Politics Containment Topic 411: Presidential Election MMXX Rebirth

I know no one was very enthused by primary analysis before but oh well, you're getting more of it. This time for both.

I'll start with the GOP since it builds off my prior observations:

Trump underperforms yet again, and this time it's the worst yet to my eye. As I noted earlier in the topic, he was coming in at about 7 points under the expected result every time, but this time it's looking to be more like 16 points. (Polling had this 79-22, actual results looking like 68-27, so Trump+57 vs Trump+41)

But the other pattern I noted before where 538 kept nailing Trump's % in spite of the margin of victory being off also finally failed here. As you can see, he underperformed that by 11 points as well (79 to 68.) All in all, this seems like the biggest underperformance by Trump yet.

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And now, though I hesitate a bit to wade into this, the Dem primary because there's been a lot of chatter about it and the campaign for Uncommitted.

ATM (72% reporting): It's:
Biden - 81.4% (498k votes)
Uncommitted 12.7% (78k votes)

There was a lot of chatter from the groups organizing the campaigns to protest vote for Uncommitted in response the administrations actions re: Gaza. I saw a lot of media reporting their goal was 10,000 votes. I'm going to stop right here and say that that number was very much them managing expectations and picking a number they knew they would breeze past - even if they did absolutely nothing. In the Democratic primaries for 2020, 2016, 2012, and 2008 Uncommitted received at least 19,000 votes.So very obviously they were going to go way past 10,000 - it was never an honest benchmark.

So let's look at past MI Dem Primaries and how Uncommitted fared:

2008*: 31% (238k votes)
2012**: 10.7% (21k votes)
2016***: 1.8% (22k votes)
2020***: 1.2% (19k votes)

*Obama wasn't on the ballot because of primary drama where Michigan tried to jump the line, so obviously this isn't a great comparison point.

**MI used a caucus this time, god knows why. Not ideal, but for comparison's sake I'd say this is your best one since it was an incumbent Obama running essentially unchallenged.

***Contested primary: Sanders v Hillary/Biden depending on the year. Therefore also not great comparison points, while Uncommitted draws about the same number of raw votes, turnout was obviously much higher and you see the % that number of votes represents drops significantly.

So, while understanding it's not quite a perfect comparison point, 2012 Obama is as good as we're going to get for how we might expect Uncommitted to perform today - incumbent Dem president with no real challenge to speak of. And in that light, I feel like electorally this Uncommitted campaign was a dud. Yes, the raw number of Uncommitted votes is much higher this time around... but that's because turnout is way up and closer to the 2016/2020 turnout so looking at raw votes is extremely deceptive (think looking at character contests and seeing how AiAi got nearly 9,000 votes against Link in 2003 and then compare to 2018 Cloud vs Link getting 11,600 votes and going "oh shit AiAi could give Cloud a run!")

If 2012 tells us that we can expect Uncommitted to run about 11% in "normal" conditions against an incumbent then Uncommitted getting 12.7% right now in 2024 doesn't strike me as all that significant in terms of electoral impact. That's basically margin-of-error (and I'm pretty sure the Uncommitted number has been coming down a bit as results come in but idk how much of this is what areas are reporting in in what order.) Basically, we've got a high turnout primary and Biden is still doing what you'd expect a typical incumbent to do - if anything, I think that's electorally a sign of strength.

OTOH, from what I can tell, the media has bought the narrative of the Uncommitted campaign and their bogus targets of 10,000 votes hook, line, and sinker and as we speak the NYT is reporting these as Biden facing a Protest movement while Trump "coasted" past Haley when as far as my eyes see this that's basically the inverse of reality here. So, whether justified or not, I think the narrative of the Uncommitted Campaign is going to win tonight and... I don't know, that may not be the worst thing in the world if it leads to any change from the administration in regards to Gaza but in terms of what actually happened in Michigan I just don't see it as having been a success in putting any fear that Biden's electoral strength was diminished.