Rasmussen: Warren +2 over Trump

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

I think the news of Warren leading Trump, in a Rassy poll has come too late for her. Biden has establishment backing and will win the nomination.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

Oh man. I can only imagine the grease fire that will be alt-right twitter (when is it never a grease fire?) if Warren defeats Trump.

[Hollywood]

I don't get the talk that Warren is unelectable, I personally think she's more electable than Biden.


Winning an election is primarily about turning out the base voters of your party, not trying to win over voters from the other side as some other candidates seem to want to do.

According to almost every poll in 2008, Obama was winning voters within his own party, the majority of independents and voters on the other side.  In 2016, polls showed Sanders winning big among Democrats and voters from the other side while Clinton was not.  Now Biden is winning voters in the Democrat Party given that he is already supported by 33% of the electorate and his the second choice candidate of other challengers.  He wins a similar majority of independents as Obama, and he brings some disgruntled Bush Republicans over.  Trying to win base of your own party is strategy that is good for a mostly homogenous voter base in the Republican party, because they need to run up the vote in mostly rural areas.  The Democrats need to run up the vote in Urban areas and suburban areas, along with satisfying the political sensibilities of different races and special interest groups with opposing viewpoints. 

[Hollywood]

45% of Americans view Warren unfavorably in that poll, and 20% of Democrats view her unfavorably in other polls.  If I was writing a book about how to swing a bat at a wall without successfully making contact, I would surely use Elizabeth Warren as my analogy to drive the point home.  She would make a cover, and her claimed relationship to Native American tribes would find it's way into the prologue.  Best Seller.

[Epaminondas]

Now Hillary Clinton is winning voters in the Democrat Party given that she is already supported by 33% of the electorate and is the second choice candidate of other challengers.  She wins a similar majority of independents as Obama, and she brings some disgruntled Bush Republicans over.

Sound familiar?
How did that pan out?

[AN63093]

Most models and fundamentals gave it a slight GOP win for 2016 so if anything Trump proved that you can literally nominate anyone and still win.

What about that Gallup poll discussed in this article about how people saw Trump as the most moderate GOP candidate since 1976?

Would your argument be that this reflects mostly a post hoc justification after people had already decided how they were voting (and that perhaps, people would've said that about any GOP candidate that year, due to background conditions/fundamentals?)

Or can a candidate ever influence how they are perceived?

Note I am not 'taking sides' between you and KYWildman on this one; just trying to make sure I fully understand the argument.

[Hollywood]

Now Hillary Clinton is winning voters in the Democrat Party given that she is already supported by 33% of the electorate and is the second choice candidate of other challengers.  She wins a similar majority of independents as Obama, and she brings some disgruntled Bush Republicans over.

Sound familiar?
How did that pan out?

I always contended that Hillary Clinton would lose the 2016 election, and never changed my tune even when I was unsure based on the polling data.  Given the information I learned from that election, I maintain that a candidate with 45% approval and 45% disapproval in the Democrat party is a loser, because people in New York and California run up the vote, so a certain percentage is wasted in our electoral college system, which Democrats are strongly pushing to abolish due to their embarrassing loss resulting from their candidate and party not understanding the rules, as well as wasting time and resources running up the vote in a state they were already going to win.  

I maintain that Joe Biden is the best chance for Democrats to win, because he's likable. His negatives are low. He appeals to the rust belt lost in the last election, and the Bush people can stomach him.  I mean anyone that could stomach Hillary Clinton after years of corruption and bladdy bladdy blah.  People like Elizabeth Warren are locked in their own heads, and they are compromised by their adherence to the far-left no matter duuhhh.  This is a person that supports reparations, because she felt uncomfortable telling black people that we aren't going to do something as preposterous as providing monetary beneficiary privileges to a single race of people in post-civil rights Americans.  Kamala Harris as well.  These are the people you think can win the rust belt?   Totally gutless human beings that can't stand to be disliked for a second.  Do what Joe Biden would do.  Do nothing and pretend to answer the question or throw it back.  

This poll has completely vindicated everything I've said in the Elizabeth Warren thread.  And it's a good poll with 3000 people.  Is it gospel? No.  But it's a good indicator.  Now come the village idiots with their usual, "It's a Republican/Democrat pollster".

[Progressive Pessimist]

Oh man. I can only imagine the grease fire that will be alt-right twitter (when is it never a grease fire?) if Warren defeats Trump.

It would be glorious!

[junior chįmp]

Most models and fundamentals gave it a slight GOP win for 2016 so if anything Trump proved that you can literally nominate anyone and still win.

What about that Gallup poll discussed in this article about how people saw Trump as the most moderate GOP candidate since 1976?

Would your argument be that this reflects mostly a post hoc justification after people had already decided how they were voting (and that perhaps, people would've said that about any GOP candidate that year, due to background conditions/fundamentals?)

Or can a candidate ever influence how they are perceived?

My argument is that how voters perceive politicians doesnt matter because most voters have no deeply held beliefs neither about policies or the politicians themselves. In Philip Convers's 1964 thesis The nature of belief systems in mass publics , he found that:

“Converse scrutinized respondents’ answers to open-ended questions about political parties and candidates for evidence that they understood and spontaneously employed the ideological concepts at the core of elite political discourse. He found that about 3% of voters were clearly classifiable as “ideologues,” with another 12% qualifying as “near-ideologues”; the vast majority of voters (and an even larger proportion of nonvoters) seemed to think about parties and candidates in terms of group interests or the “nature of the times,” or in ways that conveyed “no shred of policy significance whatever” (Converse 1964, 217–218; also Campbell et al. 1960, chap. 10).”

There is no mass of voters seeing politicians as ''extremists'' or whatever image is concocted up. These are just narratives constructed by pundits, journous, historians, etc... after the fact to give a simple fits all explanation to election outcomes. See narrative bias. That 3% that was classified as ideologues are people who post on sites like this and assume all the voters think like they do in seeing a politician as an extremist or whatever but the mass of voters simply do not think like that.

Goldwater is said to be ''extremist'' because he was against the Civil Rights Act. So was Reagan but Reagan won. McGovern is said to be ''extremist'' because he supported a minimum income. So did Nixon and the Congress voted for it. Whether or not some voters saw Trump as moderate was largely irrelevant in the outcome of election because the economic conditions and fundamentals pointed to a slight GOP win or tossup. If wether or not looking like an awful human being mattered then Trump would of been crushed in a landslide.

Again....read up on Convers's work on this:

REVIEW OF PHILIP E. CONVERSE'S
"THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS"


Philip E. Converse wrote "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" to promulgate his research into the field of voter decision-making. Converse's thesis is essentially that the vast majority of the voting public has no clear ideology and has little desire to understand issues which are not clearly and directly related to them as individuals. In order to prove his thesis, Converse tracked voter opinions on ideological issues from the 1952 Presidential election, and relates his findings with that of other researchers who studied other times.

Converse begins by defining some important terms. A ‘belief system' is a collection of ideas which are connected by function. ‘Constraint' is the degree to which a particular belief is predictive of another belief. Converse uses the term ‘centrality' for the tendency of new information to necessitate changes in belief. Beliefs that are more likely to change are less ‘central' to an individual's belief system. For example, when the Republican Party platform abandoned its call for the abolition of the Department of Education, a Republican may have decided to forgo his or her own support for the abolition of the Department, or the voter may have decided to no longer affiliate with the GOP. If the voter chose one of those options, the option forgone is thought to be less ‘central' to the voter's belief system.

Converse considers the issue of constraint early. In attempting to show that Americans have little constraint, he referenced evidence that those who most support expanding the Welfare State are also most likely to advocate lower taxes. Converse believes these two ideas are mutually exclusive, and therefore demonstrate lack of constraint. Furthermore, Converse suggests that while the intellectual and political ‘elite' do display constraint, the vast majority of Americans do not.

Converse stated that most Americans have little understanding of their beliefs, have no basis for referencing conflicting ideas, and have little desire to consider the issues. According to Converse, if asked to agree or disagree with the statement that "communists are atheists," most Americans would agree. However, if further asked why communists are atheists, the public could rarely give a coherent and correct explanation. Converse noted that most Americans tend to have limited education, which is linked with traits such as "concrete thinking," limited ability to think past the near future, and minimal conceptual scope. Unfortunately, most important political issues rely on the ability to think in abstract terms and unify various information–exactly the skills millions of Americans lack.

Labels provide an easy-to-understand gauge for assessing policy issues, if one understands the labels. In politics, ‘conservative' and ‘liberal' are commonly used terms to describe characters and policies. However, Converse wrote that nearly 48% of people are unable to even understand those two everyday terms. When elections transfer political power from one party to another, the ‘elites' tend to consider it as a fundamental shift in the mass's political leanings. However, Converse's theory that most people have no coherent conceptual ideology means power shifts have little resemblance to ideological viewpoints of the people. To understand the level of ideological sophistication of people, Converse asked a series of questions and ranked people on a scale of 1 to 5. Level 1 consisted of people with clear, coherent, abstract understanding of issues. Level 5 consisted of people who made decisions arbitrarily. More than 90% of the people made voting decisions on the basis of strict party affiliation, by ascribing current socio-economic conditions to the incumbent, or arbitrarily. Less than 10% made decisions on the basis of substantive ideology. Only 2% made decisions that utilized proper abstract thinking.

While most Americans have little understanding of political issues, the ‘elites,' politicians, and political scientists often think of the electorate as being ideologically complex. The reason, according to Converse, is that the politically active represent a small group of mostly well educated elites. The people who get the most contact with politicians are the active elites. Regrettably, the elites are such a small minority of the electorate that they have only marginal impact on elections. The vast amount of political weight is carried by people who cannot accurately differentiate between ‘liberal' and ‘conservative.'

In order to test people's understanding of party values, respondents were asked to link issues that were related according to party values. Converse chose issues that he considered to be easily understood by anyone with minimal political knowledge–simply that liberals who support expanding welfare domestically are also likely to support increasing foreign economic aid. Most people were unable to even make that simple connection of values.

In longitudinal research, Converse found that people did not even maintain their own stated beliefs over two-year periods. According to Converse, people were only slightly more likely to retain the same beliefs after two years than if they had flipped a coin to choose ideologies.

In looking at history, Converse attempted to show that major ideological debates have little impact on elections. Converse cited evidence that during the election of Abraham Lincoln, most Northerners had little, if any, knowledge of the tremendously heated debate concerning slavery. Similarly, during the Un-American Activities hearings of the 1950s, a third of Americans surveyed were unable to name a single Representative or Senator conducting the investigations. People, in essence, are socially ignorant on even the most dominating issues.

The only time people displayed some semblance of ideological constraint was on issues that clearly and directly affected them personally. For example, blacks and Southerners were likely to retain beliefs concerning desegregation. The more remote an issue was from the person's daily life, the less likely the person was to have a constrained opinion, or even to have knowledge that the issue was in debate.

http://www.brucesabin.com/nature_of_belief_systems.html

Whenever you read something on Atlas that goes like, ''Trump will win in 2020 because the American voter sees he's fighting for them,'' or ''Joe Biden will win because the voters see him as that little rascal from Scranton, PA,'' etc.... this is all BS. There is no mass of public opinion occurring like this.

[junior chįmp]

just trying to make sure I fully understand the argument.

Here let me try an explain it more fully:

1) Voters have no real beliefs about anything but just defer to their identity and things that affect them personally. (studies have shown that weather affects election outcome,the placement of polling locations affects your vote, an increase in your income makes you more likely to vote, etc...)

2) Because of this, elections are nothing but a vote of confidence of present moment circumstances around election day.

3) Candidates dont win or lose because they are perceived in a certain way through some mass of public opinion but just random circumstances around election time. (All of the worst landslide losers of the last 70 years happened during high income growth around election day. It was not their ''extremism that cost them the election but a good economy)

4) People who are knowledgeable of politics and elites hoping to exploit voters constantly fashion phony narratives relying on causal fallacies to give election outcomes some kind of meaning. (Dems cant nominate anyone too left cause of McGovern, etc.. etc.. Keep in mind that the argument against Reagan in the late 70s was he campaigned for Goldwater and was an extremist)

People's political opinions are flimsy and change with the times. Most have no real attachment to them or care if the political policies they approve of are ever instituted.

Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government. Even so, when that competence began to be measured statistically, around the end of the Second World War, the numbers startled almost everyone. The data were interpreted most powerfully by the political scientist Philip Converse, in an article on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” published in 1964. Forty years later, Converse’s conclusions are still the bones at which the science of voting behavior picks.

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility. When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/30/the-unpolitical-animal

EDIT before someone makes the point**

Now your probably asking, ''So is every story that explains an election loss/victory a load of BS?''

And the answer is yes, most of them are. Kennedy didn't win because he went on TV. Johnson didn't win because Goldwater was an extremist. Humphrey didn't lose because of the convention fiasco. Reagan's election didn't usher in some kind of mythical Reagan Revolution and he certainly didn't bring down the USSR,  and Bill Clinton certainly didn't win because he was ''centrist.''

The reason all these stories exist is because human beings are  evolutionary programmed to tell stories. We cant help it. People want stories and there are always people willing to write them. But dont fall for the narrative fallacy. Dont fall for the sweeping stories and grand narratives used to explain election outcomes. It's mostly BS

Though my original point was refuting the notion that Elizabeth Warren is an un-electable candidate because there is this mythical mass of voters who all seem to think in unison and see her as ''elitist,'' and that they also see her as ''too far left.'' This isn't happening in real life. What is happening is that the Democratic party is run by people who are interested in promoting their own from within and every time someone not a corporate hack like Biden tries to run...they trot out that whole ''we cant have a leftist cuz of McGovern'' shtick but it's all a ruse.

[AN63093]

Thanks for the detailed reply Mondale.  I appreciate you taking the time to write that out.  Unfortunately, I don't know that I can offer much in the way of a substantive response, since I haven't formed a terribly sophisticated opinion on this such that I can discuss it with someone who has a firm grasp of the topic.  I do remember this concept being touched on in an 'elections and campaigning' class I took many moons ago (I was a political science major), but we're talking about well over a decade ago now and since my bacehelors has almost no relevance to my profession, you can probably imagine how much I retained of it.

What I will say is that although I am unsure what percentage of the electorate exhibits this voting behavior, my own personal experience would seem to confirm this, at least anecdotally, so I imagine the percentage is probably pretty high.  Even people I know who are highly educated and well informed act in this way- they would bitterly deny it with every breath, but once you get to know them, they start betraying with little comments here and there that their political beliefs were not borne out of some deep, complex inquiry, but are often merely narratives repeated from pundits of choice from their chosen party (that choice having more to do with the identity they have ascribed on themselves than any true policy preference).

When I asked you "can a candidate ever influence how they are perceived?"

Do you think it would be accurate to say that a candidate can influence their perception, but this perception ultimately has no causal link to an election outcome?

In other words, perhaps it is true that Trump was perceived as the most moderate GOP option, but it doesn't matter if another candidate won that was perceived as the more conservative option, because the election results were not based on that perception and the GOP was favored to win regardless.  If the more conservative option did win, then due to humans' tendency to tell stories/creative narratives etc., a post hoc justification would have been created to explain how that occurred; but that justification would have erroneously focused on the candidate, as opposed to background conditions (economy etc).

Is that an accurate explanation of the concept?

[junior chįmp]

When I asked you "can a candidate ever influence how they are perceived?"

Do you think it would be accurate to say that a candidate can influence their perception, but this perception ultimately has no causal link to an election outcome?

In other words, perhaps it is true that Trump was perceived as the most moderate GOP option, but it doesn't matter if another candidate won that was perceived as the more conservative option, because the election results were not based on that perception and the GOP was favored to win regardless.  If the more conservative option did win, then due to humans' tendency to tell stories/creative narratives etc., a post hoc justification would have been created to explain how that occurred; but that justification would have erroneously focused on the candidate, as opposed to background conditions (economy etc).

Is that an accurate explanation of the concept?

Yes, that about sums it up. The vast majority of voters have nowhere near the amount of intellectual curiosity to even be able to tell who is an extremist or to form accurate perceptions of politicians. Elections are nothing but expressions of social identity, demographics, economic conditions, and some randomness at/around election time. There is no ''grand narrative'' except to people who keenly follow it. Only people like the posters who post on Atlas for example are aware of the bigger picture but this site is prone to the false consensus effect in thinking that all voters see what they see. The opinions and perceptions of the average voter are not deeply held and most have none other than what is currently in the news and public sphere.