Right now, you’re probably asking yourself: what do the latest tracking polls have to say about the presidential race? Well then, you really must toddle over to Bob Poulsen’s most excellent 2.004k.com site, where he has a special little page that displays the latest tracking polls side-by-side and updates that page every time new results come out. And as with all the rest of the pages on his site (he has great coverage of all other national polls, as well as data from all the states) topline results are presented crisply, LVs and Rvs distinguished and correct links to the full data provided.
Drop on by. You’ll be glad you did.
Tim Kaastad asks about the equal division between Republicans and Democrats. Interesting question; I don’t know the answer, but would like to point out that this is no new phenomenon. Since 1824, the first year there was enough of a popular vote to be worth adding up and recording (until then many states elected their electors indirectly), only 4 Presidents have reached 60% of the total popular vote. There have been whole runs of 51-49 wins, or 50.1-49.9, or 49-48 with dribblets going to minor parties. The Whig-Democrat contests of the mid-19th century were just as close as anything more recent. Lincoln only managed 55% for reelection in the middle of the Civil War, when most of the opposition was voting with bullets instead of ballots.
I think it has to do with the enormous cultural and economic diversity of the country, combined with an electoral system that encourages building coalitions with the aim of just crossing the 50% mark. More than that I cannot say without much more thought and research.
slightly off topic but relevant none the less:
just how did it come to pass that the electorate is divided almost equally betewen dems and repubs?
does that stike anyone as very unusal, or are there structural factors that that would have predicted a 50/50 electorate?
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
thanks pdb….
Tim Kaastad asks about the equal division between Republicans and Democrats. Interesting question; I don’t know the answer, but would like to point out that this is no new phenomenon. Since 1824, the first year there was enough of a popular vote to be worth adding up and recording (until then many states elected their electors indirectly), only 4 Presidents have reached 60% of the total popular vote. There have been whole runs of 51-49 wins, or 50.1-49.9, or 49-48 with dribblets going to minor parties. The Whig-Democrat contests of the mid-19th century were just as close as anything more recent. Lincoln only managed 55% for reelection in the middle of the Civil War, when most of the opposition was voting with bullets instead of ballots.
I think it has to do with the enormous cultural and economic diversity of the country, combined with an electoral system that encourages building coalitions with the aim of just crossing the 50% mark. More than that I cannot say without much more thought and research.
slightly off topic but relevant none the less:
just how did it come to pass that the electorate is divided almost equally betewen dems and repubs?
does that stike anyone as very unusal, or are there structural factors that that would have predicted a 50/50 electorate?