I have two very different takes on Hillary Clinton’s prospects of winning the 2016 presidential election. One side sees her as potentially vulnerable but most likely to win decisively, possibly realigning the Latino vote (more or less) permanently in the Democratic camp.
Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, also named Bush as a possible candidate to bridge the gap with Latino voters.
“There’s very good reason to believe Jeb Bush has an opportunity to rebuild the GOP image if he can stay true to his message and get through the Republican primary,” Barreto said at the panel Tuesday.
On the flip side, Barreto said, Hillary Clinton has an opportunity to pick up a record number of Latino votes and solidify Latinos as a Democratic voting bloc for years to come.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, she has this serious opportunity to hit and eclipse the 80 percent mark with Latino voters,” Barreto said. “Now, if that happens — which I think between these two scenarios there’s a better likelihood of — I think you are now starting to talk about a more permanent realignment in the Latino vote.”
The other take sees her as formidable, but not much better than a 50-50 bet to become the next president.
“Viewing her as a prohibitive favorite at this point is misplaced, definitely,” says Alan Abramowitz.
Abramowitz isn’t a Republican pollster or a professional Clinton-hater. He’s a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. And he and his ilk—the wonky academics who research in anonymity while pundits predict races on TV—offer the most compelling case for reconsidering Clinton as the likely winner.
“I would feel comfortable saying that it’s a 50-50 race right now,” says Drew Linzer, a political scientist who is an independent analyst in Berkeley, California. “But I don’t think anyone would be wise going far past 60-40 in either direction.”
The first analysis is based on demographic changes in the electorate and looks at what percentage of the minority vote a Republican would need to win in order to overcome their Electoral College problem.
The second analysis looks at a different set of metrics.
The best-known forecasting tool of the bunch—and one that plainly spells out Clinton’s looming trouble—is Abramowitz’s “Time for Change” model. He first built it before George H.W. Bush’s 1988 election, and he has used it to predict the winner of the popular vote in the seven White House races since. (The model predicted that Al Gore would win the presidency in 2000, when he became the first person since Grover Cleveland to earn the majority of the popular vote nationally but lose the Electoral College.)
The model uses just three variables to determine the winner: the incumbent’s approval rating, economic growth in the second quarter of the election year, and the number of terms the candidate’s party has held the White House. Official forecasts aren’t made until the summer before the presidential election. But reasonable estimates rooted in current political and economic conditions demonstrate Clinton’s vulnerability.
Consider this scenario: President Obama retains equal levels of approval and disapproval, better than he has had most of his second term; and gross domestic product growth in the second quarter of 2016 holds at 2.4 percent, the same as last year’s rate of growth. Under this scenario, the “Time for Change” model projects that Clinton will secure just 48.7 percent of the popular vote.
In other words, she loses.
Neither of these analyses considers the strengths and weaknesses of particular candidates outside of their potential to have a natural appeal to minority constituencies. Jeb Bush, for example, is married to a Mexican woman, has mixed-race children, and speaks fluent Spanish. The Bush family also has a record of performing better than average with the Latino vote.
But, what isn’t considered are the policy positions of the candidates, their debating skills, their ability to unify their respective parties, their fundraising ability, their gender, their voting or governing records, their ages, their physical attractiveness, their regional strengths and weaknesses or, obviously, their running mates.
Another potentially decisive factor is their differing roads to the nomination. Jeb Bush might be well-positioned to do well with Latino voters right now, but for that very reason might not be able to win the nomination. Or, he might have to do things to win the nomination that will destroy his positioning with Latino voters. No similar hazards are apparent for Hillary Clinton or any other possible Democratic nominee.
In my opinion, the biggest metrical hazard for Clinton is that she’d be trying to win a third consecutive term for the Democrats. Since Harry Truman declined to run for reelection in 1952, only George H.W. Bush has been able to pull this off. Arguably, Al Gore pulled it off, too, but he didn’t get to become president.
Poppy and Gore were sitting vice-presidents, which was also the case for Truman and LBJ before they assumed the presidency and won reelection. We have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find someone who won a third straight presidential race for his party who had not been vice-president. Like Clinton, Hoover had served in his predecessor’s cabinet.
In other words, we don’t have data on a presidential election that aligns closely with the one coming up, and need I mention the anomaly of potentially having the brother of a failed president running as the smarter, more competent alternative? What would have happened if Herbert Hoover had a brother who ran against Truman?
I think we can take a look at these models but we ought to put them aside. It’s safe to say that Jeb is the strongest candidate that the Republicans can field, and that’s really saying something.
Yet, I am not exactly brimming with confidence or enthusiasm about Clinton’s prospects.
I think the country, mainly, feels the same.
