Lone Candle – Page 950

no, radical policies wont drive election winning turnout

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Lone Candle

“an analysis using data from the States of Change project, sponsored by, among others, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, indicates that, even if black turnout in the 2016 election had matched that of 2012 (it dropped from 62 to 57 percent), Clinton would have still lost. On the other hand, if she had managed to reduce her losses among white noncollege voters by a mere one-quarter, she’d be president today. That’s an issue of persuasion, not turnout.”

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“In 2016, the age cohort that really killed Democrats was voters ages 45 to 64, who had split evenly in 2012 but leaned Republican by six percentage points four years later.”

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“it’s a mistake to assume that Democrats would benefit disproportionately from high turnout. Trump is particularly strong among white noncollege voters, who dominate the pool of nonvoters in many areas of the country, including in key Rust Belt states. If the 2020 election indeed has historically high turnout, as many analysts expect, that spike could include many of these white noncollege voters in addition to Democratic-leaning constituencies such as nonwhites and young voters. The result could be an increase in Democrats’ popular-vote total — and another loss in the electoral college.”

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“Stanford political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, for example, studied House races between 2006 and 2014 and found that highly ideological candidates who beat moderates for a party nomination indeed increased turnout in their own party in the general election — but they increased the opposition turnout even more. (The difference was between three and eight percentage points.) Apparently, their extreme political stances did more to turn out the other side to vote against them than to turn out their own side to vote for them.”

America Has Given Up Trying To Define Success in Afghanistan

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Lone Candle

“The United States has spent more than $64 billion rebuilding Afghanistan’s military and police forces since 2001—but there is literally no way for American taxpayers to know whether their investment has been worth it.

“Most of the [indicators] of measuring success are now classified, or we don’t collect it. So I can’t tell you, publicly, how well a job we’re doing on training,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for the Afghanistan reconstruction effort told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee”

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“”How many Afghan soldiers do we have? We’re still trying to figure out how many we are paying for. How many Afghan police are there, really? We don’t know,” Sopko said Tuesday. “This isn’t rocket science, but apparently it’s all secret, classified, and I can’t tell you what the results are.”

That the United States has sought to suppress negative information about the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan is not news to anyone familiar with The Washington Post’s bombshell “Afghanistan Papers” report. Published in December, the Post’s report included more than 2,000 pages of interviews conducted by Sopko’s office with “people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.” Those internal documents paint a picture of a nation-building effort that has lacked definable goals, wasted billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and done little to improve the internal security of Afghanistan—all while American officials have deliberately misled Congress and the public about the extent of the quagmire.”

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“That audit is part of a disturbing trend. When there hasn’t been progress to show, America’s Afghanistan strategy has been to prevent showing the lack of progress.”