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naraburns  nihil supernum  12d ago (text post)   26776 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Yeah, Harris is more naturally unpopular today than Biden was in 2016. Plus 2020 happened during a high point for widespread public political involvement, activism and debate in modern America, probably the high point since the 1970s, plus everybody was at home and on the internet. Easy to see why turnout peaked.

Most people are mostly unaffected in a visceral, immediate way by politics. In 2020, the lives of most Americans were directly affected by government in a way more major than at any time since…the Second World War, maybe? Hard to know exactly, but certainly in a long, long time.

I hate to be that guy but source? I simply cannot take such a just-so explanation at face value without something to substantiate it. Especially by the margins we are talking about here. 20 million votes out of 150 million cast? 13% of the electorate just checked back out? Especially when the conventional wisdom is that once you get a person to start voting, they generally keep voting. This study even says the effect is magnified in "high salient elections" which 2020 most certainly was?

Voting for the first time for a high-salience election should have a higher effect on turnout in subsequent high-salience elections

Edit: Let me put it like this. Show me the people who didn't vote this time that voted in 2020. Show me a poll, show me on the street interviews, tell me about people you know. Anything at all that points to this massive hypothetical dark matter voter that hadn't shown up at all in any of the polling this year. Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year. It wasn't even on the radar. Don't just default to it being the only possible explanation because the alternative is unthinkable.

Lots of them were in Philly. I pointed out before the count was finalized that turnout did not seem that high to me, just from eyeballing it compared to 2020. And I was correct. We already knew mail in ballots were down as well. My wife voted but numbers of her friends did not and she had very little queue time, compared to 2020 when she queued for 2 hours.

I had a post a couple of months back that I was observing an enthusiasm gap for Harris in the black community, and again that appears to have been borne out. I think I even got an AAQC for it.

Trump held his numbers in Philly compared to 2020, Harris dropped somewhere near 80,000 votes compared to Biden, just in Philly.

Overall in PA black voters went from being 11% to 9% of the total from 2020 to 2024. In 2016 they were 10% for comparison.

Given Floyd (May 2020) and BLM energized those communities in 2020, i don't know how much is just reversion to the mean, and how much is Harris though.

In fact according to Reuters the black share of the vote dropped from 13% to 11% nationwide. Thats, what a few million votes right there?

Nobody predicted such a steep drop off in turnout this year.

I did.

https://substack.com/@sethinthebox/note/c-73271569

40% confidence isn’t very confident

Yeah, I was under-confident, as persistent problem. Still, I made the prediction...who else did?

Nate Silver predicted "a total turnout of 155.3 million, with an 80 percent confidence interval between 148.2 million and 162.5 million", which is something like 73% odds for lower turnout than 2020 (158.4m).

Nice. It's gratifying to know my gut is aligned with the most sophisticated prediction matrices and gurus on the planet. I probably would have taken the under though.

It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?

3 different candidates vs 1 candidate? Two females vs one male? rederendum on Trump vs referendum on Democrats? Pandemic vs no pandemic? Trump telling people not to mail in votes vs not doing that? Height of BLM popularity vs. not? Sometimes people get more votes and sometimes less?

Harris is an awful candidate no one would have picked? She was not just personally awful at anything that requires charisma and communication, she was tied specifically to Biden's policy failures and the inherent cleavages they caused (e.g. Gaza) and lacked an ability to pivot away from them given she has no independent profile. Or, at least, not one she'd want to stand behind.

Nor could she explain why she shouldn't be held responsible for hiding Biden's condition, something that made him unpopular enough to drop out

In hindsight it doesn't seem that mysterious: Trump was supposed to win when it was Biden.

We were all just caught up in the media exuberance around Harris because Democrats went from a seemingly certain loss to having a chance and that breeds some Joy^(tm). Then the sugar rush ended.

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