The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

New week, new model run. States with new polls: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CO, FL, GA, HI, IN, IA, KY, LA, ME-a/l, ME-1, ME-2, MI, MN, MO, MT, NV, NH, NJ, NM, NC, OH, PA, RI, SC, SD, TX, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY. Everything else set by 270towin consensus.



What's interesting: NC has flipped for the first time. NH has crossed the B+10 mark. MN has been getting continually redder since its blue peak in July, and the trend continues, this week at B+3.4. At this point WI is almost equally for Biden (B+3.3) as MN. Which is bad news for Biden. SC has solidified for Trump. VA is back in the dark blue. TX is ticking down towards even, but at this rate Trump should keep it (but I wouldn't be surprised if it's T+<1 next week). Ohio has a better margin for Trump than TX right now.

I'm still hoping to see Trump lose OH and TX and maybe even IA.

I don't want him just to lose. I want such a devastating loss that maybe the Republican party will figure out how stupid of an idea it was to go along with a blatantly incompetent fascist who cared about nothing but his own success.

The lesson they'll take away will be to pick a competent one next time.

Just scanning all the right wing websites I peruse and they all have Hunter Biden as their lead story. This is Trump and the Republicans’ closing argument: vote for us because Hunter Biden.

Is that going to resonate with the majority of voting Americans?

Not sure where you are getting the WI and MN numbers from. 538 is giving Biden a 91% chance at MN, with all the polls in the last 2 months at +6 Biden or Better. The last poll out by Civiqs shows Biden +10. RCP's aggregate is 6.3.

Trafalgar has Biden +1 in WI, but they are the most biased poll out there, worse than Rasmussen, and are the GOP's own internal polling company. Sienna/NYT has Biden by +10, Yougov has Biden +5. RCP's aggregate in this state is also Biden +6.3, with the latest poll being Biden by +8.

Sad, but you're probably right.

What the Republicans have not figured out (fortunately), is that you don't win elections by appealing to your base. You win them by appealing to a majority of those people in the middle who will sometimes vote one way, sometimes the other. IOW, elections are won in the center, not the extremities.

The Democrats figured it out this year (and the Bernie supporters hate them fervently for it), but the Republicans don't seem to understand that.

And worse, the Democrats by pretending it's BAU in the meantime and not facing up to the reasons that Trump got elected, will be wide open to losing to the competent fascist.

I suspect that Trafalgar and Rasmussen are merely public mouthpieces. I also suspect that there are private internal polls that are telling a different story. Just a guess.

A point I have made repeatedly. In 2016 the Democrats completely misread the situation, running literally the worst possible candidate they had, never once grasping how widely despised Hillary was. They didn't take Trump seriously and lost.

Biden's latest ad doesn't mention Trump at all, and I think it's more effective for it (despite the America Greatest Land schmaltz):



"There's so much we can do, if we choose to take on problems - and not each other"

Hillary won a clear majority of American votes. What the Dems didn't take seriously was Russia's investment in Cambridge Analytica. What nobody seems to be taking seriously yet again is the same kind of internet campaign, exerted by the same actors, but being met with much less resistance because Trump has dismantled what little cybersecurity the US had.

Trump and Florida’s I-4 corridor: Can you trust polls with crowds like this?

The point is, by any rational analysis Hillary should have stomped Trump into the ground. Instead, he won enough popular votes to win the electoral votes and therefore the election. In point of fact, the Republicans also did not take Trump seriously and that's why he waded through their field of candidates to take the nomination. The party leadership had all but anointed Jeb Bush as their guy and, well . . .

Yes. But all of that didn't happen because everyone secretly hated Hillary and no pollster, strategist, or statistician could tell. Rather, some people hated her very openly, but a majority of Democratic primary voters and a majority of American voters loved her.

Hillary won a clear majority of American votes. What the Dems didn't take seriously was Russia's investment in Cambridge Analytica. What nobody seems to be taking seriously yet again is the same kind of internet campaign, exerted by the same actors, but being met with much less resistance because Trump has dismantled what little cybersecurity the US had.[/quote]

Right, but we also are seeing the results of the worst presidency in US history. While 40% of our population is insulated from reality via echo chamber in media and religion, and some just out of sheer white supremacy, you need more than that, even with the electoral college.

Trump has to run against a record - and that record is atrocious. If we have a legitimate election, he's going to lose.

Sure. But if you had had a legitimate election four years ago, he would have lost then as well.

Untrue. Hillary was a product of the DNC's manipulations of their primary process. There was enough backroom dealing going on there that no-one else on the Democratic roster was going to get the nomination no matter what the primary voters wanted. The same thing was supposed to happen in 2008 but the machinery was not as locked down then and Obama came out of nowhere to take the nomination. Even Obama was surprised when he surged ahead of Hillary.

Yep. And don't tell me that Access Hollywood tape just "happened" to be found a month before the general election. I'm sure it was dug up the moment Trump threw his hat in the ring. Plus the media gave him FAR more coverage than any of the other republicans running. They wanted him to win that primary because they figured he would be easy pickings for November . It all came back to bite them in the ass.

Obama's promise was so obvious so many years earlier that The West Wing could model Santos on him, very blatantly, as the next Democratic hope for President. And I wonder why you would assume that the DNC would be more firmly in Hillary's pocket after eight years of Obama than before she was defeated. But it is Trump, not Obama, whose result shocked and surprised everyone, including his own campaign.

I think it had been obvious for several years that Obama was going to be president. Some day.

I think he didn't intend to win the nomination in 2008. He just wanted to make a name for himself in presidential politics so that in 2016, after 8 years of Hillary, he would be known as more than just a senator. I think he honestly intended to become president, just not that quickly.

I don't think the same is true for Trump. He never expected to be elected. He just wanted to make a name for himself (even more of a name), so he could use it as leverage to make money. And he never would have been elected, if the Republicans hadn't split the vote for reasonable candidates among too many contenders, until it was too late, and if it hadn't been for quite a number of other factors that just happened to come together. If any one of them hadn't been there (dislike for Hillary, prejudice against a woman, the smear campaign about her e-mails, the Republican advantage in the electoral college, Russian interference in the election...), he would have lost.

And right now we would be fighting about Hillary not doing enough to stop the pandemic, since we wouldn't have Trump's dismal response for comparison...

Exactly right.

More than a quarter of voters have cast ballots in Florida

I'm beginning to wonder if these long lines of white voters that I'm seeing at EV sites are mostly republicans who use to vote by mail before Trump began his war against VBM,

Greta thanks you for solving the plastic straw problem by clutching at so many.

There's 'colluding with a massive Russian disinformation campaign' illegitimate, then there's 'totally throwing out the election to a corrupted court system' illegitimate. In one, they don't actually change any votes - in the other, the votes don't count at all.

I really don't understand the argument in general. Let's say for argument's sake that it's true that Hunter Biden traded on Joe Biden's position to get himself a sweetheart deal with Burisma, and that Burisma engaged in shady deals in the Ukraine.

How is that an indictment of Joe Biden, unless you have the additional level of proof of Joe Biden's personal involvement in those shady deals?

And of course, how seriously can one take the argument of "CORRUPTION! NEPOTISM!" from Donald Trump?

As of yesterday, it was 1.4 million registered Dems, and 950,000 registered Republicans.

You'd think people would realize by now that the size of somebody's rally crowds has very little bearing on actual votes.

If nothing else, they could try asking Bernie Sanders.