The GOP lost every swing state wide election this year except for 1 (PA-Senate). And even that was razor thin in a Red Wave year.
They lost Governors/Senate races in
Arizona Nevada North Carolina Michigan Wisconsin
I know it’s normal for the presidential candidates to receive the most votes on a ballot. But even the Dems that won these races weren’t too far behind Kamala Harris. Yet the Republicans candidates were way behind trump.
Why is this? Do these people literally go to the ballot box just to vote trump and leave?
After the election, AOC reached out to her constituents to ask why some of them would vote for both Trump and her.
There’s a variety of answers, but the general sentiment is people want some way to “shake up Washington” without a real understanding of how exactly that would work or what would happen.
I saw that. Do those people not realize AOC & trump have very different stances on issues? AOC will vote against like 90% of Trump’s agenda, and Trump won’t implement what she wants. If shaking up Washington means “nothing changes because bipartisanship is dead”, then okay I guess.
They don’t really think it that far through. Policy proposals aren’t considered, it’s more about vibe.
I once read that socially conservative but economically left wing voters are quite a large group, but usually get very little representation. It’s just a guess, but it makes sense that those people would vote for AOC on economics while tolerating her on social issues. On the other hand economically right wing democrats like Kamala would have zero appeal to people like that.
Why is this? Do these people literally go to the ballot box just to vote trump and leave?
This was found to actually be a somewhat common voting pattern.
But why? I know most of the GOP’s agenda dosent require 60 votes, but why do they just completely ignore all the other elections? I don’t get it.
It’s simply because they are not paying attention. And I don’t mean that as a put-down, I simply mean that Trump has their attention, not the broader GOP, nor anything about the government. They don’t care about the GOP Agenda, beyond a few of Trump’s sound bites. Many of them have an inherent distrust of politicians yet trust Donald Trump completely.
Apparently a big part of Elons attempts at voter outreach for Trump were to encourage “bullet ballot” votes (only voting for the president and leaving everything else blank), which is also what caused some scare about potential voter fraud when the very large increase of bullet ballots were noticed. He had teams of people reaching out to “low propensity voters” and trying to convince them to simply show up and vote for Trump, not to worry about knowing anything else. So that actually worked in Trump’s and Musks favor as far as simply getting them in, but there was little consideration for the state that would leave the party in.
(My personal bias would say neither Trump nor Musk give two shits about Republicans, or anyone but themselves, so Musk gets the position to further enrich himself and protection from investigation he wanted and Trump gets the same.)
There is also the issue of the media, when a fox news or the like paints Trump as dogmatic savior, only he can save you, then that leaves a lot of people feeling like only he matters so they don’t pay much attention to who else they should vote for.
Wow I didn’t know that. I don’t think a strategy like that is helpful for a party’s future. There’s so much more to government than the president.
Neither Trump nor Elon give a single solitary fuck about the future of their party.
From what I’ve seen, most people don’t care about their parties “agenda”. They usually just hear about one of two issues and take a stance on that.
A majority of the Trump votes, especially the ones that didn’t vote down ballot, were pissed at the status quo and voted against “normalcy”.
They don’t know what sort of crazy shit Trump will bring, but they know they don’t want any more of what they have now.
I’m not saying it’s the right stance to have, but it’s understandable.
I mean me personally, I’m not voting for a candidate if I don’t atleast have a good grasp of their agendas & policies. But that’s just me.
You and me both, but I heard that all political posts on social media came from 10% of users, I don’t know how accurate that is, but even if it’s much higher, that’s still a large majority of people who just have “more important things” to pay attention to.
The Republicans gained Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Montana, and with them a majority in the senate.
Maybe I’m missing something, but they don’t seem to be struggling all that much to me.
GOP ran behind its numbers in the swing states. That’s what OP is talking about. Your list of states is all solid or deep red except for PA.
But they all flipped from Democrat to Republican senators, while all the states listed by OP were held by Democrats already and remained in the hands of Democrats?
I mean, sure, somebody gave them the label swing states, but it seems they were not really all that important.
That’s not how this works. If a state that’s R+20 elects a Republican, but the final results are 55-45, that’s a problem for the GOP in the state and likely nationally. All of the partisan elections in the country are correlated and when a race or class of races falls outside the statistical expectation for that correlation it bears examination. Also, “swing states” isn’t just a marketing buzzword, it’s a term used to describe states that meet a specific criteria.
The November election had an interesting set of results where swing states actually ran left of the national race. That is how you get Michigan and Wisconsin being decided by less than their partisan lean. It’s a result of strong rightward movement in solid blue states, but that’s just an observation of how those numbers come to be, not why.
The actual data on exit polls is starting to come in and soon we’ll have Pew’s final numbers, it’s impossible to draw good conclusions without that data. However, it appears that the electorate was more comfortable voting Republican as a whole than the specific electorates were in more closely contested states. There are many reasons this could be true and the actual truth is likely a mix of all of them, but it’s interesting and both parties will be looking for answers.
I understand swing states and how they are important to follow in presidential elections, but Montana has had a Democratic senator since 2007 and he only lost his position at this election. So even though Montana is deeply red, in a Senate sense it did swing this election - it changed colour.
Thinking of swing states is a useful shortcut when trying to predict the outcomes of presidential elections. I don’t think it should be generalized to Senate elections.
My understanding is that essentially, they see the downballot Republican candidates in these states as part of a uniparty with Democrats, or as RINOs. They’re not going to vote for these ‘establishment’ Republicans, as they feel they’d undermine Trump’s agenda. There are a lot of people who’ve been feeling disenfranchised in this country and want something, anything, to change. They want the people who’ve caused them pain to suffer - and they see the government and those who directly benefit from the government to be the ones who’ve caused them pain.
There’s also the party messaging going on. For decades, Democrats and their fellow-travelers have pushed the doctrine of “think global, act local.” They push community involvement and local direct action. On the other hand, since at least 2015, the Republicans have focused almost exclusively on Trump and the White House. Before that, the Tea Party tried to get Republican local action to happen - and that movement ended up collapsing under its own weight between 2012 and 2016.
Good insight. Never thought how different the ground game was between the parties. But do those people who he’s a marauder know he needs those seats for actual BIG change?
!But do those people who he’s a marauder know he needs those seats for actual BIG change? !<
wat
Can’t comment on the rest, but the NC gubernatorial race is pretty obvious. The GOP nominated an anti-trans blowhard who turned out to also be crooked, perverted, racist, and pro-slavery. He was trailing in the polls before the CNN piece about him.
The GOP basically set out to find just how low they could go with a candidate and finally found the bar. Black Nazis are apparently that bar.
