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Sunday, February 2, 2020

Romney-Other

I got this off Mickey Kaus' twitter feed--Henry Olsen links to Democracy Fund study on Net Favorability of Presidential Candidates Among 2012-2016 Voting Groups. It's really quite important, because it shows traditional Republican voters who were misled by the Establishment NeverTrumps are coming home. A lot of people forget that the goofballs who voted for Johnson and/or McMuffin almost had a major impact on the 2016 election. In fact, they probably cost Trump the popular vote. Sooooo:




32 comments:

  1. Hey Mark!

    I was a goofball who voted for Gary Johnson! (Although I think he was the goofball...)

    The negative media onslaught against Trump persuaded me to vote for Johnson. I did and do despise Clinton and her party and her politics, so that was never an option.

    In my own defense I'll say I live in a very Red state and our electoral votes were never going to Clinton. So I thought it was a principled thing to do.

    Of course, I was wrong and in many, if not most, if not all ways Trump is the best thing that has ever happened to conservatives and he's getting better and better.

    Of course, he'll have my vote in 2020.

    (My wife, who is smarter than me, voted for Trump in 2016. She got it.)

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    1. I knew I'd offend a few. I draw a sharp distinction--libertarians are not conservatives. That's what the Patrick Deneen stuff was about. Glad to have you back.

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    2. I voted for David French.

      ....not

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  2. The whole Henry Olsen tweet (I couldn’t read most of it, lost in the sidebar):

    The Romney-Other number is key here. Those are the Gary Johnson, Evan McMullin, and write-in voters and were nearly 5% of the electorate. They can't stand the leading Dems are now lukewarm on Trump. Good sign for the President.

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    1. I only use desktop. No problem. I did the embed thing, not copy/paste.

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  3. Gary Johnson and other right leaning 3rd parties took just over 1% of the vote in 2012, and about 5% in 2016. I have assumed since the Mueller Dossier burned up in D.C. in April that the Libertarian Party etal would shrink back to that 1%, and that Trump would pick up most of that additional 4% (at least 90% of it).

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    1. Why "since the Mueller Dossier" in particular? I get that that might sway some of the McMuffin people, but why the Johnson people?

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    2. NeverTrump was discredited by the Mueller implosion, just like the Democrats. People who won't vote for Democrats will now come home to Trump.

      In short, that 5% were Johnson people- they were the NeverTrump voters- that cohort is no longer sustainable.

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    3. Here's what I was getting at. I could see the people who were taken in by the McMuffin-Interagency crowd would have their eyes opened by the Mueller Dossier, as you say. For the Johnson-Libertarian voters, I would think that the turning point was seeing Trump make good on his conservative promises, like judges, etc.

      It's all good, of course.

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    4. For me, it was the gradual realization that the MSM treatment of Trump (tax fraudster, perennial bankrupt, pussy grabber, closet racist/homophobe/white nationalist, vendor stiffer, hopeless liar, etc) was a colossal smear. Just like the serial hoaxes we have now lived through.

      Scrubbed of the smears, both Trump the man and Trump's policies seem to me to be exactly what the country needs.

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    5. And I suppose the Mueller Dossier plays into that, as well. A complex of factors.

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    6. An additional subtle factor is likely the crushing of the ELITES' bid to sabotage Brexit.
      It's one thing for them to diss DJT voters as "deplorables", but rather tougher to similarly diss Brits like that, seeing as "educated" Americans have so long slobbered on Brits, as being more "cultured"
      than Americans.

      This Johnson/ DJT situation is reminiscent of the appeal of the Thatcher/ Reagan combo, but likely has greater cultural power, since Western Civ is now much more threatened (by internal strife), than was so c. 1980.

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    7. A number of commentators have pointed out that US-UK elections tend to track each other.

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  4. I'll guess, that at least some Johnson people have had their eyes opened by Mueller, + this impeachment (over BS pitches similar to the Mueller stuff), as to the stunning level of derangement of the Dems.

    Just as the Iraq war (and then the '08 crisis) opened some Righty eyes, as to the myopia of the GOP establishment, enough to drive some Righties toward libertarianism.

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    1. And, we can add, the Left's orgies of political "malpractice" agitprop, in such matters as Kav, N. Sandmann, Smollett/ "it’s not OK to be white”, Don Lemon vs. deplorables, gov't medical $$ to illegals, "children in cages", the VA governor's cow vs. the recent gun-rights rally, etc.

      Throw in less well-known factors, such as Sarah Jeong vs. whites, Acosta’s White House antics (vs. Trump on “fake news"), etc., and the Cultural battle lines are so much clearer, than they were even two years ago.

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    2. I've always felt that those factors, which perhaps don't show up a lot in polls, have been very important.

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    3. Regarding the Acosta part, the worst of it was, that hundreds of papers rubber-stamped the Bos. Globe's rancid editorial, which whined about how the booting of him was trashing the 1st Amendment.

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    4. When Eisenhower was elected there were 5,000 + independent daily newspapers in the U.S. By the Election of G.W. a handful corporations owned 95% + of all print media in the U.S. and there is only one U.S. wire service. All pulling their oar for Gloshevik Inc.
      Tom S.

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  5. Yeah, it'd be hard for a poll to do justice to such stuff, as with the antics of Antifa etc. vs. Andy Ngo etc., and the other trends which have inspired IDW, and Prager's movie.

    Just as it was hard for pollsters to catch the strength of white fear/ revulsion vs. MSM slobbering for BLM, and Merkel's importation of Syrians, both of which clearly boosted DJT's 2015-16 campaign vs. the globalist Uniparty.

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    1. Exactly. I've seen this mentioned repeatedly:

      1) many conservatives won't talk to pollsters--I know my wife and I ALWAYS hang up.

      2) conservatives, even when they talk, won't open up on many of those topics.

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    2. And, a poll would have to have a huge sample, to have any hope of catching such subtleties among a rather small subset of the electorate.
      Most firms can't afford to pursue such a big sample.

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  6. Not on the poll, but 2A is going to be a great turn out motivator in 2020.

    Bloomberg is very anti 2A, lots of funding, and very vocal about it.

    Virginia’s actions will help.

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    1. Unless I'm very much mistaken, you're absolutely right. In 2016 Trump got people to vote who hadn't voted in many years--if ever. There's more of those out there, and they're showing up at rallies. Dems are pushing issues that matter to them, and Trump is showing that for the first time there's a politician who's more than just talk.

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    2. Yes, 2A, but don't discount immigration. That is still a huge concern for many. No point to bringing jobs back from China if we simply move China/Honduras/et. al. to U.S.A.
      Tom S.

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    3. Nope, not forgetting that. In fact, I suspect that's a major factor driving Trump's approval numbers among African Americans.

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    4. I have always (since Nov 2016) felt that Mrs Clinton's protestations that she was robbed because she won the popular vote are fallacious not only because of the McMullin/Johnson effect, but also because large numbers of possible Trump voters in Deep Blue states didn't bother to vote, knowing the outcome was hopeless. If you lived in Pelosi's or Schiff's district and had conservative leanings would you have bothered to vote in 2016? I think (and hope) that 2020 will be another story altogether. If I'm conservative and I live in Pelosi or Schiff's district, I come out and vote for sure.

      I'm also hopeful that thoughtful Blacks and Hispanics (as well as other Dems) conclude that the Dems have nothing good to offer them and cross over to Trump.

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    5. The difference in the popular vote was TOTALLY accounted for in one state where the GOP has been severely depressed--California.

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  7. You don't need to look at the polls. Look at the rallies and the crowd sizes and tell he where the energy lies.

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  8. I'm late to this discussion so I'll just add a quick couple points. There are still some of the NeverTrump crowd who are what I call Queensberry Rules Republicans--and they'll (probably) still not vote for Trump because they're too stubborn to admit they were wrong.

    I occasionally hear comments like "he's an idiot" in reaction to his Tweets because something Trump says, in Trump's inimical style, is not perfectly, precisely, absolutely accurate. It's a pathetic rationalization--as if politicians, as a rule, are not fast and loose with the facts on a regular basis.

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