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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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If Biden has a normal, boring performance at the first debate then he doesn't drop out and, who knows, maybe he wins.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-polling-trump-votes-harris-election-b2644079.html

In that world Trump gets 400 electoral votes.

What map do we think Trump can have 400 electoral votes, even against a dementia patient?

If we assume Trump v Biden, electric boogaloo, flips Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Maine, that's nowhere near. If we throw in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, you're still not there.

I see this mentioned a lot and I want to push back a little bit. As the article notes, the claim was made by Jon Favreau on Pod Save America. I happened to be listening to this shortly after it came out, and it's clear from that context that Favreau wasn't sharing this to show, as we say in the law, the truth of the matter asserted. He was trying to make a point about the Biden campaign and their contention that he still represented the candidate most likely to beat Trump. There is no other source for this number; no one has produced the poll or polls in question, and Favreau isn't likely to have seen them himself. The context was consistent with him casually tossing off a bit of Beltway gossip that wasn't intended to be taken literally.

What I think is most likely is that one poll or set of polls showed Biden losing certain states that correlated to Trump getting 400 Electoral Votes. Unless this is the only polling they did, its mere existence doesn't really say much about Biden's chances of winning. Hell, it doesn't even say much about Favreau's original argument. To the extent that such a poll probably exists, it's probably an outlier and was probably treated as such. It seems highly unlikely that internal polling was repeatedly showing a 400 EV Trump win. If that were the case, it would mean that either they or the publicly available polls were off by an order of magnitude heretofore unseen, or that the internal polls were flawed, and common sense would point to the latter. Paying to much attention to this would be like Trump changing his campaign strategy based on the Selzer poll.