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Danny the Weary

super informative, and naturally affirms my views

weekendreading.net/p/how-trump

Let's return to the difference between the oversimplified Flatland views of election dynamics and the more complete 3D-Land approach. There's a useful analogy to medical diagnosis: X-rays are great for diagnosing a broken bone, but three- dimensional MRIs can diagnose many brain and nervous system disorders, soft tissue and joint injuries, and cardiovascular disorders invisible to X-rays and earlier diagnostic approaches. When we use the wrong tools, we might not just fail to diagnose an illness — we might misdiagnose it, and prescribe a treatment actively harmful to the patient. When Flatland analysts argue America “moved right,” the prescription tends to be Democrats should also move right, or at least play nice with Trump to avoid alienating the Americans who supposedly granted him a decisive mandate. The same prescription will be dispensed to civil society and the media. But that diagnosis completely misses the life-threatening illness America is really struggling with: a billionaire-captured system doesn’t work for most people, and justifiable disaffection and anger at this system. Americans are fed up, and people are perpetually in the mood to throw the bums out, whoever the bums in charge are. But with only two parties to realistically choose from — plus an illegitimate Electoral College that makes most Americans’ presidential votes irrelevant — all of these “change elections” add up to little more than a seesaw most Americans don’t want to ride in the first place.
Danny the Weary

I found this article/newsletter (suckstab, barf) after searching for an unsourced assertion that Harris lost 19 million Biden voters.

As regular readers might recall, Biden won in 2020 thanks to a surge of new and less-frequent voters who hadn’t shown up in 2016, and who voted much more Democratic than 2016 voters. These surge voters were the critical “anti-MAGA but not necessarily pro-Democrat” bloc that Harris needed to turn out again in order to win. This year, based on VoteCast data (see chart in the previous section), we can estimate that about 19 million people who voted for Biden four years ago stayed home. (40 percent of those voting in 2024 had voted for Biden in 2020, and 40 percent had voted for Trump. From there, it’s simple arithmetic.16) Moreover, with the same caveats until the voter files are updated, both VoteCast and Navigator found that in the battleground states, a greater share of 2020 Trump voters than Biden voters cast ballots in 2024, albeit by a smaller margin than in the rest of the country. VoteCast also asked whether voters cast ballots “for” the candidate they chose or “against” the other candidate.17 The results show that about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump in 2024 than in 2020. That suggests a lot of missing “anti-MAGA but not pro-Democrat” voters.
Jan 10, 2025, 06:17 PM·Public
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