Skimmed through this a bit - seems like they understand that elections are won by turnout rather than persuasion nowadays (with the exception of certain dealigned groups), which is good.
This is a bad take honestly. Yes, it's not the depolarized 1980s, where persuasion was 95% of the equation and turnout 5%, but persuasion is still 70% of the equation. If you think Biden's gains in the built-out suburbs of WI and PA, which were ultimately the key to his victory, was simply a matter of turning out Democrats, you are dead wrong. Biden won because he was able to persuade formerly Republican suburbanites, not because he was able to turnout a hidden vote in those counties.
Even in quickly growing counties in Texas where the Democrats have made massive gains, such as Fort Bend, Harris, Tarrant, Dallas, Collin, Denton, etc., the majority of these gains have happened in the suburbs. Turnout doesn't turn Collin from a 2 to 1 Romney blowout to a swing county, that comes from Republican voters deciding to vote for Biden and not for Trump.
The same is true in the massive swing in the Rio Grande Valley. If you posit that it was simply a one-sided turnout surge that caused some counties to swing 50 points towards Trump, then you're being delusional. In Starr County, for example, the 2016 result was about 80/20 Clinton. In a county that lopsided, to say that the nonvoting population is entire Republican is crazy. The nonvoting population was probably around as Democratic as the voting population.
If there's a 50% turnout increase, as there was in Starr County, then around 67% of the electorate voted in 2016. And that went 79/19 for Clinton.
So that 67% breaks down as 53/13. That's already higher than Biden's vote share. Then maybe the new voters are 40% Biden, 60% Trump. So you can add 13/20 to that, and you get 66/33. Then to actually get to the result, you would need a 14% shift of the overall vote, or around a fifth of the previous vote, to get to the actual result.
The change in the RGV was a matter of persuasion. These voters decided to leave the Democratic party to vote for Trump. It wasn't a magic swell where the completely untapped 100% Republican nonvoting population finally voted. There was a real shift here, and explaining it through turnout misses what actually happened.
