@coldjoint,
coldjoint wrote:Quote:But voting out Trump was a much more potent motivator still.
A motivator to the people who lost power, not the average American. You are spouting rhetoric, also known as bullshit.
The evidence is right there in front of you, in the form of record high turnout and a record number of votes for the non-Trump candidate — not to mention the specific things you just observed, such as lots of people voting for Biden just to get Trump out even if they were otherwise not enthused by the Democratic candidates on the ballot — you just don't want to accept it.
coldjoint wrote:Quote:The old bellwether counties were bellwether counties because their demographics fell right in between the old Dem and GOP coalitions.
Prove it. Trump won 95% of those counties. Show me how the demographics changed. I am sure you would be glad to back up your claim.
You're seriously asking how the demographics of the Democratic and Republican electorates have changed? This can't possibly be the first time you have heard of that, no?
In short: Democrats have made major gains among college-educated voters, in the suburbs, and among (upper-)middle class voters; Republicans have made major gains among voters without a college degree, and in rural and small-town communities. This has been going on for a while, but has accelerated in the Obama and Trump years.
Hence seeing many higher-income suburban communities that always voted Republican turning blue, and seeing many small-town working class communities that had still clung to the Dems (if to an ever smaller extent) finally turning red.
Mahoning county in Ohio went to Trump this year; Tarrant county in Texas to Biden — both of them things that would have been hard to imagine a decade or two ago.
By extension, that means the bellwether counties — counties that sit right on the balance between the demographic coalitions of the two parties — change also. Many small-town, working class communities in swing states that were bellwether counties before (eg because they still had a relatively strong union tradition and/or few evangelicals) now seem indefinitely lost to the Dems as the red shift in rural America has swept them into the GOP half. We'll get other bellwethers instead.
This isn't really stuff I have to "back up" on Able2Know dot com, I'm merely stating the obvious here — just google literally any article on the subject if you'd like to doublecheck.
