Who’s this Biden character people mention every once in a while?
VP?
25%:75% is three to one odds. Is that strong or weak? I don’t know. Depends on who you’re asking. I think she’s more likely to lose than win; the probabilities are just very rough estimates.
Yeah, I’m more likely to lose than win too, in a race for POTUS. How about you, ohai?
Obama won something like 60% of the moderate vote. If Hillary can get 55%, she’ll have an even chance of winning (based on 2012 voter demographics and some simplyfying assumptions). Odds of 25%/75% would be like a 52% moderate vote share.
You must have missed the Democratic convention in 2004. They were talking about him for weeks and he clearly overshadowed John Kerry.
And what’s the common theme with those 4 presidents? They all lost the election (in the case of Bush his party lost). That’s why no one should claim that a candidate has a 100% chance of winning.
If the Democrats win the next election (or 2), not only will it force the Republicans to reinvent themselves, but it will also cause friction within the Democratic party. Whenever a party is in power for too long, fringe elements from the party tend to dissociate themselves and form their own party.
I’ve seen it all over the world. 12 years of Republican power brought us Ross Perot in 1992. He got 20% of the vote and cost the Republicans a 4th straight win. 8 years of Clinton brought Ralph Nader. He cost Gore the election. The Tea Party started late in Bush’s second mandate.
When you lose elections, you are forced to change and move to the center. When you win elections, it’s the opposite. Radical movements start forming within the party. When you fear your opponent, you unite. When you take for granted your opponent, you split up.
Why is it that whenever the Democrats win an election it means the Republicans have to re-invent themselves, but not the other way around?
^ Uhhhh…the Democrats did reinvent themselves. The year was 1989. Republicans had won the White House 5 out of 6 times from 1968 to 1988. The DNC was a complete mess. There was a battle waged between New Democrats and party liberals within the party. They then nominated an unlikely candidate named Bill Clinton who declared that “the era of big government is over”. A group of New Democrats moved their party toward the center. They reshaped the party’s agenda that embraced positions such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, free trade, a tough stance on crime, and a strong national defense.
Republicans have failed to win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Their message may sound like the revealed truth to the faithful, but it does not reasonate with moderate voters. They moved more toward the right over the past two decades. In the six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, Republican nominees have averaged about 45 percent of the popular vote and 39 percent of Electoral College votes. And they are not doing well among rising forces in the electorate (young voters, minorities, and college educated women). This is their 1989 moment.
I guess I meant recently, not 25 years ago.
So, you’re asking why didn’t the democrats sense an urgent need to reinvent themselves after losing in 2000? A race that, from an electoral point of view, it’s not clear they actually lost.
Losing by a landslide is what usually makes parties consider reinventing themselves, not losing by a hair’s breadth. That just means you need to do what you’re doing a bit better to win. The only time a hair’s breadth has the “we have to rethink everything” effect is when they should have won by a landslide
Its true that in 2004, the democrats had a problem of being in sufficiently in favor of the Iraq war, but it’s likely that not trnasforming themselves into war-Hawks was a good move.
Taxes Enough Already!
Viva Scott Walker! Heck, even Illinois elected a republican governor.
Exactly. Those tea partiers are complete nutjobs. Just radical in their ideas…
/end sarc