Speaking of polls, the Republican field seems to have stabilized for the moment. Trump is back in the upper 20's to low 30's, Carson is the only other candidate consistently in double-digits. Fiorina has fallen back into 5-6% range, possibly because of some of the crazy shit she had been saying (being qualified to fight ISIS because she was a medieval history major, for example).
Clinton is actually leading Sanders again in NH (by 4), so it seems the Bern is getting some lidocaine applied to it. Sad, but predictable.
So for the moment, we're looking at a Trump v. Clinton 2016 campaign. Which head-to-head polling has Clinton winning nationally, but of course, it's those battleground states which are truly important.
Yes...except there's a very big possible spanner in the works here. Trump is so noxious that he may well do more for Hispanic voter turnout than any Democratic campaign could, and low Hispanic turnout is a major reason why Arizona and Texas are considered solid red. I think the last time the idea of Texas going swing was brought up, I dismissed it as an overly early prediction that would only bear fruit after a couple more election cycles and another decade of demographic shift- but the prospect of a Trump candidacy adds another variable.
Quick edit because idle speculation without any numbers is a bad habit, so let's get a few.
This Pew Research article from 2012 shows that there were about 9.5 million Hispanics in Texas at the time of writing, making up 38% of the population. It's hard to get better numbers than that, but a quick scan of Google hits indicates that we could probably round this up to 10 million Hispanics, comprising 40% of the population, for next year and not be terribly far off.
Here's a Texas Tribune article showing that Hispanic turnout in Texas was 38% in 2012. Finally, Wikipedia tells us that Romney beat Obama in Texas by a margin of about 1.25 million votes.
Let's make some fairly conservative predictions- Hispanic turnout in Texas gets bumped up from 38% to 50%, and Trump retains 35% of the Hispanic vote (a Politifact article says Romney got 40%). We're being pretty generous to the Donald here. The Pew article indicates that 43.9% of the Texas Hispanic population was (at the time) eligible to vote. We know that the Hispanic population is overwhelmingly young, so we'll bump it up to 45% for 2016.
I know I'm basically pulling numbers out of my ass, but I'm trying to underestimate any effect we'd get on the outcome rather than overestimate it. The number of Hispanic Democratic votes cast in 2012 in Texas is then going to be, basically, 9.5 million*43.9% (eligible to vote)*38% (showed up to vote) * 60% (voted Democratic) = about 950,000 votes.
If 50% of Texas Hispanics vote in 2016, voting 35% for Trump, we get 10 million * 45% (eligible) * 50% (show up to vote) * 65% (vote Democratic)= 1.46 million. That's an additional 500,000 votes, which will narrow the margin significantly but probably not enough to make Texas a swing state. (Then again, I did err on the side of caution...)
OK, so Texas probably won't turn blue, but it never hurts to do your math, right?
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1548493 times)