Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.
True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-effect of our weird electoral college system.
Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states.
No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking into account that we indeed use an electoral college system so that is all that matters.
I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules.
The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York.
As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate.
IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that.
In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
When 0.1% of the total voters can swing the vote from being 60 for red to being 60 for blue, polling is obviously going to be pretty tricky to predict.
no, he means a blowout is entirely dependent on the few people that are in the states that count. Therefore your MoE is higher because your population size is significantly lower.
You can pretty much ignore every non-swing state and the result of polls would be the same.
How the specific electoral system works is irrelevant. In our case, our electoral system is designed to make most voters' votes not actually matter, so I really don't care about it one bit when talking about who had more or less support in the country as a whole. Trump only got 1.5% more votes than Harris did. That's not a blowout.
Even if you insist on going by electoral votes, 58% to 42% isn't a blowout either.
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that’s what was important. He won!
Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like saying that the only purchase to really bankrupt you is the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the aggregate. The straw did not actually break the camel's back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271 electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to someone else.
So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election.
I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California? Is it the same?
If Elections would be done via tokens and you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you say that is unfair?
Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.
It's helpful in the same way opinion or approval polls are helpful.
It also shows potential for how things could've otherwise gone.
If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest. But know that making that data is useful is MUCH more difficult. In theory a candidate could win every single state by 0.01% and lose a state by 99%. They would win in a blowout in the EC but in the popular vote they actually lost. And you would get a highly skewed and unhelpful representation of the actual election results
The popular vote result in the US is neither an opinion poll or approval poll. If it was, it would have been helpful, but it's not, because the popular vote would be very different if US election outcomes were determined by the popular vote as opposed to the current system.
> If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest.
It's part of the constitution of the US, not my personal preference.
No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments.
The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
>putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters
Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).
Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
> At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is certain. California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."
If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election, then it really is the case that only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote.
This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7 or so states that we call "swing states," because the outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known with certainty ahead of time.
Note: I'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable," not something like "rigged".
>The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is known ahead of time.
There's a world of difference between being predicatively partisan and not being able to vote at all.
>only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote
No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51 people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. It is still the case that the only people influencing the election outcome are the voters in the swing states. The outcome will always be "40% + swing-states" versus "40% + other-swing-states." If you're in one of those 40%s, your vote does not matter to the result, because your state's result is already determined. This is unlike your analogy, which supposes that no votes are fixed.
> California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality.
California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you can't really say that for certain.
All states shifted to the right in this election. Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this past one, it would become a swing state.
> The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
This would only be true if the popular vote result would be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would almost definitely have been different if the election results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
> The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office
Why is it unfortunate?
> That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a better indication of the candidate's popular support than the electoral college?
> In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did.
Again this would only be true if the popular vote would be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote, which is a false assumption.
> he has no mandate.
Please cite.
> And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote.
This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as your reasoning is only valid if you work under the assumption that the popular vote would not have changed at all if the system was based on the popular vote.
As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged).
Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap.
I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim
The Democrat-leaning media is obviously the culprit I'm talking about, and they do it to try to win. While there is some Republican-leaning media, approximately 80% of the media leans toward Democrats.
> Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever.
You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
