Please stop saying Trump will get election because Nixon did in 1968.
There’s a very ahistorical meme floating around the internet, and it’s about 1968. This year was one of the most tumultous years in American history, seeing the assassination of two very prominent figures; Martin Luthor King Jr., and popular Democratic primary hopeful Robert Kennedy. There were widespread riots and protests that erupted around civil and racial unrest. We were in the midst of a deeply unpopular and bloody war in Vietnam. This was also during a time when color TV was becoming commonplace, and people could witness the brutal war in all the horrific brilliance of technacolor.
Although 2020 has seemed like the worst year on record, at least for many of us, it was nothing compared to 1968. People who tend to make these comparisons want to see Trump as Nixon, and Biden as Herbert Humphrey. Biden is, after all, a former Vice President, but that is about where the similarities end. First of all, Humphrey was the Vice President of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who dropped out of the running for the nomination due to how deeply unpopular he was at the time. Biden, by contrast, was the Vice President for Obama, who has a 55% approval rating post-Presidency, with a 61% approval rating with Millennials, the largest voting block. Biden may have some superficial similarities to Humphrey, but that is it.
Trump is also no Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was seen as smart and capable, if not a bit of a loose cannon. He had also been Vice President of a previously popular President: Dwight Eisenhower. Additionally he was Eisenhower’s point man on Civil Rights. He oversaw the implementation of Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Act. Nixon benefitted from the run of one George Wallace, now independent and former Democrat.
SERWER: Well, so Nixon was actually triangulating between liberal Democrat Hubert Humphrey and segregationist George Wallace. So when George Wallace talked about law and order, everybody understood that he meant, you know, kicking the crap out of black people. Nixon, who had, you know, a kind of reputation at the time — and people forget this because we all remember Nixon as the racist Nixon on the White House tapes. But Nixon had a reputation as a pretty pro-civil rights guy.
During the Eisenhower administration as vice president, he had been the point man on civil rights. He had supported Eisenhower’s 1957 civil rights bill. He — you know, his nemesis in that conflict was, ironically, Lyndon Johnson, who at that time was not a pro-civil rights guy and was trying to water down the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
So what he did was very clever. He triangulated between the sort of explicit racism of George Wallace and what he portrayed as the permissiveness of Hubert Humphrey. And that — the reason it worked is because that’s where most white people in America were in 1968. And I think that the country is both demographically different than it was in 1968, but also, white people are a lot more progressive on issues of race than they were in 1968.
Obviously every election is new, but in 2018 negative partisanship drove out record turn out to flip the House for the Democrats and that was when there was no violence, no COVID 19 and the economy was on cruise control.
“Violence = conservative President gets elected” has to be one of the most vapid things people try to pass as “political analysis” online and in the media. If violence got conservatives into office then Chicago would be deeply red. Washington right now should be Trump country. It isn’t. Pay attention in class next time, please. This isn’t how voting works or how voters behave. There is not some magic switch in people’s heads that go “well, I saw a car burning on TV, better go vote for Trump”.
In online discourse there is a major misconception that most voters approach voting like political armchair theorists do online. That it is all some big Communism vs. Libertarianism throwdown. A fight over Castro and Ayn Rand. It isn’t. Maybe that passes for discourse on some college quads, but in the real world elections are dominated by kitchen table issues, not philsophical discussions.
If you look at the right track/wrong track data right now, roughly 70% of Americans think we are on “the wrong track”. I’m sure some of these people are Republicans who think Trump is somehow going to right the ship that is already trending in the wrong direction, and has been for the last four years, but that is unlikely to be the majority of that seventy percent,
Also, you can just look at the trend lines. Right now with no toss ups the map is 337 to 201. One big reason for this is older voters:
And — maybe the biggest play of all — see if the campaign can win or at least significantly cut into the president’s margins with older voters, a traditionally more conservative and reliable bloc that suddenly seems to be turning away from the president. A recent Fox News poll found voters aged 65 and older said they preferred Biden to Trump by 17 points. A recent Quinnipiac University poll also showed Biden 22 points ahead with women 65 and older (and Trump leading men in the same age group). These polls could certainly change, but they’re worrying sign for Trump, who won older voters by 7 points in 2016.
COVID right now is polling as the biggest issue in the election. It’s one of the reasons that Florida, a state with 29 electoral votes, has been polling consistently for Biden since the start of the pandemic. Turns out Trump’s ho-hum response to a global pandemic that is very dangerous to people over the age of 65 might not have been the best strategy to endear the very reliable voting block of older Boomers to him (or their children and grandchildren for that matter).
Trump’s handling of coronavirus is the only election issue that matters
In poll after poll, voters say former Vice President Joe Biden is better equipped to handle the issue than Trump. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.
As for the “violence” that “hur-dur got Nixon elected”?
Nixon wasn’t the incumbent.
You could much more easily paint Trump as Johnson in this scenario. There were recently protests outside the RNC held at the White House. In 1968 an infamous protest and riot took place outside the DNC. The same protest and riot that led t the trial of the Chicago 7.
As for the current riots, if you are Conservative you likely are reading them incorrectly. The majority of Americans polled are sympathetic to George Floyd and the protests that ensued over his death.
Most Americans support national protests over race, poll finds
More Americans (53%) also are more likely to say the protests “will help” public support for racial justice and equality rather than “hurt” (which 34% said).
Even more than that half of Americans think Trump is racist. So I don’t know why people think Americans will vote for someone they see as racist as being better at handling protests and riots over racial tension.
The survey, which was conducted by YouGov/Yahoo! News from July 11 to 14, showed that 50 percent of U.S. adults said they think Trump is racist. Just 37 percent of respondents said they did not believe the president was racist, while 13 percent were unsure.
Comparatively, a little less than a quarter of U.S. adults said they think Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is racist, while 48 percent said they did not believe he was racist. An additional 29 percent said they were “not sure.” The poll got responses from 1,504 people and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percent.
Even if you personally think Conservatives are the ‘law and order’ party, guess what, Americans polled still blame Trump for the violence.
According to the poll, 52% of American adults say they are sympathetic to those who are still gathering to protest the police treatment of minorities, especially African Americans, about 12 percentage points lower than a similar poll that ran in mid-June.
But a majority of Americans remain unhappy with the way he has responded. The poll showed 54% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the protests, which is only a slight improvement from a similar poll that ran in mid-June when 58% disapproved.
The rise in support comes primarily from Republicans who have backed the president in greater numbers as the protests rage across the country: 78% said they approved of Trump’s response to the demonstrations in the latest poll, up from 67% in mid-June. Nearly nine out of 10 Democrats say they do not like the way Trump is dealing with the protests, and that has not changed over since June.
Trump does well with his home team, true, but I thought, according to Conservatives that “facts don’t care about your feelings”, and all I hear online are feelings. You feel because Nixon won due to violence (while ignoring all other factors and context) that this somehow refutes the mountains of data available at your fingertips.
The trend lines right now look terrible for Trump, and before you say what about 2016? Yes, what about it. It was very different.
Clinton ran much closer to Trump, with periods where Trump appeared to be winning, whereas Biden has stayed ahead of Trump for the entire election. If you remove the Rasmussen poll, which is known to be conservative and always has been, Biden is running about 8 points ahead of Trump now. He is underwater, and he knows it.
Look I’m glad you know Nixon ran for President in 1968. I suppose that’s a small victory. But stop comparing his election to Trump. It makes you look stupid.