will voter suppression be the most important factor in this election?

[Gabi Hayes]

I heard on the television last night that about 140 million votes could be cast.

what is the expected African American and Hispanic turnout?

I did some googling awhile back and couldn't find any satisfactory answers, even to the simple question of how many voters of each group there are, or how many might be voting. no skills in the department, but I'd thought it would have been easier to find.

will it be enough, and monolithic enough to offset the deeply ignorant vote?

[glowing]

1. I think it's going to be a low voter turnout out year.

[Gabi Hayes]

2. hope you're wrong, but who can tell anything in this twilight zone scenario.

one interesting tidbit they discussed on CNN

the egregious, soporific DINO, Tim Kaine speaks fluent Spanish, and could be valuable in Florida.

he's also from Richmond, not NOVA, so he could really help solidify VA.

that, according to the sages at CNN, could be all Hillary needs to win.

it they're right, and they've been completely, assholishly wrong with their sycophantic love affair with trump the last few days, then I'm all for Kaine

who cares about the veep, EXCEPT as a vehicle to pull in votes in key areas. if he's a twofer...that's fantastic! go, Tim

[Wounded Bear]

3. Well, the strategy boils down to states...

if you look at the "blue wall" of states that have gone Dem the last 5-6 elections, and Hillary is already at around 240 or so, of the 270 needed to win.

For Trump to win, R's would have to dominate in almost every 'battleground' state and would need to win basically all of the rust belt states, many of which went for Obama. That seems unlikely, and if VA goes blue, it really puts the hurt on Trump. A lot of folks don't like Kaine, for valid reasons, nobody is perfect. But in the strategy you outline, it makes some good sense to go with Kaine.

If pressed, I think I would like Vilsack, who would seem to be a good fit to drag some votes from the flyover states, as he has solid ag credentials.

But I don't really think the VP pick will mean much in this election. This will be won or lost at the top.

[Gabi Hayes]

5. very true, but one can dream, can't one? and vilsack is a real douchebag

my sister was appointed to the bench by him, and she has not much good to say about him, based on personal interaction. he's also a huge tool of agribusiness. about the same charisma as Kaine, meaning zero

he has less chance of helping than Kaine, and Iowa has only a handful of EVs

this race is going to be so chaotic, with ugly specter of Reagan democrats resurfacing, that even Connecticut has been mentioned as possibly being in play. if that's accurate, there's no telling what could happen.....maybe 1980 all over again, lord help us?

[sofa king]

4. Now I am inclined to think, "no."

A factor that does not appear to be tracked is the motivation that voters experience when they are directly attacked by one party.

We are constantly told that Hispanic and African-American turnout is lower than white Americans, but that was not the case in 2012, when 66% of eligible African-American voters turned out, compared to 64% for whites. Hispanic turnout in that election was only 48%, but they were not directly targeted in that election as they are in this one. That means that millions more Hispanic voters could turn out in 2016.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/2016/01/19/hispanic-vote-pew-research-center-report-2016-election/79003656/

Similarly, Mitt Romney won 6% of the African-American vote in 2012. Trump is now polling at an astonishing statistical zero among the same voters. Hillary Clinton may get more votes from the African-American community than Barack Obama did.

Also do not discount the massive shift of college-educated voters away from Trump. It was nearly ten percent before this disastrous convention (compared to 2012), and will surely grow.

That shift was somewhat balanced by the far more numerous non-college educated whites who flock to the new Nazis, but two important things happened this week: Ted Cruz did not shift his support to Trump, and Trump himself backed off on gay inequality. Right-wing authoritarians cannot stand uncertainty, and when it surrounds a Republican candidate, as it did with Bush-smeared McCain in 2008 and Mormon Mitt Romney in 2012, the knuckledraggers stay home.

Furthermore, some voter suppression laws were built around the premise that white Republicans vote more often than minorities, so voter registrations were deliberately set to expire sooner. Now, however, the very Republican voters the GOP depends upon are at risk of being boxed out by that very voter suppression move, because so many of them sat out in 2012, while African-Americans, in particular, took care to turn out in that same election, and Hispanics and educated Americans of all stripes recognize a Fascist when they see one.

In addition to that, Democrats have learned an awful lot since 2004. Now they attempt to directly approach individual voters long before registration deadlines, while Republicans have done nothing of the sort this year. Republicans, frankly, are relying upon the self-serving ground-games of their House and Senate candidates, few of whom have an incentive to directly align with Trump.

Therefore, in sum, I think that Republican voter suppression efforts have an excellent chance of backfiring on them this year, while the Republican Party splits its vote between Trump and the Libertarians, and disillusioned supporters of other primary candidates stay home.

[Gabi Hayes]

6. Chris Sautter, are you back from making movies?

Your brother was on Beyond the Beltway on Sunday

jst kdn.....

thanks for the encouraging analysis; I fervently hope you're correct.

the attacked group voting premise is a hopeful one, because you know the likelihood of a much lower black vote is very possible, given the obvious candidate difference, but the threat vector will, please I hope, be a very strong motivator to get out there.

[sofa king]

8. Heh, never heard of him!

But he seems like an interesting person, and I'll look into his work. Thank you!

[Igel]

7. The one decent study I know of implied

that voter suppression was more from bad information than from laws restricting voting. It dealt with the voter ID law in Texas. A very large percentage of those who said they didn't vote because of the law--they didn't have the right ID--upon questioning said they had the right ID. They just didn't know it. They'd been told their vote was being suppressed, that they almost certainly did have the right ID, and didn't check.

Who told them these non-facts? Mostly advocates against the law. Seeing what kinds of ID were valid was an easy thing to do.

Redistributing voting machines based on past history is a bigger form of "voter suppression." The problem with that being that (D) are hurt by this when they're in the majority, and if they're in the majority the BOE for those districts is probably majory (D). To dstribute the machines well requires knowing what turnout's going to be. Their sources aren't much better than yours, because turnout both varies a lot and it varies unevenly. You can find estimates of the number of eligible voters by race/geography, but it's harder to find estimates of the number of registered voters by race. And among the registered voters, who knows who's going to turn out to vote?

Surveys where people are asked, "Are you registered?" are fine, but flawed. Am I registered? Yes. I know this because a few months ago I got a voter registration card in the mail at my current address with the correct name on it. Otherwise, I'd say yes because I registered. But I could have screwed up my registration, forgotten to re-register when I moved, been purged because of inactivity or error (I'm not the only "Igel" in my county, there's another with the same first name and last name. And we have the same middle name, but spell it differently.) Or maybe, if asked, I just don't want to admit I'm not registered. Just as voting technology ignorance affects low-income areas more than middle/upper, so errors in self-reporting are more common in low-income areas.


I'll overlook the implicit racism or ethnocentrism in the last line of your post.