Omnibus GOP Primary ThreadFollow

Looks like he's entering his own Reagan years now.

If presidential elections were won by popular vote alone, you *might* have a point. You have to look at where the Dems get 66% of the youth vote and compare that to states they normally win anyway, versus states they picked up which allowed them to win in 2008. When you pick up states which normally send their Electoral Votes to the other party, it's the swing voters in that state which made the difference. This is really not rocket science.



The point of my earlier post was that the biggest factor was voters in the middle, who swung Dem because of a combination of those factors I listed. And this time around, those factors are either not present or have been more or less reversed. Which means that most likely, those votes will go the other direction this time, just as they did in the 2010 mid-term. No amount of getting out the youth vote is going to change that if it happens.

Edited, Jan 9th 2012 1:52pm by gbaji

/shrug

That's easy and cheap rhetoric though. And somewhat meaningless. The voters that matter in this next election aren't going to care about that rhetoric. They aren't looking for flashy. They got that with Obama and have been supremely disappointed. They're looking for anyone who looks like they might have a shot at undoing the mess the country is in. And frankly, anyone with an "R" after their name automatically has a huge boost in that regard.

Isn't it? What about the GOP candidates (or hell, Romney if you want to be specific) do you think will make swing voters ignore the actual polices and actions that Obama has taken over the last 3 years that they've disliked? Swing voters tend to be swing voters exactly because they don't fall into neat partisan lines. They're the least likely to be influenced by the sorts of candidate characterizations which the left and right often put so much stock in.

They're certainly unlikely to be swayed to vote Obama because they just aren't excited about how devoutly conservative and/or perfectly aligned with the Tea Party the GOP candidates are. Seriously. Think about it.

Approval ratings as of Dec 16-18:
Republican Party: 43-52
Democratic Party: 55-41
Republican Congress: 20-72
Democratic Congress: 27-66

Also: lol


Edited, Jan 9th 2012 5:57pm by Jophiel

oh that movie looks exciting Joph... though when I saw the storm clouds I was sure it was another anti-***** marriage commercial.

Approval ratings with regard to what? Bit vague there, isn't it?

You know you're awesome when half the people who approve of you start to dislike you the minute you try to do the job they hired you for.

That's kind of vague, Allegory. What were those people voting for?

I genuinely, earnestly don't understand the answer to that question.

Yes. Hence my use of the word "relative" in my original statement about this.



So are the Dems. Voter turnout is higher overall over the last decade than the previous one (in terms of partisan voting at least). What is your point?



And only 2 out of that same 13 elections shown did the Dems get a higher percentage. You really suck at analysis if you thought that your statement above is significant within the context of what we're talking about here (turnout within a party and swing voters switching from one party to the other).




Ok. But if we're asking the question "why did the GOP win in 2004, but lose in 2008", isn't the fact that basically 4-5% of the total votes shifted from one to the other kinda the most important (or "primary" even!) thing? The total percentage of eligible voters who voted only increased by about 1.5% (and we'd need more data to see if that was actually more people voting, or less people eligible, or some combination of the two). In any case, by far the most significant factor wasn't new voters but voters shifting from one party to the other.


How the hell can you look at that data and not see this? When you shift from 28/30 in one election to 31/28 in the other, you're clearly looking at voter shift. That should be the first and most immediate result you conclude from that data, right? It's by far the most straight forward explanation. You could assume that a whole bunch of people who voted GOP last time around just didn't vote this year and at the same time, a whole bunch of people who'd never voted before ever all signed up and voted Dem, but there's no data to support this. It's certainly reasonable to assume that *some* people didn't vote who voted before, and clearly *some* people did vote who hadn't voted in the previous election, but to assume that is a more significant factor that people changing their party votes is a pretty incredible stretch.


Occam's razor sort of applies here. The simplest model assumes that mostly the same people voted (plus/minus some small number), but that a couple percent of them switched from one party to the other.

Sorry, I was actually engaging in a sarcastic mockery of gbaji's claim not to understand opinion polls.

Edited, Jan 10th 2012 2:04am by Kavekk

Ah, so that is what you meant. Well why didn't you just say so?