CNN: Clinton leading Trump by 15 points (48% - 33%) in latest poll (Aug 3rd)

PurpleJ said:

BallSacked said:

It'll narrow. An upstart Obama only beat McCain by 7% after 8 years of a rep president with an approval rating in the 30s and worldwide economic collapse. Politics are too polarized these days to have a regan/Mondale populous beat down in the 15% range.

But Trump is done on the electoral map, pending some type of disaster email leak. Even a fuckup at the debate (like Obama had in 2012) won't matter. Enough said on that.

PurpleJ said:

2001400ex said:

PurpleJ said:

BallSacked said:

It'll narrow. An upstart Obama only beat McCain by 7% after 8 years of a rep president with an approval rating in the 30s and worldwide economic collapse. Politics are too polarized these days to have a regan/Mondale populous beat down in the 15% range.

But Trump is done on the electoral map, pending some type of disaster email leak. Even a fuckup at the debate (like Obama had in 2012) won't matter. Enough said on that.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect:
Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

I'm voting for Trump because he wants to exterminate the Jews and the Arabs. Win/win IMO. Allegedly.

The next bubble is going to *pop* no matter who is in orifice. Thank Obama and the Fed for that. HTH.

BearsWiin said:

BallSacked said:

BearsWiin said:

BallSacked said:

BearsWiin said:

BallSacked said:

It'll narrow. An upstart Obama only beat McCain by 7% after 8 years of a rep president with an approval rating in the 30s and worldwide economic collapse. Politics are too polarized these days to have a regan/Mondale populous beat down in the 15% range.

But Trump is done on the electoral map, pending some type of disaster email leak. Even a fuckup at the debate (like Obama had in 2012) won't matter. Enough said on that.

The country is no more polarized than any other era. It's the representation that's more polarized and which creates such a toxic atmosphere. That's why we need competitive redistricting at the national level (California did this a few years back and is already seeing a better political climate) to get more cooperative representation, and comprehensive campaign finance reform to limit special-interest influence.

Another 59-41 rout like 1984 is entirely possible.

You're one of my favorite classy poasters, so I respectfully disagree that these aren't more polarized than 30 years ago. Lot of data out there that would back it up.

Agree on your point of redistricting and campaign finance reform will help address.

I'd like to see data on how the US of 1986 was less polarized than it is now. The electorate, not the representation. We argued over involvement in the Middle East and Central America, over whether an ex-actor could be trusted with the nuclear codes and to deal with those crafty communists, we had the Moral Majority telling us what to do in the bedroom, what to do with deficits and taxation, school busing, the crack epidemic and gang violence, etc.

This country has always been made up of people with vastly divergent viewpoints, and issues to divide us. Twenty years before that you had the Vietnam War and civil Rights movement. Thirty years before that you had a depression that drove some (fortunately not many) to fascist and communist parties here in the US. Twenty years before that you had income inequality that resulted in the original Progressive/Bull Moose movements, and a few years before that you had Grover Cleveland lampooned with Ma Ma where's my pa, gone to the White House ha ha ha. Before that you had issues of Reconstruction, a result of a little squabble about secession and slavery. The weird thing now is that we're as rich, healthy, prosperous and secure as we've ever been, with fewer real reasons to get at each others' throats, yet the impression is that things are worse. One big factor is information/media; a cop gets shot in a flyover state today, and the whole country knows about it and is talking about it within hours, whereas even, say, 30 years ago, it wouldn't have made anything but local news.

Gerrymandering serves to exaggerate the divisions within the country by electing polarized candidates (and placing a premium on polarizing behavior once they're elected). The more cooperative candidates elected through a system of more competitive redistricting will serve to temper those divisions. But the divisions are always there, in some form or another.

Doesn't go back to 86, but still...

http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/#interactive

Fair enough. Pew does good work, and I won't take issue with their methodology. 20 years is a long time to be doing this kind of study with relatively consistent questions, but it's a short time to be measuring division and polarization over the course of the country's history. We really have no idea if 1994 was a good or bad benchmark year to start measuring (like when climate change people use a specific start year to highlight or minimize change over a certain period).

Two things jumped out at me on my first reading:

1) Polarization, as they measure it, increased at a much greater rate among the politically engaged (1/3 of respondents, those who "follow what is going on in government and public affairs most of the time") than among the less engaged (2/3, those who, uh, "don't"). Apart from the depressing implication that the majority of respondents don't give that much of a shit about politics, it would seem that those who don't give a shit about politics didn't become polarized that much, even though they live in the same world as those who are politically engaged. This suggests that those who are politically engaged are affected by the environment of political engagement - that the environment itself may be a factor in their increasing polarization. What might be causing this polarization among those who are paying attention?

2) Polarization among elected officials in Washington predated polarization among the politically engaged: "Forty years ago, in the 93rd Congress (1973-74), fully 240 representatives and 29 senators were in between the most liberal Republican and most conservative Democrat in their respective chambers. Twenty years ago (the 103rd Congress from 1993-94) had nine representatives and three senators in between the most liberal Republican and most conservative Democrat in their respective chambers. Today, there is no overlap." By their methodology, a huge move toward polarization occurred between 1973 and 1993. This move toward polarization coincided with a worsening of the geographic integrity of congressional districts (gerrymandering) that had begun in the 1960's. The more gerrymandered a district, generally the more polarized the voting in it, and the more polarized the elected official was going to be, either because he/she conformed to more polarized views, or he/she felt compelled to be more polarized in DC due to the fear of being voted out.

I don't want to go all institutionalist here, but there's a saying among them that rules determine outcomes. You make the rules, and you create incentives and constraints on actors in the system, and you can pretty much determine what's going to happen. In this case, redistricting creates an incentive for polarized representation, which goes to Washington and creates a polarized environment where less bipartisan cooperation can occur. That polarized environment then affects the politically engaged who are following "what is going on in government and public affairs most of the time," who, seeing their elected officials acting polarized, take their cue and become more polarized themselves (the less politically engaged, not paying that much attention to the polarized political environment, remain less polarized themselves). It's a vicious cycle caused by noncompetitive redistricting that got out of hand 50 years ago.