When Terror Inspires Action

 

The Stress in America poll, conducted by the American Psychological Association (APA), found that 77% of adults are stressed about the future of the nation, and 69% are worried about the upcoming election.

--Health News, 10/23/24

You don't say.

Additional intel: About 72% said they are worried the election results could lead to violence. More than half (56%) believe the election could be the end of democracy in the United States.

Them stakes high enough for you? The loss of hope hangs in the balance. But this poll found the upside:

Most Americans aren't giving into their despair, however. More than three-quarters (77%) intend to vote in the presidential election, and half (51%) said they feel compelled to volunteer or support causes they value.

That's been the good thing, the utter blessing, of this campaign year. The level and dedication of volunteerism. 

Any Port in a Storm

 

I try to pay little attention to polls -- especially when they scare the living shit outta me -- but I'm grabbing for the results from a national poll conducted by North Carolina's own conservative guru Carter Wrenn who teamed up with reformed Trumpist hit-man John Bolton.

Our friend Gary Pearce presents the most salient numbers from those cross-tabs, along with this piece of political wisdom by Carter Wrenn, who "is challenging the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party is Trump’s party":

“When a candidate’s popularity begins to wane it’s seldom like a titanic crash – it’s more like watching a row of dominoes fall: People who once said ‘He’s great’ roll downhill saying ‘He’s okay;’ people who used to shrug ‘He’s okay’ roll downhill saying ‘I no longer like him.’ That’s what’s happening to Donald Trump.”

I'd really like to believe that. I mean, really. But it's hard watching the Republicans in state leges moving hard and fast to barricade the ballot box, and Republicans in Congress doing everything in their power to rewrite the insurrection of January 6th as a merely enthusiastic visit by happy tourists, and Republican parties everywhere purging everyone deemed one degree less than perfectly Trump-loyal. Jeez! It's a spectacle of apparent Trump power everywhere you look.

But here are some numbers from that poll to leaven the lump:

Here were Trump’s numbers among Republican voters last October in a New York Times/Siena College poll: very favorable, 77; somewhat favorable, 15; unfavorable, 6.

 Here were Trump’s numbers this April in Carter’s poll: very favorable, 58; somewhat favorable, 27; unfavorable, 13....

“Trump opposing a candidate in a Republican primary does not appear to matter a great deal to Republican primary voters. 50% said Trump opposing a candidate makes no difference to them. 26% said they would be more likely to vote against a candidate Trump opposes; 24% said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate Trump opposes – a margin of only 2 points.”

Trump's disapproval among independent voters is much worse.

 

Rachel Bitecofer Makes Me Nervous

Rachel Bitecofer is a 42-year-old political scientist who teaches -- and writes extensively, disruptively -- at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She is rather unique among her prognosticating brethren for coming within one US House seat of nailing the Blue Wave of 2018. She predicted a Democratic gain of 42 seats. The Democrats took 41. She got it right, according to David Freedlander (Politico.com), "even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall." While all the other analysts were saying, "Oh the Democrats are going to screw this up. They are overreaching. They are going to get 23 seats if they're lucky" -- Bitecofer was the too optimistic one who was right.

Reading her analysis both jazzes me and scares the God-blessed living shit out of me. Because what Bitecofer predicts for 2020 in red Trump counties -- and I'm surrounded by blood-red western North Carolina Trump counties -- is that the Trump vote will likely increase over 2016. There aren't enough "soft Republicans" to make a difference for Democratic candidates, and right-leaning independent (Unaffiliated) voters will be leaning harder right, as their hatred of Democrats congeals like lard. The Republican coalition -- mostly non-college whites, with a smattering of religious-minded voters, financiers, and people in business, largely in rural and exurban counties -- is now -- following impeachment -- not only mad as hell but they're scared, too, of what could come next after a rejection of Trump. 

With a red wall building for this November, if there's not enough left-leaning and otherwise previously disinterested voting-age population who will commit to vote in sufficient numbers to overtop that red wall, there's little hope for Democratic campaigns in districts rated "Safe Republican" (and that label applies to most of western North Carolina). What is a political "wave," anyway, but the working of "negative partisanship," an instinctive human reaction to extreme departures from the norm. Bitecofer relies on "negative partisanship" to explain the Democratic wave of 2018. She sees "negative partisanship" as an almost genetic American inheritance -- a pushing back against whoever's in power. In 2018, it became a wave of revulsion to a plain awful human being -- his cruelties, his double-dealing, his willful and destructive ignorance.

Negative partisanship is not exclusive to Democrats. In 2010, it was the Tea Party wave of revulsion against the government spending of a black man. The Tea Party wave became the Trump surprise of 2016. "...Modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place." 

Turnout explains everything. Turnout of new people entering and exiting the electorate rather than people switching sides. What drives that kind of turnout in major "change" elections? "Negative partisanship." Shorter definition: Mass expression of instinctive human emotion rejecting an ideology or a personage.

The Chuck Todd Theory of American Politics

"About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of 'swing voters' who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side."

Bitercofer laughs at that. The swing voter -- at least in appreciable numbers -- is largely a myth. “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment -- it's just not true.”

As she sees it, it isn’t quite right to refer to a Democratic or Republican “base.” Rather, there are Democratic and Republican coalitions. “In the polarized era, the outcome isn’t really about the candidates. What matters is what percentage of the electorate is Republican and Republican leaners, and what percentage is Democratic and Democratic leaners, and how they get activated,” she said.

Isn't really about the candidates. Bitecofer has said that any one of the Tier 1 or Tier 2 Democratic candidates can -- and will -- win against Trump, but more recently on Twitter she's hedged a bit on both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, calling them the riskiest options for Democrats. Alarmingly, Sanders failed to turn out his promise of record numbers of new voters in the Iowa caucuses this week, and Biden represents too much the status quo. “If you want to win the election, you have to be able to frame your candidacy in a way that reminds voters that Trump is an abnormality that must be excised,” Bitecofer said.

I realize that Bitecofer has critics.

Bitecofer hasn’t exactly been clairvoyant: Her original Senate prediction was off in 2018. She didn’t anticipate the surge in GOP turnout that would match the surge in Democratic turnout in places where the demographics still favored Republicans. She thought Democrats would win Florida, and maybe even Texas, and that the Georgia governor’s race was winnable. What she didn’t count on at the time was that negative partisanship can work both ways, even when there is one party in power, and that no one knows how to fire up the fear factor in his coalition quite like Donald Trump. He did just that, and Blue Dog Democrats in Missouri and Indiana and South Dakota were done for.

But still, the results bore out her theory: For Democrats to win, they need to fire up Democratic-minded voters. The Blue Dogs who tried to narrow the difference between themselves and Trump did worse, overall, than the Stacey Abramses and Beto O’Rourkes, whose progressive ideas and inspirational campaigns drove turnout in their own parties and brought them to the cusp of victory.

The Democratic coalition -- people of color, college-educated whites, and people in metropolitan areas -- has got to grow in 2020, and appreciable growth in rural jurisdictions is sometimes just plain impossible.

Finding a new voting cohort -- including college students, for example -- the "step-up" voters, the previously disengaged, the young, especially the educated -- is far easier in urban areas. I don't like feeling apprehensive about that, never mind my little blue dot of Watauga County.

North Carolina Trends

For what it's worth... (hattip PoliticsNC)

Weather Forecast: Continued Cloudy with a Chance of Drain

"It seems unlikely Trump is going to win over his opponents any time soon, but his base support has softened somewhat and there’s reason to think that whatever his exact floor is, he hasn’t hit it yet."

--Ariel Edwards-Levy, director of polling at HuffPost, assessing what Trump's poor polling numbers mean

#itgetsworse: You're Not Improving NC's Mood, Bubbas

Hattip: DJ. Polls mainly capture a moment in time. We know that. But perhaps we were wrong in assuming that the voting public in North Carolina were not paying attention to the radical over-reach in Raleigh:

Only 11% of voters support the pay raises Pat McCrory gave to his cabinet, to 82% of voters opposed to them. Even Republicans oppose them by a 75/14 margin.

Only 39% of voters support cutting benefits for unemployed workers to $350 a week, while 50% are opposed to that change. And just 41% favor reducing the time period during which workers can receive benefits by six weeks to 48% who are opposed. Independents are opposed to the actions the legislature has taken on both counts.

32% of voters disagree with the comments McCrory recently made about higher education in the state to 26% who agree. In the Triangle, where voters were much more familiar with his statements, 44% of voters disagree with McCrory to 30% who agree.

Voters give the Republican controlled state government as a whole a 40% approval rating, with 49% of voters disapproving. It's at 35/49 with independents.

Only 33% of voters have a favorable opinion of legislative Republicans in the General Assembly, to 49% with a negative one.

Political Polls with the Best/Worst Records for Accuracy

This chart is must-study, for demonstrating which political pollsters proved to be spot-on with their polling, and which ones skewed either right or left and got it all (mainly) wrong.

The line down the middle represents closest to what actually happened in the Obama-Romney contest. Notice that the three polls closest to that accuracy line are Public Policy Polling, the Raleigh shop which works mainly for Democrats; YouGov; Ipsos-Reuters, which is an Internet poll; and dKos/SEIU, the progressive Dem outfit that no Republican would be caught dead quoting. But there you are! According to that center line, all four of these most highly accurate polls actually overstated Romney's numbers slightly.

Drop to the bottom and see the most inaccurate polls, all of which skewed wildly to the Romney side: Rasmussen (big surprise!), Gallup (another big surprise), and National Public Radio, which has been so beaten up by the right wing for years that they are probably afraid to be accurate.

Apparently, people who consume no other news than Fox News were flummoxed by the outcomes Tuesday night, because they had been told repeatedly that their boys were going to win, and Fox News had the polling to back it up.

Heh.

Republicans Blew Their Wad

All that August noise from Republicans about socialist Democrats seems now in the cooler shade of September to have done nothing particularly harmful to health care reform and several things very harmful to the Republican "brand." From this a.m.'s NYTimes:

...recent polling ... done for The New York Times and CBS News in the last week ... gives Democrats a clear edge over Republicans as the party favored to deal with health care issues. The same polls show significant support for a public option despite months of criticism from Republicans, who describe it as a government takeover of health insurance.

On the issue of reforming corporate, for-profit insurance, the Republicans are truly irrelevant, except as background noise and the occasional clown eruption. Democrats from red states or red districts are the entire story for what's to come.

Polling on Landslide Hazards

The survey of Watauga County voters about land development issues reported on in yesterday's Watauga Democrat might, in the best of all possible worlds, lead to some new public policy.

Nearly all of the 402 people surveyed -- 95 percent of them -- believe property buyers should be forewarned about landslide hazards.

Duh.

And in this county particularly, there are now very thorough landslide hazard maps available ... though no ordinance requiring the information in them to be shared or acted on. The real estate industry is dead set against it.

Tennessee Poll: We Like Obama, We Don't Like Obstructionist Republicans

Students in the College of Mass Communications at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro polled 629 randomly selected residents of the state and found that, even though Tennessee gave its electoral votes to John McCain/PomPom Palin, some 53 percent of those polled said they approve of President Obama's job performance, while only 24 percent say that Republicans are doing enough to compromise with the president.

The polling sample breakdown is pretty interesting, especially if you're suspicious that the MTSU students over-weighted for age, gender, or race:

Those polled were 50% male, 50% female

White 84.7%
Black 10.4%
Other 4.9%

Age
18-34 ... 29.8%
35-49 ... 28.8%
50-64 ... 24.4%
65+ ... 17%

Three-fourths of those polled said they'd heard at least one racial joke about Obama, while almost 1 in 6 admitted telling such a joke. But some 57% in the poll (the great majority of whom were white) said they considered such jokes unfunny.

Obama Now Leading McCain in N.C.

Scott Rasmussen, founder of the Rasmussen Reports polling firm, was also co-founder of ESPN and an evangelical Christian to boot and is generally regarded as a "Republican pollster." His polling company is also credited as one of the most accurate during the 2004 presidential election and the 2006 mid-term elections.

So?

Rasmussen just released a North Carolina poll showing Obama with a two-point lead over McCain.

I've taken a solemn vow not to get distracted by polls, but this is a head-turner.

Presidential Polls: None the Wiser?

This just came to our in-box from TechPresident, seeming to confirm what many of us had suspected about the accuracy of polling this year as the pollsters try to figure out who's gonna show up:

Cell-Only Young Voters Lean Obama: You don't have to follow polls that closely to know of the fears that cell phones threaten to kick the leg out of modern surveying. A new Pew Research Center study finds that while among all voters, modeling off of land lines to capture the leanings of the mobile-only crowd is a satisfactory approximate. But, there's a "but" -- when it comes to those under 30, the gap between land and air widens considerably. Pew found that while 39% of sub-30 registered voters reached by land line are backing McCain, just 27% of cell-only voters lean his way. On the other side of the aisle, the trend goes the other way: just over half of land line voters under 30 are Obama fans, but that number jumps to 62% when the sample is limited to those who only use a mobile phone. If young people turn out in force on election day, those nuances might be multiplied enough to have serious impact on who becomes the next President. But our polls might be none the wiser.