Choosing Between Two Schools
In two months, on November 8th, our American neighbours will elect their next President. All summer I have given my election addiction free
rein. Here’s my sense of what's happening in this unusual
campaign.
As of today, there are two competing views of the state of the race. One is that Hillary Clinton maintains a solid lead and will almost certainly win, likely comfortably. The other is that the race is tightening to the point that the outcome is very uncertain. Perhaps this is obvious. This year nothing is obvious. We will only be able to tell once what has happened when it is over and the results are in.
The "solid lead school" is supported by most of the polls, pollsters, aggregates of polls and aggregates of the aggregates. The latter are the most reliable. Single polls are the least reliable. There are about five, maybe six aggregators, including the betting sites, that pull together the polls and other information into predictions. These place Clinton with a minimum of 71% chance of winning and a high of 95%. The high prediction site Princeton Election Consortium has had a stunningly accurate record in past elections. The betting houses agree and offer a 77% chance that Clinton will win. Most agree that the different methods for reaching these conclusions when taken together provide confidence that they are reliable. And there has been little significant change in Electoral College projections especially after the conventions.
To the comfort that working with numbers may offer, there are the much more subjective factors. The general view is that opinions about the two candidates and how one is going to vote are deeply “baked in” by now. It would take figurative, and perhaps literal, dynamite to the move the numbers. Hillary is disliked (in my view for unsustainable reasons) but so too is Trump, perhaps even more passionately and for entirely sustainable reasons. Trump is proving to be a candidate who can manipulate the media to give him a disproportionate amount of airtime, deflecting from his inadequacies for the most part, and amplifying Clinton’s negatives. But the shifts in the polls are very marginal, suggesting most people aren’t moved off their perceptions by the media. By most standards, Trump is a particularly bad candidate, undisciplined and incompetent. And besides, when a candidate has been ahead on Labour Day by as much as Clinton is, narrow though her lead may seem, that candidate has always won.
There is a view that Clinton’s ground game is so superior to Trump’s that she will gain significantly on Election Day. Usually organizations are relatively evenly matched, cancelling themselves out. Occasionally one party has a decided advantage and it shows (see Bush in 2000 and especially 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Harper up until 2015. My own experience is that organization adds five percent plus except in unusually volatile elections or huge sweeps.) The polls are not taking this advantage of Clinton’s into account.
On the other hand, the "close election school" emphasizes that polls are still quite close at least on the surface. They point to Trump’s capacity to fire up his supporters by appealing to their deepest anxieties and fears, and to the sheer unpredictability of Trump’s campaign. There is nothing ordinary about this election. Look at Europe, they say. Never ever trust the electorate, they say, especially in times like these. Anything could happen.
So which "school" do you go to?
As of today, there are two competing views of the state of the race. One is that Hillary Clinton maintains a solid lead and will almost certainly win, likely comfortably. The other is that the race is tightening to the point that the outcome is very uncertain. Perhaps this is obvious. This year nothing is obvious. We will only be able to tell once what has happened when it is over and the results are in.
The "solid lead school" is supported by most of the polls, pollsters, aggregates of polls and aggregates of the aggregates. The latter are the most reliable. Single polls are the least reliable. There are about five, maybe six aggregators, including the betting sites, that pull together the polls and other information into predictions. These place Clinton with a minimum of 71% chance of winning and a high of 95%. The high prediction site Princeton Election Consortium has had a stunningly accurate record in past elections. The betting houses agree and offer a 77% chance that Clinton will win. Most agree that the different methods for reaching these conclusions when taken together provide confidence that they are reliable. And there has been little significant change in Electoral College projections especially after the conventions.
To the comfort that working with numbers may offer, there are the much more subjective factors. The general view is that opinions about the two candidates and how one is going to vote are deeply “baked in” by now. It would take figurative, and perhaps literal, dynamite to the move the numbers. Hillary is disliked (in my view for unsustainable reasons) but so too is Trump, perhaps even more passionately and for entirely sustainable reasons. Trump is proving to be a candidate who can manipulate the media to give him a disproportionate amount of airtime, deflecting from his inadequacies for the most part, and amplifying Clinton’s negatives. But the shifts in the polls are very marginal, suggesting most people aren’t moved off their perceptions by the media. By most standards, Trump is a particularly bad candidate, undisciplined and incompetent. And besides, when a candidate has been ahead on Labour Day by as much as Clinton is, narrow though her lead may seem, that candidate has always won.
There is a view that Clinton’s ground game is so superior to Trump’s that she will gain significantly on Election Day. Usually organizations are relatively evenly matched, cancelling themselves out. Occasionally one party has a decided advantage and it shows (see Bush in 2000 and especially 2004, Obama in 2008 and 2012, Harper up until 2015. My own experience is that organization adds five percent plus except in unusually volatile elections or huge sweeps.) The polls are not taking this advantage of Clinton’s into account.
On the other hand, the "close election school" emphasizes that polls are still quite close at least on the surface. They point to Trump’s capacity to fire up his supporters by appealing to their deepest anxieties and fears, and to the sheer unpredictability of Trump’s campaign. There is nothing ordinary about this election. Look at Europe, they say. Never ever trust the electorate, they say, especially in times like these. Anything could happen.
So which "school" do you go to?
Since he entered the primaries, he has been counted down and out so many times. The candidate you have declared incompetent defeated 16 other Republican candidates. I think what you and so many of my Canadian friends miss is the anger of the American public - feeling betrayed by both parties. As Maria Bartiroma of Fox Business News declared "What the American public want is someone to go to Washington and kick over the table."
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid that I'm of the "anything can happen" school. As you imply, the polls have been wrong on other big, important things. We should be wary of poll figures when (very nearly) all the elites are on one side of a question. With Trump -- as in Brexit -- I'm especially concerned about people lying to the pollsters (particularly about being undecided) out of paranoia or fear of condemnation or anger or the out of the same kind of rebellious spirit that leads them to vote for Trump or Brexit in the first place.
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