Quote (El1te @ 22 Jan 2024 04:40)
You make a great point about Mike Pence. He is just flat out unattractive and unpopular with modern Republican voters. That includes even the modern young evangelical Christian right.
Pence was important for locking up Trump-sceptical evangelicals who still objected to him back in 2016 because of moral concerns and his conduct. But I agree with Goom that Pence added nothing to the ticket anymore in 2020.
Quote (Goomshill @ 22 Jan 2024 04:16)
Well a +0.5% / -0.5% swing might be what it takes to get over the finish line. It might have let Trump win in 2020. Georgia was +0.23% Biden and is 33.1% black, PA was +1.2% Biden and is 12.2% black, Michigan +2.8% / 14.1%, Wisconsin +1.3% / 6.6%, Arizona +0.3% / 5.5%
Lets face it, Mike Pence got nobody to go out to the polls who wouldn't vote for Trump anyway except evangelicals who despise Trump on personality grounds, and that has become such a minority with Trump's lock on the base that he doesn't need to drum up any right wing support anymore
Besides, Tim Scott wouldn't be a big turn-off for anyone but the racist fringe on the right. Granted, that is a serious risk, I mean there's a lot of elderly voters in the republican base they count on, but is it so sizeable compared to eating into the Democrat's base?
Kamala Harris was picked just to be a black woman and failed at being a black woman, and even refuses the black woman gigs. Her favorability is even sagging among black voters. Tim Scott is a huge net negative too of course, simply by being a Republican, but all it takes is getting him in front of a camera a few times and being positive and he's going to attract more black vote than Mike Pence ever would, that's for sure
The big question is how much Scott as Trump's veep would actually eat into the Democrat's base. Some 98% of the presidential voting decision is driven by the top of the ticket, not the running mate. And since Biden is guaranteed to have a black running mate, the effect will be muted even more.
The real value of Trump having a black running mate would not lie in appealing to Democratic-leaning black voters, but rather in symbolically reassuring squishy white suburbanites that Trump isn't actually a racist.
Regarding the 2020 math: the tipping point state of Wisconsin was Biden+0.63 (not 1.3!). If black voters made up 6.6% of the electorate in the state and Biden won them by a 75% margin, then black voters added 6.6*0.75 = 4.95 percent to his overall margin. Another 5 point erosion of Biden/Democrats among black voters would reduce the margin he gets out of this voter bloc to 6.6*0.7 = 4.62 percent and thus swing the statewide vote by 0.33% in Trump's favor. All of that of course assuming equal turnout rates among all demographic subgroups, which is unrealistic. What really won Wisconsin back for Democrats in 2020 was Trump's erosion in the Milwaukee suburbs and sky-high turnout (as well as stalinesque margins) in Dane county (UW-Madison).
Simply put, if both trends continue at the rate of the past 7 years, then further erosion of Democratic standing with minorities will be drowned out by further erosion of Trump in the suburbs. And the suburbs are actually the place where Tim Scott might help the ticket more than in inner city black neighborhoods. So yeah, after thinking it through, you've actually convinced me that Scott would be a good VP choice.
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