Fox News Shouldn’t Have Called Arizona When They Did

Avatar

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

69 Responses

  1. Avatar Saul Degraw
    Ignored
    says:

    Taken on its own? Maybe. However, Fox is cutting one of its news hours and replacing it with another right-wing opinion show from a Trumpist lickspittle. In concert, they seem to think the lesson is to double down on being a safe space for right-wingers with grievances.Report

    • Avatar InMD in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      At the end of the day they know their job is to make money. Their decisions will reflect that.Report

    • Avatar North in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      That’s fine.

      If they keep degrading their ability to communicate reality to their audience then their use to the audience will decline.Report

      • Avatar Slade the Leveller in reply to North
        Ignored
        says:

        Seems unlikely. “News”max has climbing ratingsReport

        • Avatar North in reply to Slade the Leveller
          Ignored
          says:

          I didn’t say they’ll suffer business wise. There’s a lot of money to be made peddling pap. Junk food vendors don’t go broke- junk information vendors probably won’t either.

          When I look at the last four years- the way Trump and the GOP in general has thrashed about incoherently, like a trout hooked on the line of the ever changing fads and memes of their media wing, I see that there’s a real costs to this media ecosystem bubble they have.Report

          • Avatar Slade the Leveller in reply to North
            Ignored
            says:

            I see. By reality you mean “reality”.Report

          • Avatar LeeEsq in reply to North
            Ignored
            says:

            Causing further damage to the body politic because there is money to be had seems really bad. There is a point and we are rapidly approaching it or reached it already where things like Fox News, OANN, and NewsMax become really dangerous. They already caused a lot of suffering and a near insurrection that if it went a little differently could have gotten a lot of Congress people killed. There are people in Congress that should have never been elected like Hawley, Cruz, Boebert and several more. A lot of Americans need to be dragged towards sanity.Report

            • Avatar North in reply to LeeEsq
              Ignored
              says:

              I don’t see any way to regulate that or involve government in such things that isn’t both unconstitutional and also hair whiteningly terrifying to contemplate; and I’m not even a libertarian.Report

      • Avatar Saul Degraw in reply to North
        Ignored
        says:

        Assumes facts not in evidence.Report

    • Avatar Will Truman in reply to Saul Degraw
      Ignored
      says:

      Yeah, I don’t have a whole lot of faith that they are doing this for the right reasons. Like I said, if they’d made a mistake the other way I don’t think they would have been fired.Report

  2. Avatar Jaybird
    Ignored
    says:

    Fox making that call had the result of taking all of the wind out of the “The Election Was Stolen By Cheating” accusations.

    Pretty goddamn high risk… I mean, if it flipped back… well, if it had flipped back, I don’t know what would have happened but I disagree with your take. I think that these guys would have gotten fired under that scenario as well (and that firing would have been a hell of a lot more defensible).

    As it is… eh, let them become commentators at news agencies scrambling to find a bone to throw to moderates/centrists and say “See? We, too, are fair and balanced!”Report

    • Avatar InMD in reply to Jaybird
      Ignored
      says:

      The real question is whether these alternative networks that go even farther than Fox News are sustainable now that Trump is out of the spotlight. I find the possibility of so many people taking another step down the rabbit hole pretty disturbing.Report

      • Avatar Jaybird in reply to InMD
        Ignored
        says:

        I guess it would depend on if OANN or whatever can get advertisers. I know that when I am in a room with Fox News, I pay attention to the commercials and they seem to be for stuff like medical products or pain management and financial products like silver or insurance. When I watch CNN, I see stuff for, you know, McDonald’s and Superhero Movie IV.

        The WWF wasn’t able to get a major automobile manufacturer to advertise *FOR* *YEARS*. (Does the Scion count?)

        If they’re splitting the audience, they’re splitting the advertising dollars. I know that they can go minimalist on production but they’re are still going to have to hire people. (Maybe the elite overproduction will come in handy after all.)Report

        • Avatar InMD in reply to Jaybird
          Ignored
          says:

          Yea. I guess the other question is whether fracturing diminishes the influence of its backers how do those people react? My perception of Fox News is that for all of its editorializing, misleading framing of issues, and pandering, keeping a toe or two in the reality-based community was a necessary ingredient for its success. Even people who hate it have had to take it seriously as a major media and political force. Is Murdoch really going to let himself lose that kind of stature chasing a bunch of totally off the reservation upstarts?

          I also wonder how it plays out for our politics at large. On the one hand it would be a good thing if GOP pols no longer had an obligation to kowtow to this massive, flag-ship driver of the conservative media celebrity complex. But is replacing it with smaller entities beaming the latest messages from Q into peoples’ brains 24/7 better? I know I am rambling but I just don’t know.Report

          • Avatar Jaybird in reply to InMD
            Ignored
            says:

            Say what you will about the Wall Street Journal, part of the reason they did so well was because they knew why people were reading them. It wasn’t about any grand narrative or ideal. The readers wanted to know who was doing what and get better information about where and how to invest. Let the other guys write a story about “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”, the WSJ was going to write about “Is”.

            The people who read stories to feel endorphins could read the other guys.

            But we now live in a Cybersquare future (what’s the opposite of “punk”? Prog? Cyberprog). The corpos have signed on to endorphin production. They’ve realized that they were leaving money on the table.

            All that to say: I have no idea. I see two groups of people in epistemic divorce and neither seems to have any theory of mind whatsoever. It strikes me as unsustainable.Report

  3. Avatar Pinky
    Ignored
    says:

    This article inspired me to check something. Remember how many times we were told that Clinton was 62,000 votes away from winning? Well, Trump lost 2020 by practically the same number:

    AZ – 11 EV – 10,457 margin
    GA – 16 EV – 11,779 margin
    WI – 10 EV – 20,682 margin
    NE-2 1 EV – 22,091 margin
    NV – 6 EV – 33,596 margin

    Trump fell 65,009 votes shy of tying for electoral votes, and 76,514 votes shy of winning. Looking at the 2016 results, here’s what I’ve got for Clinton’s shortfall:

    NE-2 1 EV – 6,534 margin
    MI – 16 EV – 10,704 margin
    WI – 10 EV – 22,748 margin
    ME-2 – 1 EV – 36,360 margin
    PA – 20 EV – 44,292 margin

    If my math is right, that would get Clinton a tie at 76,346 votes, and a win at 77,744 votes. (Actually, in both cases, they’d need 4 more votes than that, to push them from ties to wins.)Report

    • Avatar North in reply to Pinky
      Ignored
      says:

      Scary.Report

    • Avatar greginak in reply to Pinky
      Ignored
      says:

      Which points to a pretty serious failing in the EC since Clinton won the PV by 3 million and Biden by 7 million. The closeness of the results entirely separated from total vote is crazy pants and a recipe for chaos. Well more chaos. Minority rule is not a good thing.Report

      • Avatar InMD in reply to greginak
        Ignored
        says:

        I think this is the wrong lesson. Teams that gained twice the yards still lose by 50 yard field goals. The game is what it is. It isn’t changing any time soon if ever. Instead of obsessing over the unfairness of the rules obsess over how to consistently pick off Georgia.Report

        • Avatar greginak in reply to InMD
          Ignored
          says:

          Oh yeah the rules ain’t changing. That doesn’t mitigate the bucket of fail that they are. It does play into the legitimacy of our democracy or least as far as anyone cares about certain groups being sporked over. GA and WISC are goals and , especially WI, need to be un gerrymandered as much as possible. Removing the worst gerrymandering is an obtainable goal. But minority rule is still outrageous and those arguing for it should be seen for what they are.Report

          • Avatar Chip Daniels in reply to greginak
            Ignored
            says:

            Who sez the rules can’t change?

            1. Pass a series of voting rights laws to expand access;
            2. If any courts strike them down, expand the courts on a 218-51-1 basis as necessary to change the rules;
            3. Flip a few statehouses, hold mid-decennial redistricting and gerrymander the Democrats into power;
            4. The game is now what it is and the Republicans just need to try harder.Report

            • Avatar greginak in reply to Chip Daniels
              Ignored
              says:

              Urm yeah, i won’t hold my breath on all those things. Lots of things are theoretically plausible but extremely unlikely in real life. I’m all for the new VRA and squishing the worst gerrymandering. There are things we can do. Heck i’m all for mocking the “minority rule is cool” peeps for what they are, but the EC is here and i’m not seeing it leaving.Report

              • Avatar Chip Daniels in reply to greginak
                Ignored
                says:

                I just want the Democrats to understand that working the refs and changing the rules, are the rules.Report

              • Avatar InMD in reply to Chip Daniels
                Ignored
                says:

                We’re talking about the EC and as you know switching to popular vote requires amending the constitution. It won’t happen.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels
                Ignored
                says:

                I think the party that first proposed court packing under FDR, that borked Bork, that passed Obamacare without a reconciliation, that tried to steal Florida for Gore, that drew the current MD Congressional districts, and that tries to pass off Bill Clinton’s bimbo handler as a mainstream journalist knows all about working the system.Report

              • Avatar Pat in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                A couple of these things are not like the others.

                I know it’s all the rage to say the Democrats borked Bork, but Reagan never should have nominated a guy who was responsible for the Saturday Night Massacre for a position as an impartial arbiter of the law.

                Also I think the FL characterization is debatable.

                I’ll grant the others, to a degree.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to Pat
                Ignored
                says:

                The complaints against Bork were more often about back-alley abortions, segregated lunch counters, et cetera.

                I’ll grant you that the Florida characterization is debatable, but it was followed by years of denying that Bush was the president, then conspiracy theories about voting machines (!) four years later, after which the next Republican president was impeached for, let’s be honest, having won the election. I’ll give you that the 2017 Inauguration riots only destroyed non-government
                property.

                Point is, the Democrats have known about working the refs and changing the rules for a while.Report

              • Avatar Philip H in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                Bork Borked himself.

                And unlike Merrick garland, he got committee hearings, he got a committee vote and a floor vote – where he was defeated in no small measure by members of his own party.

                And the only people trying to steal Florida were Roger Stone’s attorneys, who were ultimately aided by SCOTUS.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to Philip H
                Ignored
                says:

                Election denial.Report

          • Avatar Pinky in reply to greginak
            Ignored
            says:

            We’re talking about presidential elections here, which don’t have anything to do with gerrymandering. I don’t know why people confuse the two things. Gerrymandering is about the distribution of a set number of congressional districts within a state; the Electoral College is about the number of electors with each state. Both are affected by the Census, but they’re unrelated things.Report

            • Avatar greginak in reply to Pinky
              Ignored
              says:

              There is some pretty intense gerrymandering at state levels which is a problem and can and should be corrected. Minority rule is bad. The EC isn’t going anywhere but again minority rule is bad. Nothing is being confused they are two separate issues that can lead to the same bad outcome: minority rule or serious over representation.Report

              • Avatar gabriel conroy in reply to greginak
                Ignored
                says:

                I agree with all that, but also believe majority rule can be bad, too. Maybe on average or in general, it’s not as bad, or usually not as bad, as minority rule. But it’s a danger…..

                ….so I guess what I’m saying is two cheers for majority rule and one cheer for well-placed veto points. That’s not to say I think the EC is necessarily a good thing, and as you say, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

                ETA: I don’t mean to imply that you don’t see dangers in majority rule.Report

        • Avatar LeeEsq in reply to InMD
          Ignored
          says:

          What if dealing with the system the way it is requires the Democratic Party to abandon it’s more vulnerable base? The entire idea of the anti-idpol or class or race theory of politics is that by engaging in the right policies and saying the right words in the right order, the Democratic Party can break the stranglehold that the Republican Party has over White America? What if that is wrong? What if a lot of White America really does want herrenvolk democracy and is increasingly fine with the anti-democratic parts of American government because of that?Report

        • Avatar Alan Scott in reply to InMD
          Ignored
          says:

          “Teams that gained twice the yards still lose by 50 yard field goals. The game is what it is.” Sure, but a field goal used to be worth five points. They changed it because five point field goals lead to shitty football.

          The Electoral College doesn’t just give the advantage to Republican candidates–it specifically gives the advantage to shitty Republican candidates like Trump. I don’t expect the Electoral College to last past my lifetime, because at some point even the Republicans are going to want to see some touchdowns.Report

          • Avatar InMD in reply to Alan Scott
            Ignored
            says:

            I think any analysis that envisions a critical mass of GOP reps in Congress and state legislatures across the country giving up a structural advantage for their party is so divorced from reality I wouldn’t know where to begin.Report

          • Avatar Pinky in reply to Alan Scott
            Ignored
            says:

            I don’t think you can talk about the Electoral College giving some advantage unless you’re comparing it against something, which puts the cart before the horse. We weren’t set up to be a democracy, so there’s no reason it should be the benchmark against which we measure our system.

            Additionally, you can’t compare the results of this election under the EC to the results of this election if we didn’t have the EC, because the change would have a lot of effects. The primary system is set up with states in mind; I don’t see how that could survive the removal of the EC. Both parties are built around state structures; take away the primaries, and they’d lose power. We’re already seeing greater unity within each party, but that’s creating a tension between regional cultures. We don’t know where that would lead in the new scenario.

            Actually, I see three different scenarios that kind of get blurred together: what if we had never had an EC, what if this election was decided by the popular vote instead of the EC, and what if we got rid of the EC. They’d be very different.Report

            • Avatar InMD in reply to Pinky
              Ignored
              says:

              The ‘never had’ is such a counter-factual it would result in major differences in history.

              The push I think comes from the tension created by our own federal administrative state and the lack of basis for it in the constitution. Like who cares if the president is elected through the EC when the president is just some functionary administering policy set by Congress? Now, and particularly in the face of Congressional gridlock, its become a powerful policy making office.

              Calling the EC ‘minority rule’ wouldn’t have made sense in the context of which it was created. Of course when people talk about it that way now my immediate question is ‘what do you want, a popularly elected king?’ And the answer I think is an implicit ‘yes we do.’

              All of this is a rambling way of saying I agree with you, that it isn’t a simple question of enfranchisement, but of our entire constitutional structure. And by all means we should be free to have those discussions, but we need to understand if goes beyond a question of partisan advantage. I’d only be open to eliminating the EC if it came with clearer constitutional restrictions on the executive branch. Which you know, is exactly what advocates of eliminating the EC don’t want.Report

              • Avatar Stillwater in reply to InMD
                Ignored
                says:

                Which you know, is exactly what advocates of eliminating the EC don’t want.

                Another way to look at it: if the POTUS *already* has king-like power, then isn’t it better for the person wielding it to represent the will of citizen voters than the will of abstract entities like states?Report

              • Avatar InMD in reply to Stillwater
                Ignored
                says:

                My honest answer is I don’t know. Maybe in the abstract yes.

                However I worry in practice it would grant legitimacy to a bunch of highly suspect actions and encourage an even further pushing of the envelope. Like who else would be able ro question the one person popularly elected by the entire country? Could already battered and blurred checks and balances on an aging piece of paper contain that person?

                And I’m not dismissing it out of hand. But we’re talking about changing the constitution and if we’re doing that I’m not abolishing the EC and leaving the executive branch as is.Report

              • Avatar Jaybird in reply to InMD
                Ignored
                says:

                Seeing arguments for a stronger executive at the same time as seeing arguments for abolishing the senate (not here, not in this thread, but elsewhere) has me thinking stuff like “haven’t we seen this movie before?”

                Maybe this time it will be different, of course.Report

              • Avatar InMD in reply to Jaybird
                Ignored
                says:

                Sure. But I don’t want to dismiss the critics out of hand either. My understanding is that the driver for the Senate going to popular vote was crippling gridlock in state legislatures. It was getting to the point where states couldn’t even seat Senators.

                We may be starting to run up against a similar failure. The president gets ever more powerful because our parties turned from vessels of regional interests to ideological actors and are now unable to compromise. So the question is what does eliminating the EC do in these circumstances? I’m not sure it helps.Report

              • Avatar Stillwater in reply to InMD
                Ignored
                says:

                Also note, which I think is directly related to your worry, that the EC, and not the popular vote, handed the presidency to a totalitarian who tried to use his power as Chief Executive to overthrow his duly elected successor, and did so in a multiplicity of ways, by some accounts almost succeeding. (The most recently reported attempt involved the DOJ.)

                Ie., I don’t think the electoral college is a check on the type of abuses you’re worried about.Report

              • Avatar InMD in reply to Stillwater
                Ignored
                says:

                Is it by itself going to stop that from happening? Of course not. But I don’t think it’s meaningless either.

                If it was why did Trump spend his entire 4 years in office defensively lying about the popular vote? I think the fact that he lost the popular vote absolutely gnawed at him and undermined any argument outside of his true believers that he had a broad mandate.Report

            • Avatar gabriel conroy in reply to Pinky
              Ignored
              says:

              Another interesting thing to consider (interesting to me, at least) is how a popular vote would be administered. I strongly suspect that if the EC is replaced, there would still be a role played by the individual states in validating or certifying the count in their own jurisdiction.

              I say that as an addition to the discussion. I think I pretty much agree with you overall.Report

              • Avatar InMD in reply to gabriel conroy
                Ignored
                says:

                I think that’s exactly right and much like state legislatures draw their own Congressional districts with… we’ll say idiosyncratic results, we could expect all kinds of interesting takes on administration. It’s far from clear to me everything would play out exactly as it does now, just this one thing would be different.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to gabriel conroy
                Ignored
                says:

                I’m not sure what you mean by administering the vote. Are you talking about the states’ role in a national election in which the president is chosen by majority vote? How would the states have a meaningful role? I must be misunderstanding something.Report

              • Avatar gabriel conroy in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                I presume states would have to certify the election results, just like they do now. The main difference would be that instead of saying, say, “we certify that Sangamon’s 19 electoral votes go for X,” they’d say, “we certify that 1,259,139 votes went for X, 1, 111,057 votes went for Y, and 11,215 went for 3d candidate Z.”

                The states, presumably, would also probably have their own laws about how voter registration takes place and about marginal issues, such as whether ex-felons should be allowed to vote.

                However, maybe I’m wrong, and maybe a hypothetical dismantling of the EC would also create (god help us) a fully nationally administered and certified election process.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to gabriel conroy
                Ignored
                says:

                The states wouldn’t be much different from a British king, ceremonially nodding assent.

                I’m a big states’ rights guy. Pro 10th Amendment, anti 17th Amendment, pro Electoral College, and for intellectual consistency there should probably be some mechanism for secession. What’s greginak has been calling “minority rule” on this thread isn’t that; it’s states’ rule. And since the 10th gets no respect, basically we’re down to the EC to speak for the states.Report

              • Avatar gabriel conroy in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                I admit that the states’ role would be ceremonial, but there are points on the margin where that role would affect the outcome, for good or for ill (where “good” and “ill” are defined by my policy preferences and not necessarily my constitutional preferences).

                I’d quibble a little with your view that states get no respect. However, I admit they get less respect than the 10th amendment seems to grant, at least on my reading. I do think they have more than just the EC.

                I know we’re on opposite sides when it comes to support for Trump. I oppose and you, it seems, support him. (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) That said, the recent years have given me a deeper respect for subsidiarity and federalism–and for what one might call states’ rights, though I shy away from the word “rights” to describe what it is I think states should have.Report

              • Avatar Pinky in reply to gabriel conroy
                Ignored
                says:

                I think Trump’s a malicious idiot and I’m glad he’s gone. I’m also glad I didn’t have to vote for him. If the system were a direct democracy, I would have voted for him. That’s not why I support the EC, but I am glad about that part. And from that personal perspective, I wonder how many millions more votes he would have gotten if there were no EC.Report

              • Avatar gabriel conroy in reply to Pinky
                Ignored
                says:

                Thanks for clarifying your views.

                And yes, I’ve wondered the same thing.Report

    • Avatar Kazzy in reply to Pinky
      Ignored
      says:

      I was thinking of this exact thing today and wondering how it compared. Thanks for the research.

      Of course, this only looks at it from one side. 74K votes the other way in NC and Biden wins by over 100 EVs.

      And in 2016, a similar number of votes the other way in Minnesota, Nevada, Maine, and NH gives Trump a 100+ EV win.

      Wiki has a nice summary:
      2020
      States where the margin of victory was under 1% (37 electoral votes; all won by Biden):
      Georgia, 0.24% – 16
      Arizona, 0.31% – 11
      Wisconsin, 0.63% – 10 (tipping-point state for Biden victory)[368]

      States where the margin of victory was between 1% and 5% (86 electoral votes; 42 won by Biden, 44 by Trump):
      Pennsylvania, 1.16% – 20 (tipping-point state for Trump victory)
      North Carolina, 1.35% – 15
      Nevada, 2.39% – 6
      Michigan, 2.78% – 16
      Florida, 3.36% – 29

      States/districts where the margin of victory was between 5% and 10% (80 electoral votes; 17 won by Biden, 63 by Trump):
      Texas, 5.58% – 38
      Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, 6.50% – 1
      Minnesota, 7.11% – 10
      New Hampshire, 7.35% – 4
      Maine’s 2nd congressional district, 7.44% – 1
      Ohio, 8.03% – 18
      Iowa, 8.20% – 6
      Maine, 9.07% – 2

      2016:
      States where the margin of victory was under 1% (50 electoral votes; 46 won by Trump, four by Clinton):
      Michigan, 0.23% – 16
      New Hampshire, 0.37% – 4
      Pennsylvania, 0.72% – 20 (tipping point state, including two faithless GOP electors)[490]
      Wisconsin, 0.77% – 10 (tipping point state, excluding the two faithless GOP electors)[490]

      States/districts where the margin of victory was between 1% and 5% (83 electoral votes; 56 won by Trump, 27 by Clinton):
      Florida, 1.20% – 29
      Minnesota, 1.52% – 10
      Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, 2.24% – 1
      Nevada, 2.42% – 6
      Maine, 2.96% – 2
      Arizona, 3.50% – 11
      North Carolina, 3.66% – 15
      Colorado, 4.91% – 9

      States where the margin of victory was between 5% and 10% (94 electoral votes; 76 won by Trump, 18 by Clinton):
      Georgia, 5.16% – 16
      Virginia, 5.32% – 13
      Ohio, 8.13% – 18
      New Mexico, 8.21% – 5
      Texas, 8.99% – 36
      Iowa, 9.41% – 6

      In 2016, Trump dominated the states that were any degree of close. In 2020, Biden swept the closest states, they split the next closest, and Trump dominated the somewhat close.Report

    • Avatar Will Truman in reply to Pinky
      Ignored
      says:

      I think your math is off?

      It reads tpo me that Trump needed 43k (10.5k+12k+20.5k) to tie (232+11+16+10=269) and 65k (43k+22k) to win (269+1)

      It was even closer than that.Report

  4. Avatar Damon
    Ignored
    says:

    It was a prediction. Plenty of results have been called in the past…plenty were dead wrong. If voters seriously pay attention to the calls and don’t vote, well, it’s their own damn fault.Report

  5. Avatar Stillwater
    Ignored
    says:

    What I firmly believe, however, is that the Arizona call was very premature, not justified when they called it, and nearly a disaster.

    Not really. The vote totals are just the vote totals.

    Calling a state, however, is not just a prediction. It is declaring it over.

    So what? The vote count still continues, and it is what it is.

    Americans seem to think the running vote-count is like Alabama and Clemson trading touchdowns and three-point kicks. Like one candidate is making a push, only to have it countered by the opponent. It’s weird, and just another indicator of the quality of our culture.Report

  6. Avatar Michael Cain
    Ignored
    says:

    I called Arizona about the same time Fox did. Biden had taken the lead. It was the point in previous ballot counts where the “blue shift” kicked in. I also said that Biden would win AZ by 100,000 votes or more. I was wrong. Arizona had changed their process, and the ballots that caused the historical blue shift had already been counted. I suspect that Fox made exactly the same error. We got lucky. I can make the excuse that it’s just me and there are only so many hours in the day*. Fox can’t claim the same.

    Look at 2018 for an example of the AZ blue shift. Sinema didn’t take the lead in the counting for the Senate race until a couple of days after the election, but eventually won by >2%.

    * F*ck anyone who criticizes. My wife was diagnosed with the early stages of dementia. I had to buy a house, move, sell a house, so she and the granddaughters can know each other while she’s still her. In the middle of a pandemic. 2020 was a crappy year. But State-of-the-Discussion still works. Cartogram.pl may be available on git next month. I have faith that the “peaceful partition” book will reach a draft stage some year, and that the cat-chaser system will work before I die.Report

  7. Avatar Michael Cain
    Ignored
    says:

    I assert that AZ and GA reflect the “demographic trend” that matters: high growth in the suburbs. Couple that with the Republicans’ leaning towards policies that will eventually piss off enough voters in those changing suburbs. If I’m right, then NC and TX are the two large states to watch. It may take a while. Colorado was 15 years behind California, and Arizona 15 years behind Colorado.Report

    • Avatar Damon in reply to Michael Cain
      Ignored
      says:

      And how much of that is due to folks fleeing blue states like Cali and changing the mix in red states. It happened in colorado, oregon, and wash.Report

      • Avatar Michael Cain in reply to Damon
        Ignored
        says:

        The California Diaspora is definitely a thing. Though watching the Colorado suburbs for 30+ years now, I think the inflow of young people from the Midwest is a bigger driver here: the staggering population growth for the last 40 years has not been mostly Californians. I’m not enough of a demographer to try to do anything rigorous with the idea that the blueing of the West and reddening of the Midwest over the same period of time are related, but that’s my intuition.Report

        • Avatar Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain
          Ignored
          says:

          I think that much of the problem is that if someone moves here from Indiana, they will say “golly, I can’t believe that my house cost that much! But the food is so good and the mountains are so beautiful and I can’t believe that it’s not cloudy, even though it’s January!”

          If someone moves here from California, they say “I paid cash for my house. It sucks that you guys don’t have an In’n’Out!”Report

          • Avatar Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird
            Ignored
            says:

            The Californian may well vote blue simply out of habit.

            The tipping point for the Colorado Democrats occurred around 2006, and one of the large keys was they figured out that if they could focus that Hoosier on the question of public lands for recreation rather than extraction, the Hoosier would also vote blue. The Gang of Four was very good at focusing specific voters on specific questions.Report

            • Avatar Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain
              Ignored
              says:

              Hey, I was just saying why I find the Californian moving here more memorable than the Hoosier.Report

              • Avatar Michael Cain in reply to Jaybird
                Ignored
                says:

                And I’m just pointing out why the Hoosier was probably more important to turning Colorado blue. Consider the case of our former Governor and new junior Senator.

                Born in Pennsylvania, went to a liberal arts college in Connecticut, brought his shiny new geology degree to Colorado to work. When he got laid off during the mid-1980s oil bust, rather than retreating to Houston like so many of the laid-off geologists he stayed on and did something entirely different: the first brewpub.

                During the sequence of the dot-com implosion, telecom bust, and 2001 recession, I knew a ton of well-educated people who said, “I’ll stay in Colorado and find something else to do” rather than move.

                In the literature about higher education, there’s a thing called “the Colorado Paradox”. We’re only so-so at getting the kids born here through high school and college. But we have one of the highest-educated workforces in the country because so many people bring degrees they got elsewhere to Colorado to work.Report

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *