What are the chances of Trump winning Pennsylvania again in 2020 Election?

[wanderer34]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

You've written a cogent and thoughtful response, one that I agree with in part and disagree with in part, so I'll do my best to give this the response it deserves.



Trump's championing of that border wall will keep a good chunk of Hispanic voters who might otherwise have voted for him from doing so. Because of that, I wouldn't bet on him winning the Hispanic vote.

It depends which Latinos. If you're Mexican, more than likely most (not all) would be offended that a barrier would be built along the southern border, as well as being stereotyped as rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. This is what I was talking about before when I said that them Dems will risk the Latino vote by playing the "one size fits all" playbook rather than learning each Latino ethnicity and their needs. A Colombian and Venezuelan are practically similar but even so they're different in many ways, and don't get started with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, they're most similar to each other, but even those two have their differences. That's like saying all Indians eat chop suey and all Japanese eat curry because they're all Asian and we know that's not true and this is going to cost the Dems big in 2020.

It doesn't help that AOC and Luis Gutierrez (both Puerto Rican) are talking about immigration reform when decade after decade Puerto Ricans ranked as the poorest Latinos and there's no real dialogue on how to help Puerto Rican Americans in the mainland. Puerto Ricans and Cubans for the most part have no trouble with immigration and while Cubans are political refugees and Puerto Ricans are automatic citizens regardless of being born on the island or on the mainland, despite both being culturally and even physically different from the rest of the American populace, I don't feel that a Puerto Rican or a Cuban should tell an immigrant about immigration reform, I feel both of them should be restricted to their countries and just because both are Latino, doesn't make them qualified to be experts of immigration and it insults my intelligence just because they're both Latino.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

But there's also that same paradox that we witness among Blacks: Hispanics are also conservative culturally, but they too don't vote their morality.

It's going to depend how this growing Latino demographic evolves from being a fringe demographic in the 1980s and 1990s to the largest minority group today. I'm pretty sure that if a Latino was going to win the presidency, he (or she nowadays) is going to be Cuban descent and a Republican (á la Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio). I don't see somebody of Mexican descent really making it, and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans could go as far as reaching governor or senator in states like CT, RI, and even NJ or DE.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Actually, truth to tell, Trump isn't that much of a homophobe; he was pretty pro-LGBT when he was merely a New York developer and reality-TV star. But his base in the GOP includes the Judgmentalist Christians, so he has to toss them some chum (though their willingness to overlook his own more serious moral transgressions because he's delivering the political stuff they want just shows once again what hypocrites they are).

Agreed. If Trump was pro-LGBT like he was in the past, then he would've never won the Republican nomination in 2016, therefore forget the presidency, but he had to downplay it. He still has LGBT supporters (Log Cabin Republicans), but once again he has to downplay it not because he hates gays, but he has to reach out to evangelicals and conservatives, even though he's not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

You can find plenty of evidence of Trump's bigotry in his past; The Atlantic presented lots of documentary evidence late last summer, and his real estate firm has entered into consent decrees based on rather extensive testimony the FBI collected about the Trump Organization's rental practices. Granted, the company admitted no wrongdoing, which ultimately led to a consent decree, but I doubt that what got reported in both The Atlantic and this Business Insider article was made up.

As for narcissism, well, his niece Mary put together a rather damning account of it in her recently released book. Most politicians have this trait to a greater or lesser degree, but he has it to an extreme degree. Consider today: while the country, including all three of his living predecessors, were paying final respects to John Lewis, he calls a hasty press conference to get on center stage (none had been planned for this day).

I feel it's more Trump's father than himself, albeit I'm not absolving any blame on Donald. He's just as much a part of the racial discrimination as his father was but you have to remember this was the 1970's and Trump didn't even have full control of the Trump Organization until the 1980's. Even though Donald was the president of TTO, Fred was the chairman of the board, so his father made the final decisions, but like I said, that's not absolving Donald from any blame neither and maybe Donald learned from his father's racial mistakes by reaching out to black superstars like Mike Tyson, Lawrence Taylor, and Herschel Walker in the 80's as a way for absolving his father's racial sins.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

You're right on that last part, but we're not there yet. I think, however, that you might be surprised to find left-of-center Blacks who also believe that we should be forming and supporting more businesses.

We shouldn't be surprised, in fact that has to be the status quo of any group. Do you see any Italians eating in Olive Garden or buying a cheesesteak at Wawa? NO! Would you find a Jew getting Kosher food at Subway? NOT A MAJORITY OF THEM. The Chinese food we eat at takeouts isn't even the authentic stuff the Chinese eat at home and I'd be damned of eating at a Caribbean restaurant when roti and oxtails with rice and peas are served by a Mexican owned and operated restaurant posing as Caribbean. I don't care how cheap the food is, that establishment would go out of business in a matter of months because we Caribbean folks value quality as well as quantity and we're not that hungry to undercut ourselves just because we want to save a few dollars.

I could live with Arab convenience stores, Korean dry cleaners, Vietnamese nail salons and barber shops (I'm not a woman and I stopped cutting my hair in 2013), Indian quickie marts, and Chinese takeout places, so long as we have our Caribbean restaurants and soul food places in certain parts of the city. If there's none, and we make up 90% of the population in a section, then there's a major problem and you'll see mini-riots until we see that we're represented in the small and mom-and-pop businesses. And even though I use Uber at times, I do miss the old medallion cabs, as they're much cheaper and they're more knowledgable of the city streets than the Uber drivers.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

And I think that more than "a few" Berniecrats will pull the lever (or punch the button) for Biden this fall. Polls show that something like 75 percent of Democrats agree with the statement that removing Trump from office is the most important task at hand this November.

The "lesser of two evils" type of voting is done an while there are some things that I can agree and some things I can't with both candidates, the point of the matter is that if both candidates can't bring any tangibles, especially to the black community, I just don't see how not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump when under that same logic, not voting for Trump is actually a vote for Biden so the idiots who had this logic are the biggest morons and if Trump wins, I'll just laugh at them for suggesting this and I'll laugh at the pollsters for tinkering with Biden's and Trump's numbers and I won't be surprised if some of those pollsters end up on the streets with no pot to **** in.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

What Biden had been doing up until this week is following the old political maxim, "If your opponent is busy destroying himself, don't get in the way."

But you and I both know he can't just do that all the way to November. So he has been raising his profile and offering people reasons to actually vote for him.

Your point about the debates below, however, is well taken.

Biden is too old and out of touch with the under-50 crowd. The over-50 and especially the senior crowd will vote for Biden, but then more seniors will vote for Trump. It's just that the under 30's are going to be not motivated to wait in rain, sleet, or snow just to vote for Biden and I wouldn't be surprised if either the rain, sleet, or snow comes this Election Day. And it would be very interesting depending on where you live, whether the hood turns out to vote in higher numbers or the suburbs or the sticks and mountains and I fear the "other PA" will show up in fuller force this time to stick it to the polls and MSM while we'll take the Democrats for granted, as usual and not vote this year.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Those hippies may have gotten more conservative, but they didn't all become Republicans. If they were college-educated, some of them became Democrats anyway.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

"I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" was funny as hell. But I don't see what that middle clip says about women today.

The middle clip was just alluring what many black women are doing nowadays, having fake boobs, fake butts, and fake hair.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

"I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat." --Will Rogers

Yes, they are, and New York isn't Philadelphia either. Yet Democrats govern all five cities.

The interesting thing is, based on what I see happening here, there is a sort of convergence taking place among urban Democratic electorates.

But NYC and Philadelphia are the most similar cities. Another city that similar to both cities is Boston. Baltimore and DC are south of the Mason Dixon Line and while both cities are just as urban as NYC and Philadelphia, the demographics and even the native accents are strikingly different. Both cities are essentially black/white cities (although DC has become more cosmopolitan in recent years and Baltimore has declined into a shell of what it once was). Plus MD was a slave state while PA (and to a certain extent DE) was more "free states" however there was reports of slaves in Philadelphia when Washington was president and DE had smaller numbers of slaves in comparison to even MD and especially VA. Heck, NYC had the first slave auction in America, so my birth city has skeletons and the first commodities in the NYSE was African slaves!!!

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

I actually have no problem with your spending priorities here, either.

But Trump came into office talking a great infrastructure game. Once in, however, he didn't even bother to follow through.

Even though he didn't follow through his entire plan, most of the stuff he promised (the southern border wall, the improved economy, lowest unemployment rates, the USMCA, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, and even foreign policy, which was his weakest point) happened and killing the first, the second, and even the third in commands for Isis was assassinated so for people who feel that terrorism is a major voting issue, Trump wins in this regard.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

And Mitt Romney was also the lone Republican to vote to impeach the President. I doubt he will then vote for him come November.

Romney is just another RINO and that will cost him in 2024 for somebody who's actually from Utah, not any old Mormon from anywhere.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

I maintain that there are some things more important than policy to deal with this time. Trump has done several things I even approve of, like the First Step Act and the recent executive order elevating job skills over educational credentials when considering candidates for Federal employment. But I consider his character so defective and his integrity so lacking that were he still a Democrat and holding this office, I'd vote him out just as quickly.

Bush Sr promised "No New Taxes" and when he got into office, he raised federal taxes, Bush Jr placed the Patriot Act after 9/11 and lagged when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Reagan placed drugs in the inner cities, Clinton and JFK were both rampant womanizers, Obama was soft, Carter was cowardly about Iran despite being commissioned in the Navy, Nixon lied, and LBJ despite passing the Civil Rights Act, was a racist and we can go on and on about different president's shortcomings, but it's still not going to make Biden a president as long as he has these gaffes (https://youtu.be/91ohifzjk1M).

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

The Libertarians already have a candidate; she doesn't have the name recognition former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson had four years ago and won't pick up as many votes. But given that, I don't think the NeverTrumpers will field a third-party candidate. They're going to be more like my ex, slowly but quietly coming around to accept the idea of voting for Biden. Carly Fiorina, the HP CEO who ran for the GOP nomination for President herself, has already said to a reporter that since the choice in any American election is ultimately a binary one, she will be voting for Biden come fall. The same logic that is already driving Bermiecrats to vote for Biden will send NeverTrumpers in the same direction.

Well, maybe Fiorina is a RINO and I'm not surprised since she's from CA anyways, the most liberal state in the Union. Yes, there are Republicans who hate Trump including members of the Bush family because they thought that Jeb Bush was going to be the next one after Obama (and if he was, I would've really left the country and went to either Canada or the Caribbean), but Jeb bungled on a lot of issues and being married to somebody of Mexican descent didn't help him either, considering that illegal immigration was (and still is) a major topic this election cycle.

Illegal immigration isn't even number one, it's actually the economy and now with the coronavirus, healthcare and sovereignty. And Fauci looks very plastic day after day and I believe people are going to show up for the polls, even if the American electorate have to wear face masks, and now goggles and face shields and stand 6 feet from one another to cast their ballot in rain , sleet, or snow just to vote for who they like.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Which, btw, is why the Democratic Establishment pretty much fell into line behind Biden once the Black voters of South Carolina gave them permission to do so. I think that any Democrat would have been able to win without adding some of those disaffected Republicans to their electoral coalition, and while that crowd might vote for Biden through clenched teeth, they sure as hell wouldn't vote for a self-described socialist.

If people were iffy about Sanders, Beto would've been a better choice since he's younger and comes from TX, which has the second most electoral votes behind CA but Beto was flat and didn't really electrify the electorate. The black voters in SC don't really reflect the black voters from NYC, the black voters from Philadelphia, the black voters from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St Louis, Oakland, LA, or even fellow souther cities like Atlanta and Miami. SC doesn't really have a major city over 200K and the closest is Charleston, which has about 130K and just surpassed Columbia as the largest city in that state. And then there's North Charleston, which is the third largest city in SC and wouldn't really be surprised if it became the second considering it's growth.

But SC as a whole is still very rural and much slower than NC with Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, and especially GA with Atlanta and ditto FL. even amongst Southerners, each state is different with it's own identity, and there's a common joke amongst Southerners that Virgina, despite being home the the former Confederate capital, Richmond, is still too far North, FL isn't really the South (even though it's the most Southern state in the Union, geography), LA is basically another French outpost, and TX is just more than just another nation, it's just another world, especially for East Coast outsiders like myself.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Agreed with that second boldfaced statement — he's more of a right-populist. But Nelson Rockefeller? You've just inadvertently touched on one of Trump's insecurities: He wanted to be accepted as part of New York's elite society, but that society snubbed him.

And — Attica notwithstanding — Nelson Rockefeller was a good bit more liberal than Trump is now.

One thing Trump has over Nelson Rockefeller was that Trump is already the president and Rockefeller couldn't even achieve that feat and it's funny considering that the Rockefellers are basically old money (petroleum) while the Trumps are new money (real estate and casinos) and old money couldn't even achieve the highest office in the land and most powerful office in the world but some guy from Queens beat them to the punch.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

My point about Biden was that Delawareans have already taken the markdown on his gaffes. Those won't faze them going into November.

I'm not just talking about Delawareans, but the nation in general. DE may still back their man, but the other states not so much and Biden has become the modern-day version of Mondale.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

I would like him to pick Stacey Abrams myself. I think she has a promising future and would also take the party in a good direction.

She may be a promising politician in the near future, but I don't see how she's going to gain any traction with her remarks about the undocumented and how they should vote when those same undocumented don't even have the privilege of dong that. If Abrams doesn't backtrack and clarify her statements, it's going to haunt her political career and you wonder why she was close to defeating Brian Kemp in GA's gubernatorial election.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

I really don't think anyone would deliberately put the economy in a coma just for the hell of it. We all heard what happened in Italy, we had no defenses in place, Trump had disbanded the CDC pandemic planning team his predecessor established, and he was busy pooh-poohing the pandemic as it was headed this way. While he was doing that, we should have been getting testing and contact tracing ready to roll. Instead, we didn't.

Those overloaded hospitals in New York City were stage props, then? The whole point of the lockdowns was not so much to save lives as to keep the hospitals from filling with patients. Outside of New York City, they worked.

Maybe we could have flattened the curves without shutting down the economy, but given what was happening in Europe at the time, "an abundance of caution" I think was defensible.

I feel that there's too much conspiracy going on with COVID-19 and how Bill Gates stated that COVID-19 was going to happen fiver years before it actually occurred. It's too much and the fact that it happened on an election year makes it too shady at the most and the Wuhan virus affected the entire world at that. I feel there's a much bigger agenda at hand than just trying to get rid of Trump. And nowadays, I'm no big fan of Bill Gates and especially no fan of Microsoft and their products and I personally feel Gates had Steve Jobs and Paul Allen (who was the real brains behind Microsoft as well as the tech revolution) killed, but that's another topic.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

The word that got auto-censored begins with Q and ends with R. If you go back and read the post I was responding to, you should be able to figure out what set me off. Depending on where in the Caribbean your family hailed from, they could have absorbed Jamaican levels of homophobia or Trinidadian tolerance — there's a wide spectrum of attitudes towards LGBT folk in the Caribbean, from what I can tell. My response there had nothing at all to do with Trump and everything to do with the person I was responding to. Not only did Trump's two appointees join the liberals and Chief Justice Roberts in the opinion that the title of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex covered sexual orientation too, but Trump's response to the ruling was very equaniminous — had he truly been opposed to LGBT folks, his response would have been more like one of his Tweets.

Trump isn't a real conservative, but because the Republicans are the party of business and families, and the Democrats are more associated with civil rights, equality, and minorities, Trump has no choice but to side with conservatives, when at the most he's just like Chris Christie, a fiscal conservative, not a social conservative, and the social conservatism that's practiced in AL, MS, KS, and UT won't fly in NY, NJ, CT, MA, and PA. Come 2022, when PA appropriates their state legislature, you're going to be seeing more Latino state representatives and senators, and a bit more Asian state representatives, and even another Black state senator, possibly in Pittsburgh.

PA will almost look like NY and NJ in a lot of ways demographically, culturally and maybe even politically, this being while a majority of the political power is concentrated in NYC for NYS, and much of the political power in NJ is concentrated in North Jersey, I won't be surprised if that same political power is concentrated in not just SE PA (Philadelphia, Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware, and Chester counties), but practically slightly over half of the power will be concentrated in the eastern tier of the state (Lehigh, Northampton, Monroe, Luzerne, Lackawanna, Pike, Berks, and Lancaster) due to the population decline in Western PA and the growth in eastern PA and I can't forget south central PA.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Um, in that article, Gov. Rendell didn't say the Dems shouldn't investigate the President. On the contrary, he said they should dig into as much of his dealings as possible aside from those Robert Mueller was already looking into. What he did say was that that the Democrats shouldn't be doing that and nothing else. He thought there were opportunities to work with Trump and get some things done across the aisle. They did indeed not take that advice.

Rendell was trying to tell the Dems to work out common goals such as infrastructure, the economy, and jobs. He sides with the Dems on immigration and civil rights, but then again, Rendell made it as far as governor and he was using his own experiences as PA governor to try to at least pass some laws that the Democrats could've used, such as DACA, but even so, the Dems didn't want DACA in lieu of the border wall, and the DACA deal would've given 1.5 M undocumented people amnesty but the Dems punted instead and the GOP scored another touchdown by finally finding out that the President didn't need to go through Congress just to build a wall and instead went through defense spending and used a portion of that money to build the border wall. That act alone will hurt the Dems when it comes to Latino voters than the GOP this Fall.

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

What do you mean Trump "didn't get inaugurated into office in 2017"? He absolutely did, and claimed the crowd that came to witness was the largest ever, despite photographic evidence from Barack Obama's first inauguration that put the lie to that claim. No, the average black voter wasn't clamoring for Trump's head on a pike, and I even made statements saying I though impeaching Trump unwise —*not because he had done nothing impeachable (he had) but because he would never get convicted in the Senate, and after surviving, Trump would claim it as proof he was innocent (which he did). Nancy Pelosi also tried to keep the hounds at bay for as long as she could, but the cries from the firebrands became too strong after the Ukraine phone call broke to continue resisting.

One of Trump's other problems is that he shoots from the lip way too much. I think people are now seeing that first hand in a way they hadn't before, and the fence-sitters don't like what they see. If Biden can give them a reason to vote for him and not just against Trump, those fence-sitters are his.

The bolded quote was a major typo as I meant that Trump was inaugurated in 2017, so it's my fault at that, but while Trump did get caught in some lies at that, the point of the matter is that 2016 is the biggest political upset in history because just about every media outlet felt that Trump was going to lose because he had no political experience and Hilary was going to win outright until the final days, and when the election day came in 2016, she had a hard time winning NC, FL, and TX, and the reliable Blue Wall states except MN failed to help Hilary n any way. She was also lucky in winning NH, and the only state in the traditional South that she won was VA which is funny because a lot of people thought she had PA in the bag (which she didn't).

But regardless, if the pollsters and the newspaper editors don't accurately show how Biden and Trump is doing, I could see the New York Times and The Washington Post selling $10 Sunday editions (buying the Philadelphia Inquirer is now $4.95, when it was $1.25 just a decade ago, the horror), and I could see these pollsters being on the streets by not accurately and fairly forecasting how the election is going to play out. Fox News will be the new standard for cable news while CNN will go junk status and it's a shame because I love CNN's election better than FOX's but Fox News seems to really be more fair and balanced nowadays albeit I used to hate them back in the 2000s to the early 2010s.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by wanderer34

[bulk deleted, though I will have a comment in passing below]

The bolded quote was a major typo as I meant that Trump was inaugurated in 2017, so it's my fault at that, but while Trump did get caught in some lies at that, the point of the matter is that 2016 is the biggest political upset in history because just about every media outlet felt that Trump was going to lose because he had no political experience and Hilary was going to win outright until the final days, and when the election day came in 2016, she had a hard time winning NC, FL, and TX, and the reliable Blue Wall states except MN failed to help Hilary n any way. She was also lucky in winning NH, and the only state in the traditional South that she won was VA which is funny because a lot of people thought she had PA in the bag (which she didn't).

But regardless, if the pollsters and the newspaper editors don't accurately show how Biden and Trump is doing, I could see the New York Times and The Washington Post selling $10 Sunday editions (buying the Philadelphia Inquirer is now $4.95, when it was $1.25 just a decade ago, the horror), and I could see these pollsters being on the streets by not accurately and fairly forecasting how the election is going to play out. Fox News will be the new standard for cable news while CNN will go junk status and it's a shame because I love CNN's election better than FOX's but Fox News seems to really be more fair and balanced nowadays albeit I used to hate them back in the 2000s to the early 2010s.

Good points on the diversity of Hispanic cultures. I tend to complain that both whites and Blacks alike define us (ourselves) as something of a cultural monolith, and I can tell a Midwestern Black from a Southeastern one, so I really shouldn't be engaging in the same sort of reductionism when it comes to native Spanish-speakers.

I disagree that "lesser of two evils" voting has gone the way of all flesh: you should have read PhillyMag's endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. There was a lot of nose-holding going on even then, and I also think that plenty of voters on both sides will be holding their noses as they mail in their ballots (assuming Trump doesn't achieve his goal of wrecking the Postal Service* in time to really muck up the election and thus claim fraud if he loses, which is the aim of his various Tweets and moves now) this fall. I know at least one Trump supporter who agrees with everything I say about his character but plans to vote for him anyway because policy (and no, this person is not only not a Judgmentalist Christian but a Black guy who lives near me and basically hustles stuff to put bread on his table).

But the main point I wish to make is that the critics of the pollsters are also getting it wrong. FiveThirtyEight, which is the best of the poll/poll analytics sites, did give Hillary Clinton 70 percent odds of beating Trump.But that meant Trump still had a 30 percent chance of winning, which he managed to take.

However, both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics aggregates of the polls had Hillary Clinton up by about 3 points in the national popular vote on the eve of the 2016 election. (That, by the way, is the standard margin of error for scientific polls.)

Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points.

So they did call the margin right. What they did miss was the effect non-college-educated voters would have in several of the industrial states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, both of which Trump carried by razor-thin margins (any one of a number of small moves in this state would have tipped it to Clinton, for instance: one of them was Blacks turning out in the same numbers they posted for Obama in the two prior elections).

The polls right now have Biden leading by wider margins both nationally and in several key states, plus Biden is actually competitive in several states that should be locks for Trump. Given the actual facts of 2016, I wouldn't dismiss those figures as made up. The pollsters are adjusting their formulas to give the less-educated voters more weight.

I do believe that even though there's talk on my side of the divide of a landslide, that won't happen either way: whoever wins in November will win by a narrow margin. Trump is plowing the ground to plant seeds of doubt should Biden be the winner, and IMO that's just one more data point in my argument for his unfitness: he's trying to undermine the legitimacy of our entire electoral process just to save his own hide, a highly irresponsible move.

*You're conversing with the son of two Federal civil servants. Mom was a Veterans Administration nurse for just about her entire career, rising into the administrative ranks in her middle and later years, and Dad was a letter-sorter at the main post office in Kansas City. Delivering the mail in a timely fashion is one of the fundamental functions we expect our government to perform (and even though we spun the U.S. Postal Service off as a quasi-private corporation, it remains attached to the Federal government), and for most of its history, the Post Office Department/U.S. Postal Servics has done so at a loss. Trump may be right that the USPS should raise its rates, but "reforming" the Postal Service by hobbling it is hardly the way to bring that about.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by Duderino

I guess I just don't understand why folks even think about bringing up Biden "gaffes" in defense of Trump.

Did we forget about the part where Donnie proudly explained he was super on board with sexual assault, or where he completely demeaned a disabled reporter? The man is a walking case of verbal diarrhea.

I also literally don't understand how racial minorities could see any hope in the Republican Party; it's proven itself over and over again in that it couldn't two ***** about the advancement of people of color. Hell, look at Trump's latest thinly-veiled racial dog whistle about how the Democrats will "destroy the beautiful suburbs" with more high-density housing, or how he'll send federal forces to the "inner city" on a moment's notice.

I mean, really, is it 1968? I can't think of a President in modern history who has been more desperate for a race war.

Not to say the Democrats have been absolutely perfect in that regard, but at least their party actually reflects racial diversity and human dignity.

He didn't say "high-density."

He said "low-income."

That's worse.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by wanderer34

But NYC and Philadelphia are the most similar cities. Another city that similar to both cities is Boston. Baltimore and DC are south of the Mason Dixon Line and while both cities are just as urban as NYC and Philadelphia, the demographics and even the native accents are strikingly different. Both cities are essentially black/white cities (although DC has become more cosmopolitan in recent years and Baltimore has declined into a shell of what it once was). Plus MD was a slave state while PA (and to a certain extent DE) was more "free states" however there was reports of slaves in Philadelphia when Washington was president and DE had smaller numbers of slaves in comparison to even MD and especially VA. Heck, NYC had the first slave auction in America, so my birth city has skeletons and the first commodities in the NYSE was African slaves!!!

1. Delaware was a slave state. But it didn't enforce slavery as harshly as the states to its south did.

2. At the time the Americans declared their independence from Britain, slavery was still legal in just about all of the 13 colonies. The ones in New England (including Rhode Island*), where the economics just didn't work, had already passed gradual emancipation laws. Pennsylvania would adopt one at about the same time it declared independence; the arguments of the Germans who protested slavery all the way back in 1688** had managed to worm their way into the heads of the Quakers to whom the protest was addressed. New York was actually the last of the Northern colonies to get rid of slavery; the last slaves there weren't freed until the 1820s.

3. I get your point about DC and Baltimore, but even though both Delaware and Maryland lie below the Mason-Dixon Line, I've never thought of Baltimore as a particularly Southern city. It's way too industrial to merit that tag. And like Missouri, Maryland never seceded, and also like Missouri, the Civil War tore it in two: its state flag (the coolest of all 50) was adopted in 1905 as a symbol of reconciliation between Union supporters (the Calvert family arms) and Confederate sympathizers (the Crossland arms). But there is this: they don't sing the words to the state song because its verses were a call to rally Marylanders 'round the Confederate cause. I would maintain that both Maryland and Virginia have in some ways shed some of their Old Southernness.

*Actually, Rhode Island proper is just a small part of the state's territory. Most of it consists of "Providence Plantations," which is still part of the state's official name (interesting that the nation's smallest state by area has its longest state name). I hear that the powers-that-be in Providence are moving to remove "Providence Plantations" from the state name now.

**Whenever someone argues that by criticizing the Founders for holding slaves, we're judging them by standards that apply in our time but not their own, I point to this as counter-evidence. Sheesh, even Jefferson himself acknowledged in Notes on the State of Virginia that slavery was wrong and that America would be punished for countenancing it.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by Duderino

I mean, really, is it 1968? I can't think of a President in modern history who has been more desperate for a race war.

He rose above the republican pack in 2015 when he gave his “murderers and rapists” speech. His base knows what he’s selling and they like it.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Good points on the diversity of Hispanic cultures. I tend to complain that both whites and Blacks alike define us (ourselves) as something of a cultural monolith, and I can tell a Midwestern Black from a Southeastern one, so I really shouldn't be engaging in the same sort of reductionism when it comes to native Spanish-speakers.

I disagree that "lesser of two evils" voting has gone the way of all flesh: you should have read PhillyMag's endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016. There was a lot of nose-holding going on even then, and I also think that plenty of voters on both sides will be holding their noses as they mail in their ballots (assuming Trump doesn't achieve his goal of wrecking the Postal Service* in time to really muck up the election and thus claim fraud if he loses, which is the aim of his various Tweets and moves now) this fall. I know at least one Trump supporter who agrees with everything I say about his character but plans to vote for him anyway because policy (and no, this person is not only not a Judgmentalist Christian but a Black guy who lives near me and basically hustles stuff to put bread on his table).

But the main point I wish to make is that the critics of the pollsters are also getting it wrong. FiveThirtyEight, which is the best of the poll/poll analytics sites, did give Hillary Clinton 70 percent odds of beating Trump.But that meant Trump still had a 30 percent chance of winning, which he managed to take.

However, both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics aggregates of the polls had Hillary Clinton up by about 3 points in the national popular vote on the eve of the 2016 election. (That, by the way, is the standard margin of error for scientific polls.)

Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points.

So they did call the margin right. What they did miss was the effect non-college-educated voters would have in several of the industrial states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, both of which Trump carried by razor-thin margins (any one of a number of small moves in this state would have tipped it to Clinton, for instance: one of them was Blacks turning out in the same numbers they posted for Obama in the two prior elections).

The polls right now have Biden leading by wider margins both nationally and in several key states, plus Biden is actually competitive in several states that should be locks for Trump. Given the actual facts of 2016, I wouldn't dismiss those figures as made up. The pollsters are adjusting their formulas to give the less-educated voters more weight.

I do believe that even though there's talk on my side of the divide of a landslide, that won't happen either way: whoever wins in November will win by a narrow margin. Trump is plowing the ground to plant seeds of doubt should Biden be the winner, and IMO that's just one more data point in my argument for his unfitness: he's trying to undermine the legitimacy of our entire electoral process just to save his own hide, a highly irresponsible move.

*You're conversing with the son of two Federal civil servants. Mom was a Veterans Administration nurse for just about her entire career, rising into the administrative ranks in her middle and later years, and Dad was a letter-sorter at the main post office in Kansas City. Delivering the mail in a timely fashion is one of the fundamental functions we expect our government to perform (and even though we spun the U.S. Postal Service off as a quasi-private corporation, it remains attached to the Federal government), and for most of its history, the Post Office Department/U.S. Postal Servics has done so at a loss. Trump may be right that the USPS should raise its rates, but "reforming" the Postal Service by hobbling it is hardly the way to bring that about.

Conservatives do not like the USPS for two reasons - it is an example of government doing something well, and the civil service is a way for minorities, people from low income backgrounds, and the generalized “undesirables” to enter the middle class. They talk about getting ahead via hard work, but they don’t actually believe in it.

[PghSportsGuy420]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020...-into-thin-air

Kushner's pandemic response team decided that they didn't need to do anything about the pandemic because it was killing people in blue states. The only way administration officials got Trump to respond is by telling him that the pandemic was hitting "their people."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020...-into-thin-air

Straight up genocidal stuff. Criminal negligence.

[toobusytoday]

Here's a great place to talk about the election in National terms. We can open this up in a a few weeks but it's impossible to moderate a national conversation in a state forum.

https://www.city-data.com/forum/elections/