To make this even simpler and to pay credence to what merits your issues with Trump’s GOTV or electoral performance MAY have…

There’s more to baking bread than raw numbers of loaves produced, and proportion of loaves produced relative to one’s business competitors/partners IS important. And you can complain losing proportion of loves baked to one’s opponent(s) indicates a problem, such as flawed business decisions (such as not campaigning in the right places or being polarizing and controversial as a politician) or not using the same resources and space as efficiently as possible (such as not making as effective or mechanized a GOTV Machine as possible). Maybe it’s backlash from an ad campaign promising the moon and the biggest, bestest cakes and loaves only for customers to get disillusioned with that (I am fairly sure you can imagine the logical parallel).

But it’s not fundamentally a problem with the ability to bake enough bread loaves.

Which is the equivalent of what you were saying.

You can knock the “GOPe” all day. You can mock ORCA and point out that the “GOPe” GOTV machine was inferior to Democrats’ operation. (You’ll get no argument from me.) But the “GOPe” had a nationwide GOTV operation to build from. Where’s the MAGA GOTV operation? For pity’s sake, Trump is more focused on “punishing” Republicans who fail his loyalt test than he is on turning out his voters for other Republicans.

As the statistics we put together show, MAGA GOTV wasn’t the problem. It performed quite well and generally far better than its predecessors, especially in terms of raw volume and Republican voter turnout. But the opposition apparently gained ground in overall proportion by dint of getting out more votes/baking more bread.

Turtler – You lost me at “the greatest GOTV campaign in Republican history.” The greatest GOTV campaign in Republican history won 46.1% of the vote? Or are you referring to 2020 when he won 46.6%? Romney did better than that.

No, no he didn’t. Because the % of vote is based on Republican voters vs. Dem +other Voters.

Romney underperformed Trump in both elections both per capita and in absolute numbers. The difference is that the Dems got out even more votes (leaving aside the legitimacy of said votes).

That IS a legitimate issue. You might even argue it’s a more important problem.

But it’s a different one from GOTV. You were doing the equivalent of questioning if the chief or oven could bake loaves at all, not if they were keeping pace with the Dems. Which is also why I identified MAGA GOTV as not really the issue, especially in comparison to other problems. MAGA GOTV turned in more than enough loaves to keep pace with almost any Republican candidate’s track record in history, the bigger issue was Dem turnout.

Which is a separate issue from assuming the oven can’t bake at all. Maybe you want to hire a new, even better head baker (IF you can find them; the equivalent of replacing Trump). Maybe you want to study the ovens and kitchen to see if they are acting as effectively as possible with their time and materials (the old Fordism account of studying your org and seeing how it can approve). Or maybe you want to invest and buy new ovens, utensils, and so on (overhauling the GOTV org and buying new computers and stuff).

And all of those are worth investigating (and my opposition to the former is based on how it is often argued for illogically and using faulty premises). But they’re different from “Where is that Chef? Aren’t they baking loaves?” Being annoyed at that doesn’t make one a Trump Cultist. Nor does questioning if you can find a better head chef.

You got the math wrong and then took issue with me for pointing out the flaws with your methodology.

i) In 2012 Romney won ~61M votes, amounting to 47.2%, turnout was 58.6%.
(ii) In 2016, Trump won ~63M votes, amounting to 46.1%, turnout was 60.1%.
(iii) In 2020, Trump won ~74M votes, amounting to 46.8%, turnout was 66.6%.

That’s from Wikipedia, but as far as I know, those are the facts.

Which is broadly similar to what I described. And ignores the key point I made. That the true measure of GOTV is Votes Gotten Out, namely proportion of voters moved to vote. Which makes the “share of vote” interesting at best, misleading at worst (in spite of how important it is in other respects such as deciding the vote).

2016 is when Trump’s GOTV was comparable to Rommey’s in success.

As near as I can tell, your argument is that Trump’s 2020 GOTV effort was successful because it netted him more votes than any previous Republican nominee, 13M more than Romney and nearly 12M more votes than he received in 2016.

And a particularly large share of the registered voters

My argument is that Trump’s GOTV effort was unsuccessful because he lost the election and still won a smaller percentage of the vote than Romney in 2012.

The problem is that your argument crashes and burns because that isn’t the metric of GOTV, even if GOTV is important for what happens there (whether it is in terms of turning voter participation or suppressing it – as our friends the doyens of Tammany Hall showed).

MAGA GOTV was decentralized, chaotic, and sometimes foot-shooty. But it churned out gigantic voter turnout in comparison to Romney (let alone McCain) and their much more rarified and expert driven one. Indeed it (“supposedly”) failed in 2020 because of even larger scale Democrat vote mobilization in an environment highly favorable to them (in part “thanks” to Trump, both in terms of repulsion but even more so in terms of his fence sitting on the lockdowns and mail in balloting), and which probably includes some as of yet undetermined and probably undeterminable amount of fraud in the margin.

Moreover, by the standards of your own argument both Trump and Romney’s GOTV efforts failed (or at least one of Trump’s two ones did) because they lost the election, and Romney was able to grasp a supposedly larger share of a supposedly smaller voter turnout. Which brings us back to the Vote Proportion as a measure of success for GOTV, and the pitfalls I pointed to before when using that.

Again you were asking where MAGA GOTV in comparison to GOPe GOTV. The answer by your own statistics is “Right there behind the even larger amount of Dem GOTV.”

And you were simply ignoring that. And when called on your ignoring MAGA GOTV efforts, you resorted to fudging
the statistics and elevating THE LEAST RELEVANT STATiSTIC OF THAT SET in terms of GOTV yields to being the dominant one.

Put in comparison, this would be a bit like measuring how productive a new oven or head chef is in baking buns by comparing the proportion of buns you baked to those of all the bakeries in your area. Even if the one next door used their much larger budget to buy a much more expansive set of machines, hire a celebrity baker, and get in more employees. To say nothing of rumors that they are in a corrupt deal with the local supermarket to sell “ghost” bread and split the proceeds as a form of insurance fraud.

When put in that context the flaws in your statistical argument appear for what they are. Flaws. And the argument is not merely a matter of opinion but objectively wrong.

I am not saying Trump is some kind of messiah whose GOTV campaigns were perfect. They obviously are not. Nor am I saying we have nothing to learn from ORCA. But GOTV is about vote number and voter participation, not share of the vote, in the same way that we’d compare a bakery of bread to its own performance before and after a hardware or personnel change before we compare it to the competitors.

am not persuaded by your argument and you are not persuaded by mine. So be it. Frankly, reasonable minds can differ.

Reasonable minds can differ.

Someone claiming “why is your oven malfunctioning?!?! Where is the chef?!?” while the oven worked fine and produced more bread in this fiscal quarter than before but it had a (supposed) lower proportion of overall bread baked in this neighborhood (as possibly explained by higher customer turnout, the competitors next door hiring a new head chief/more employers/fudging the numbers for fraud) is not a reasonable conclusion.

It is a fundamental butchering of the statistics and math that even my by-no-means-Einsteinian grasp of math could understand.

This is not a “difference of opinion”, this is you not comprehending basic reality, as I have tried to demonstrate by showing how you were complaining about where the MAGA oven was baking bread when it was in fact keeping pace with demand better than whatever Romney did and the slip is best explained by Dem production (whether or real or fraudulent Does Not Matter).

This is also a pretty basic fact that brings up the question of “Fool? Knave? Knavish Fool? Foolish Knave?” And the fact that you refused to even consider this clear point did you no favors.

So no, my conclusion you were lying and gaslighting on the issue was not “completely absurd.” Even if it was wrong (which I am let us say not prepared to conclude yet) it did point to you using terrible logic and math to try and beat the Orange Man Bad gong.

I am genuinely mystified by your name-calling, crude language, and generally boorish behavior.

This is rich considering you have been far more guilty of it than I am, and added to by botched reasoning and remarkable callousness. You tried to elevate the GOPe and what you admit were its failures in GOTV at the means of hammering on the Great Orange Whale and took issue with me pointing it out, to the point where you refused to engage with it and were incredulous that anyone could disagree with your conclusion in spite of your conclusion being objectively, mathematically wrong.

You have also been acting like a holier than thou sorts who has barely even tried to understand why your fellow commenters or other Republicans might be open to supporting Trump while you are not, arguing simply that they are stuck in a right wing bubble while you, almost uniquely if we are to believe your comments, are not. This is in spite of this being Neo’s blog and she talking about left wing coverage in general.

You also then generally reject even well meaning critique and are prone to being boorish, insulting, prejudice, and illogical like many of those you accuse (sometimes accurately, sometimes inaccurately). In addition to often reiterating the left’s propaganda points even well after they have been torpedoed.

I do not claim to be all competent, which is why I refrain from commenting on this. I also am not above agreeing when others make a point I view as valid. And I will make my case as best as I can.

now this notion that independence is a bad thing, seems to have permeated other media, like the RAI Sky TV production Devils based on a novel by an Italian master of the universe type, which purports to show financial manipulation, in many of the crisis of the late 00s and early 10s, sort of House of Cards from a mostly London perspective,

the series has a protagonist, Massimo a brilliant young Italian financier and Dominic Morgan, an American in the Gordon Gekko vein who operates as a kingmaker from his perch in a London based NY firm,

I’m genuinely interested in DCL’s answer to my question, since he/she purports to be a conservative. Figured I’d be more likely to get an answer if I asked it in a civil way.

I am moderately curious too, but only so much. Ultimately asymmetrical politeness can only go so far x and while others have spoken about the right or left wing bubbles DCL seems firmly stuck in the latter. I disagree with Bauxite and others plenty, but they could identify the partisan and corrupting influence of the Jan 6th Committee plenty.

I’ve never succeeded in changing someone’s mind by yelling at or insulting them. Also, it takes a lot of energy and I’m lazy.

I can make no rebuttal to the second sentence and I commend. As for the former, I think that makes sense to a point. But in my admittedly partial and flawed experience it is important to be able to stand upright for one’s own stance or oneself. This doesn’t mean being a douche (even if some might be), but while people tend to respect willingness to hear from other sides and consider their points they tend not to respect weakness, and for many after a certain point even politeness is viewed as weakness. And even if it wasn’t I have no reason to conflate the achievements of some with those of others just for sharing the same nationality.

I certainly view Neo’s approach as close to an ideal, and I think the way DCL “responded” to her by brushing her points off is illustrative.

I wish you the best with it and maybe something good can come of it.

Maybe he foresaw today’s $83.3 million dollar judgment against Donald Trump.

(i) In 2012 Romney won ~61M votes, amounting to 47.2%, turnout was 58.6%.
(ii) In 2016, Trump won ~63M votes, amounting to 46.1%, turnout was 60.1%.
(iii) In 2020, Trump won ~74M votes, amounting to 46.8%, turnout was 66.6%.

That’s from Wikipedia, but as far as I know, those are the facts.

As near as I can tell, your argument is that Trump’s 2020 GOTV effort was successful because it netted him more votes than any previous Republican nominee, 13M more than Romney and nearly 12M more votes than he received in 2016. My argument is that Trump’s GOTV effort was unsuccessful because he lost the election and still won a smaller percentage of the vote than Romney in 2012.

I am not persuaded by your argument and you are not persuaded by mine. So be it. Frankly, reasonable minds can differ. I am genuinely mystified by your name-calling, crude language, and generally boorish behavior.

I’ve never succeeded in changing someone’s mind by yelling at or insulting them. Also, it takes a lot of energy and I’m lazy.

I’m a big fan of Joe Walsh (the guitarist). Life’s been good to him so far!

In contrast to Bertie Wooster, DCL can’t admit or conceive that he is wrong. No Jeeves can save DCL. Does DCL have a moral compass or a good heart? A mystery; hatred of The Great Orange Whale does that to people.