Currently, Nate Silver is giving Donald Trump less than an eleven percent chance of winning the November election and becoming the next president of the United States. Digging down a little deeper, we see that Silver says that Clinton has a better chance of winning Montana (29%) and Utah (24%) than Trump has of winning Florida and Ohio (both at 20%) or Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Colorado (all at 10%).
This election, as it currently stands, is not like the elections we had in 2000, 2004, 2008 or 2012. The “red” portions of the map are being erased, as Silver’s map currently has Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina shaded blue. Clinton is listed as having a better than 40% shot of winning both Missouri (41%) and South Carolina (43%), and Mississippi (20%) is now at least somewhat in question. If I told you two years ago that Clinton would be twice as likely in mid-August 2016 to win Mississippi as the Republican nominee was to win Virginia, how would you have responded?
It’s something I was already predicting nearly three and a half years ago in March 2013, as I examined early polling that showed Clinton running strong in Texas and winning in Georgia.
To begin with, I was looking at results of the Republicans’ effort to polarize the white vote (particularly in Texas) and how that was going to work against a (likely) white Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. As I noted in my last post, I’ve been writing about this for a long time.
These results seem to confirm that the Republicans were successful in polarizing the electorate along racial lines, at least in Texas. If we think of their strategy as an effort to counter a growing minority population by increasing their share of the white vote, they did exactly that in the Lone Star State, and the result was that Texas stayed precisely 19 points more conservative than the country as a whole.
[Nate] Cohn predicted that this strategy had reached it’s full fruition and that no more white votes could be squeezed out of the electorate. But as long as the Republicans retain this high level of white support in Texas, the state will remain reliably Republican for quite some time. Cohn also acknowledged that the next Democratic candidate, who is more likely than not going to be white, will probably fare better with white Texans than Obama did the last time around, but the Republicans have plenty of cushion before they need to worry.
But I identified some signs that indicated to me at the time that the Republicans should worry.
What Cohn didn’t really contemplate was that the Republican Party would splinter and fall apart. What do white Texans think about the new Republican National Committee report that recommends that the party agree to a comprehensive immigration reform bill with a path to citizenship and that advocates acceptance of gay marriage?
…I’ve argued this before, but I think racial resistance to Obama’s presidency is masking the true weakness of the Republican Party. And things aren’t going to remain static. There will be consequences to the Republicans’ lack of unity on immigration and gay rights. With the RNC taking an official position on those issues that is anathema to, respectively, the racist and evangelical bases of the party, we can expect further erosion of the Republicans’ hold on the white vote. Some of those voters will be receptive to a Clinton candidacy, but the real problem will be lack of enthusiasm resulting in less volunteerism, fewer donations, and more third-party voting.
What I missed in this early-2013 piece was the possibility that the Republican Establishment would not just alienate their base voters by selling them out on gay rights and immigration, but actually have their leadership (Boehner and Cantor) and top presidential candidates (Jeb, Walker, etc.) defenestrated in favor of the Freedom Caucus and a racist demagogue.
The effect was largely the same though. The headline of the column I’m referencing here was “This is What Collapse Looks Like”. What I saw was an imminent coming apart of the Republican coalition, and it portended for me a different kind of presidential election in 2016.
I don’t think it really mattered who the Democrats or the Republicans nominated, the only way the results would have been different is if one of the candidates made a very concerted effort to reshape the electorate by going after completely different segments of the electorate than is traditionally done by the two respective political parties. Trump is trying to do that in his own way, but he’s really doing more harm than good and providing an opening for Clinton to realign a lot of traditional Republicans into the blue column. Jeb would have kept some of this squishy middle but suffered mass disenchantment and apathy on his right in the bargain.
At times, I’ve used the analogy of “winning the argument.” In the last several presidential elections, no side has really done that decisively the way that Reagan did in 1980 and 1984 or Nixon did in 1972 or LBJ did in 1964. That led a lot of commentators to conclude that things are different today and we’re stuck in a world where even the losing candidate is guaranteed somewhere between 40% and 45% of the vote.
I never believed that.
I always believed we were in that system until one side won the argument again. In 1984, Ronald Reagan convinced the liberals of Massachusetts and Vermont and Rhode Island and Hawaii that he was the better choice than Walter Mondale. I knew that the reverse was still possible and that a Democrat could win in places like Georgia and Arizona. All it would take is one side to lose its strength so that it could no longer push back with equal force.
Trump is uniquely bad, spending no money on advertising, for example. But the crack-up of the Republican Party began in earnest with the reelection of President Obama when they couldn’t pass immigration reform and they couldn’t operate the federal government. Fox News has fallen apart and no longer serves as an organ of the Republican nominee. The National Review, Red State, and other previously reliable wurlitzer-grinders stand in strong opposition to the Republican nominee, but also to the preferences of the party’s base.
These schisms were in evidence years ago, which is why I found it possible to predict that the GOP wouldn’t be able to hold up their side of the wall in 2016 and things would tilt against them in dramatic fashion.
People will blame Trump for this, but it was all there before Trump was seen as anything more than a barking birther tree monkey.
This is not Trump’s fault. He’s making it worse, but it’s not his making.
I’ll bet you $10 the map is the same as in 2012, with the exception that Clinton wins NC.
Will be very happy to be wrong…
Make it $20.
Deal.
It is too bad that it took this long for this to happen to the GOP. The damage that has been caused by them to the Average American is horrible.
An example is look at what Pence has done to Indiana, of course it is being ignore by most so called news outlets now. When it should be pushed hard.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/mike-pence-is-the-real-extremist-on-the-gop-ticket-just-look-at-his-
trail-of-victims-in-indiana/
Sadly I doubt that the GOP will learn one damn thing that’s truly useful from the Trump debacle. I would LOVE to be completely WRONG and hope I am.
My prediction? That when Clinton wins on Nov 8, they’ll begin impeachment proceedings first thing on Nov 9. And they’ll continue to obstruct and be generally horrible, racist, sexist, xenophobic to the extent that they’ll make their Obama years look mild.
I simply do not see them as changing their stripes. They’ve invested so much in this business model, and their rabid fan-base is so heavily propagandized that I cannot see them making some sort of reasonable turn-around.
anyway, why bother? Things are still as lucrative for them – if not more so – when a dreaded D is in the white house. That’s my take anyway.
Winning the white house isn’t everything. The GOP still controls the House and a TON of State & local governements. Why change when they don’t need to.
See Mike Pence for an example.
Think they’ll at least wait for something arguably impeachable (which includes virtually anything) occurring post-inauguration. Also think there’s some chance a majority will be chastened enough by the election result that now looks likely that they’ll even hold off absent something more clearly substantive. Especially if Dems take Senate, as looks increasingly likely. If it’s such a wave election that Dems take House, too (still looks unlikely), impeachment looks off-the-table, barring some credible evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in the Founders’ sense, not just in the wingnuts’ sense.
But will they
Does the Pope wear a funny hat?
Nah, they started already.
Been doing that for a while. Talking and doing are different things, though.
I appreciate your willingness to make these bold predictions, Martin. In my experience you’re right about this stuff most of the time, which is why this is the first site I look forward to reading each day. I also speak highly of your work and repost articles such as this one to facebook. It helps that your worldview is quite similar to mine, by which I mean well left of center but pragmatic and realistic. I’m an outlier in this community in that I bring a spiritual/religious perspective that’s out of fashion on the left. But despite your lack of interest in subjects that inspire, I find your work truly first rate. Thanks so much for doing what you do.
I doubt it. Not motivated to research it, but my guess is that even in those states, widely seen as liberal-leaning, liberals are at best a plurality, not a majority, hence were not capable of carrying their states for Mondale on their own even if they voted unanimously for him. Think that would have required some moderate/centrist/indy types, too. But it seems pretty implausible to me that Mondale didn’t wouldn’t have gotten at least a majority of the liberals in those states, even though that wasn’t enough to carry any of them.
Technically, Reagan only convinced those in HI in ’84. He convinced those in CT, MA, and RI in 1980. Or we could say that Kennedy convinced those voters in ’80 not to support Carter and Mondale was more Carter.
Anyone else find 11% alarmingly high?
That’s Silver’s “black swan” wiggle room. Perhaps he’s being conservative since he blew the MI Democratic primary by a huge amount.
The crystal ball says Trump has zero chance. Next month his goal may be down to matching the ’64 electoral map but without AZ in his column.
Eh, pretty much everybody in the forecasting business has Trump’s chances somewhere between 10 and 15% (Cohn, Wang, etc).
Silver’s actually got Trump’s chances higher than that — into the 20s — if you use the polls-plus model, which, if memory serves, is what people think of when they think back to 2012 and Nate Silver’s ModelTM. Polls-only is, I think, more like his 2008 model.
I’ve been somewhere in between the two — somewhere between 2008 and 2012, but probably closer to 2008. “The economy’s a mixed back by historical standards, but Trump’s uniquely awful,” basically.
I had her taking 332 EVs and about a six-point margin. Thinking 347 is probably most likely now, given what a trainwreck Trump’s turning out to be in the big suburbs of the South.
“…mixed *bag” obviously. Long day.
It’s that “Trump is uniquely awful” variable that can’t be quantified.
Does that energize liberals to show up and vote for HRC in numbers similar to ’08 or ’12 and conservative leaning Inds and GOP to vote for HRC, stay home, vote Johnson/Weld, or leave the top line blank? I’m getting from liberals that ’16 will be like the ’64 landslide election. But ’72 was also a presidential landslide, and in the Senate Democrats gained two seats.
Voters are reasonably predictable but they can also be quirky in how they make their personal calculations.
That’s what that broad variance in the 20,000 trials of his model is telling him now. I doubt that they tweak the model midstream, just between elections.
As a statistical probability, 11% is extraordinarily low.
In addition, I don’t believe Silver’s statistical model accounts for the competent Hillary campaign and the incompetent Trump operation. When you add those important ongoing circumstances to the statistical analyses in Silver’s model, it comes about as close to a statement of “no chance for Trump” as can be mathematically made nearly three months out from Election Day.
No advertising? No GOTV? No office staff, or minimal staff, in historically battle ground states?
It’s incredibly incompetent, or, more likely, a money grift.
Anyway, it’s a incredible something. There are going to be a LOT of books written about it. He making history.
.
At least Mr. Narcissist can be gratified by all the books written about his Yuuuuuge Failure of a campaign. The Best Books! The Most Books! He’ll get a Bigly amount of books out of it. All the better if Trump can stike some deals to get a cut of the profits… which I’m sure he’ll try to do.
not to see it go even lower.
At this point the probability is just a matter of attrition. Even if Trump shaves half of Clinton’s lead in the next month, he wont move the needle very much. The actual reported probability depends on what type of “forecast” model you’re using. To be honest, 85/15 “feels” right about now; comparable to betting on the Bulls in the ’97 finals.
That’s the value of the midpoint of the statistical distribution shown as normal curves toward the bottom of the stats.
But the variation is very wide and there are several local peaks.
This is August. Typically that variation gets narrower as the election approaches.
I appreciate everyone taking this seriously and assuming I don’t understand statistics.
I was making a joke, but obviously not a very good one.
Depends on your definition of a landslide.
I’ve been saying since HRC announced that she would win the Pres and win it handily … by which I meant > 273 EV. I don’t care about 350EV, 400EV or 475EV. I care about +21 congress critters and +8 senators.
Obviously, the more places HRC positively impacts for the election, the better. But after you got 278+, its the percentage in the “tossup” states that count. Currently, VA has a D governor, 2 D senators and 8 of 11 congresscritters are R. This is not news and is not particularly surprising.
Most of the gerrymandering has been of the “packed D” variety. Pack all the Democrats you can into a small number of congressional districts. Make most of your R districts pink … that is, in a normal election the R districts will win by 1-3%. You see this all over, but it is especially prevalent in the South and along the Ohio River. If HRC can pull +6 or better in the tossups (PA, OH, FL, NC, IA) those pink districts will be tingeing purple big time. Gerrymandering of that sort only works in “normal” elections. This isn’t.
I hope.
Conventional definition of a landslide is more than 10% margin in popular vote.
The sort of landslide we need is one like that that Reagan had — only one or two states go to the opponent. 1 ou4 of 3 from Nebraska and the 3 Wyoming vote would send the same messages as Reagan’s 1984 victory in the electoral college.
The “rigged” story is hard to sell under those circumstances.
Would really like to see an indepth work from you on Kane and the various angles going on there. PA is your expertise right?
BooMan, I’ll give credit where credit is due: political analysis and prediction is hard work and even when I don’t agree with you I think you do a good job of it. You deserve to take a victory lap or two, or even three.
At the moment, fortunately, predicting that Trump will lose is … not that hard. Let’s hope it stays that way. We’ll wake up on Nov. 9 trying to guess what the Clinton Administration will look like. That’s more of a challenge for your predictive skills, no?
Finally, with regard to this:
Is it equally possible that defense of Obama’s presidency is masking the true weakness of the Democratic Party?
1, Ken Salazar – that horse just left the stable, according to dKos.
Along with:
The power/money brokers are satisfied and ordinary voters won’t pay attention.
Your finally question– Not with Trump at the head of the Republican ticket.
Although there are some younger black Republicans trying to make a career move by supporting Trump. The chair of the Durham County NC GOP is one of them.
I may be missing the point of your response, but I’m trying to think out beyond November. It’s reasonable at the moment to assume Clinton will win and Trump will lose, perhaps even more decisively than McCain and Romney did before him. At that point both Trump’s position at the head of the Republican ticket and Obama’s presidency are in the past.
For the Republicans it’s a huge setback. They would be denied the Presidency for at least another four years, lose the Supreme Court for a generation, likely lose the Senate for at least two years. On the other hand they control the governorship and both houses of the legislature in 23 states, and share power in 20 more. They were in worse shape in 1964, and came back.
Meanwhile the Democrats would have the power and the freedom to drive their agenda to a greater degree than any time in the past eight years. But neoliberalism has not been kind to a lot of the people whose expectations will have been raised by their victory.
To think beyond November, one also needs to project the results of the down-ticket races.
I presume you know that the NC GOP chair, who is trying to disenfranchise voters, is the brother of a Democratic bagman(who is married to a GOP operative … ugh!!)? How does that work, exactly?
Are you talking about Hasan Harnett or Robin Hayes? The GOP canned Harnett on April 30.
Who is the Democratic operative? National or state?
How does that work? Ask Carville and Matalin, DC’s favorite power couple.
In your post, “When the End Comes, It Will Be Sudden”
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/7/21/13114/9312
Pretty damn prescient, Boo.
“… spending no money on advertising.” Some other blog suggested he might believe that advertising this early won’t produce lasting results and he’s better off waiting until late September to start with a really massive blitz. That seems to go against the conventional wisdom, but is plausible to me. If Hillary was at 80% and he was at 20% everywhere I might agree that he’s wrong, but I’m skeptical that the huge expenditures on advertising are really as effective as the people who get commissions for placing the ad buys tell us they are.
I am convinced at this point that Trump is just figuring out the best way that he can divert the funds into his own assets.
One of the clearest, best, crystallizations of what’s at stake in this election that I have ever seen.
From Kay over at BJ:
What if the GOP splinters? Is that even a plausible scenario?
It’s not a matter of conservatives losing the will to fight and surrendering. It’s a matter of liberals, slowly but surely, gaining substantial levers of power in all three branches of government for a long enough period of time that they are able to largely overcome the GOP’s maximalist obstruction strategies.
This appears likely to happen most quickly at the Federal level, but time will tell.
Trump campaign undergoes (another) major staff shake-up
08/17/16 08:00 AM
By Steve Benen
In April, in the face of broad criticisms about his campaign’s direction, Donald Trump shook up his leadership team and implemented a “massive restructuring.” Two months later, in June, the Republican presidential candidate made another major staffing change, ousting campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
And now, two months after that, facing long odds of success, Team Trump is once again undergoing an overhaul.
Donald Trump is shaking up his campaign’s leadership amid flagging poll numbers, NBC News has learned.
Kellyanne Conway – already a senior adviser to the campaign – told NBC News she has been promoted to the role of campaign manager. She confirmed that Paul Manafort will stay on as campaign chair but said Stephen Bannon, the co-founder of conservative Breitbart News, will come on board as campaign CEO.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the staffing changes, said Manafort will stay on, though his power will clearly be diminished. The Washington Post’s report added, “Trump’s stunning decision effectively ended the months-long push by campaign chairman Paul Manafort to moderate Trump’s presentation and pitch for the general election.”
And just when it seemed things couldn’t get much worse for Manafort, the Associated Press reported this morning that the Republican lobbyist “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.”
OT:
Liz Cheney appears to be on her way to Congress
08/17/16 09:12 AM
By Steve Benen
If you think what’s missing from Congress is a member of the Cheney family, you’ll be pleased with yesterday’s primary results out of Wyoming.
Liz Cheney has won Wyoming’s Republican primary for U.S. House. Cheney beat seven challengers for a chance at the job her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, first won 40 years ago.
Her campaign focused on national security and rolling back federal regulations affecting Wyoming’s beleaguered coal industry.
Incumbent Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R), who has served as Wyoming’s sole representative for the last eight years, is stepping down at the end of this Congress. There was a large GOP primary field, which Cheney ended up leading with relative ease.
Yesterday’s results don’t guarantee Cheney’s place in Congress, but given Wyoming’s status as a ruby-red state, it’s widely assumed that the winner of the Republican primary is well positioned to win the U.S. House seat in the fall.
What’s especially notable about Cheney’s victory is the degree to which the former Fox News pundit and State Department official had to undo the damage done by her last congressional bid.