Perhaps you think a unifying message that gets people excited to participate is somehow decoupled from voter turnout but I can guarantee you that the number of people who didn't vote, your Indolent Majority if you will, far exceeded anything that Republican voter suppression is capable of producing.
It's funny that you chastised me for making a "metric shit ton of qualifications" and then proceeded to assert something that was directly addressed by my qualifications. Regardless, when you're talking about election fraud tactics you're necessarily talking about small percentages, but as we saw in 2016, that's all it takes.
Which is where technicalities seem like such a strange hill to die on.
By "technicalities" are you referring to the fact that
when examining who runs the fastest, you look at who ran the fastest, not necessarily who got the ribbon?
The numbers exist to mop the floor with Republicans, and indeed undo most of these efforts in all except the reddest states, but somehow we're hanging our hats on people who lack the means to get government IDs, have middle initials that don't match the voter rolls, or errant hanging chads.
First of all, who is hanging any hat on just those aspects? Secondly, the hats you're referring to in regard to the government IDs and voter purge lists and the like are
targeting primarily minority populations (i.e., black and latino) and contribute to the general sense among minorities in particular that their votes don't count and/or that they aren't a part of the system.
We saw how powerful these groups were, however, in the record-breaking turnout overrall for Obama in 2008 and then again (but for
blacks only) in 2012 and then the decline in 2016:
A record 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Overall voter turnout – defined as the share of adult U.S. citizens who cast ballots – was 61.4% in 2016, a share similar to 2012 but below the 63.6% who say they voted in 2008.
A number of long-standing trends in presidential elections either reversed or stalled in 2016, as black voter turnout decreased, white turnout increased and the nonwhite share of the U.S. electorate remained flat since the 2012 election. Here are some key takeaways from the Census Bureau’s report, the data source with the most comprehensive demographic and statistical portrait of U.S. voters.
The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.) The number of black voters also declined, falling by about 765,000 to 16.4 million in 2016, representing a sharp reversal from 2012. With Barack Obama on the ballot that year, the black voter turnout rate surpassed that of whites for the first time. Among whites, the 65.3% turnout rate in 2016 represented a slight increase from 64.1% in 2012.
...
[W]hites made up 73.3% of voters in 2016, a share unchanged from 2012, when they accounted for 73.7%. Meanwhile, blacks made up 11.9% of voters in 2016, down from 12.9% in 2012 – the first time since 2004 that blacks have declined as a share of voters.
This is in line with
Nate Cohn's analysis as well:
This was mainly a result of higher white and Hispanic turnout; black turnout was roughly in line with our pre-election expectations. On average, white and Hispanic turnout was 4 percent higher than we expected, while black turnout was 1 percent lower than expected.
The stronger Republican turnout among white voters narrowed the Democratic registration edge below pre-election expectations in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
So how much did turnout contribute to Mr. Trump’s victory? As the party registration numbers and turnout figures by race imply, just a bit. But Mr. Trump won the election by just a bit — by only 0.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, for example.
So, small changes can have big impacts, particularly in regard to "technicalities" like the EC. Which is why looking at the details (how fast the runners ran) is more important than looking at who is in the WH.
Pew did the most comprehensive report yet on the 2016 electorate,
matching respondents to their voter registration to confirm that the polling actually corresponded to people who did in fact vote (as opposed to other such studies that rely on self-reporting):
This report is based on surveys conducted on Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel. The Center tracked views of Trump among the same groups of Americans in March 2018 and at three points in 2016, including in November shortly after the election. In that survey, respondents reported whom they had voted for.
When state voter files – publicly available records of who turned out to vote – became available months after the election, respondents were matched to these files. Self-reported turnout was not used in this analysis; rather, researchers took extensive effort to determine which respondents had in fact voted. And unlike other studies that have employed voter validation, this one employs five different commercial voter files in an effort to minimize the possibility that actual voters were incorrectly classified as nonvoters due to errors in locating their turnout records.
Clear? Notable findings:
This study also includes a detailed portrait of the electorate – which also is based on the reported voting preferences of validated voters. It casts the widely reported educational divide among white voters in 2016 into stark relief: A majority of white college graduates (55%) reported voting for Hillary Clinton, compared with 38% who supported Trump. Among the much larger share of white voters who did not complete college, 64% backed Trump and just 28% supported Clinton.
So we see--once again--non-college educated white guys as the central problem, but what exactly does that entail? Here's a more extensive breakdown:
Overall, whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).
There also were large differences in voter preferences by gender, age and marital status. Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men). The gender gap was particularly large among validated voters younger than 50. In this group, 63% of women said they voted for Clinton, compared with just 43% of men. Among voters ages 50 and older, the gender gap in support for Clinton was much narrower (48% vs. 40%).
About half (52%) of validated voters were married; among them, Trump had a 55% to 39% majority. Among unmarried voters, Clinton led by a similar margin (58% to 34%).
Just 13% of validated voters in 2016 were younger than 30. Voters in this age group reported voting for Clinton over Trump by a margin of 58% to 28%, with 14% supporting one of the third-party candidates. Among voters ages 30 to 49, 51% supported Clinton and 40% favored Trump. Trump had an advantage among 50- to 64-year-old voters (51% to 45%) and those 65 and older (53% to 44%).
Most revealing:
About a third of Clinton voters (32%) lived in urban areas, versus just 12% among Trump voters. By contrast, 35% of Trump voters said they were from a rural area; among Clinton voters, 19% lived in a rural community.
So, that's voters. The problem area for those who actually voted were non-college educated white people in rural areas, but apparently NOT those making little to no money (aka, "working class"). Iow, the problem area--apparently--were non-college educated white people in rural areas that nevertheless were making pretty good money ($75K or more). Iow, older white people.
Now, more to the point, what about non-voters?
The data also provide a profile of voting-eligible nonvoters. Four-in-ten Americans who were eligible to vote did not do so in 2016. There are striking demographic differences between voters and nonvoters, and significant political differences as well. Compared with validated voters, nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite. And nonvoters were much more Democratic.
Among members of the panel who were categorized as nonvoters, 37% expressed a preference for Hillary Clinton, 30% for Donald Trump and 9% for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein; 14% preferred another candidate or declined to express a preference.
Pause a moment there. A clear, expressed preference for Hillary over Trump by 7%. There were some 70 Million non-voters (eligible, but did not vote). By this metric alone that's an additional 5 million vote differential added to Hillary's established vote count, or a total of some 8 million votes (had they voted) over Trump, once again supporting my point that the nation
as a whole is Democratic and that the key is voter turnout. They
wanted Hillary, they just didn't get off their asses to actually vote.
Further evidence supporting:
Party affiliation among nonvoters skewed even more Democratic than did candidate preferences. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents made up a 55% majority of nonvoters; about four-in-ten (41%) nonvoters were Republicans and Republican leaners. Voters were split almost evenly between Democrats and Democratic leaners (51%) and Republicans and Republican leaners (48%).
While nonvoters were less likely than voters to align with the GOP, the picture was less clear with respect to ideology. Owing in part to the tendency of nonvoters to be politically disengaged more generally, there are far more nonvoters than voters who fall into the “mixed” category on the ideological consistency scale. Among nonvoters who hold a set of political values with a distinct ideological orientation, those with generally liberal values (30% of all nonvoters) considerably outnumbered those with generally conservative values (18%).
And the demographics:
Voters were much more highly educated than nonvoters. Just 16% of nonvoters were college graduates, compared with 37% of voters. Adults with only a high school education constituted half (51%) of nonvoters, compared with 30% among voters. Whites without a college degree made up 43% of nonvoters, about the same as among voters (44%). But nonwhites without a college degree were far more numerous among nonvoters (at 42%) than they were among voters (19%).
There also were wide income differences between voters and nonvoters. More than half (56%) of nonvoters reported annual family incomes under $30,000. Among voters, just 28% fell into this income category.
So, again, we see that there was no sea change
ideologically, which means there were other factors than political ideology at play. And no, the "message" wasn't the issue either as--again--the numbers prove that the
preference was overwhelmingly pro-Hillary.
So why did people not vote for someone they
wanted to vote for? A logical answer to that question (at least in part) would be the fact that so many people believed Hillary was going to win no matter what and/or that Trump couldn't possibly win, so there was no need to get off their ass and vote. Another logical answer (based on the demographics above) would be the various impediments to voting (aka, election fraud tactics).
Again, we're talking about those who stated their
preference but just didn't vote, so this is NOT about ideological concerns or identity politics. Iow, it's NOT "I hated Hillary." It's precisely the opposite. They did not hate Hillary, they
wanted Hillary, but they nevertheless did not cast their vote accordingly.
Something
else stopped these people from executing their preference at the ballot box. So
that is the question and NOT what the Electoral College did (or, in this case, didn't do).
Let's have some perspective here.
Provided.
