Explaining the 2020 U.S. Election — Four Theories of Victory

this video was brought to you by Blink Estelle o friends my name is JJ and given it is less than 200 days until the big exciting US presidential election today I thought I would entertain you with some of my political analysis so barring some truly done foreseeable circumstances this year's presidential election will pit incumbent Republican President Donald J Trump against Democratic challenger Joseph R Biden Jr and based on all of the political commentary that I have been reading over the last little while there are basically four theories on how this election is going to play out two theories are Pro Biden and two theories are pro Trump and here are the names that I have given the America always wants a Democrat theory the Trump is uniquely awful theory the Americans want big change theory and the Trump has massively changed US politics forever theory let us go through them one at a time and you can tell me which one you think is the most persuasive note that I'm not gonna be talking about any election polls in this video only because the polls change all the time and I do not want this video to get dated and I also think at the end of the day elections are a lot more about stories than numbers so the Americans always want a Democrat theory is based on the assumption as the name suggests that most Americans always want a Democrat to be President the main evidence of this would be to just look at the result of the popular vote in the last seven presidential elections in the last thirty years a Republican has only ever won a majority of the popular vote once that was in 2004 when george w bush was reelected every single other time the democrat has either won a majority or a plurality of the popular vote now some will quickly say aha but this is relevant because the president is in fact elected through a bunch of individual state elections through the electoral college and not one giant national vote and that's true but what's important to remember is that in the two cases in which the democrat won a plurality of the popular vote but still lost the presidency the margins of victory in the relevant states were also incredibly narrow in the 2000 election the democrat only lost because he lost the state of florida by a measly 537 votes and in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost because of three incredibly thin margins in just three states Wisconsin Michigan and Pennsylvania as Vanity Fair put it you could fit all the voters who cost Clinton the election in a mid-sized football stadium so anyway the conclusion that some people draw from all this is that six times out of seven all things being equal America is a country that really wants a Democrat to be President and this has to do with the fact that the two American political parties are based around two pretty rigid coalitions of voters the Democrat coalition consists of women people of color young people people in cities immigrants and people with college degrees and that is simply a bigger collection of Americans than the Republican coalition which relies most heavily on evangelical Christians senior citizens and white people living in rural areas this makes the Democrat candidate basically the safest pony to bet on in basically every presidential election in fact the only way a Democrat could lose a presidential election according to this theory would be if there is some sort of really exceptional circumstance working against them in 2004 for instance the conventional wisdom is that George W Bush beat John Kerry just because America was still very deep in the war on terror at that time and some small number of Americans had just enough anxiety about switching presidents mid-war to give Bush a slight edge and in 2016 the argument would be that Hillary Clinton was just an almost impossibly divisive and unpopular character this is a woman who was primarily known for being controversial and hated by huge chunks of America for nearly 30 years or as the wags often put it if anyone could blow a sure thing it was her people who believe the Americans always want a Democrat theory are very pleased to see that joe by wound up as the party's nominee just because he is basically mr. generic Democrat he's bland uncontroversial and relatively well liked and as a result could win relatively easily just cruising the general pro-democratic tilt of the US electorate if you are looking for a smart person to convince you that this theory is right how about Rachel Vinick offer she is a political scientist from Virginia who has recently made a name for herself by very confidently predicting that the Democrats will win in 2020 her whole argument is based on the premise that elections are fundamentally won by turn out not by persuasion and since there are more Democrats to turn out this means that the party has a near lock on the presidency or how about longtime Democratic pollster scan' greenberg he is so confident that the Democratic coalition is basically unbeatable that he has written a whole book entitled r.i.p GOP how the new America is dooming the Republicans all right now let us talk about some possible holes in this theory a big one is that this whole coronavirus situation is exactly the sort of exceptional circumstance that might be enough to persuade some small number of otherwise reliably Democrat voting Americans to change their mind and vote Republican and I mean there is already evidence that president Trump's approval ratings have gone up during this crisis as part of the so-called rally around the leader phenomenon but a stronger rebuttal would just be the argument that President Trump is a savvy politician who has come up with a viable strategy through which a Republican can get elected president in a majority Democrat country we will talk more about this in detail when we get to theory number four but first theory number two which just holds that Trump is uniquely done popular and terrible this one is somewhat similar to the first one but also has a somewhat less grand sweeping theory of American voters instead it basically just says that by any objective measure Donald Trump is a uniquely unpopular and even hated president and will thus have an extraordinarily high hill to climb if he wants to get a second term Donald Trump's approval ratings been consistently the worst of any modern president always well below 50% in fact the one time is approval rating got to exactly 50% his social media campaigns all celebrated it like this was some huge heroic achievement even with the rally room the leader bump of the coronavirus crisis Trump is still well below the levels of support that other presidents enjoyed during similar situations during the 1991 Gulf War for instance President George HW Bush enjoyed approval ratings over 80 percent as did his son in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Trump's numbers however seemed to have the least fluidity of any modern president as you can see in this chart in the Washington Post look how small his box of movement has been now Trump's victory in 2016 clearly shocked a lot of people and this has resulted in a kind of rhetorical overcorrection confidently predicting that Trump will win reelection very easily has suddenly become a very trendy thing to say it's gonna destroy I'm gonna kill a man I mean it's such an easy target it's like Mike Tyson versus a three-year-old but the Trump is uniquely unpopular theory argues that no Trump is quite objectively a man that the majority of Americans cannot stand making it quite sensible to bet against him now to be sure Trump does have a lot of fans he remains the beloved figurehead of a very organized and passionate conservative movement among which he enjoys astronomical levels of support but the argument would go that these people are just not good enough on their own Trump won in 2016 because he was able to supplement his predictable popularity with the most stereotypical Republican voters with some non stereotypical Republican voters as well but the Republican Party has fared quite poorly in a number of election since 2016 and an argument you often hear is that this can be directly attributed to the fact that Trump is continuing to turn off more and more Americans white suburban women in particular are often held up is one of the most critical groups of voters that Trump has now hemorrhaged similarly many would argue that Trump basically has no plan to become more likeable he is often accused of becoming increasingly obsessed with just becoming more among right-wing Republicans and no one else this is sometimes called the base first strategy and it is terrible politics if as the Atlantic says your base is shrinking now the main rebuttal to this theory is that there is nothing to stop Americans who hate Trump from still voting for him the idea would be that trumps unique unpopularity is just kind of part of the unusual president that he is he's just very unlikable as a person making him a very easy politician to disapprove of broadly speaking even many top Republican politicians would probably say that they disapprove of him if you could get them into a private room but here is the thing Trump was also a very unpopular guy in 2016 in fact a popular thing to note at the time was that Trump was in fact the most unpopular person to ever be nominated as a major party's presidential candidate in recent decades yet in the end his share of the popular vote considerably exceeded his approval rating according to Gallup on the eve of the election Trump's national approval rating was only 36% yet he won 46% of the vote so this has led to all sorts of theories about how Trump voters are like shy or lie to pollsters or are able to compartmentalize in some way how much they dislike the man in order to find some other reason to vote for him and now let us get into some of those reasons of why people might vote for him theory number three is the Americans want a change theory this might sound like another reason explaining why Trump will lose but it's not for better or for worse Trump's 2016 campaign was like nothing Americans had ever seen before he was going to build the wall and drain the swamp and ban the Muslims and all of these other wild and dramatic things he was undoubtably the candidate of extreme change Hillary Clinton by contrast was mrs. status quo mrs. career politician so it was always very obvious that she was going to lose because when you look at recent American history the boring status quo establishment candidate always loses to the dynamic outsider the two most recent Democrat presidents Bill Clinton and burn Obama were both dynamic young men when they were first elected Americans felt like they were casting a ballot for an exciting new era of fresh change and possibilities when they were voting for them their opponents by contrast were these worn-out old men who were not exciting to anybody and following this logic we can conclude that Joe Biden is destined to be the next Bob Dole John McCain or Hillary Clinton in fact if anything Joe Biden is the most extreme version of this stereotype a man who is cartoonishly old with a cartoonishly long political career and perhaps you could even say that he is cartoonishly uncharismatic as well think about it we hold these truths to be self-evident all men are women created by goal you know this you know the thing now this argument is obviously very popular with websites like Breitbart or people like Steve Bannon who really liked seeing Donald Trump as this agent of radical disruption to the American political system but far-left Democrats tend to be very into this theory as well you read it a lot in places like the intercept or Jacobin or current affairs the difference is that Democrats of this sort all saw Bernie Sanders the socialist senator as the man who was going to be their change agent to win the White House Bernie's wild promises of Medicare for all and free college tuition were basically seen as the left-wing version of Trump's wild promises the only way you beat one agent of change is with another and therefore by itching Bernie and instead appointing Biden as their candidate the Democrats are admitting that they learned basically nothing from Trump's tremendous success as an outsider candidate and will thus probably lose when Sanders lost there were even a number of proton Servat --iv willing to say this so the standard rebuttal to this theory comes down to two words motivated reasoning hard core people on both the far left and the far right are by definition trying to push political extremism and as a result have a vested interest in being in denial about just how moderate most Americans actually are over at Vox Matthew Iglesias wrote a column no in 2016 the data showed that most voters actually saw Hillary Clinton as the radical while Trump was viewed as the most moderate Republican presidential candidate in years this means that there is good reason to believe that the Democrats actually made a wise decision in picking Biden the Republicans meanwhile are at a marked disadvantage because Trump is now seen as being a much more hardcore right-wing figure than he was in 2016 in this context appointing an outspoken radical like Sanders would have been the riskiest move of all all right and then lastly we have the most Pro Trump theory which is that Trump is an extremely significant figure in American political history who has changed the nature of the u.s. party system possibly forever standard American political theory holds that most Americans vote in fairly predictable patterns I talked about this when we were talking about theory number one Democrats have one rigid coalition of voters and Republicans have another but as we also noted Trump also won three states he wasn't supposed to three states that were demographically supposed to be part of the Democrats so-called blue wall of support now exactly why Trump won these three states has been the single biggest question that American political observers have spent the last four years puzzling over but for the purposes of this theory the argument is that Donald Trump was a uniquely talented political persuader who was able to get some of the most stereotypical Democratic voters to flip from left to right Trump appealed to blue-collar white working-class men who would ordinarily vote Democrat for basically class reasons the Democrats were more Pro worker more Pro Union more Pro social programs and more anti elite and all of these things appealed to the economic and social concerns of voters of this set Trump however came in and completely scrambled that calculation he was very anti-immigration and very anti trade to economic positions that arguably put him to the left of the Democrats and his anti elite credentials certainly could not be challenged he hated and was hated by basically everyone who was big and powerful in America big business the media the political establishment and Trump has shown no signs that he intends to stop campaigning this way meaning that if you are a voter who found him compelling in 2016 you will probably still find him compelling in 2020 so this particular Trump strategy of just being narrowly appealing to a small group of voters in a handful of states may be all he needs and in fact that group of voters might not even be that small some people would say that trumps support among working-class white men was actually understated in 2016 just because in those days he was still the kind of new untested thing whereas in 2020 that particular demographic has become much more closely associated with Trump's political brand so a lot of demographically similar voters perhaps even in other states might be inclined to move towards him as well the main rebuttal to this theory would just be that Hillary Clinton sort of lazily took the blue wall States for granted in 2016 whereas now the Democrats are putting a lot of effort into trying to win them back Joe Biden in particular is often held up as a guy who has unique talents and winning back the votes of white working-class men in these sorts of places the fact that Biden beat Bernie Sanders by big margins in Wisconsin and Michigan is held up as further proof that he is uniquely popular in these states and Trump can't take them for granted then there is also the possibility that Trump has actually changed US politics too much which is to say his remarkable unpopularity has actually caused holes to emerge in the Republicans red wall putting states like Arizona and North Carolina suddenly in play as well now I guess one of the big conclusions to draw from all of this is that American politics is very complicated and you know who can help you keep on top of it today's video sponsor bling cast Linkous tis a very cool app that summarizes popular non-fiction books in both written and audio form it can be the longest book in the world and they will find a way to condense it down to just 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to end this video on is which of these four theories do you consider to be the most plausible not who is going to win but just which theory strikes you as the most broadly accurate summary of American politics in 2020 because regardless if you want Trump to win or lose the first step is having an accurate understanding of the playing field that the fight for his re-election is going to be fought on don't forget to Like and subscribe and I will see you all next week [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 355,686

Rating: 4.7784634 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: vPhm-HE6_4E

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Sat May 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AnNoAdj]

I love this dude’s videos. Even though he is a conservative he seems to put it aside when taking on topics. You wouldn’t really know he was conservative but he’s said it in videos before.

[u/memeintoshplus]

JJ is based

[u/im_sorry_wtf]

What theory do y’all think is the most likely to prevail come November?

[u/Peacock-Shah]

Is J.J McCullough a reliable source?

[u/Lycaon1765]

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