% blue shade: Biden down 1-5%
40% blue shade: Biden down 5-10%
50% blue shade: Biden down 10-15%
60% blue shade: Biden down 15-20%
70% blue shade: Biden down 20-25%
80% blue shade: Biden down 25-30%
90% blue shade: Biden down 30%+


It is approval ratings, and not favorability ratings. Favorability ratings are relevant when they are blatant  (as in states that are not close and usually do not get polled, like New York Rhode Island or Oklahoma) because the states rarely decide an election, but they always must defer to approval. Would I use a favorability rating for Illinois? Sure. Wisconsin? Absolutely not.

A poll for Pennsylvania showed a significant edge (high single digits) for Biden in favorability. Well, I no longer need discuss favorability of the President in Pennsylvania.

[pbrower2a]

Redfield & Wilton, May 8-9, 1500 RV (change from late March)

Approve 52 (-1)
Disapprove 36 (+1)

Strongly approve 27 (-1)
Strongly disapprove 25 (-1)

Other approval ratings (no priors):

Kamala Harris: 49/36 (strongly 25/28)
Mitch McConnell: 25/42 (strongly 9/26)
Nancy Pelosi: 38/41 (strongly 18/33)
Chuck Schumer: 30/34 (strongly 14/23)
Kevin McCarthy: 26/31 (strongly 10/21)

Generic Congressional ballot: D 44, R 37

Trump went down to -20 in approval after Charlottesville, I wonder if Biden will ever hit +20 in the polling averages. Biden is the exact opposite of Trump so far.

Not surprising. Republicans can lose badly in 50-50 and more modestly in generally-favorable environments if seen as corrupt or extreme. which explains Bayh and McCaskill winning against nutcases in 2012 but losing in 2018 to less-extreme nominees, or how Tom Corbett could lose a governorship in Pennsylvania in 2014 in an excellent year for Republicans. All three cases involve the trivialization of rape ("legitimate rape" nonsense or a scandal by association with someone messing with children), a very bad political stance.

Joe Biden is of course a complete repudiation of Trump just as Trump is a complete repudiation of Obama. The distinction between the two cases is that Obama still had the perception as an above-average President (and will likely retain that) and Trump generally had a reputation as a below-average President (and will likely retain that) in historical assessments.

Obama has the mentality of a good prosecutor who may not grandstand but goes for the jugular in a court of law... and for good reason the Chicago machine wanted him out of the local scene as quickly as possible. Biden so far seems much the same... as one of those "do the crime and do the time" characters who don't have to say such but get such a result. Joe Biden has said nothing about federal criminal cases  including the Michigan plot and the January 6 insurrection. That is fine. The drama belongs in a court of law until after the settlement of the criminal cases. After that any convicted offenders are open to derision in the mass media. Kamala Harris, by the  way, leaves no doubt in her record as a prosecutor.

A D+20 or R+20 election is near the historical maximum, and it usually involves utter failure of the Other Side. That is FDR 1936, LBJ 1964, Nixon 1972, and Reagan 1984. Such happens rarely, and it usually involves a very weak opponent facing an incumbent in a strong position. I look at the opponent as either the restatement of a perceived failure (Landon 1936, Mondale 1984), or someone easily cast as a troublesome extremist (Goldwater 1964, McGovern 1972). So figure that the Republicans might nominate someone as ludicrous as Richard Murdock or Todd Akin in view of the ideological extremism of the current GOP or a Trump acolyte in an environment that holds Trump in contempt, and things can go very bad very fast for the GOP.

The Republicans have little chance of winning the Presidential election in 2024 unless the Biden Administration endures some calamity such as a diplomatic or military debacle or an economic meltdown. The incumbent has the built-in advantage of setting the agenda and defining the political debate. That is not enough if the incumbent is connected to failure (Hoover or Carter) or doesn't have a clue on running a competent (Ford) and spirited (the elder Bush) campaign.

As a rule I do not predict the results of civil or criminal cases yet to go to trial or on trial. I was wrong on OJ Simpson and on Scott Peterson when I relaxed that rule... and criminal trials can get capricious results. I'm not going to predict results of criminal cases involving the insurrection, but there have been plea bargains already in the Michigan plot that, like the January 6 insurrection, involves people closely connected to extreme expressions of Trump-friendly ideology.   

[pbrower2a]

These jokers said Biden would win PA by 7. Why should I believe anything they say?

This is probably an act but it is fun to look back at final Data For Progress polls:
AZ - Biden +3
CO - Biden +12
FL - Biden +3 (yikes)
GA - Biden +2
IA - Trump +2
ME - Biden +14
MI - Biden +5
MN - Biden +9
NV - Biden +7
NC - Biden +2


Too bored to go further but seems like their house effect in 2020 was D+5 or so.

Again, 2020 was weird due to COVID-19. It may be that Democrats got complacent late in the season and Republicans did not. It could be that Democrats were unable to do their usual canvassing  and Republicans were able to get their message across.  I'm guessing that undecided voters went heavily R this time. Trump does offer excitement even if that excitement comes with the prospect of bad government.

"Off by five" means that some core assumptions are wrong. Were those wrong for assuming that core assumptions about the electorate from prior years were off or that 2020 would be normal? It is far too early to tell that.

It is a fair assumption that Donald Trump is toxic, at least after January 6.