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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Now The Line is That Trump Did Not Expand The GOP Voting Base

Yahoo News is reliably pro-Democrat.  No matter the day, there's always a story that shows Hillary in a good light or Trump in a bad light.  It's getting ridiculous.  They seem now either have lost their minds at Yahoo News or else they have just given up on facts and gone all-in on propaganda.  A good example is a story they are running today under the headline "New Data Backs Argument That Trump Has Not Expanded the GOP".  Basically, the story looks at a few states in which Republican voting was way up from 2012 and combines this with polling data that tells what portion of the voters were new voters vs. voters who usually vote Republican in the general election.  Adding the number of these "new" voters in the primary to the results of 2012 then tells us that Trump will not carry any of the states.

That article is nothing but propaganda.  First of all, it ignores a basic fact of the 2012 election:  the GOP turnout was lower than normal.  President Obama actually got fewer votes than he did in 2008, but because millions of GOP voters did not bother to vote, Obama still won.  The data that Yahoo News uses for its story shows in dramatic fashion that those stay-at-home GOP voters went back to the polls in 2016.  In fact, the GOP turnout was so heavy in the primaries that a surge of that size on election day would be enough, by itself, for Trump to win.  Now no one ought to analyze this year's election by taking the 2012 results and modifying one factor.  Nevertheless, if Yahoo News wants to try that, it ought to be honest about it at a minimum.

Let's look at an example:  In Virginia, there were close to 700,000 additional voters in the GOP primary compared to four years ago.  That increase is more than four times the margin by which Obama beat Romney in the state four years ago.  On top of that, it is safe to assume that the margin by which Hillary Clinton wins the African American vote and the turnout of the African American community will decline because Obama is no longer at the top of the ticket.  Combine those two factors, and the prospects for Trump in Virginia look quite good indeed.  But again, none of this analysis really tells us what will actually happen this fall.  What we do know, however, is that Yahoo News is totally wrong in what it is reporting.

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