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 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 embattledcampaign 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. On the other side, you have MAGA lunatics and some reluctant single-issue voters, but not a lot of genuine Biden haters.
This is why we’re seeing people like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham attack “the Squad” rather than Biden. He’s on the record saying that Biden is the nicest man he’s met in politics, so he criticizes him for being a puppet of “socialists” like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That’s just not that convincing or scary to most folks.
So, yes, about twice as many Trump supporters say that they’re really jazzed to cast a vote for him as say the same about Biden on the other side, but it remains Biden who has the advantage.
If there’s some support for Trump that isn’t being detected in the polls, it’s not enthusiasm that explains it. It’s probable that a lot of people are simply ashamed to admit that their desire for abortion restrictions or lower taxes or more oil drilling is enough to make them support the president’s reelection. There are definitely some folks in this category, but are there enough?
It’s not, and never really as been, about enthusiasm. It’s always been determination.
I don’t know about Penslytucky, but around here there are quite a few people determined to get him gone. And there are a SHIT TON of women determined to vote him out. For gods sake, my sister-in-law is writing letters to the Washington Post!! I bet it’s 80% of women around here.
There is no other issues besides Trumps character and COVID. Nothing. Wait two weeks, it’s going to get BAD. Then Trump will sic his minions on school boards (he already did). This means Republicans are now going after the kids.
We are no where near the bottom. All past conventional wisdoms on the electorate are in the past.
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I agree with nalbar. The waves of Trump obstinance and insanity are now lapping at the shores of every local school board and city council who want to keep Covid out of their town. And he is going to press and press and press for these people to toe his line, and they are going to very quickly be all sorts of pissed off. I don’t care who you voted for in 2016, when the President is telling YOU and YOUR COMMUNITY that, by god, you have to send your damn kid to school in the middle of this pandemic, with absolutely no plan in place, or I’m going to personally make damn sure your school or town doesn’t get another damn dime of federal money.
Trump is so deep in a hole at this point that he’s not even visible. And he is digging so fucking furiously in that hole that before long the walls of it are just going to cave in on him. The really scary part is just how much he can really fuck up in the next 6 months.
100% Mike. I daresay that with Trump approval at 36% according to latest Quinnipiac poll, the farcical school opening push will test the true value of the crazification factor. I daresay that we might be able to find a value lower than 27% by September
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The educators I’m Facebook friends with are universally against him and his minion DeVos for their insistence on tossing themselves and their students into a deadly situation without a safety plan. Speaking with neighbors, they’re against sending their kids back to school without a comprehensive plan in place.
So your article jibes with the sentiment on the ground in my western NY suburb.
When we Democrats and liberals stick together and vote, there’s no contest. It’s hard to imaging Trump coming back but I wont trust that assessment until the last state is called. Besides which it’s not enough to win. We need to stomp the living shit out of the Republicans. So I’ll be making calls, and more calls, and yet more calls.
On that, we agree. I refuse to take anything for granted, but right now the polling looks much better at this juncture for Biden than it did around this juncture for HRC.