Why Trump can’t win if he loses the moderates in the swing states as he seems bound to do
Why Trump can’t win if he loses the moderates in the swing states as he seems bound to do
Trump does well in polling because the Democrats aren't campaigning yet.
RFK if he does stand, third party candidates don't normally get many votes. They make little difference.
What matters are the voters in the battleground states.
And you can ignore the polling even for those, as there hasn't been any campaignign yet.
What we WILL get if Trump runs as candidate is Liz Cheny, near certainty, running as a deliberate spoiler. Her only aim would be to prevent Trump getting in. So she would be a REpublican but only running as president to attack Trump and saying over and over, paying for ads (she has a fair ibt of funding) that Trump is anti-constitutional and can't be trusted as president because of Jan 06.
Then - we have the news recently that Trump likely loses control of all his properties in New York. Even Trump Tower - probably will have to be handed over to his daughter Ivanka Trump as she is the one Trump that the Justice says is NOT covered by the injunction.
One of the main reasons was that Trump repeatedly said his own penthouse home in Trump Tower is three times larger than it really is which the Justice ruled is an implausible mistake for a real estate developer to make.
The lawsuit alleges that Mr Trump artificially inflated the triplex's value, by repeatedly saying it was more than 30,000 sq ft (2,790 sq m) in size, significantly larger than the 11,000 sq ft listed in property records.
"Tripling the size of the apartment for purposes of the valuation was intentional and deliberate fraud," the lawsuit reads. "Not an honest mistake".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66949606
Also
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/29/trump-tower-new-york-ruling-engoron-james/
That will rather dent his image, as a powerful magnate, that he has to get his daughter to manage his properties because he is not permitted to run them himself in New York State.
Then the criminal charges.
Then the handling of confidential documents.
We have about three or four slots for every presidential debate already, variations on:
Do you support the US constitution?
Why didn't you tell the jan 06 crowd to stop?
Can you be trusted with money? If so why did you lie about the size of your home at the top of Trump tower and say it is three times larger than it is?
Can you be trusted with secret documents?
Only the far right would ask similar questions of Biden.
He wouldn’t be able to avoid those questions and then he would have to try to make his case on the economy and on immigration.This is not because of his policies. It is because of Jan 06.
IN 2020 what mattered were the views of perhaps 10 million people in three battleground states.
These people are going to be moderates / closely tied states because that is what maks them battleground and Trump would have to win his pitch to them, not to his core base. I can't see that happening.
For the most part the news stories just don't mention this point. But that’s missing the hippopotamus in your kitchen :). Well the elephant in the room is how it is usually put.
Gavin Newsom's full interview with CNN
Why is Joe Biden running neck and neck in almost every poll with a man who was impeached twice and facing 91 felony counts.
Gavin Newsom: Because we are an incredibly divided country and always have been certainly in recent years in notable terms.
The last election arguably was 44,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsiin. That was one half of one percent of 10 million cast in those three states.
National polls, I know our obsession with them, then we all shift to we shouldn't ahve really been focusing on the national polls it is about these key states. Come on this is so early, our obsession with polls, who is up and now.
Right now 24/7 surround sound all things Trump.
Q. That's not going to change?
A. I don't know there's other things going on in this country than Donald Trump.
Q. We are covering other stuff. I'm just saying if he's going head for head ...
A. We haven't even started. These guys are in the middle of a primary. You are rightly focusing on Trump, Trumpism, and those who are bellyflapping like Ron De Santis and whose up and whose down, is Nicky Haley up to.
We are going to shift that focus, I assume, in the interests of the American people and fairness, to Biden's re-election as he gears back up and he is just starting to get into gear
So those polls with Biden and Trump as apparently equal are meaningless
The third party No Labels likely makes no difference because third parties get few electoral college votes in US politics. That’s because of the way the electoral college is set up, with most states having a win all lose all type approach. In most states and all the larger states, unless a third party candidate can beat the Democrats AND the Republicans in the popular vote for the state, they will get no electoral college votes for that state.
As an example in 1992, Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote for president. Yet he didn’t get even one electoral college vote.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/america-isnt-really-set-up-for-third-party-presidential-bids/
The only place where a third party candidate could make a difference is in the swing states, not by winning electoral college votes but by attracting votes away from one or other of the two main parties to affect their margin.
But the “No labels” party is likely to take away votes from both parties.
There is far more risk from LIz Cheney campaigning against Trump as she would be campaigning against her own party and actually want people to vote for Biden, anything to stop Trump.
I don’t know if this has happened before, a candidate, former member of one party whose only aim is to prevent that party’s candidate from ever becoming president.
This gives a taste of what her ads would be like. She has the ability to attract funding for ads. She can run ads like this whether or not she also runs as an independent candidate to try to spoil Trump’s chances.
Quora seems to have issues playing embedded videos at present - if it doesn’t work click on the link below the video.
Video: Liz Cheney releases new ad blasting Donald Trump
Trump is polling high because the news is full of Republican news right now because of the primaries and other reasons. The Democrats aren’t campaigning yet. Such polls are meaningless at this stage, Trump needs a big advantage to have a chance later one.
Neck and neck isn't good for Trump given that he fills the news and
it is all about the Republican primaries,
Democrats haven't started campaigning
Never Trumper Republicans arent going to start campaigning until or if Trump becomes their candidate. T
There will be serious trouble for Trump like Liz Cheney, we don't know what she'd do, probably run as a third party but one that isn't out to try to get elected but to persuade everyone to vote for anyone except Trump she'd probably prefer they vote for Biden to keep him out!
Then there’s all the legal cases
There are a significant small number of senators and members of the House, who really didn't like it at all when
they were inside the house and an angry crowd was banging on the door of the House
looking for the Senate shouting "Death to Mike Pence" inside the Capitol
Trump didn't say a word when they knew at least a few would have left if he'd told them to.
What do they do if Trump becomes their candidate? Leave the party?
Of course the Republicans can replace moderate candidates by far right candidates who would support Trump but then they get fewer votes in the moderate swing states.
It does no good to Trump to win over the far right in solid red Republican states.
He just needs to lose 3% to Biden or 6% not vote or 3rd party in the battleground states and he loses all of them compared ot 2020
This is very different from 2016 and 2020. In those years he had the whole of the Republican party behind him and had nobody in his party campaigning against him.
Democrats aren't doing any campaigning and the election news naturally focuses on the Republican primaries. So everything in the media is pro Trump
Also others will be voting in protest against Biden trying to influence him to change on some policy they are opposed to.
Probably not many of the moderates are seriously considering Trump as their president.
The bias could be because of “expressive responding.” registering disapproval for Biden rather than a real intention to vote for Trump in 2024.
As an example one poll that showed a high result for Trump by the Washington Post asked questions about the government shutdown and Ukraine before asking who they would vote for in 2024
You can swing a poll by asking questions on other matters before the key central question in your poll.
If they had asked a question about the Jan 06 riots first, like
"Do you think Trump did the right thing on Jan 06"
then that would swing the result against Trump
If they asked that before they got to the point of who to select as president as it ensure that they are thinking about things Trump did that were worong
E.g. if they also said
"Do you think Trump will be sent to prison?"
That’s a neutral question but one that gets them thinking about him as a criminal.
You can easily see how those sorts of questions can shift the response
Especially since they found the numbers in favour of Biden as the same as in other polls.
So they asked questions that would lead to the respondents thinking about topics that tend to get them into lines of thought that are unfavourable to Biden.
Then they asked "Who will you vote for in 2024" or some such.
For voters who are not sure who to vote for that could easily be enough to swing it.
Especially since they also likely don't give a lot of deep thought to the poll, may be answring the questions while thinking about numerous othe rthings int heir daily life and not paying much attention to the poll and wanting to finish answering the questions.
And while pollsters have some statistical tools for fixing these issues with demographic groups, they have few solutions for bias that arises when certain political groups are more or less likely to answer polls, which we call “partisan nonresponse bias.”
See:
It’s possible that this partisan nonresponse bias affected the ABC News/Washington Post poll published on Sunday. Diving into the “crosstabs” of the poll (this is the document from a pollster that breaks down the poll’s results by different slices of the population), we can see that Biden is conspicuously weak among key Democratic groups. For example, among voters ages 18-29, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden if the election were held today, and 48 percent said they would vote for Trump — a margin of -7 points for Biden. But according to an ABC News exit poll conducted by Edison Research in 2020, Biden won that group by 24 points in 2020. That’s a 31-point drop on the margin — more than twice as much as the overall population shifted. Biden also saw steep declines among Latinos, urban dwellers and Black respondents.
…
There’s one more type of potential error to consider (for now): “measurement error.” Sometimes, a question pollsters ask does not do a good job of capturing the underlying thing they’re trying to measure. That can manifest itself in unusual ways. For example, occasionally when partisans are unhappy with the news or something their political party has done, they will exaggerate to a pollster to make a point.
…
Scholars call this phenomenon “expressive responding.” Similarly, if young people and people of color are dissatisfied with the progress Biden has made or upset that he is running for reelection, they could be withholding their support for him in polls as a way to register their displeasure with the situation. Ultimately, however, they may vote for him anyway.
...
Measurement error also can pop up for certain questions and not others. The NBC News and ABC News/Washington Post polls have similar net approval ratings for Biden despite finding different horse-race numbers. That may suggest that the survey designs of both polls are sound overall, but something has narrowly gone wrong to push the ABC News/Washington Post’s horse-race number off course. Here, expressive responding among Democrats who disapprove of Biden may be the culprit.
...
In his analysis of the ABC News/Washington Post survey for ABC News, pollster Gary Langer noted that the order of questions in the poll may also have been a factor. “As is customary for ABC/Post polls at this still-early stage of an election cycle,” Langer wrote, “this survey asked first about Biden and Trump’s performance, economic sentiment and a handful of other issues (Ukraine aid, abortion and a government shutdown) before candidate preferences. That’s because these questions are more germane than candidate support in an election so far off. Since many results are negative toward Biden, it follows that he’s lagging in 2024 support.”