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Sean T at RCP Profile picture
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9 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
So after the "Trump path to victory" piece a couple of weeks ago, I started a "Trump gets blown out" piece. That's pretty much ready to go, but these are two things that I had thought would be part of the "blowout" piece that didn't work out. 1/

realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/…
We're in a weird situation where, along with the "are you better off than you were four years ago" poll from yesterday, there are actually a fair number of non head-to-head poll info for Trump/Republicans that are fairly decent. The Occam Razor's explanation for this 2/
is that Trump is/Republicans are going to lose, bigly, despite a number of decent indicators precisely because of Trump. This is a referendum on the party in power and Trump is so toxic that his actions/persona overwhelm other considerations. 3/
So, as with the last piece, if we end up in a "here we go again" situation as polls start to close and votes get counted, this is sort of a pre-write on "what did we miss."

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More from @SeanTrende

Sean T at RCP Profile picture
11 Oct
So in the wake of my interview with @IChotiner and pieces the past couple of weeks, people have asked why I am bullish on Trump. The answer is . . . I'm not, really. I would not even think to take an even-money bet on Trump winning right now. 1/
I'm probably more bullish on him relative to @NateSilver538 's 14%, but we can debate the relative differences of an 14% chance of someone winning versus, say, a 20-25% chance of someone winning. But let's take Nate's 14% chance. 2/
That translates to about a 1-in-7 chance. Let's call it 1-in-8 to make the math easy. We did this ad nauseum in 2016, seemingly to little effect, but that 1-in-8 chance is roughly the same chance of having three kids, all boys. That's not unusual. Trust me! 3/
Read 9 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
20 Sep
This is actually a major contingency point in US history. LBJ convinced Goldberg to resign so he could appoint his friend Abe Fortas to the Court, knowing that Fortas would give him a heads' up if the Court was going to find his legislation unconstitutional. 1/
By the end of LBJ's second term, there was an overwhelming liberal majority: Warren, Marshall, Fortas, Douglas, and Brennan. Yes, Brennan was the swing justice on that Court, which did things like declaring shopping malls to be state actors subject to the 1st Amendment. 2/
Warren was afraid he wouldn't make it through Nixon's term if he won, so in June of 1968 he announced his retirement. LBJ quickly nominated Fortas for the position. But the Fortas nomination ran into trouble over allegations of impropriety and 3/
Read 10 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
20 Sep
Apropos of a major project I'm working on: Up through 1920, Congress passed an apportionment act every 10 years. They regularly increased the size of the House, and specified how districts had to look, e.g., from 1870-1930 they had to have a roughly even number of residents. 1/
had to be compact, etc. If you look at the appendices to Colgrove v. Green and Baker v. Carr, the "roughly even" requirement actually worked pretty well. Then, in 1920, the headline for the census was "for the 1st time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas." 2/
Now by "urban" it mean "in excess of 5k people" but nevertheless, rural legislators freaked out, especially Midwestern Republicans who had seen major Democratic cities spring up practically overnight in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, etc. 3/
Read 7 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
19 Sep
Since people are already discussing the impact of this on 2020: The smart Trump play happens to be the one with the best outcome for the country: not to nominate anyone. He doesn’t care about Republicans, conservatism, or least of all the court. 1/
Constitutional cons will complain but they are few in number and what are they going to do? Vote Biden? It puts the screws to wavering center-right folk. If he loses, he spends the next four years on his OANN show railing against the Lincoln Project for giving away her seat. 2/
He can even name the person he will nominate. But the alternatives are ramming through a nominee and having the left go apoplectic with 100% turnout, while conservatives can vote on character, or worse, losing the confirmation battle. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
29 Aug
I don't think this is as surprising as people think, and doesn't necessarily mean that "Florida is the linchpin for the election." Let's stipulate that Trump has a very hard time winning w/o Florida, so that 95% is, if anything, a bit bullish on Trump 1/

So let's take a view of swing states that includes AZ, NE-02, IA, MN, WI, MI, PA, NC, GA, FL, ME-02. That puts Biden at 220 EVs to Trump's 182. 2/
Right now, the models that are showing Trump at 25% or whatever to win have Florida as roughly 50-50, give-or-take. What we're doing is taking the *conditional* probability of Trump winning Florida. 3/
Read 6 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
27 Aug
People are having trouble grasping the full legal import of this. This is mostly about legal implications, not moral ones. It doesn't really inform questions about why he was there in the first place, why he was carrying a gun, etc. I'll leave those normative qs to others. 1/
Legally speaking, this is not as much of an open-and-shut case as it appeared yesterday AM. The defense will likely center around a self-defense argument. As of last evening, I thought that argument would fail. He might have had it for the second/third shootings 2/
because he was being pursued by at least one armed individual, but that still left the first shooting to account for, and from what we'd seen that appeared cold-blooded. 3/
Read 7 tweets

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