Dear Coalition of voters opposed to a Trump presidency, please take to heart the following commitments:
1.) Plan your vote. Make sure you are correctly identified in your state’s voter rolls. Know your exact precinct voting location and what ID proof is required. Learn all the voting rules in your state and make sure you are eligible for different forms of voting, like for the mail-in ballot.
2.) If you can, join in grass root movements in your area that are set up to register new voters. Volunteer at phone banks. Drive friends and neighbors to where they can vote. In, short do whatever you can to encourage others to exercise their voting rights. Just think, turnout, turnout, turnout.
3.) NO MATTER WHAT, DON’T BE DETERRED FROM FOLLOWING STEPS 1 AND 2.
4.) Discount out of hand, all polls indicating that the MAGA ex-president is winning, and all trash talk via the press, ads, social media sites making predictions like any group will be voting in favor of the GOP MAGA ex-president in the 2024 US presidential elections. Ignore AI created robo calls like what happened during the January 2024 New Hampshire republican party primary election where the party speaking, sounded just like POTUS Joe Biden reaching out to New Hampshire residents, to advise them against voting in (the) presidential primary and saving their vote for the November general election.
Read: How AI will transform the 2024 elections | Brookings
Expect that authoritarian country leaders like Vladimir Putin from Russia, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, President Xi Jinping from China who are all rooting for an authoritarian US president will be flooding US media outlets/ sites with disinformation campaigns magnified by the AI expertise present in all of these countries.
As per USAFacts.org, in the 2020 US presidential elections, 61.3% out of all eligible voters actually cast a ballot.
“The states that voted for current Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 and former Republican president Donald Trump in 2016 and are often highlighted as swing states. These states include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All five of these states have governorship elections in the 2022 midterms. Four of them—Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have Senate seats up for election this year as well.”
“Tight margins in races also indicate that a state could have been won by either party. In 2020, seven states were won by a margin of three percentage points or less. These states included the five above states, in addition to North Carolina and Nevada.”
The Washington Post has published a very lengthy report on the 2024 electoral college map which is a must read. The post has made this article available to all readers including any who don’t subscribe.
As per a December 8, 2023 Washington Post article by Michael Scherer, Clara Ence Morse, Josh Dawsey and Marianne LeVine, “Small segment of voters will wield outsize power in 2024 presidential race:”
Excerpts:
“But that is not the system handed down from the nation’s founding fathers, who opted for multiple winner-take-all contests that give greater power to smaller states. The electoral college was supposed to moderate the passions of what Alexander Hamilton called the “general mass,” which he worried could fall prey to candidates with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”
“That 18th-century system — which is unlike anything used by the United States’ 21st-century democratic peers — has aged in surprising ways. Premised on the idea that states should each choose electors who would then select a president, the system increasingly distorts the democratic process as partisan divisions grow along geographic lines.”
“Advances in technology, meanwhile, allow campaigns to calibrate their outreach to only the most persuadable voters. The upshot is that a tiny segment of the population will get an outsize say in who leads the United States. And the will of the majority may not even prevail.”
Once rare, the frequency with which the electoral college has skewed the overall result has increased: The “general mass” — now called the popular vote — has been won in two of the past six contests by someone who lost the White House. In both cases, the Republican candidate benefited.
“At the same time, the count of swingable states has narrowed. The 2024 presidential campaign is likely to target a smaller share of Americans than at any point in the modern era, despite massive increases in spending due to online fundraising.”
“During the last election, just 10 states and two congressional districts were targeted by Republican or Democratic nominees’ campaigns. It was a precipitous drop from the 26 states on average that were targeted each year between 1952 and 1980, according to a forthcoming book by political scientists Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos. The research is based on internal campaign documents, interviews with campaign leaders and media reports.”
“The Washington Post’s analysis found that just 1 in 4 Americans lived in such areas in 2020, down from roughly 3 in 4 in the earlier period. If the major parties do not contest Florida in 2024, as is widely expected, only 18 percent of Americans would live in battlegrounds.”
“The targeted voters in the decisive states should expect a barrage of communications — on their phones, in their mail, from their friends, family and colleagues, over radio, television, streaming services and social media networks. The rest of the country’s citizens will find themselves on the sidelines, watching the news or the occasional live candidate event with a diminished voice in their own futures. Their vote will still count but is unlikely to decide anything.”
“It’s now getting to the point where you are probably talking about 400,000 people in three or four states. That is what it is getting down to,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns since 1980. “It does mean that more and more people feel that they don’t have a say.”
“The geographic sorting of Americans along partisan lines helps explain why. Most of the country resides in red or blue states where the outcome in a two-party race is not in doubt. If a candidate wins California by one vote or 1 million votes, the electoral college outcome is the same, giving candidates no incentive to campaign in places where the outcome can be predicted. Thirty-three states — including giants such as California, New York and Texas — have voted for the same party in each presidential election dating back to 2000.”
“But geography is not the only way Americans have found themselves excluded. That’s because voter opinions have hardened in recent decades, and technology has improved to allow candidates to target only the individuals they need to reach, sometimes even distinguishing between members of the same household.”
“We are in an era of politics where data makes campaign strategy highly sophisticated and specialized, which creates smaller and smaller universes of what we call ‘gettable voters,’” said Republican strategist Mike Shields, one of the architects of his party’s data infrastructure. “Instead of using increased spending to target a broader swath of voters, you have more and more money focused on specific voters that campaigns think will be decisive in the electoral college.”
“The shrinking campaign is aided by the fact that many voters are consistent from election to election in their choices about whether to vote and which party to back.”
“An analysis for The Washington Post from Grassroots Targeting, a Republican data firm, found that the number of voters who split their ticket between parties in their presidential and federal legislative votes has dropped sharply since 2000 in 7 of 8 major battleground states. No more than 3 percent of voters in the 2020 presidential election split their tickets in all those states. In Nevada, the share was just 0.1 percent.”
TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, did another analysis of swings in partisan vote share for the 2012, 2016 and 2020 elections. Despite some double-digit outliers, the average swing in targeted states between elections was close to 5 percent. In the 2020 election, the second in which Trump was on the ballot, turnout rose but the number of voters who changed their party preference was especially small as a wide majority remained locked in.”
“It is pretty clear that not all voters are equal,” said Shaw, the political scientist, whose book “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era” is due out next year. “It’s not just the system. It is the system and the voters it is operating on.”
“The great irony of the shrinking campaigns is that they have never had more money to spend. Advances in online campaign fundraising and changes in campaign finance rules to allow unlimited donations have unleashed billions of dollars in new donations. Political ad spending on the 2024 campaigns is expected to approach $11 billion, a nearly fourfold increase over 2016, with about 1 in 4 dollars going to the presidential race, according to projections by AdImpact.”
“The vast majority of the ad and organizing dollars is focused on media markets and outlets where the voters who will decide the election reside, as campaigns seek to infiltrate the communities, households or iPhones where the few identified swing voters such as Monk spend their time. The evolving science of figuring out where those few people are has become a growing obsession of the political strategist class, and is the central purpose of Biden’s initial $25 million in advertising this year.”
“As it stands, the campaign data science cannot predict exactly who will vote or how those who do vote will mark their ballots. But it can create probabilities for each voter on those metrics, crafting digital dossiers that are used by everyone from the campaign bosses to grass-roots volunteers. Those dossiers are then used to hone small universes of potentially persuadable voters who get the most attention. With each election, explains Trippi, the ability to narrow the size of these groups improves.”
“We are reducing it and reducing it,” he said, adding that the effort will probably become even more precise once artificial intelligence tools become more involved.”
“Michael Whatley, the chair of the Republican Party in North Carolina, said his party will focus on less than 2 percent of the votes cast in the swing state.”
“We’re looking at 5.5 million votes that will be cast in North Carolina. It’ll be down to 100,000 voters who are undecided going into the election that we’re going to be targeting and communicating with,” he said. “We can target them.”
“Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, said he begins with the assumption that both major parties in his state will get 48 percent of the vote, though the identity of those voters changes from cycle to cycle depending on turnout.”
“We look for inconsistent voters who will probably vote for a Democrat if they vote and then we look at ticket splitter or swing voters,” he said.”
“At the Biden campaign, the early betting is that the outcome of next year’s election will be close, with a margin once again hinging on tens of thousands of votes in a few states. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who won the 2016 popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or 2 percent, could have won the electoral college if about 80,000 people in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had voted differently.”
“In 2020, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin could have changed the outcome of that race, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million.”
Before 2000, the outcome of the electoral vote had matched the popular vote in every election for more than a century. But in recent years the aberrations have become more common, with mismatches in 2000 and 2016 that enabled the popular vote loser to claim the White House.
“In the past 2 elections, Republicans have had a distinct electoral college advantage. That’s because the tipping-point states that won the election were more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole. In 2020, Wisconsin, the tipping-point state, was 3.5 points more Republican than the country, the highest advantage since 1948.”
“The shifts have only magnified the need for campaigns to ignore the bigger blue states where Democrats tend to rack up large margins. Biden volunteers are being trained to use a smartphone app that allows them to directly enter information to the party voter file about their friends, family and people they meet from key states to help improve the targeting. Early organizing efforts have focused narrowly on Black, Latino, young and female voters in Arizona and Wisconsin, groups that they now think could be decisive.”
“Persuading people to participate in the election at all may prove more important than winning them over from the other side. That means campaigns are likely to focus on voters who are among the least politically engaged.”
“The people who will decide this election don’t want to participate in it,” said one Democrat who requested anonymity to describe planning for next year.”
“One person close to Trump, who is not authorized to speak publicly, said most of the campaign’s resources if he wins the nomination will focus on the same seven states that Biden has identified as early targets — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. If things go well for Trump, the campaign could expand into Virginia and Minnesota.”
“In some formerly swing states, such as Florida and Ohio, Republicans are unlikely to spend much money. Even in the states up for grabs, the focus will be narrowly defined.”
“The reality is: The swingy areas aren’t that swingy anymore. You win an election by going with your base vote plus a swing universe. The swing universe is smaller now because people just put on their uniforms and go vote,” said Justin Clark, the 2020 deputy campaign manager for Trump. “You’ve got to dial in the message in terms of what people care about. It’s a lot of data work, focus grouping, targeting. Really, really digging in and finding voters.”
“Clark said that in the 2020 campaign, Trump and his team looked for particular issues in key states to move groups of voters, such as the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina, a population of about 55,000 that the Republican National Committee recently opened an office to target. “You’re talking about raw numbers of voters in the thousands that are winning and losing presidential elections. You’ve got to find those votes and move them. You’re talking about crazy small margins here,” he said.”
Gronda Morin 
“Their vote is unlikely to decide anything.”
“Gronda, I think you err with your statement about only 400,000 voters controlling the outcome of the election. You did say people should vote, but that their vote will not help decide the winner.
Everyone who can must vote. Never tell anyone their vote is not important. Every vote is important! Why should they vote if you say their vote will not help decide the outcome? And if too many stay home the other side might win.
I know you mean well, and in truth their vote may not decide the winner in the end, but not voting definitely will.
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Hi!
You are absolutely right. Every vote is important. But it’s helpful to be knowledgeable about flaws in each country’s voting infrastructure. In the US, there are actually 2 systems. One where each person who votes gets his/ her vote counted and this is termed the “popular vote.” The other system is called the “electoral college” vote count.
The Electoral College is a presidential voting process established in the US Constitution. Our founding fathers created this system as a compromise between the popular vote, directly among citizens, and a congressional vote. This was supposed to promote fairness in the voting process because otherwise, states with large populations would wield much more power than US states with much lower population numbers. Yes, there’s a lot of controversy about this system.
There are 538 total electoral votes given to each of the 50 states and Washington, D.C. based on how many members of Congress it has in Washington. Candidates need 270 votes to win.
In the USA, it is possible to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college vote. Although in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote count, it was the GOP MAGA ex-president who won the electoral college vote. The electoral college vote count trumps the popular vote count and that is how the USA ended up with President Donald Trump from 2016-2020.
I hope this helps explain why the above discussion is important. I for one do not want a repeat of what happened in 2016. It is possible for President Biden to win the popular vote count in 2024 but still lose the election because of the electoral college vote count.
Hugs, Gronda
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Unfortunztely, I already understand you electoral college to a point, but I cannot understand why it wasn’t thrown out a centjry or more ago.
Be that as it may, yes the candidate with more popular votes can and sometimes does lose the Presidency, but you still need to have enough voters to contend in the race for Electors. (And what happens if it is 269 each? Or if an Elector gets killed on the way to cast his or her College vote, however that is done?)
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HI again!
As per NY post.com, “If neither candidate gets a majority of the 538 electoral votes, the election for US President is decided in the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote. A majority of states (26) is needed to win. Senators would elect the Vice-President, with each Senator having a vote. A majority of Senators (51) is needed to win,”
Hugs, Gronda
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