8 Comments

I would have thought that you would include in your excellent fact-based article the potential for the Electoral Count Reform Act to reduce the risks of the 2024 election substantially. This requires a serious push over the finish line in the Lame Duck session of Congress before year-end 2022. At the moment, despite co-sponsorship by both Schumer and McConnell, it is Schumer who needs to bring the bill to the Floor and to ensure passage of the law before the 2023 Congress resets the work to 0.

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Defeating election deniers, as you are suggesting, is clearly an immediate and important goal.

But it seems the root problem is that a big chunk of the republican party simply do not want to let the country choose a leader by our constitutional rules. You mention Trump, but I suspect he is not the problem - I suspect he just uncovered it. Any thoughts on how to get the GOP to be more supportive of constitutional rules? This is a party that didn't even publish a platform of what they stood for at the last election.

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I agree with you that there is an underlying problem that must be solved in order to maintain a working democracy.

The only answer I can think of is for election deniers to be exposed, and for them to lose elections. And then wait for long-term demographic change to kick in, which I believe will get us off the knife-edge of 50-50 division that we have experienced since the mid-1990s. Until that happens, do what we can to maintain the institutions of democracy.

I was interested to notice that election-deniers' performance in polls is 3 points worse than partisan tendency estimated using PVI and the generic Congressional ballot. (FYI, my formula was to double PVI and then move the resulting margin 2 points toward Democrats, which is the current difference between current polls and the 2020 Biden-Trump margin.)

I have not yet calculated the equivalent quantity for non-deniers.

After Election Day I will recalculate this quantity. If it holds up, it represents the electoral penalty that comes from being a denier.

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I think your 3 percent is a decent estimate of the number of actual never-Trumpers.

For demographic change, I think of Ruy Teixeira missed projections.

For example, in California the electorate is increasingly opposed to affirmative action in college admissions. Affirmative action went down 57/43 in 2020 after having gone down 55/45 in 1996. During that time, non-Hispanic whites fell from being a majority to being 35% of the population. But the Hispanic and Asian-Americans that replaced them are more opposed to affirmative action than the whites were.

Does that indicate less tolerance of democratic party values? Not to look at elected officials. But it is worth keeping an eye on.

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Donated! Thank you for the analysis. It feels good to help in a small way.

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Just FYI the Michigan SOS candidate is Jocelyn Benson, not Dana Nessel (she's AG).

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And Steve Sisolak is a Democrat not a Republican.

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Thank you!

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