Democrat 2020

[ReluctantSamurai]

Whitmer, divorcee, mother of two, remarried man with 3 children of his own. Experienced, but she's a bit of an odd duck in terms of policy, being the only democrat against single payer healthcare. I dunno, the dems seem to think she's a good choice, dont think I would agree.

Michigan was one of the key states that put Fearless Leader into the White House in 2016. According to some, he's made a big mistake ridiculing Whitmer:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...avirus/609727/

Bernie Porn, the president of the Lansing-based nonpartisan polling firm EPIC-MRA, told me that before the outbreak, Trump “was already vulnerable in Michigan.” But his confrontations with Whitmer could seal his fate. “I don’t understand what he is thinking about,” Porn said. “She has done a fantastic job during this health crisis. She’s been very decisive. And she made decisions about closing things down and taking actions” before the state hit a spike. By attacking Whitmer while she copes with these enormous challenges, Porn said, Trump has created a situation where “the ads write themselves” for Democrats in the state.

He [Trump] won Michigan in 2016 by only 10,704 votes—a smaller margin than in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the two other bricks that he dislodged from the Democrats’ “blue wall.” The president can hardly afford any erosion in the populous Detroit metropolitan area.

Two suburban counties outside the city illustrate his problem. Four years ago, he won Macomb County, the fabled seedbed of blue-collar “Reagan Democrats,” by 12 percentage points, and he lost white-collar Oakland County by about eight points. In 2018, Whitmer narrowly won Macomb and roughly doubled Hillary Clinton’s margin in Oakland. Just before the outbreak crested last month, turnout in both places soared in the 2020 Democratic primary compared with 2016, a sign of rising engagement among Democrats. Now both counties are facing fierce conditions, with more than 6,600 cases and 375 deaths combined as of yesterday morning. (Wayne County, which includes Detroit, has more than 9,600 cases and almost 450 deaths, one of the nation’s heaviest concentrations.) Detroit newspapers this week have been filled with wrenching stories about hundreds of local health-care workers, particularly nurses, who’ve tested positive for the disease. The only recent public polling in Michigan came in mid-March, before Trump’s public attacks on Whitmer and the health-care crisis’s surge in the state. Even at that point, the share of residents who approved of Whitmer’s response to the outbreak (about 70 percent) dwarfed the portion that approved of Trump (about 50 percent), according to the Great Lakes Poll, which is conducted across several Midwest states by Baldwin Wallace University. The survey also found that Trump trailed former Vice President Joe Biden in a general-election matchup in Michigan by five percentage points.

Now for sure, polls don't necessarily translate into reality, but as the pandemic starts to creep out into the rural, Republican areas of Michigan (like it's starting to do), the dead will begin to have their say

[Seamus Fermanagh]

... the dead will begin to have their say

And why not? They've been voting for years in Cook County...





(Okay, so maybe that sort of thing didn't happen much after Old Mayor Daly stopped looking at the green side of the grass, but it is a hoary political chestnut).

[Greyblades]

The left are oft accused of having the dead vote while the right are frequently accused of rewriting the district lines to marginalize people.

It gives me the amusing mental image of an electoral war between necromancers and geomancers.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The left are oft accused of having the dead vote while the right are frequently accused of rewriting the district lines to marginalize people.

The former is the fantasy of those who would like nothing better than to reduce the two-party system to a single party; the latter is the reality of those who are working hard to make it so....

Think this scene won't have an impact?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-...ork-1/12140490


.........wasn't too long ago that US media was plastered with pics from mass burials in Iran.....

[Greyblades]

The former is the fantasy of those who would like nothing better than to reduce the two-party system to a single party; the latter is the reality of those who are working hard to make it so....

Sure buddy.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The left are oft accused of having the dead vote

The accusations were proved to be patently false:

Fearless Leader from a 23 June 2019 interview with Meet the Press:

I think there is a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some. There’s evidence that’s being compiled just like it’s being compiled in the state of California, where they settled with Judicial Watch saying that a million people should not have been voting. You saw that? I am telling you, in California, in the great state of California, they settled and we could’ve gone a lot further. Judicial Watch settled where they agreed that a million people should not have voted, where they were 115 years old and lots of things and people were voting in their place.

That statement debunked:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/9/2121482...ce-coronavirus

Judicial Watch is a right-wing nonprofit led by staunch Trump loyalist Tom Fitton. The settlement Trump referred to is a January 2019 agreement between the organization and Los Angeles County that required the county to remove inactive registrations from the voter rolls. By definition, these people hadn’t voted — that’s why their registrations were inactive. Yet Trump has somehow spun this into an unfounded claim about a million people casting illegal ballots.

the right are frequently accused of rewriting the district lines to marginalize people.

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/27/...ofeller-memos/

In a trove of never before published memos and emails, however, GOP leaders come clean: Their nationwide advantage in state legislatures and Congress is built on gerrymandering. And top Republican strategists and political operatives admit to weaponizing racial data and the Voting Rights Act in order to flip the South red and tilt electoral maps in their direction.

Now put this all together with Fearless Leader's recent comments on mail-in voting:

https://www.vox.com/2020/4/8/2121341...in-coronavirus

But in Trump’s mind, mail-in voting has a major downside. Because it’s so easy, it increases voter turnout. And increased turnout typically helps Democrats. (There’s little evidence that mail-in voting disproportionately helps Democrats, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and other Republicans from opposing it on a partisan basis.) On Wednesday morning, Trump came very close to admitting this. In response to something he saw on Fox & Friends, Trump tweeted that “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting,” adding that “for whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

So yeah, buddy, I'm sure.....

[Montmorency]

I'd be more worried if this wasnt the same thing being said in 2016.

Trump eked out a narrow victory with a variety of unique (ephemeral) tailwinds behind him. Not that it's impossible, but to build a case for his prospects you do actually have to build a case based on evidence and the fundamentals of national politics, not a gut intuition from motivated reasoning of hatred for liberals.

I don't understand what relevance your weird evaluations of various Democrats have to the electoral impact of the VP selection. The way you speak it's as though you're privy to some meta-mechanical information like Paradox-type character stats for all the contenders.

Michigan was one of the key states that put Fearless Leader into the White House in 2016. According to some, he's made a big mistake ridiculing Whitmer:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...avirus/609727/

"Bernie Porn?" And just yesterday I learned the name "Joe Pizza." What a world.

Speaking of Bernie porn, Whitmer is certainly not the only national Democrat not to subscribe to Medicare for All. Pretty straightforward factual question.

The left are oft accused of having the dead vote while the right are frequently accused of rewriting the district lines to marginalize people.

It gives me the amusing mental image of an electoral war between necromancers and geomancers.

Republicans are the party of court-verified (and more famously, court-enabled) electoral fraud. But think about that framing of yours, "the left are oft accused... the right are frequently accused..." The substantive thing is always objective fact, not the existence of conflict - right?

[ReluctantSamurai]

"Bernie Porn?"

Yeah.......I said the same thing when I saw that. I would've changed my name as soon as I was legally able. Can you imagine what that individual went through in high school??

Republicans are the party of court-verified (and more famously, court-enabled) electoral fraud

With the just completed election in Wisconsin the latest example....

[Crandar]

I don't think Trump is going to lose Florida, as he has been reinforcing his influence there for a long time and he also benefits from his more mainstream image, as opposed to the previous elections. However, Florida alone is not sufficient, especially since he may lose the blue collar vote that contributed the most to his unexpected victory.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I don't think Trump is going to lose Florida

I don't think Florida is as much of a slam dunk for Fearless Leader as people think. From the previous link:

The Good.

The outbreak’s concentration in the bluest parts of the state has created a dynamic similar to the one in Michigan: The Republican heartland (in northern and Central Florida, as well as parts of the Gulf Coast) may feel more threatened now by the economic risks of the disease than by the health dangers. “You have to remember, this is largely a South Florida thing,” says Ryan Tyson, a Republican pollster who conducts surveys for the state’s business community. Even Democratic strategists privately acknowledged to me that many Florida voters may be sympathetic to DeSantis’s decision to delay action, given how important tourism is to the state’s economy.

The Bad.

https://www.unf.edu/uploadedFiles/aa...9%20Survey.pdf

The Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL) at the University of North Florida released a new poll comprised of registered Florida voters revealing mixed levels of job approval for President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in their address of the coronavirus (COVID-19)pandemic. The survey also shows most voters are concerned about personally contracting the coronavirus (COVID-19). The poll shows 45% strongly or somewhat approve of the job Trump is doing to address the pandemic,with 53% disapproving. DeSantis clocks in at 51% approval, with 46% disapproving.A majority of respondents, 79%, are very or somewhat concerned about personally contracting the virus.

And The Ugly.

But to Smith, as with other analysts in the state, the coronavirus outbreak remains a wild card. DeSantis deviated so conspicuously from the approach of virtually every other big-state governor. (Ironically, until this crisis, most political observers in Florida felt like DeSantis had been edging away from Trump and looking to broaden his appeal.) Whether DeSantis faces a backlash for delaying a shutdown will likely depend on how hard the disease ultimately hits the state. Another potential vulnerability is that Florida’s unemployment system, which was redesigned under DeSantis’s Republican predecessor, has staggered under the increased demand from disease-related layoffs.

But what is clear even now is that many in the state see Trump’s fingerprints on the governor’s decisions. That means the president is unlikely to escape unscathed if Floridians ultimately conclude that the governor made the wrong choice in waiting to act until only a handful of governors in the most conservative states, such as Alabama and Wyoming, had refused to do so.

Also of note is that Fearless Leader won the state by just over 1% in 2016.