‘We’re gonna win, maybe bigger than anyone understands’.- Trump
(nitter.poast.org)
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Law of large numbers calculations using county populations. Tempered with other factors. I have been doing this ever since’76. Republicans confided in me back then that they just accepted the 3% as a cost of doing business such that the people would have confidence in the elections.
Is there anything online that you can point me towards so I can try to learn more about it?
That must be a hell of a task. How many thousands and thousands of counties did you have to go through in order to get numbers for the entire country?
A little over 3,000 counties and county equivalents in the territories. After each election there is a breakdown. I am not sure where it is archived. One key is that the election participation rate does not change very much across the country except for a few small outliers. Although in 2020 the deep blue city counties made themselves outliers by exceeding 100% of registered voters or very close to it.
Do you do the calculations yourself? What other factors do you use?
How are "core" and "legacy" voters defined? Which/how many counties were used as a sample size in order to make these calculations? How does it account for the fact that liberals and conservatives are not equally distributed through the country?
Does it take into effect the aging population and the fact that older people are historically much more conservative than younger people? Considering that we have the youngest part of the largest generation ever now at retirement age and older, and the highest mortality rates for conservative voters, that seems like it should be taken into consideration.
What about the changes that covid and work from home caused in the demographics? Many people moved out of cities (more likely blue) and into suburbs and the countryside (more likely purple or red) when the pandemic hit. A good deal of them are still there, hence all the complaints about people moving into red states, trying to turn them blue. All this has happened since the last election, so there won't be any voting records that would reflect this. This could potentially affect swing states if large numbers of democrats moved there during/after the pandemic. And judging by how many people are complaining about being overrun by liberals moving in, it's not beyond possibilities.
From what I understand, the counties exceeding 100% of registered voters were due to same day registration voters.
Core are the true believers and legacy is my parents, etc. were democrats so they are democrats too.
You are drilling down too deep. That is the benefit of large numbers. One factor is that elections are pretty much zero sum. If the Republican gains, then the Democrat looses. You have to take in population growth, but it is not that large in four years and the trend is fairly steady. With Trump winning 11-12 million more votes than 2016, Biden should have gone down several million votes from 2016. But he gained 15-16 million. That’s a big percentage jump and a confirmation of the counties fraud rate.