re: #282 NO SMOCKING GUN!

Here is an analysis that explains that swing voters are mostly a myth, andTrump has little chance of being reelected, regardless of the nominee. Even if Sanders does win the nomination.

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She basically says that there aren’t swing voters in any quantity; there are Dem voters and gooper voters, whose respective turnouts are based on backlash against the other side. You then work the numbers from there. I thought this was obvious by now, but apparently not.

They don’t go into it, but I believe a lot of the resistance from other professionals is like the joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlamp instead of where he lost them: because the light’s better there. It’s much easier to poll and focus test a population if you think there’s a set of reliable voters who change their minds instead of two fixed teams with variable turnout. Once you go down the latter route it gets really messy to measure really quickly.

Also, from anecdotal experience, anybody who’s an actual swing voter these days is either an attention-seeker or a fucking flake. They will make decisions for random and transient reasons, and putting any significant work into changing their minds to be a waste of effort. Get the people that already sympathize with your side motivated and to the polls and demoralize the others.