electoral map after 2020-guess

[pbrower2a]

Does anyone think that Guam and the American Virgin Islands could also be states at some time?

[pbrower2a]

2020 may be a new Era of Good Feeling with the demise of the Republican Party. The more interesting divide may happen in 2024 after the Democratic Party splits as it did within a few years after the disappearance of the Federalists and Whigs.

Conservative and Labor?

Christian Democrats and Social Democrats?

Conservatives and  Social Democrats?

What is to say that the electoral college, or at least the winner-take-all system. won't be abolished by Constitutional amendment, or that an interstate compound ("such and such states will vote for the winners of the popular vote") won't effectively give the election to the winner of the popular vote?

The GOP looks as if it is in a death spiral -- one far harder to extricate itself from than the GOP was in in the 1930s. The GOP endured one of the most lopsided electoral defeats in 1936 after economic bumbling that came close to putting the capitalist system in mortal peril.  That was bad enough, but add the pervasive corruption and dictatorial tendencies of the GOP clique of at least 2001-2006, that George W. Bush is likely to become even more a non-person than Hoover, and things could get so bad that the real alignment occurs with the split of the ultimate Big Tent Party that can win overwhelming victories for a few years.

The Senate losses for the GOP in 2006 and 2008 show little sign of reversal in 2010. Those losses could include defections as well as defeats.

Watch the 2012 election for President to see if Obama picks up the states that he got clobbered in in 2008 but Clinton won at least once (AR, LA, KY, WV, TN, GA) likely to move together and the states that haven't voted for a Democratic nominee since Carter in 1976 (TX, MS, AL, SC)... then it could be time to write the last chapter of the Party of Lincoln, the penultimate chapter being the time in which it adopted the suicidal "majority of a majority" strategy... of Vladimir Lenin.     

[pbrower2a]

(Corrections made)

Code:

Red: states likely to vote for any Democratic nominee for President should demographic trends continue.

Yellow: Very close under most circumstances.

Green:  Potential gains for Democrats should Obama win back the usual voters for Southern moderate populists such as Carter '76 an Clinton '92/'96. If Obama doesn't, someone like Carter '76 or Clinton '92//96 run for them.

Blue: Last likely holdouts for the GOP.

[pbrower2a]

Current reality:

Code:

Red: states likely to vote for almost any Democratic nominee for President should demographic trends continue.

Yellow: Very close under most circumstances.

Green:  Potential gains for Democrats should Obama win back the usual voters for Southern moderate populists such as Carter '76 an Clinton '92/'96.

Blue: Last likely holdouts for the GOP.

Oh, yes... in 2020 the Republican Party is going to be utterly irrelevant.  The Obama steamrolling is just gonna keep moving ahead.  These things aren't cyclical or anything.

Cyclical? The model for a cyclical drought for the GOP would be 1930/2006 as Stage I, 1932/2008 as Stage II... we will have to see about 2010 and 2012. Twenty years after FDR won a landslide victory in 1932, in came Dwight Eisenhower, a watered-down New Dealer who might have as well been a Democrat.  Eisenhower had to get Americans to forget Herbert Hoover. If conservatives are still running as Republicans in 2008, then those conservatives will have to make people forget about George W. Bush. Note well that corruption and dictatorial tendencies ensured that the Democrats could take back the Senate House of Representatives in 2006 and only added to the trend in 2008 by electing their Presidential candidate. People are not going to forget the real estate meltdown of 2007-?? very soon; and they will associate it with George W. Bush. If things improve at all they will lionize Obama for a long time.

Eisenhower had it fairly easy in one respect: Herbert Hoover was a man of impeccable integrity, much unlike Dubya. That's one thing that any Republican of 2024 or later will have to live down or repudiate in practice.

Demographic change suggests that the youngest voters are trending Democratic. When do they start to trend Republican again? Not until 2024 when the newest voters have little memory of George W. Bush in full charge. That the youth entering the electorate now are more active as voters and campaign volunteers than any generation since that of the World War II veterans suggests that the GOP will be in electoral trouble for a long time.

I have not said that conservatism is dead; it's the Republican Party that seems to be dying because of the disastrous Bush Presidency. But if the Republican Party dies, conservatives will have to win Democratic nominations -- until the Democratic Party splits. Your guess is as good as mine on how the split would happen. I can name all sorts of names for the new two parties of the new two-party system, but some are familiar in places like Italy, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Great Britain.

A conservative in 2028 might be running as a "Christian Democrat" and not as a Republican.



 

[pbrower2a]

You are absolutely right about predicting the results of an election. About all that anyone can reliably predict is what sorts of candidates might win where under certain conditions. Does a folksy, charismatic, optimistic right-winger defeat a morose liberal who doesn't have a clue? Ronald Reagan won twice.  Does a folksy, charismatic, optimistic left-winger defeat a morose conservative who doesn't have a clue? Absolutely.

Do bad economic times that appear suddenly under an incumbent President threaten his term of office? Of course; broad management of the economy through fiscal and monetary policy affects the quality of people's lives. 

Ten years ago, anyone who predicted that a black man then entering his late thirties not known outside one large city (sure it's a big one -- Chicago, but he wasn't Mayor) was going to become President of the United States, would you have laughed? Add that he would defeat a war hero in the general election. I would have laughed, too. Sure, we have elected blacks to the Senate, as mayors of large cities, and as governors of some states and we may have great respect for them. But those as a rule were people around 50 at the least. President? No way! We had our chances to elect non-WASP Presidents, and the only non-WASP President that we had ever elected (JFK) barely won. We had yet to elect a Polish-American, Italian-American, Scandinavian-American, Latino, Jewish, or Asian-American President; I would have expected one of those to become President before a black man. 

All that I can see are patterns, and most of them are unstable. I see the alignment of states in the election of 1992 far more similar to that of 2008 (sixteen years later) than that of 1976. One can use the political map of 1992 with a few adjustments to discuss 2008. The most unstable is a pattern of electoral blowouts for one Party; the party that loses big will try to find interest groups that feel underserved and people who dissent with the leadership of the then-dominant party. Add to this, the underdog Party offers electoral opportunities that the fat-cat party doesn't because incumbents have a huge advantage in primary elections, and might find some attractive young challengers to incumbents who eventually become irrelevant.

Political realities change with demographic change, economic changes, and of course the most unpredictable of all aspects of a Presidential election: who gets nominated. Could someone like (God forbid!) Jimmy Carter have been elected in 2008? Sure -- and that says much about 2008/

[pbrower2a]

Here's one scenario as it might play out, a nightmare scenario for the GOP:

2008: Obama election

with which we are familiar.

2012 re-election:

(The GOP nominee does something nasty to Sarah Palin's campaign, and despite her calls for party unity, Alaskans don't forgive the GOP. The GOP also takes Texas for granted and pays dearly.

2016: A southern moderate populist takes the nomination. The hard-core Democratic states will still vote for practically anyone riding a donkey, and things get really bad for the GOP:

while a President very different from Obama has a surprisingly good first term. Much like the Democrats in the US Senate race in Indiana in 2006 against Richard Lugar (the Libertarian candidate won 12.6% of the vote, and the Democrats offered nobody), the Republicans don't even bother to put up a serious challenge for the Presidency. Who needs to see such a map?


That is called an Era of Good Feeling. It doesn't last; the Democratic Party becomes unwieldy and rifts in 2023 and 2024. One Party is clearly conservative, and one is liberal to the point of social democracy.  Neither will be known as the Democratic Party because both will refuse to allow the other faction to possess the symbolism. 

The 2024 map could be far more interesting. 

This scenario has a slight chance of occurring.
 

[pbrower2a]

2020 may be a new Era of Good Feeling with the demise of the Republican Party. The more interesting divide may happen in 2024 after the Democratic Party splits as it did within a few years after the disappearance of the Federalists and Whigs.

Conservative and Labor?

Christian Democrats and Social Democrats?

Conservatives and  Social Democrats?

What is to say that the electoral college, or at least the winner-take-all system. won't be abolished by Constitutional amendment, or that an interstate compound ("such and such states will vote for the winners of the popular vote") won't effectively give the election to the winner of the popular vote?

The GOP looks as if it is in a death spiral -- one far harder to extricate itself from than the GOP was in in the 1930s. The GOP endured one of the most lopsided electoral defeats in 1936 after economic bumbling that came close to putting the capitalist system in mortal peril.  That was bad enough, but add the pervasive corruption and dictatorial tendencies of the GOP clique of at least 2001-2006, that George W. Bush is likely to become even more a non-person than Hoover, and things could get so bad that the real alignment occurs with the split of the ultimate Big Tent Party that can win overwhelming victories for a few years.

The Senate losses for the GOP in 2006 and 2008 show little sign of reversal in 2010. Those losses could include defections as well as defeats.

Watch the 2012 election for President to see if Obama picks up the states that he got clobbered in in 2008 but Clinton won at least once (AR, LA, KY, WV, TN, GA) likely to move together and the states that haven't voted for a Democratic nominee since Carter in 1976 (TX, MS, AL, SC)... then it could be time to write the last chapter of the Party of Lincoln, the penultimate chapter being the time in which it adopted the suicidal "majority of a majority" strategy... of Vladimir Lenin.    

Everyone remember, this is how ridiculous you sound when you predict the collapse of one of the parties (no offense, it's the prediction that's silly).

Attention everyone: guesses this far out mean absolutely nothing.

Hell, before Katrina, everyone thought that every map would be like 2000-2004 forever, with the Ds gradually losing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania...basically, they would be down to...urmm... 204 EVs or somtin..and just be the Antisouth of the 21st Century.

Ironically, proving the first guy's mentality wrong, the Democrats did end up losing those states. What some people seemed to miss, but lots of people in this thread correctly predicted, was that they would balance those out with Western and "New South" gains.

I noticed that. I expected Obama to be a great President (in the "Mount Rushmore + FDR category) because he showed most of the characteristics of a great President -- coherent, wise, cautious, and principled -- so long as he could stop and reverse the dangerous economic meltdown underway during the 2008 election.  I didn't see the Rea Party coming to the fore and undoing President Obama's efforts to reshape America -- and to drive America into a rightward spiral that would culminate in Donald Trump.  Although Donald Trump the person is repugnant enough to have ensured his decisive defeat, his ideology hits some of the right chords. I expect this time that the Hard Right will defend R Senate seats in Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that could be weak and to seek an R majority in the House to get bigger tax cuts for the super-rich, get regulatory relief, and push a nationwide Right-to-Work (for much less) law.

Obama was above average by most assessments of historians. Even if he got one lasting change (the Affordable Care Act) it looks likely to stick. But if Obama hasn't had the major impact that FDR had in reshaping America as much as was possible in his time if all went right, the Affordable Care Act is about as likely to be undone as that Americans will tear up the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System.   

[pbrower2a]

2016:

(ME-02 votes R)



2020:

(ME-02 and NE-02 vote differently from their states at large)

A close R win in 2024 is going to look much like 2020, with perhaps Michigan, Nevada, and New Hampshire switching from 2016.  (Republicans are going to pay a high price in Michigan for the spineless response of President Trump to the plot against the Governor). 

OK, Biden is a disaster:

(ME-01 votes differently from the state as a whole; NE-02 votes with Nebraska as a whole. 5% R shifts away from Biden or Harris make Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia close, but that would be less than enough. 

The last four Presidential elections with an incumbent running for re-election  have had no more than five states changing hands -- five in 1996, three in 2004, two in 2016 (and NE-02), and five in 2020 (and NE-02). Five going D would sway about 100 electoral votes because the five closest wins for Trump (NC, FL, TX, OH, and IA) contained 106 electoral votes between them. Five going away from Biden would be Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada; it would take Michigan as well to flip all states that went for Biden by less than 3% from D to R in the Presidential election.

The incumbent President typically sets the agenda, for better or worse. No matter how one sees Donald Trump for quality as President, he was extremely effective at pushing his point. 51% voted against him and five states changed sides, and all against him, indicating that he pushed the wrong points. More states are likely to change hands in an open-seat election, as in 2000 (eleven), 2008 (seven), and 2016 (six).   

Trump was uniquely offensive as a person, and it is hard to see Biden that way. On the other hand, any re-election bid involving Joe Biden will involve someone 79 years old. Yes, 79-year-olds and older can win re-election in other countries, but those countries are not democracies. (Think of the late dictator Robert Mugabe or Zimbabwe).