'It's Biden, Not Trump Who Has The Enthusiasm Advantage: Energy Is On The Former VP's Side'
"It’s Biden, Not Trump, Who Has the Enthusiasm Advantage." The former VP doesn’t have a cult following like the president, but all the energy is on his side. By Martin Longman, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, July 15, 2020.
The precincts have all reported in Tuesday’s Republican Party runoff in the 23rd Congressional District of Texas, and the two candidates are separated by seven votes. Now the lawyers will get involved and it should form an entertaining spat between President Donald Trump, who endorsed Tony Gonzales, and Senator Ted Cruz, who endorsed Raul Reyes. Neither of them is favored to hold the seat, which is currently occupied by Rep. Will Hurd, but don’t let anyone tell you that your vote doesn’t matter.
Do you know what doesn’t matter, though? It doesn’t matter whether Reyes’ or Gonzales’ supporters were more enthusiastic about voting for them, because every vote counts the same. That’s why Trump’s embattled campaign manager Brad Parscale is on pretty thin ice when he says the president’s enthusiasm advantage over his challenger is “the most important factor in the campaign.” As Michael Tesler writes for FiveThirtyEight, “Biden voters may not be all that excited about voting for Biden, [but] they’re very enthusiastic about voting against Trump,” and “the share of Trump voters who rate Biden unfavorably is consistently much lower than the share of Biden voters who rate Trump negatively — nearly 30 percentage points lower as of the last survey conducted at the end of June.”
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether a vote was cast for or against a candidate, it only matters how that vote was cast, and right now Donald Trump is down nationally by about nine points and battleground polls point to a thumping Electoral College loss. The “most important factor” in the campaign is who wins, and Trump isn’t winning. If we want to look at an important factor for why Trump isn’t winning, it might be that he has a substantial favorability deficit.
Second, because Trump voters don’t dislike Biden as much as Biden voters dislike Trump, Biden actually has an advantage in net enthusiasm (calculated as the difference between a candidate’s “very favorable” and “very unfavorable” rating).
As a competent and loyal vice-president to the wildly popular Barack Obama, Biden certainly has his fans within the Democratic base, but he has nothing like a cult following. It’s only when you combine strong Biden supporters with people who hate Trump with the fire of a thousand suns that you discover the enthusiasm advantage...
More, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/15/its-biden-not-trump-who-has-the-enthusiasm-advantage/
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