They weren't close
He won back the States Trump flipped in 2016 by 3 times the number of votes.
And flipped 2 additional states
But somehow that's being presented as Biden doing worse than Trump in 2016 lol
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Biden won the popular vote by over 6 million. But he won the electoral college by only 43,692 votes (less than Trump did in 2016)
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They weren't close
He won back the States Trump flipped in 2016 by 3 times the number of votes.
And flipped 2 additional states
But somehow that's being presented as Biden doing worse than Trump in 2016 lol
Electoral College sucks, but the Math here is incorrect. Biden Just needed to flip PA, MI, and WI to win (provided he held Clinton's states). He won those states by 256,413 votes. A much bigger margin than Trump's in 2016 which was close to 80,000.
Still it shows how broken the Electoral College is when it's somewhat close between two candidates, and the winner is ahead by over 6 million votes in the popular vote total.
Still it shows how broken the Electoral College is when it's somewhat close between two candidates, and the winner is ahead by over 6 million votes in the popular vote total.
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Actually, Trump flipped 6 states from 2012 (Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) plus Maine 2. You shouldn't leave out the other states just because only 3 of them decided the election.
No one is defending the EC but it wasn't the EC that made the argument that Biden did worse in 2020 than Trump did in 2016 that's you lol.
They represent the minimum number of votes that the losing candidate would have needed overcome in order to change the outcome of the election. A.K.A the "margin of victory".
No, the math here is 100% correct. Biden won Arizona and Georgia by closer margins than Michigan and Pennsylvania, which makes them irrelevent to the conversation. Biden could have won Michigan and Pennsylvania by 10 million votes each and he still would have lost the election if he lost Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia.
Fair enough forgot about those.
I'll just go back to the blue wall vs blue wall
Which is 3x in Biden's favour.
Trump flipped 6 states (PA + MI + WI + IA + OH + FL) to win, and their EC numbers were exactly the same.
- Push infrastructure, drug legalization, apprenticeship, and union bills
- Talk about border security in addition to protecting the immigrants currently living in America
- Be more critical of media / tech
- Don't advocate for gun control (the only gun control measures that actually work in reducing gun violence are extremely unpopular)
This should be enough to win back at least 5-10% of WWC voters, without sacrificing too much of the democratic agenda. They're still going to be very strongly republican, but margins matter. Joe Manchin managed to win in West Virginia despite Trump winning it by 40%. Jon Tester and Brown won in red states. It CAN be done. Tester and Brown are barely even any different from the average dem.
Trump's path in 2016 wasn't the "blue wall" on the whole. He only needed one of the three. Clinton and to a lesser extent Biden needed the whole blue wall to win. That's why Michigan and Pennsylvania get treated differently.
Wisconsin is the focus because it's the tipping point state both years. That's it. You can gymnastics yourself with how many states candidates flipped from the previous cycle, etc. but Wisconsin decided the presidency both years and the margins were very similar.
Yeah I've been corrected
That was the weakest argument of mine ever
So I'll concede it.
Because it doesn't really change anything
Clinton's nearest path to victory was around 75k votes in three highly contested states.
Trump's nearest path to victory was around 45k votes in three highly contested states.
Yes the Biden path most talked about leading up to the election was rebuilding the blue wall, and fortunately he did that. But that path was barely achieved with Wisconsin being closer than any of the polling suggested.
Trump's nearest path to victory was around 45k votes in three highly contested states.
Yes the Biden path most talked about leading up to the election was rebuilding the blue wall, and fortunately he did that. But that path was barely achieved with Wisconsin being closer than any of the polling suggested.
This hyper desire to make Biden's win look not impressive is so bizarre
Can't comment on the other two, but Wisconsin has been purple for ages. I remember my Civics teacher back in Junior High talking about how WI was unique in the sense that they always seem to be the guinea pigs for different political shifts (most recently in the bad direction, with the Right to Work stuff for example).
You don't know what you're talking about is why it's bizarre to you and you're not grasping what people are trying to communicate to you.
Pretty much. The lede really is that Wisconsin is something the left really needs to figure out. To keep the full blue wall firmly blue. Not sure exactly what though.
It's because you're assuming people are out to make it look "less impressive" rather than pointing out how the electoral college continues to fuck us. I don't give a damn about thumping my chest over a "landslide" or whatever. I do care that despite Biden winning by a historic number in the popular vote, we had to sweat out around 40k votes in three states to make sure his path to victory was secured.
Manchin talks out of both sides of his mouth:
What he says doesn't equal what he'd do. He generally backs dems when his vote actually matters, and he'll likely be able to justify new states if he gets some money for West Virginia out of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he'll be in the way for other things, but statehood seems more like something he could be bribed into.
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I already said his win was impressive. You have to go back decades to find other challengers who beat incumbents. But it was closer than it should have been considering Trump has 250k and counting deaths on his hands, and the electoral college disparity continues to grow for Democrats. Those are the real concerns.
The electoral college is garbage. We shouldn't have a situation where a candidate can lose despite receiving millions more votes, as happened in 2016. Just because Biden won in 2020 doesn't mean the problem went away. He was within 100k votes of losing despite having an even larger lead in the popular vote.
Conservatives game the EC to "win" elections despite their unpopular policy positions. They can literally drag the majority of the country down with them because the founding fathers didn't like the idea of regular citizens actually deciding elections. We already fixed some of their other bad ideas (originally senators were appointed, not elected, and the Vice President was just the runner up from the presidential election), so we can fix the EC too. The hard part is getting smaller rural states to give up their unfair, unearned political influence.
Conservatives game the EC to "win" elections despite their unpopular policy positions. They can literally drag the majority of the country down with them because the founding fathers didn't like the idea of regular citizens actually deciding elections. We already fixed some of their other bad ideas (originally senators were appointed, not elected, and the Vice President was just the runner up from the presidential election), so we can fix the EC too. The hard part is getting smaller rural states to give up their unfair, unearned political influence.
Look
If Trump's states were AZ, GA and WI in 2016
No one talks about how close the election is ok.
The narrative entirely came out because it was narrow wins in the Blue Wall
That's the story of 2016.
Both Trump and Biden basically won Wisconsin by equal margins. So that's basically a wash.
Then Biden retoom the other two with relative ease and flipped two historically red states while facing the incumbent.
If Trump's states were AZ, GA and WI in 2016
No one talks about how close the election is ok.
The narrative entirely came out because it was narrow wins in the Blue Wall
That's the story of 2016.
Both Trump and Biden basically won Wisconsin by equal margins. So that's basically a wash.
Then Biden retoom the other two with relative ease and flipped two historically red states while facing the incumbent.
I'm more just worried about the Senate. Dems should be okay for the presidency and house under the current strategy. Their current strategy is actually quite fine for the current House map, although redistricting could change things. But Dems need to win the Senate to deliver on a Medicare public option and higher taxes on the rich. These are policies I really, really want, but I absolutely can't get them unless democrats win the House + Senate + Presidency. So I just want dems to win control of all three so they can deliver on these policies. And I don't see how dems win the Senate unless they improve their numbers among WWC. I also want a lot of tech regulation, but I think there's still some small room for that in a divided congress.
Important to point out: Obama benefited from the electoral college in both of his elections if you take the tipping point state margin minus the popular vote margin. I think the EC is bad, but it hasn't proven to be bad quite yet because it fundamentally favors one party over another. It could end up that way in the next few decades, but it could also resolve itself once Trump is out of the picture.
Because you're making Biden flipping two red states while reclaiming the blue Clinton fucked up in losing by a combined 3 times margin during an incumbent re election attempt out to be an underperformance.
It's not a wash though. No one cares about the narrative. We all hate the EC, but it's never changing. So we have to play the game. Having Wisconsin possibly always being a toss up is a dangerous game to play when it's 1/3 of the fabled blue wall.
I wouldn't call it an underperformance once you consider the fundamentals. But that doesn't mean it wasn't close.
I don't think the common perception was that the election was a blowout. I think the perception was that it was too close considering how much Biden won by.
It absolutely is not.
The Electoral College was supposed to protect the country from a populist demagogue ascending to the presidency. It is now enabling it.
We don't even know that it's a toss up.
I mean it could be a close blue moving forward along side AZ for all you know (GA will probably be a swing state now too)
I think it's the other way around. Biden needed to get to 270 EV. Flipping Mi/PA/WI got him to 279. Everything past that point is extra, no matter how tight.
This seems like selective math.
The states that you win that are the closest are as much of your electoral college victory as are the states you win by a landslide. The reason most people focused on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin is that they were comfortably blue states in 2012, that all swung for Trump in 2016, and could be won back because of their slim margins. Biden won all three states in 2020 by a larger share than Trump won those 3 states in 2016, AND Biden flipped Arizona, Georgia, and NE-2, and increased the margin in some key states.
And then if you add in other flips between 2016 and 2020
I have to look at the results in a table to compare the easily won states.
But, this just seems selectively choosing which states put you over 270. The most obvious states to look at are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as those three flipped the E.C. for Trump in 2016 and they were very narrow; adding Georgia and Arizona doesn't weaken Biden's victory, it makes it stronger.
Using the metric of "the 3 closest states" isn't a great metric for determining how close the election is. Obama in 2008 won North Carolina by just 13,500 votes, Indiana by 25,000, but his EC win was a landslide by modern standards, where this metric would make it look pretty close.
As votes are still being counted, final tallies arranged, it'll be good to look back at 2020 and 2016 and decide where work needs to be done. 3 weeks out, we know that Democrats need to make up losses in the Latino & Hispanic community at a faster pace than they gained votes from white suburbanites. Democrats didn't just lose Latinos in Florida and along the Texas border, but in weird places you wouldn't expect like in Lawrence Massachusetts, a city that votes overwhelmingly for Democrats, but the Latino community swung that about 5% to Trump in 2020 from 2016... The share was still overwhelmingly Democratic, nearly 50%+, but..... it's less than in 2016, and some early prognosticating seems to point at the precinct level about poor performance. Now, there's a question there ... Biden expanded Massachusetts by 5% from Clinton in 2016, so does it matter? Y'know, do you just ignore the areas you lost because you expanded more in other areas (in this cases, rural areas in central and Western MA and near the South Shore voted more for Biden than they did Clinton in 2016).
The states that you win that are the closest are as much of your electoral college victory as are the states you win by a landslide. The reason most people focused on Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin is that they were comfortably blue states in 2012, that all swung for Trump in 2016, and could be won back because of their slim margins. Biden won all three states in 2020 by a larger share than Trump won those 3 states in 2016, AND Biden flipped Arizona, Georgia, and NE-2, and increased the margin in some key states.
- Michigan:
2016: Trump: ~10,000
2020: Biden: ~150,000 - Pennsylvania
2016: Trump ~44,000
2020: Biden ~80,000 - Wisconsin
2016 Trump: ~23,000
2020 Biden: ~20,000
And then if you add in other flips between 2016 and 2020
- Georgia
2016: Trump ~210,000
2020: Biden ~13,000 - Arizona
2016: Trump ~90,000
2020: Biden ~11,000
I have to look at the results in a table to compare the easily won states.
But, this just seems selectively choosing which states put you over 270. The most obvious states to look at are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as those three flipped the E.C. for Trump in 2016 and they were very narrow; adding Georgia and Arizona doesn't weaken Biden's victory, it makes it stronger.
Using the metric of "the 3 closest states" isn't a great metric for determining how close the election is. Obama in 2008 won North Carolina by just 13,500 votes, Indiana by 25,000, but his EC win was a landslide by modern standards, where this metric would make it look pretty close.
As votes are still being counted, final tallies arranged, it'll be good to look back at 2020 and 2016 and decide where work needs to be done. 3 weeks out, we know that Democrats need to make up losses in the Latino & Hispanic community at a faster pace than they gained votes from white suburbanites. Democrats didn't just lose Latinos in Florida and along the Texas border, but in weird places you wouldn't expect like in Lawrence Massachusetts, a city that votes overwhelmingly for Democrats, but the Latino community swung that about 5% to Trump in 2020 from 2016... The share was still overwhelmingly Democratic, nearly 50%+, but..... it's less than in 2016, and some early prognosticating seems to point at the precinct level about poor performance. Now, there's a question there ... Biden expanded Massachusetts by 5% from Clinton in 2016, so does it matter? Y'know, do you just ignore the areas you lost because you expanded more in other areas (in this cases, rural areas in central and Western MA and near the South Shore voted more for Biden than they did Clinton in 2016).
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Very true. One of the reasons for the Electoral College (according to the Founders) was to have a way of stopping a dictator/King type coming into power. Instead, it enabled that type to win in 2016, and didn't stop him.
1). The EC is not somehow inherent to federalism. What a weird mixture of actual US-centrism and status quo bias.
2). "Hot take" is a bizarre term to use in this case, considering the EC was almost abolished decades ago.
3). It's not just noise to point out that the net effect of the EC, the Senate, gerrymandering, and voter suppression is to neutralize our politics. Twice in the 21st century alone we've had a discrepancy between the popular vote and the election winner, one of those times it was a difference of millions, and we just went through an election where everyone knew who most people would vote for but not who would actually win. We've hit a tipping point with the EC, partially thanks to things like geographic polarization, and speaking up about it is a necessity.
I don't think that's particularly important to point out, tbh. Yes, the EC has been biased toward different parties, but who cares? We're living through a period of time where it is just straight up incompatible with democracy.
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Doubt it. Unless they stop running far right candidates like they always do. If Texas turns blue, then I doubt Republicans will have a shot to the electoral college either. But the problem is that while it's trending bluer each election, it's taking forever to actually win.
Democrats made a significant move to the right after the Reagan revolution of the 80's and they still can barely win presidential elections. The grim reality is that as long as the electoral college exists, true progressive platforms will be almost impossible to implement. The Democratic Party has a greater chance of moving to the right than the left.
AZ and GA were comfortably red states. So Trumps path was keeping two states that hadn't gone Dem in decades and keeping one of the blue wall states. This path came down to around 45k votes. It was one of the few paths Trump had compared to Biden, but it wasn't far off from happening.
Honestly, I think the extreme partisanship and gerrymandering are way bigger issues than the electoral college.
The electoral college itself is something I understand in theory. If each state has its own ecosystem, etc., then you'll want a President that appeals to all of that.
But the GOP has people convinced of straight lies, and the people they can't convince are disenfranchised. So what you end up with is this bullshit.
It's actually funny - I think people like to say "oh, obviously the system created by racist founders sucks" but so much of it makes sense if you imagine political parties never existed. And that people had an interest in letting every single person vote.
Oh well.
The electoral college itself is something I understand in theory. If each state has its own ecosystem, etc., then you'll want a President that appeals to all of that.
But the GOP has people convinced of straight lies, and the people they can't convince are disenfranchised. So what you end up with is this bullshit.
It's actually funny - I think people like to say "oh, obviously the system created by racist founders sucks" but so much of it makes sense if you imagine political parties never existed. And that people had an interest in letting every single person vote.
Oh well.
Party would adjust after a series of losses, and people will get the "give the other guy a chance" urge, so I would say there would.
Why are you combining MI/PA/WI together like they're all one state? They're three separate states.
Biden gets ~21k fewer votes in Wisconsin, he loses the state. This brings him down to 296 electoral votes.
Biden gets ~13k fewer votes in Georgia, he loses the state. This brings him down to 280 votes.
Biden gets ~11k fewer votes in Arizona, he loses the state. This brings him down to 269 votes whereby he loses the electoral college.
It's really not that complicated. PA and Michigan don't matter at all in this scenario. They are exactly as relevant to this conversation as his margin of victory in California (i.e. not at all).
Yes definitely. They are not just going to cede the presidency without pivoting to a winning strategy.
But we're stuck with it, so it's an open question of how much it's going to fuck us or not.
1. It's my understanding it's overstated how much the EC was "designed" and was really more of a compromise among dudes that just wanted to go home and didn't have much brain function left to think about something that was going to easily make Washington president any way they slice it.
2. It was began without electors being selected via popular vote so it's not really the same as it first existed
yea im confused how did he win it by less votes trump got in 2016? I thought he won MI alone by more votes than trump won by in 2016?
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The appeal of those tactics is only decreasing as time goes on. They have tasted nectar with Trump, somebody who promises every policy they want and also confirms their fears and delusions as real. They do not seem super interested in going back to water. Machin and a few select others have a good personal brand with them, but I think that it's pretty clear that the culture war interests of the WWC have hugely outweighed all other considerations, and that the WAR part of culture war is only going to get more pronounced as time goes on. It's not enough to offer them something they need; they also want to know that other people are losing.
Like, breaking it down point by point:
-They don't care about infrastructure, not really
-Sure, we should be doing that anyway
-Unions are barely popular with union members at this point due to culture war stuff
-This was the status quo for ages and it sucked both as policy and as politics
-Sure, but they don't really care. This is just persecution complex stuff, it's not going to respond to rational "look we're on the same side of this" appeals.
-They're still going to think that you're taking their guns.
He won the three closest states by less than the three closest that Trump did in 2016.
Other countries have federal systems without being this fucked up about it...
What are you talking about. If he loses PA trump gains 20 trump gains 20. This is selective math. If you are talking about margins, then trump won michigan by 10000 votes and now lost by more than 200000. Like i don't get what you are trying to say.
Like if he doesn't win he loses? Well duh.