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Category: Iowa (Page 12 of 13)
Photo by Pete Linforth. https://pixabay.com/en/users/TheDigitalArtist-202249/
There’s a certain pattern to how Trump and his interlocutors engage one another. A certain pattern of rhetoric, if you like.
It works something like this. Trump makes a wild claim. Usually it’s false. An opponent, or the news media, points out how and why it’s false. Trump doesn’t blink, and Trump’s supporters don’t blink. Trump wins, or, at the very least, doesn’t lose. Trump’s opponents look very confused as they fail to gain traction.
Why does this happen?
The 2018 election went pretty well for Democrats in Iowa, as I predicted. They took 2 of 3 Republican House seats. They won seats in the state legislature. Not enough for a majority, but better than last election. Democrats also did pretty well nationally, as we know. But it didn’t go so well for Fred Hubbell.
Fred Hubbell lost.
Why did he lose?
Source: https://www.deviantart.com/trish2/art/Crystal-Ball-2-48410126
Let’s predict tomorrow’s US election!
First, I’m not a pollster or scientist. I can only stand on the shoulders of giants.
And so this is really only for entertainment value. I’ll say a bit about where I think things are nationally, and then about where things are in Iowa.
College students turned out in droves to vote for Bernie Sanders. Among voters under the age of 30, Sanders won about as many primary votes as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz combined.
‘Under 30’ and ‘college student’ aren’t the same group. Some college students are over 30, and many people under 30 aren’t college students. But there’s a lot of overlap. We also know that voters, as a group, have a higher socioeconomic status than non-voters. It stands to reason, then, that college students make up a healthy portion of the under 30 vote.
My own Iowa caucus site sits on a college campus. While the site covers both student and non-student neighborhoods, it overflowed with Sanders supporters. He won 77% to Clinton’s 23%. Nothing was more obvious than the age difference between the two camps. And, despite attempts to label Sanders a candidate for only white people, he carried the under 30 vote nationally across all racial groups.
Local elections are a different story. Turnout is low among basically all ages everywhere across the country. But it’s really low among young voters.
Given the facts about who votes, you’d expect turnout to be very low among young people who don’t go to college and relatively higher among those who do. And turnout is low among those who don’t go to college, in both national and local elections. College students, though, don’t behave quite as expected. They do often vote in national elections but don’t vote in local elections.
Why is that?
