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This is one of these voting patterns that seems simple at first glance but is actually really confusing.

Soldiers Grove is a tiny town in Crawford County in the Wisconsin Driftless. It's most known for entirely relocating to higher ground following repeated flooding in 1970s, and subsequently embracing solar power in the process. That history is suggestive of a place where Democrats might be expected to hold up a little bit better than elsewhere in southwest Wisconsin.

However, the village still voted narrowly for Trump, swinging to him from 2016 to 2020. That by itself isn't too surprising given how dramatic the swings were in that part of the country between 2012 and 2020.

But, wait, that actually makes less sense if you look at the surrounding context:


Image screenshotted from Dave's Redistricting App

Soldiers Grove actually votes to the right of surrounding rural areas! Apparently the whole area is a hub for organic farming, including the massive collective Organic Valley, and as a result Democrats have held up well, largely winning the blue areas in 2016 too.

But for some reason this pattern is avoided in the tiny towns nearby these farms, with Gays Mills, Readstown (especially dramatic here) and Viola voting to the right of the rural communities surrounding them. Why would an ecologically oriented small town vote Republican, when even neighboring rural areas stuck by Democrats through the collapse of their vote in the Trump era?

Since Trump did this. Biden should counter by having a rally in say West Virginia or North Dakota.

Trump going to south Bronx is him riding on the narrative that he is making inroads with AAs and Hispanics as what polling and the MSM media suggests. Biden going to West Virginia would be nonsensical as there are no talks about him making inroads with rural whites nor the polls are showing so, no evidence to suggest that currently.

It still makes no sense to go to an area you aren't going to win in a state you aren't going to win. Trump lost the Black vote in his own primary to Haley if precinct analysis is accurate so polling is not to believed.

Trump won the Black vote by about the same proportion he won the primary as a whole. If you look at precinct maps of cities in competitive primaries, Haley usually won the White yuppie areas but Trump won the Black areas, often by 50+%.  These precincts had very few votes however.

In terms of KY-03, it should be noted that KY’s own redistricting guidelines, as adopted in 1991, explicitly requires that “communities of interest” be kept as intact as possible. I think any attempt to redraw KY-03 into multiple R-leaning districts will likely not survive court challenges due to the aforementioned guideline.

In terms of Maryland, someone posted elsewhere on this forum that drawing a 8D-0R map would likely jeopardize Steny Hoyer in a primary.

An underreported story as far as Kentucky goes is that trends for Republicans are actually kind of bad in the Lexington area, enough that they felt obliged to put Frankfurt in KY-01 and got kind of messy in the state leg. maps. If these trends continue (massive "if" here), Republicans might already have to make things fairly ugly in Lexington and may not want to go full throttle on Louisville.

The smart thing would be to pull KY-06 down to the blood red rurals by the Tennessee border.

Trump has solid leads in enough swing states to secure a pretty easy win.

Biden is losing and we need something pretty dramatic to change that.

Not exactly—the states with "solid" leads only total up to 268 EVs, and even that's debatable, depending on how what qualifies as an "easy win" in your mind.

Congressional Democratic candidates would have to massively outperform Biden and run significantly ahead of his vote share in order to capture the 26 House delegations necessary to settle a contested election in his favour. I'm not sure it's too realistic to expect such a high rate of split-ticket voting in a presidential election year these days.

Polling agencies keep updating their weighting method every cycle.

On the whole, they really don't make as many changes under the hood as you probably think.

I think denying Trump 26 should be their main goal. The GOP has 26 now, and are expected to get NC, so D’s need to beat Schweikert, Ciscomani, and Zinke to do this, and the last one in particular will be extremely tough. Other than that, they need to flip two seats in Iowa, and it’s difficult to see any R go down there other than maybe Nunn; or beat both Van Orden and Steil in WI.

Also they can’t lose Peltola, or Wild/Cartwright, or either open MI seat.

Pretty much all of the polls this year have been contradicted by every notable election since the start of 2022. There's really no way around this. We can talk a bunch of sh-t about the "generic" ballot, but almost every single time a named Republican candidate is up against a named Democrat, the Democrat has won or at least over-performed. Is Sisolak the only Democrat of note to lose since the Youngkin mess back in 2021 (when Trump was the least visible he's been in the last ten years)? Downballot Republicans have not been this weak in my lifetime. Obviously more of them lost in 2006-2008, but that was when they had no hope of winning. If Biden is as hated as the polls say he is then Democrats should have been losing across the board these past couple years.

 

I don't think people are willing to admit it but I feel like the country has depolarized significantly in the last few years. It's not at the point where Hogan can win in Maryland baring a miracle, but I could absolutely buy Biden doing far worse than downballot Democrats. Maybe not 10 pts worse, but around half of that is certainly possible.

I agree Biden will do worse, but this supposed depolarization seems to have only gone one way post Youngkin, and I don't think it's a coincidence that 2021 was the least visible Trump has been in the past decade. It's not like credible Republican challengers were putting up a fight in safe D states while popular incumbent Democrats won safe R states. Republicans just did pretty bad or at best mediocre across the board except in New York, and I suppose Florida but I don't really care about Florida.

Pretty much all of the polls this year have been contradicted by every notable election since the start of 2022. There's really no way around this. We can talk a bunch of sh-t about the "generic" ballot, but almost every single time a named Republican candidate is up against a named Democrat, the Democrat has won or at least over-performed. Is Sisolak the only Democrat of note to lose since the Youngkin mess back in 2021 (when Trump was the least visible he's been in the last ten years)? Downballot Republicans have not been this weak in my lifetime. Obviously more of them lost in 2006-2008, but that was when they had no hope of winning. If Biden is as hated as the polls say he is then Democrats should have been losing across the board these past couple years.

 

I don't think people are willing to admit it but I feel like the country has depolarized significantly in the last few years. It's not at the point where Hogan can win in Maryland baring a miracle, but I could absolutely buy Biden doing far worse than downballot Democrats. Maybe not 10 pts worse, but around half of that is certainly possible.

Congressional R overperformed Trump in the vast majority of cases in both 2016 and 2020.

[The Palestinians are storing dead bodies now?]

Israeli military recovers the bodies of 3 more hotages killed on Oct. 7 from Gaza

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israeli-military-recovers-bodies-3-hostages-killed-oct-7-gaza-hamas-rcna153869

"Hanan Yablonka, Michel Nisenbaum, and Orion Hernandez were killed on Oct. 7 at the Mefalsim Intersection and their bodies were taken into Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Friday morning, citing intelligence."

R.I.P. Brothers.

The Palestinians are storing dead bodies now?

Keeping them in a fridge. Storage locker? How do you keep 3 dead bodies for 229 days? There is something fundamentally corrupt in stealing dead bodies and storing them.

It should be noted that both the Israeli government and various Palestinian groups do this and have been doing it for a while.

[some]

I believe it’s the opposite. Michigan is the most likely to stay blue as it had the largest margin of victory for Biden in 2020 and is traditionally the bluest of the 3 states in question. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are more likely to flip as they were within a point in 2020.

PA was Biden +1.2 but point taken. Nonetheless I think MI could easily vote to the right of one or both of WI and PA. They voted only about half a point apart in 2016 and around 2 points apart in 2020. Polling so far this cycle also suggests this is a possibility.

Demographically MI looks more promising for the GOP than the other two, as its trends are ripe for further Trump gains. The Gaza issue will likely also hurt Biden in MI even if some posters here may be overstating its potential impact at the moment.

Polling earlier this year suggested Michigan would be Trump’s best state of the trio, but now Pennsylvania is polling the best for him.

I feel that if Trump’s made enough gains with minorities to flip MI he’s already flipped PA and WI. Trump won PA’s white vote in 2020 by more than he did MI’s so gains with minorities alone won’t be enough to move MI to the right of PA. WI is a bit different as Trump won the white vote there by less than MI/PA, but the point where MI moves right of WI on the back of minority shifts, Trump’s already won both states.

Also the Gaza issue is very much overstated, Arabs are only 1% of the vote in MI and netted Biden only about half a point on his 2020 margin at best.

the Republicans who didn't like Trump

The million-dollar question is, how many of these voters will show up in November? And will they vote third-party or leave their ballots blank?