Minority Rule and Election Strategy

For post-Christmas updates on polling, click here, on in-person appearances, click here, and on the vital importance of minority enfranchisement, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The United States’ biggest problem today is not that its people are divided. It’s not even that private propaganda mills like Fox fuel the division, as does fake news on social media partly pushed by foreign spooks. It’s that the governmental structure enshrined in our Constitution entrenches minority rule.

A recent spreadsheet on this blog shows the extent of the problem. Our nine most populous states, all together, account for 51% of our population, but only 46% of the electoral votes for president, and only 18% of votes in the Senate. It you want to understand why our Senate will likely acquit Trump of serious impeachment charges without a serious trial, you need look no further than that 18%.

But the Senate doesn’t elect presidents. The Electoral College does. And the Electoral College is far less skewed toward minority rule than our Senate. More important, the numbers in that recent spreadsheet are not representative of the Electoral College’s actual division, since big states like California and Texas, or New York and Georgia, don’t usually vote the same way. So it makes better sense to analyze how our red and blue states are actually divided.

The spreadsheet below aggregates the votes in the Electoral College, House and Senate of all states that voted for Trump by a margin of 3% or more in 2016. The 26 states have an absolute majority in the Senate, or 52% of the senators. But their shares of the nation’s total population and its 538 electoral votes are 41.5% and 42.75%, respectively.

Those numbers don’t differ much from each other, or from the consistent polling of Trump’s popular support, which has been stable at about 37% to 40%.

[NOTE: Click on the spreadsheet to get a larger, clearer version.]



This more granular analysis of the Electoral College’s vote distribution suggests some strategies for the Dems to use in the 2020 election, regardless of the Senate’s likely acquittal of Trump. Following is a table of the states that the Dems can expect to win in the presidential election almost regardless of who their candidate is:

Reliably Blue (Democratic) States
State	Electoral Votes
California	55
Colorado	9
Connecticut	7
Delaware	3
District of Columbia	3
Hawaii	4
Illinois	20
Maryland	10
Massachusetts	11
Minnesota*	10
New Jersey	14
New Mexico	5
New York	29
Oregon	7
Rhode Island	4
Vermont	3
Virginia	13
Washington	12
TOTAL	219

* The only state in this table that Trump lost by less than 5% was Minnesota, which he lost by only 1%. I nevertheless include it as a “reliably” Democratic state because of its progressive history and its educated population. Four years of exposure to Trump as president, I think, will only increase his margin of loss there.

Two conclusions jump out from these last two spreadsheets. First, Trump will have an advantage, going into the election, of 230 “reliable” electoral-college votes, versus 219 for the Dems. Second, the total of “committed” states’ votes for both parties is 449, leaving 89 electoral votes up for grabs. The Dems need 51 of those to win, the GOP only 40.

The following table lists, in descending order of their numbers of electoral votes, the states that appear on neither party’s “reliable” list, i.e., the so-called “battleground states.” For each state, the table also lists the margin or Trump’s win or loss in 2016.

States Up for Grabs
State	Electoral Votes	Trump 2016 Margin
Florida	29	2%
Pennsylvania	20	<1%
Michigan	16	<1%
Wisconsin	10	<1%
Nevada	6	-2%
New Hampshire	4	-<1%
Maine	4	-3%

This last table dictates the Dems’ strategy for the 2020 general election, and perhaps for picking a candidate in their primaries. Four points are worth making.

First and most important, Florida is the big prize. The Dems can win without it, but only if they win Pennsylvania. If the Dems lose both Florida and Pennsylvania, they cannot elect a president without some miracle in an even bigger red state. If the Dems win Florida, they can elect a president by winning just one of Michigan or Wisconsin, plus the other almost-reliable three small states.

So the Dems must focus laser-like on Florida. They must do so in picking a candidate. They must concentrate their voter-registration drives there, so as to register as many of the Puerto Rican refugees from Hurricane Maria as possible, and to oppose the Florida GOP’s push to limit Florida’s recent felon re-enfranchisement law. They must also give first priority to their Florida ground game. No single effort will be as important to electing a Democratic president.

Second, Pennsylvania is next most important state. The Dems can win without it only if they win Florida. So registration drives, candidate visits, and get-out-the-vote drives should focus on Pennsylvania as the Dems’ second most important priority.

Third, the two upper-Midwest states (Michigan and Wisconsin) that helped make Trump president in 2016 are still vitally important. If the Dems win both Florida and Pennsylvania, either Michigan or Wisconsin could put them over the top, without any of the three small, almost-reliable states. If the Dems win only one of Florida or Pennsylvania, but not both, they will need one of Michigan or Wisconsin with Florida and both of Michigan and Wisconsin with Pennsylvania.

Finally, the three small Democratic-leaning states (Nevada, New Hampshire and Maine) are important, but not so much relative to the others higher on the list. Their total of fourteen electoral votes could compensate for losing only one bigger state: Wisconsin.

Anyway, all three of these small states are likely to go Democratic. All did in 2016, but by small margins; they are listed as “up for grabs” for that reason only. If we include their total of 14 electoral votes in the Dems’ “reliable” column, they neutralize and reverse the GOP’s electoral-college advantage. But they remain important states whose allegiance neither party should take for granted.

It may seem strange, and a bit sad, that the coming presidential race boils down mostly to two states: Florida and Pennsylvania. But facts are facts. At least both states are highly diverse and more representative than most states of the nation as a whole.

In an earlier essay, I speculated that the Dems might win the presidency, without the upper Midwest states that elected Trump, if only they won Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. That could still happen, and it will become more likely as in-migration and demographic change morph the South. But the Dems lost those states in 2016 by margins of 2%, 5% and 4%, respectively. So Florida, one of our most diverse and fastest growing states, is not just the most important prize, but one of the most attainable, too.

An old business-school motto advises us to spend 80% of our time and effort on the 20% of things that are most important. It’s called the “80/20 rule.” There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, but failing to follow the 80/20 Rule was prominent among them. She herself has expressed regret for neglecting Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in her final campaign, where her margins of loss were tiny.

The Dems cannot let that sort of negligence happen again. This time, with our Republic and possibly our species at stake (through global warming), they must be much smarter. They can be sure that Trump and his lackeys, following the 80/20 Rule, will be focusing like lasers on Florida and Pennsylvania.

Endnote: Speaking of global warming, the first spreadsheet above tells a stark cautionary tale. Smaller states whose economies depend primarily on fossil fuels (Texas’ economy is diversified) gave Trump impossible landslide margins in 2016: North Dakota 36%, Oklahoma 36%, West Virginia 42%, and Wyoming 46%.

These percentages are the differences between fractions for Trump and for Clinton! The Dems might be tempted to write these states off as irrevocably red. But they might better be used as testing grounds for policies and messaging aimed at people who fear they won’t have jobs in a transformed energy economy. These states are literally canaries in the coal mines, warning of adamant resistance to acknowledging, let alone fighting, climate change.

Endnote 2: The Fatal Seduction of Polling. I’m leaving this post up until after New Year’s Day because I believe it’s one of the most important ever to appear on this blog. I do not believe that our Republic can survive another four years of a Trump presidency, at least not in any form that someone of my generation would credit as a democracy or egalitarian society.

With that dismal thought in mind, a mathematical truism is worth taking with extreme gravity. Credulousness toward political polling, and gross ignorance of the math behind it, underlay the complacency of the Democrats, our “mainstream” pundits, and the Clinton campaign in 2016.

Take another look at the table of “States Up for Grabs” above. In every single case but Maine’s, the margins of victory, whether of Trump or of Clinton, were smaller than the normal margins of error in political polling, which are typically are in the range of 3%-5%.

More careful polling is unlikely due to the expense and delay it would entail. So similar margins of victory likely will be as undetectable by advance polling in 2020 as they were in 2016.

Accordingly, neither candidate ought to rely on polling to determine how much campaigning to do, or how much effort to exert, in these critical states. That effort must be all out all the time.

This conclusion applies without regard to what statisticians call “systematic bias” in polling. Most expert observers believe that political polling in 2016 was riddled with that sort of bias. But even without it, Nate Silver, who literally wrote the most recent book for non-quants on social polling and error in it, had predicted the chance of Clinton losing in the Electoral College as around 25%.

In real life, that’s a huuuuge number, as Trump himself might say. Imagine being told that you had a one-in-four chance of dying in a certain situation, say, in a cosmetic surgical procedure or in skiing a particular run. You would do everything in your power to avoid that situation, wouldn’t you?

So pols and people who plan campaigns ought to react similarly toward relying on political polling. If they show granular characteristics of state’s likely voters well above any margin of error, polls might be useful in targeting or messaging particular subgroups of a key state. But in predicting the outcome of the “horse race” statewide, let alone in the nation as a whole, polls are likely to be as useless in 2020 as they were in 2016. And that’s true without even factoring in such relative novelties as disinformation on social media, deliberate foreign interference, and rampant “fake news.” So it’s enough for pols to know, as outlined in this blog based on actual critical past performance in a real election, which states are most up for grabs.

In other words, polls might show with somewhat more particularity where within a state to focus a campaign’s all-out effort. Reading into them anything more than that is highly likely to produce failure.

Endnote 3: In-Person Appearances. Donald J. Trump is president of the United States because he’s the greatest political showman since Julius Caesar. He understands the importance of in-person appearances, which he’s perfected in his MAGA-hat rallies.

While everyone else is focusing on relative political novelties—what voters see when alone and staring at their computer screens—Trump has gone back to basics. He understands that we humans are social animals. He knows the staying power of a stadium full of like-minded people, all clapping, shouting and chanting for “their team” and trashing “the enemy.” No pale computer screen viewed in solitude could ever match that.

Trump’s MAGA-hat rallies also have a multiplier effect. Almost every person present will pass the power on to others by avid word of mouth. And our eyeball- and click-seeking mainstream media multiply the coverage of almost every MAGA-hat rally by televising the juiciest portions, in the case of Fox, over and over again.

Trump also understands his demographic well. His MAGA-hat rallies resemble the baseball, basketball and football games, and the major concerts of rock and country music, with which his key demographic is intimately familiar. He often uses the same stadia.

So if Dems want to peel away some of Trump’s supporters, they are going to have to meet the “Woody Allen” test. They are going to have to show up, at least in key states. Failure to do so is why Clinton lost in the upper-Midwest states, by surprisingly small margins.

That’s one reason why youth and vigor matter. It takes physical stamina to hold all those rallies. And that’s one reason why I think Michael Bloomberg will flame out, after a minor surge, no matter how much of his billions he spends on TV ads in major video markets (most of which are already irrevocably blue or red anyway.) At 77, he’s as old as Joe Biden, only one year younger than Bernie Sanders, and four years older than Trump. As someone who’s already there, I can assure readers that, in your seventies, every single year matters.

Endnote 4: Minority Enfranchisement. The minority rule entrenched in our Senate and (to a lesser extent) our Electoral College is not the only way in which our nation deviates sharply from democracy. There are also extra-constitutional ways, which I would argue are really unconstitutional. They include gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Only our legal system and our pols can handle gerrymandering (at least to the extent of getting an initiative on the ballot). But voter suppression is a different matter. Legal challenges can help. But so can simply registering would-be voters, helping them jump through the hoops that voter suppressors put in their way, waking them up with phone calls and in-person visits, and driving those who need transportation to the polls.

That’s what Stacey Abrams does. Unlike Clinton, she fully internalized the 80/20 Rule: she gave up a chance to run for the U.S. Senate from Georgia to found and run the group Fair Fight Action (sometimes called just “Fair Fight”). That group does all of the above, focusing on African-Americans and other minority groups who’ve been excluded from voting by such things as unfair distribution of polling places, onerous voter-registration requirements, voter-roll purging, fraudulent election announcements, and their own confusion and despair.

The minority groups who’ve been so disenfranchised, including recent immigrants, don’t need training to know how to vote. They’ve been lied to, oppressed and deceived, in the case of many immigrant-citizens for years, and in the case of African-Americans for centuries. All they need is help in seeing how their votes can matter and in jumping through the hoops to cast them.

At the end of the day, supporting organizations like Abrams’s is perhaps more important than supporting your favorite Democratic candidate now. No Dem can be insured of winning without these disenfranchised would-be voters, especially in key states. And at this point no one knows who the Democratic candidate will be, let alone who might best beat Trump.

That’s why I'm giving as much monthly now to Abrams’ Fair Fight (through Act Blue, which makes giving easy and secure and keeps good records) as I give to Elizabeth Warren, my favorite candidate now. (I also give a bit less to through Act Blue to Black Voters Matter, which, to my knowledge, has no one with Abrams’ stellar strategic and executive skills.)

There’s yet another reason to support these groups, and for Democratic pols to make in-person appearances. Both are things that foreign spooks and meddlers can’t do. Several have been jailed for trying, or have fled our country one step ahead of the cops.

The enemy is ever watchful. In the past several weeks, hits on this blog that Google reports as from an “Unknown Region” have increased seven fold. I take that designation to include hits through proxy servers known for “anonymizing” probes by spooks from such places as China, Iran, and Russia. So we all have to assume that everything you read here the enemies of our nation are reading, too.

Those enemies can do a lot of things. They can spread disinformation, propaganda and fake news over social media and their own disguised outlets. They can weaponize these things and target them at individuals identified by analyzing their reading and “likes” on social media. But they can’t hold in-person campaign rallies, and they can’t legally register American voters or personally help them vote. So in-person appearances by our pols and helping the disenfranchised vote could be the salvation of our democracy, not just from minority rule, but from foreign meddling, too.

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