A Super Tuesday Civil War & Sex Tape in the South
If I am being completely honest, then I will say that with the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary is getting hot AF, the State of Iowa could not possibly be in the news more. Iowa could film a sex tape with Kim Kardashian and Ray J and it would not be a bigger media sensation than it is right now.
Mayor Pete is up! Warren is down! Biden is out! Give me a break. I am tired of all this fake news and am no longer paying attention to what is going on there.
As far as gambling opportunities are concerned, these markets are way too tight for me. There is just too much information out there which means fewer morons are on the other side of trades. No bueno. I am moving on from Iowa and looking ahead to the Dirty South, where there is a Democratic Party Civil War brewing on Super Tuesday. That’s when Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia go to he polls. And as both Robert E. Lee and Andre 3000 from Outkast famously said:
What’s going on in the Southern primaries?
99 percent of of what we know about the Southern electorate comes from polls in South Carolina and among black voters, who make up a very large chunk of the Democratic Party there. Here is the TL:DR:
— Black voters love Joe Biden but recently Elizabeth Warren has been able to cut into his massive advantage in that demo. Also, black voters are probably more likely to vote for Donald Trump than Pete Buttigieg.
— A lot of the black vote is still up for grabs.
–Â Elizabeth Warren is underperforming more in the South than all the Union Army generals prior to Ulysses S. Grant.
— Hillary Clinton swept the South in 2016. In other words, Bernie lost more battles there than the Confederate Army– and did not have Sen. Elizabeth Warren skirmishing with him on his Left flank like he does now.
This makes the South a great place to gamble because unlike other regions, there aren’t tons of overlapping demographic blocks jamming things up. I personally think you can boil all of these races down to: Will Joe Biden win, or will he lose? Pick Biden or pick the field. And the odds are still pretty good if you do — usually around 50/50.
But WAIT — Why is Super Tuesday a Civil War???
Because I am only half right about the South having a simple demographic profile.
As some of you know, the Civil War ended in 1865 and certain parts of the South have actually recovered from it in recent years. This is due to the fact that lots of people are moving to places like Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta in order to escape housing prices and taxation levels in New York, California, and Washington, D.C., that have basically enslaved them to their mortgages. Now that these people have been emancipated, they are bringing changing political attitudes and racial/economic diversity to previously sleepy regions. This means that a candidate like Warren or Sanders could sneak down into Ol’ Dixie for a surprise victory or two. Maybe Georgia will feel the Bern from a Northern invader like it did in 1864. Maybe Elizabeth Warren will Stonewall Uncle Joe in the suburbs of Nashville. It is even possible that North Carolina could be a Cold Harbor for Democratic moderates; or that Joe Biden could be defeated in the Shenandoah Valley by a progressive Army of Northern Virginia.
To get to the bottom of this, I have created a savage political prediction model that I am going to share with you today. This model will calculate whether or not a state is a gimme for Joe Biden or a question mark that awaits further information. It is called the Keendawg Cabela’s Index (KCI). The Keendawg Cabela’s Index takes the adjusted number* of Whole Foods Stores in each state–
then divides it by the adjusted number of Cabela’s locations–
BTW, for those of you who don’t know, Cabela’s is the hunting and fishing superstore that also owns Bass Pro Shops; and Whole Foods is an organizing hall for Elizabeth Warren’s campaign that also sells fresh produce and Amazon Prime memberships.
Next, the Keendawg Cabela’s Index assigns a score to every state by benchmarking it against South Carolina’s ratio of Whole Foods-to-Cabela’s, which is 1.33. Again, we are using South Carolina as a benchmark because it is totally in the bag for Biden, pending unforeseen events.
But we aren’t done yet because we need to find out how other states in the South compare. To do this, we need to multiply every state’s individual Whole Foods-to-Cabela’s ratio by the proportional decrease in black electoral representation in each respective state. This assumes that as black voters are diluted in a Southern state, they are being diluted by bougie white people moving from out of state– aka Whole Foods shoppers.
Any states whose actual Whole Foods-to-Cabela’s ratio is less than the number computed by the KCI is one where Biden should win. Any state where the actual Whole Foods-to-Cabela’s ratio is above the KCI is one where Biden could lose and at a minimum, we need to wait longer before betting on. Here is what it looks like.
[googleapps domain=”docs” dir=”spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSjPP0ClQNjFd48voxJwicax2IfmMBj0-PCgA3lXttD5B9b-GCYVB88JzH0NwpJb6OFaQR0SEo3lyR5/pubhtml” query=”widget=true&headers=false” /]
The results say:
— Go bet on Arkansas and Alabama immediately. Biden is going to crush those states like the ramparts at Vicksburg.
— In Virginia, I highly recommend you retreat into the Wilderness like Robert E. Lee’s army post-Gettysburg. This could be a tough campaign for Biden to wage.
— Tennessee and North Carolina are borderline. They were the last states to secede from the Union so they will probably be the first states to be conquered by Whole Foods. Be careful and await further intelligence before committing your army to the field. We’ll know more soon.
Good luck and happy trading.
KEENDAWG.
*adjusted ratio excludes Whole Foods stores in Hilton Head, SC, and Virginia Beach, VA that clearly services bougie tourists from out of state. Also excludes on Memphis Cabela’s location that clearly services suburbs in Mississippi.
Whole Foods to Cabela’s Ratio! Ha ha!
It’s way too early to make predictions even about IA & NH, let alone Super Tuesday.
Stop being smarter than me.