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The primary job of a Vice Presidential candidate is to help you win the election. I know that people worry about lots of other things like if the Presidential candidate likes the VP candidate, but everything takes a backseat to getting elected.
An obvious media obsession is the race or ethnicity of the candidates. For instance of the primary candidates for Democratic VP, two names come up, one MAWG and one young Latino.
Timothy Michael Kaine (age 58) Senator from Virginia
Julián Castro Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (age 41) Former Mayor of San Antonio
In the 2010,*United States of America was 63.01% "white, not Latino" a percentage which drops every year. But in the 2016 Presidential election, really only a few states matter. The other states and DC can be predicted to vote Democrat or Republican with almost certainty.
2012 Presidential Election Electoral College Votes (Democrats won by 126 votes)
332 Barack Obama
206 Mitt Romney
So a shift of 63 votes would have resulted in a tie.
If Trump wins these three states or the following six states he wins 67 more electoral college votes than Romney
29 Florida
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
10 Wisconsin
9 Colorado
6 Iowa
4 New Hampshire
By and large these states have higher than normal percentage of "white, not Latino" citizens.
The primary job of a Vice Presidential candidate is to help you win the election. I know that people worry about lots of other things like if the Presidential candidate likes the VP candidate, but everything takes a backseat to getting elected.
An obvious media obsession is the race or ethnicity of the candidates. For instance of the primary candidates for Democratic VP, two names come up, one MAWG and one young Latino.
Timothy Michael Kaine (age 58) Senator from Virginia
Julián Castro Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (age 41) Former Mayor of San Antonio
In the 2010,*United States of America was 63.01% "white, not Latino" a percentage which drops every year. But in the 2016 Presidential election, really only a few states matter. The other states and DC can be predicted to vote Democrat or Republican with almost certainty.
2012 Presidential Election Electoral College Votes (Democrats won by 126 votes)
332 Barack Obama
206 Mitt Romney
So a shift of 63 votes would have resulted in a tie.
If Trump wins these three states or the following six states he wins 67 more electoral college votes than Romney
29 Florida
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
10 Wisconsin
9 Colorado
6 Iowa
4 New Hampshire
By and large these states have higher than normal percentage of "white, not Latino" citizens.
So, the critical undecided vote for the 2016 election is "white, not latino".
I have been saying this along. The Latino vote is not significant enough yet to pander to them as so many Democrats and some Republicans are doing. They need to appeal more to the non-Latino white voter.
The problem with this theory is some of these states are continuing to get more diverse (Colorado and Florida especially) so the white not latino vote in those states will diminish more than it would nationwide. You also have a state like Pennsylvania which hasn't gone Republican for President since 1988. Not to mention the white vote differs quite a bit in the state. The working class white rural voters in western PA (which has trended heavily Republican) are considerably different than the middle and upper middle class white voters in suburban Philly (which use to be the GOP base and have trended heavily Democratic)
a state like Wisconsin which hasn't gone Republican since 84 and wasn't all that close in 2012 and would require a significant shift in the white vote (and others which were in the 5-6 point victory range for Obama)
As you will note, the VP is the first one in the line to move into the position of POTUS should that person not be able to fulfill the duties, which kind of makes the choice important one when you have older candidates and/or ones with notable ill health (Hillary) or one that may go down for breaking all the rules (Hillary).
So, the VP choice is important and even more so in this election unless you can prove otherwise, what you are saying does not make sense.
The primary job of a Vice Presidential candidate is to help you win the election. I know that people worry about lots of other things like if the Presidential candidate likes the VP candidate, but everything takes a backseat to getting elected.
An obvious media obsession is the race or ethnicity of the candidates. For instance of the primary candidates for Democratic VP, two names come up, one MAWG and one young Latino.
Timothy Michael Kaine (age 58) Senator from Virginia
Julián Castro Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (age 41) Former Mayor of San Antonio
In the 2010,*United States of America was 63.01% "white, not Latino" a percentage which drops every year. But in the 2016 Presidential election, really only a few states matter. The other states and DC can be predicted to vote Democrat or Republican with almost certainty.
2012 Presidential Election Electoral College Votes (Democrats won by 126 votes)
332 Barack Obama
206 Mitt Romney
So a shift of 63 votes would have resulted in a tie.
If Trump wins these three states or the following six states he wins 67 more electoral college votes than Romney
29 Florida
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
20 Pennsylvania
18 Ohio
10 Wisconsin
9 Colorado
6 Iowa
4 New Hampshire
By and large these states have higher than normal percentage of "white, not Latino" citizens.
So, the critical undecided vote for the 2016 election is "white, not latino".
It's not Latino vote alone that's a problem; its those states where the total minority vote (counting Latino as minority) reaches close to 30% of the total vote. If the minority vote reaches that level, and continues to tilt Democratic by better than 5 to 1, which was the case in 2012 with Romney only receiving 17% of the total minority vote, you need 65% of the white vote to overcome it. With the exception of the old Confederate states and states in Appalachia, you rarely have white voters tilt to one party by that magnitude.
But I grant you though, for Trump the most important voters are white college grads. While he's winning non-college whites by huge numbers, he's far behind Romney 2012 with college voters. With most of the polls I've seen, Trump loses more with white college than he has gained in white non-college. In an NBC poll from a few weeks ago, Trump was already receiving a couple of points more from white non-college than Romney did, with some undecided left so he could add to his total. But while Romney carried white college voters by 14%, the poll had Clinton and Trump splitting them evenly.
In the Pew Poll of July 7th, Trump led Clinton 57-36 among white n/h non-college voters but was losing white n/h college grads 52-40. The Republican candidate has never lost the white n/h college grad vote, since it was first tracked in polls since 1956, but no Republican has been as unpopular with that group as Donald Trump. In 1956 it wouldn't have mattered because there were few college grad voters. But in 2012, white college voters equaled white non-college voters for the first time. With white n/h non-college voters share of total votes cast shrinking on an average of 3% with every Presidential election for the past 20 years, and white n/h college grads gaining about 1% on average per cycle, and Trump currently being killed in polling of the minority vote, there aren't enough non-college white voters alone to pull Trump to victory. He has to do much better with white college voters to have any chance at all. According to the Pew Poll again, which may or may not prove to be accurate in the long term, but is unique because of the detail of the data they provide, they currently have Trump leading Clinton 51-42 among white voters, which needless to say, isn't nearly enough to win.
Trump has managed to lose every single demographic accept for uneducated, white men. Bureaucat's analysis is correct in that percent of white voters doesn't mean anything when Trump is only winning one demographic; he is losing college educated whites by a good margin.
It's not Latino vote alone that's a problem; its those states where the total minority vote (counting Latino as minority) reaches close to 30% of the total vote.
In the last census 2 out of 3 Americans live in a state where 30% or more Americans fall into one or more minority racial group or are Latino. I don't have the numbers handy, but I'm sure a few more states have slipped over since 2010.
So you are talking about the majority of America and not that many battleground states
79.63% *Hawaii
73.55% *District of Columbia
60.49% *New Mexico
57.54% *California
56.52% *Texas
51.75% *Nevada
48.78% *Arizona
47.07% *Georgia
44.38% *Florida
43.08% *Maryland
42.66% *South Carolina
41.78% *Mississippi
40.78% *North Carolina
40.33% *Alaska
39.31% *New York
38.36% *Louisiana
37.94% *Virginia
36.79% *New Jersey
36.75% *Delaware
36.32% *Colorado
34.61% *Alabama
34.35% *Illinois
31.86% *Oklahoma
31.10% *Utah
30.81% *Washington
To be fair to your analysis, the general population includes children, of which a huge majority fall into one or more ethnic or racial minority. The actual percentage of voters would be a smaller subset of the above states.
California and Texas by virtue of their huge size contain 1 out of 5 Americans. But because they are more diverse, they contain 1 out of 3 minority members.
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