2024 Election Life and Death Game Theory: Post- Conventions (full text)

This is the easiest one. No possibility of changes. It’s Biden/Harris v. Trump/Sycophant.

For Biden, the alternative is clear: the race would be between Kamala Harris and DJT. Credit where due: Biden has reconfirmed on multiple occasions that he does not intend to replace Harris with Sherrod Brown the Mythical Generic Democrat with No Baggage, or even the fifth columnist whose every peccadillo is known to the opposing party (G.N.)

As of this writing, DJT has not chosen a running mate. There has been much scuttlebutt about SD Governor Kristi Noem or Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), but nothing is certain save that he will choose someone who he believes benefits him the most. Which is usually a white male.

We know from previous research that there is a set of people (~8%) who will not vote for a female candidate for President. There is another set who will not vote for a Black candidate. There are others who won’t vote for an indicted felon or someone assisting a genocidal maniac, but no one cares about the latter and the size of the former is indeterminate; working assumption is that most of them will vote for the Republican candidate. Idiotic assumption being made by Democratic Party apparatchiks is that they are persuadable, so you can basically assume Biden’s alleged monetary advantage will be pissed away trying to persuade them to vote.

So, assuming Joseph Robinette Biden dies, Kamala Harris becomes DJT’s opponent. The changes are:

  • She is a woman. While Hillary Rodham Clinton easily won the popular vote–partially because people in the New York area who wouldn’t vote for Trump if you paid them found themselves having to vote for the Lesser of Two Evils. But we can reasonably presume that some portion of that 8% are Biden-leaning voters who will not vote for a woman. This is negative from the base.
  • Especially not a Black woman. Some portion of those who were willing to vote for a woman will not be willing to vote for a Black. Again, the odds are good that most of these voters are not going to vote for a Democratic Presidential candidate in the first place, but there will be a decline on base.
  • She is not Biden. Some of those of us who will not make any effort to vote for Biden, and possibly even some who are inclined to sit out the election, might be persuaded that Harris is not Biden. (The dead-enders that the LG&M crew believe have simply flitted from issue to issue are not going to vote for Biden or Harris. Whether there are as many of those people as they presume is left as an exercise to the reader, who probably can find them hanging out with the Generic Democrat referenced above.)