Not much meat here, especially compared with my last diary. But I just discovered FiveThirtyEight’s Swing the Election tool today, and I decided to experiment: Suppose Donald Trump wins the Democratic Republican [*facepalm* —GaW] nomination. Suppose this results in the Republicans’ getting a 10 percentage point swing in their favor among non-college-educated white voters, along with a 10 percentage point turnout increase in that same group. Suppose it also results in an opposite effect of equal magnitude among Latino voters: 10 percentage point swing toward Democrats, with a 10 percentage point turnout increase. Suppose, finally, that Trump’s candidacy has no effect on black voters, Asian voters or college-educated white voters.
The result is the map above, which is pretty damn alarming: Democrats win Florida and Virginia, but Republicans seize Colorado, New Hampshire, Iowa and the entire Great Lakes region except for Illinois. (Drop black turnout by 10 percentage points, to account for Obama’s no longer being in the running—which I did not do in the map above—and Virginia and Florida flip to the Republicans, too.)
Our temptation is to guffaw at Trump’s candidacy and say, “Bring it on.” But the dude has genuine, if horrifying, appeal to a whole lot of low-information potential voters. Can you imagine less-than-likely voters getting excited about any other Republican candidate? I can't. That’s the threat Trump poses, made visible in the map above.