Contributors

Monday, April 27, 2015

A Breathing Democrat

In the coming presidential election in 2016, the Democrats need only nominate a breathing human and they will likely win. Here's why:

In looking at the electoral map, the Democrats essentially have 246 EVs baked in the cake.

Take a look:

California-55
New York-29
Illinois-20
Pennsylvania-20
Michigan-16
Washington-12
Minnesota-10
Wisconsin-10
Oregon-7
Maine-4
Vermont-3
Mass-11
Rhode Island-4
New Hampshire-4
Connecticut-7
New Jersey-14
Delaware-3
Maryland-10
Hawaii-4
DC-3

One could also throw in Iowa with its 6 EVs as its only gone GOP in 1984 and 2004 but let's just leave that as a tossup. Some might argue Wisconsin is a tossup but let's remember that they have been blue since 1984, including voting for Dukakis in 1988!

So, the Democrats only have to run a breathing human and they will win these states. Webb or O'Malley would win all of these states. Sanders would likely win them as well, especially if the GOP nominates a REAL CONSERVATIVE as they promise to do in 2016. With a base of 242, that only leaves 28 EVs so the Democrats could pick up Florida and be done. Or they could snag Ohio and a couple of western states and do the same thing. Their path to the White House can take many forms. 

The GOP candidate, on the other hand, starts with a much smaller base, 206 EVs. To get to 270, they have to run the table in nearly all of the swing states and hold the ever changing North Carolina. 64 EVs is a steep climb and if they really do nominate a far right candidate, they simply won't get any of the swing states. The independents won't go for them.

Now, if it is indeed going to be Hillary, then you can start ticking off Ohio and a couple of the western states like Colorado and New Mexico. Even if she runs a weak campaign and is continually hounded by scandal, she will still eek out a win. Of course, that's assuming that conservative leaning women/moderate women don't really vote for her. If they do, well...it could be 1988 except of the Dems, all over again.

6 comments:

Nikto said...

Mark, Mark, Mark... This is just not so.

No party has anything in the bag, because voters are not automata. Weird stuff happens. People and parties can change. Dark horse candidates appear.

Most Democratic voters are not died in the wool Democrats. It only takes one phony scandal at the wrong time and the Republicans have the election in the bag.

Remember John Kerry's Swiftboating? If something like that depresses Democratic turnout significantly by making Democrats feel hopeless, unhappy or unloved, Republicans can win a presidential election. That's what this constant drum of Benghazi is all about.

The Koch brothers are spending a billion dollars putting their agents provocateurs in every pocket of the country. They're trying to figure out ways to jigger voting machines in Ohio and sabotage registration drives in Florida. There is literally a vast conservative conspiracy of Republican oligarchs trying to wrest control of the electoral process by any means possible. They have been at it for years with ALEC and their other machinations like voter ID laws. Large parts of the conspiracy are conducted in completely secrecy, as secret corporate donors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into secret slush fund PACs.

If Democrats fool themselves into thinking they will just automatically get votes from all those states, the voters will feel taken for granted. At best those voters will just stay home.

At worst those voters will look at a Marco Rubio or a Jeb Bush and think that those guys aren't typical racist white know-nothing conservatives, and give them a chance. This is extremely dangerous thinking, however.

The problem is not Rubio or Bush -- it's the Republican machine that would be dragged into office with them. Rubio or Bush could be fine presidents, if they had a Democratic Congress, and a reasonable cabinet forced upon them by a zealously partisan Democratic Senate.

But the money men behind any Republican president will force them to do all manner of crazy and evil things. Like W, Jeb and Marco will be the puppets of men like Dick Cheney, beholden to the likes of the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, the right-wing Israeli lobby (which doesn't represent the interests of the majority of Israelis), and the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about. Any Republican president will be forced to cater exclusively to conservatives and the wealthy. That's what they believe winning an election means: doing what the guys who bought them want.

Individual Republicans aren't usually bad people. It's only when you get a bunch of them together and give them any kind of political power that they become dangerous. They just can't resist those little devils in the back of their minds whispering about bombing Iran, torturing prisoners, shooting trespassers, carrying guns into movie theaters, forcing women to bear the unwanted children of rape and incest and making the poor suffer for the crime of being poor.

Mark Ward said...

John Kerry won all the states that I have listed here and a sitting president ended up winning the rest with a whopping 286 EVs.

Show me how any of the current GOP candidates wins the list of these states. As you have noted, the Kochs are going after Ohio and Florida, not California and New York.

And how did those money men do in 2012?

Barack Obama 332
Mitt Romney 206

Nikto said...

Your notion that the Democratic Party has large swaths of electoral votes locked up because there are legions of fanatical Democrats willing to slog to the polls to vote for anyone with (D) after their name is naive.

If you had played the numbers game in 1980, when Democrats had solid locks on both houses of Congress (277-158 in the House and 58-41 in the Senate), Democrats had the advantage of an incumbent president, and the Republicans were still smarting from the resignation of Dick Nixon, one of the most corrupt and mendacious presidents in history, you could easily come to the conclusion that Democrats couldn't lose. But high inflation, a hostage crisis in Iran, an electorate who felt the president was condescending to them, and an affable old fool who continued to play the Southern Strategy with talk of welfare queens, and who promised rainbows and ponies to everyone if we just cut taxes on the rich gave the election to Reagan in 1980. He got 10 times as many electoral votes as Carter, 489-49. Carter carried only six states and DC.

In the end, the numbers don't matter. Presidential elections are about emotion and narrative. The numbers you cite are not atomic weights: they are polls of people who are easily swayed by the latest headlines, people who are far more interested in Britney Spears' latest hijinks than John Boehner's congressional agenda.

Though they lost in 2008, in 2010 Republicans won the House in and important state redistricting battles. They gained ground in 2012, losing by a lot less. They gained control of both houses in 2014. The party you had written off completely in 2009 is clearly not dead, not by a long shot. I cautioned you then that they were still dangerous, and you laughed it off then. Don't continue to make the same error.

With no incumbent Democrat in the White House, a few juicy ginned-up scandals, and a candidate like Rubio or a Jeb Bush, it's easy to see how Hillary fatigue could very well demotivate mushy Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and cause them to stay home in 2016. If California feels snubbed by Hillary and Rubio/Jeb starts winning over Latinos, going to a couple of gay weddings after the Supreme Court decides gay marriage is legal everywhere, Colorado is lost, and California could be in play. Then all bets are off. Geeze, they elected Schwarzenegger governor!

Unlike Republicans, a large percentage of Democrats are not rabid partisans. I'm not, even though it may seem I bleed blue by the way I write. I used to vote Republican when Republicans were reasonable. If Republicans become reasonable again -- if the party itself weren't such a menace -- I could vote for them. I don't see that happening for at least a generation, because so many of them are still under the sway of Nixon's vengeful ghost. But I hope with all my heart that the Republicans become the party of Lincoln once more, instead of a cult of Jefferson Davis-worshipping secessionists.

These days Republicans are driven by fear and negative emotions. Democrats are driven by hope and positive emotions. That means that when life looks like crap, Republicans show up at the polls and Democrats stay home.

Under the right conditions, all the statistical models at 538 go right out the window. Because the election is not about numbers, it's about the nightmares and dreams, the fears and aspirations of the nation.

Which is not to say that the numbers are totally meaningless. The Democrats do have a numerical and generational advantage. But that advantage is very tenuous, being completely dependent on turnout. If Democratic turnout is suppressed by the Koch brothers' evil machinations or by mopey Democrats mad at Obama for signing some trade agreement or approving the XL pipeline, Democrats suddenly lose their advantage. And quite possibly the White House.

Blue Jeans said...

I disagree with Nikto here and agree with Mark. I don't see how any of the crop of Repub noms wins the states on this list. They are too conservative and the electorate is younger now which means more Demmy.

Considering that Clinton is the likely nom, I say she wins most of the tossups and even steals a red state. Arkansas? Kentucky? North Carolina?

oojc said...

Nikto, you sound like a frightened old lady! Even during those years you mentioned, Repubes still couldn't win these states and that was with half way normal candidates.

rw said...

The thing is, Mark is right on this one. Until the Republicans push out the religious right and other theostatists from the party, they will lose presidential elections. Libertarianism has a big appeal to younger voters and if that was the guiding ideology, we could win more states.