No. of Recommendations: 13
This was a thoughtful and well written post, WTH. I'll try to fill in some blanks.
For some contingent of voters, the debate performance was maddening but it didn't change anything. An impaired Biden is still not a corrupt Trump and a corrupt Trump is far worse. We'll never know exactly what portion of the total electorate that population was because the forecasted margin of victory in this election was and still is so tight that the concerns of the youngest generation of voters grew to dominate all strategy discussions. During the period right before Biden dropped out, Trump was polling as much as 4 percentage points better than Biden when you looked at the national polling averages. Democratic leaders were freaking out. The 4% gap was significant and outside the margin of error. Sometimes, the averages narrowed to 3% or 2% higher for Trump, but Biden was
never ahead.
That has now completely flipped. The latest polling shows Harris ahead of Trump by 2% nationally. More importantly, she's now ahead of Trump by 2% in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin. She's gained 4% compared to Biden in those 2 states, and tied with Trump in PA. She only needs to win MI, WI and PA (the Blue Wall) to get the 270 votes she needs. She's also essentially tied with Trump in AZ, NC and GA so she has another path to victory outside the Blue Wall. Biden never had this other path.
Check out the excellent timeline of national polling at the NY Times, and you can see when the blue line (Harris) crossed above the red line (Trump).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/electi... Four years ago, Jim Clyburn and back men and women in South Carolina, in particular, had figured out that left-of-center candidates like Sanders would never win. They were smart enough to know that the country was looking for a moderate - not someone advocating Medicare for All. They came out in droves for Biden. He was exactly the candidate we needed at the time.
Some people may have calculated that he would be 81 at the end of his first term, but it didn't matter at the time. Democrats needed someone with the best possible chance of beating Trump. In 2020, national polling averages showed Biden ahead of Trump by 7%, and the actual margin of victory was less than 5%. Amazing it was that close since Trump's management of the Covid crisis was among the worst of the rich countries, with 700K deaths here. (Some of the best were New Zealand, Australia and South Korea.)
Wanna feel old? There are 69 million Gen Z'ers in the US, and 73 million millenials. Those 2 groups combined now make up over 40% of the population, twice the percentage of Baby Boomers.
"New polling shows that as of Tuesday, among 18 to 29-year-olds residing in seven battleground states, Harris has surpassed Trump by an astounding 32 percentage points. ... The division between voters aged 18 to 34 was much closer in a Biden-Trump contest, with 53% of them supporting Biden and 47% supporting Trump. According to a Generation Lab poll released last month, the same group was split 60 per cent for Harris and 40 per cent for Trump in a race between the two candidates, giving Harris a 20-point lead. The distance between Trump and Harris has only widened since then."
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internat... 