wtkog13@gmail.com

Oct 23, 2024 – Prayer Focus

Oct 23, 2024 – Prayer Focus

  1. Harris is the favorite to win the popular vote, but the Electoral College bias favors Republicans by about 2 percentage points. In an era of intense partisanship and close elections, this is inherently difficult for Democrats to overcome.
  2. Inflation hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. It has abated now, but prices remain much higher than when Joe Biden took office, and voters are historically highly sensitive to inflation. Democrats can also plausibly be blamed for it given intensive increases in government spending during COVID recovery efforts.
  3. Though the reasons for this are much debated, voter perceptions about the economy lag substantially behind objective data, and growth in take-home income has been sluggish for many years for the working class amid rising corporate profits.
  1. Incumbent parties worldwide are doing very poorly, and the historical incumbency advantage has diminished to the point where it may now be an incumbency handicap instead given perpetually negative perceptions about the direction of the country.
  2. Populism is often a highly effective strategy, and many Trump voters are indeed “deplorable” in the Hillary Clinton sense of the term.
  3. Illegal/unauthorized immigration increased substantially during the first few years of the Biden / Harris administration amid a rising global backlash to immigration.
  1. Harris ran far to her left in 2019, adopting many unpopular positions, and doesn’t really have a viable strategy for explaining her changing stances.
  2. The cultural vibes are shifting to the right, and the left continues to pay a price for the excesses of 2020 on COVID, crime, “wokeness,” and other issues.
  1. Voters have nostalgia for the relatively strong economic performance in the first three years of Trump’s term and associate the problems of 2020 with Democrats, even though they weren’t in charge at the time.
  1. Democrats’ dominance among Black voters and other racial and ethnic minority groups is slipping. It may be unfortunate timing: the memory of the Civil Rights Era is fading. Educational polarization, which implies deteriorating Democratic performance among working-class voters of all races, may also be coming to dominate other factors. It’s possible this works out well for Democrats if Harris makes corresponding gains among white voters, who pack more leverage in the Electoral College, but there’s no guarantee.
  1. Many men, especially young men, feel lost amidst declining college enrollment, contributing to a rightward shift and a growing gender gap.
  2. Biden sought to be president until he was 86. Voters had extremely reasonable objections to this, and it neuters what should have been one of Harris’s best issues about Trump’s age and cognitive fitness.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:4efedd1d-787c-467c-9efa-7e1a637fdbc6

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *