In all honesty I think they do more harm than good. It gets it into the morons heads “oh, he’s going to win, I can stay home”.
I keep seeing this line printed over and over again, in every election cycle, by people who seem to think there really is this enormous body of people who are enthusiastic about a candidate but unenthusiastic about voting.
Hell, Cuomo complained about it shortly after the election. He lost because too many people liked him too much and thought his win was assured. I heard this after Brexit. I heard it after Hillary lost in 2016 and after Trump lost in 2020 and after Harris lost in 2024. We can have historic high turnouts and historic low turnouts. We can have sea changes in the composition and ideology of the voters. We can have scandals flood the papers a day before the election that throw polls into chaos and candidates who coast to victory on double-digit margins. (Incidentally, Mamdani won by 12% in an election he was projected to lose by more than that a month earlier). The “I was secretly so popular that people forgot to vote for me” myth endures.
I’ve got an alternative hypothesis. Maybe people turned out for Mamdani because they liked him a lot and people stayed home for Cuomo because he was a creepy sex-pest POS. It had nothing to do with their projected odds of winning and everything to do with their appeal as political leaders.
I keep seeing this line printed over and over again, in every election cycle, by people who seem to think there really is this enormous body of people who are enthusiastic about a candidate but unenthusiastic about voting.
Hell, Cuomo complained about it shortly after the election. He lost because too many people liked him too much and thought his win was assured. I heard this after Brexit. I heard it after Hillary lost in 2016 and after Trump lost in 2020 and after Harris lost in 2024. We can have historic high turnouts and historic low turnouts. We can have sea changes in the composition and ideology of the voters. We can have scandals flood the papers a day before the election that throw polls into chaos and candidates who coast to victory on double-digit margins. (Incidentally, Mamdani won by 12% in an election he was projected to lose by more than that a month earlier). The “I was secretly so popular that people forgot to vote for me” myth endures.
I’ve got an alternative hypothesis. Maybe people turned out for Mamdani because they liked him a lot and people stayed home for Cuomo because he was a creepy sex-pest POS. It had nothing to do with their projected odds of winning and everything to do with their appeal as political leaders.