538.com talk about Trump's chances in 2020

[Baconator]

Posted in GD as this is mostly about the general and not the primary.

Link to tweet

[ScratchCat]

1. Trump is not just "unpopular"

He is now a "known commodity". While many tried to argue that once President, Trump would "surround himself with the best people" and tone down all the nonsense, they wont be able to make that argument in 2020. We have 2.5 years of evidence that he did no such thing, and in reality, did the complete opposite.

Hillary Clinton had two-plus decades of not just "political baggage", but being characterized the the "epitome of evil" essentially by the entire range of RW media. I don't think some Democrats understand how many voters went to the polls to "stop Hillary" rather than to vote for Trump. What will they do this time?

All the DNC has to do is to NOT give Trump a "scary" opponent that will put voters - who don't like Trump - in the position of stopping someone who they have been convinced will "steal their country". Again, I don't think there is any legitimate candidate that the RW can attack in the same way they did Clinton. Some combination of Biden with Booker or Beto as VP, with the understanding he will likely be one term due to age, is probably the easiest way to defeat Trump. The worst "critique" they can do on Biden would be "it would be a return to the Obama years". But Obama was a popular President. Other than the economy in his first four years which wasn't his fault, most rational people saw Obama as a good, successful President. So the "But Obama.." smear wont be that effective against Biden.

My two

[renate]

2. re her performance: she won, FFS

Russia put its thumb on the scales, which would explain Pennsylvania, and her campaign made the profoundly stupid decision to take Michigan and Wisconsin for granted. But she still won the popular vote.

To talk about her "performance" when she won the popular vote by a HUGE margin... that's just unfair.

[marylandblue]

4. Even taking into account the popular vote she underperformed

She ran against the worst candidate in history and only beat him by 2 points, not even breaking 50%. That's not a huge margin. In June 2016, I thought she would beat him by 20 points.

[Hortensis]

9. Oh, come on. Btw, a second Democratic administration

after two terms of Democratic administration, a first woman president after a first black president, a liberal after a huge number of huge social/racial advances practically set the right on fire, including legalization of gay marriage? Weaponization of the internet. Russia. Kleptocrats fighting for their economic lives. Massive voter disenfranchisement and suppression and other election tampering in dozens of states.

In June we all thought she was doing great and would beat him by 20 points anyway, and sweep the senate and most or even all of the house. Gee, wonder what could have happened if it wasn't her turning from high achiever to underperformer?

Intelligent people look to the right for what went wrong. The answers, and all the giant threats engaged in this huge battle for the soul and future of our nation, are there.

[marylandblue]

11. See the linked.

I didn't appreciate how good Trump is at driving the narrative, nor did I realize his creepy dark story would be appealing to so many right wingers. I appreciate it much more now.


https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=11936331

[Hortensis]

13. Basically agree with all of that. But conservative

and con-leaning voters on left and right responded to every one of the revelations and Trump betrayals of all their supposedly cherished values, each one of which should have killed his chances, with silence for a few days while they found ways to deal with them and then recovery to, if anything, even stronger commitment to electing him, all narratives permanently buried.

Massive media narrations of Russians surrounding Trump and possible treason, proofs of sexual predation and depravity, decades of cheating and otherwise defrauding thousands of people he did business with, outright criminal activities including connecctions with organized crimes, attacks on our veterans/"our boys", calling Second Corinthians "two Corinthians," and so on and on and on -- NONE of those narratives, powerfully created by Trump himself and furthered by press frenzy and our media, changed their course.

And we now know that they were mainly driven by anger at way too much social change way too fast -- massive racism and misogyny -- greatly exacerbated by many anxieties over personal futures, due to other giant changes, many could no longer visualize beyond being very dark and frightening.

Not by Hillary "underperforming." For most on the right and left, some mixture of HillHate, the need to battle "liberal fascism" or "liberal corporatism," and/or the "narrative" of the desperate importance of getting conservative justices on SCOTUS were just excuses manufactured and adopted to justify abandoning all principles.

[marylandblue]

14. I agree with you.

By "underperforming" I don't mean that it's her fault. She had a lot of things working against her and I remain surprised that so many people fell for the lies and manipulation.

We will face the same array of forces again. At least this time we are forewarned and we can pick the candidate who is best able to fight against it. But, even with the best possible candidate we can still lose.

[Baconator]

15. We should pick someone popular this time...

Throw in some policy and vision and we are on our way.

[rufus dog]

3. Democrats must realize we are at war with these people

The media will flip on whoever is the Dem nominee. The Sanders supporters who state he would have beat tRump are wrong. There is no evidence to support that assumption. There is plenty of evidence that the media would have turned on him immediately. Rather than Clinton's emails and the Clinton foundation (ponder that the Clinton foundation got more coverage than the corrupt tRump foundation) the focus would have been on Socialism, Bernie's tax returns. subtle digs that Sanders is not a Christian. Then the media would have explained that Sanders lost in WI, MI, PA, because his message of socialism didn't resonate with the true americans in the midwest.

They did it to Obama, (You didn't build this, Reverend Wright, foreign born) Kerry (war hero, BS he shot a guy in the back and then turned is back on Vets, French, out of touch elitist) Gore (too smart, bookish, don't want to have a beer with him, liar who claimed he invented the internet) and every Dem candidate as far back as we can remember. Issue is it got worse in the 90's and has now reached a point of being ridiculous.

At the gym they have a tv bank above the machines. I am playing 90's grunge music trying to make it through the hour but watch the chyrons, almost always slanted, and they get worse as we get into the election year.

Monday it was 51% of Americans think the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt. Yesterday it was Republicans are more motivated for 2020 election. Let's think about the former. Fund raising for Dems is through the roof, the Dems are a quarter away from the largest sweep ever in the House, (Net vote difference) polls show tRump eroding support in key swing states, states won with razor thin margins. Yet the focus is on the negative for Dems. Think back to Bill Clinton, how many times was it brought up that he didn't win the MAJORITY of the vote only the plurality , compare that to tRump...., hell compare that to Bush, who immediately afterwords didn't win the popular vote but the talking point evaporated. I would bet my house that it was brought up 5x more for Clinton compared to Bush/tRump.

So Silver is right, but also wrong. The media will make this a case of both candidates being unpopular which will favor tRump. Reality is the media will DRIVE the narrative and push to make the Dem unpopular while ignoring tRump negatives.

[Cosmocat]

17. Yep x 1,000

All points I have been making for two decades now generally, and specifically in this situation. I keep telling people we can't get an idea of how this is going to go until our nominee is established, and we see how he or she gets slandered.
This country, enabled by its quote liberal media un quote spent almost two months debating how unpresidential BHO was for not wearing an American flag lapel pin.
John Kerry actually served in combat, was wounded and received medals and commendations, Busch evaded service through a coochie Air National Guard appointment. Somehow Carrie was made out to be weak, and Bush resolute.

[Doodley]

5. I think Trump has a good chance. Repugs are better at messaging. Let me give you examples.

Those who think the national debt is a problem with Trump has plummeted compared to those who did so with Obama.

Most people are unaware that Trump actually wanted to take away healthcare from tens of millions of people or that he wants savage cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

We are not winning the propaganda war. We aren't turning Trump's 40-42% support away from him, despite him being the worst president ever. There is no coherent, vocal opposition to get the message across. Trump gets away with his thousands of lies because there is no strategy to deal with them and hold him to account.

The election will be decided on the turnout and his base in fired up.

[marylandblue]

8. There is some chance that a good candidate could solve the messaging problem.

Pelosi did a good job of this in 2018. She made it about healthcare rather than attacking Trump. Of course Trump was a subtext throughout, but she didn't need to push that, he does it by himself.

[rocktivity]

6. Was Hillary's underpeformance due to being too unique, or being too generic a Democrat? Yes.

She made the same mistakes with Trump that she made with Obama: assuming that every woman in America had her back, and not making a template of the agenda that got her own husband in the Oval Office.


rocktivity

[marylandblue]

7. Media doesn't drive the narrative, Media is driven by narratives.

Media , like most of us, are pretty lazy. If the candidate writes a good story (good, as in, people will watch) for them, they will run with it. This is what Trump does. He drives the narrative publicly with his outrageous lies. He does it privately as well, he often talks to the press off the record. He even leaks his own dirt. All to give the press an easy narrative that favors his view.

Obama was good at this as well. He spoke well in public, he told a good story about hope and harmony. He also cultivated good press relationships behind the scenes.

Hillary was not so good at this. she wasn't compelling in public She kept her distance from the press. She didn't trust them. So they never really heard her story. If killed her.

I see O'Rourke and Buttigieg as the best at writing narratives. I'm backing Inslee because his narrative is about climate change, not himself. That's a novel approach, but it could work.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

10. If it's a referendum election Trump is likely done. If it's a choice election he has a chance.

[Johonny]

12. 538 doesn't factor in voter suppression. The "unpopular" talk is a "safe" narative

for explaining the fall off in Democratic voters from 2012 to 2016. However, the truth is between those two elections the courts allowed states to suppress minority voters like we've not seen since the Jim Crow days.

Just saying...

[Baconator]

16. One does not necessarily exclude the other...