The Democratic Convention wanted you to learn; the Republican Convention wanted you to feel.

This was the biggest contrast between the parties’ big parties: the Democratic Convention wanted to drive home information and the Republican Convention wanted to push emotional buttons.

 The Republicans two touchstones: anger at past Clinton mistakes and fear over crime and ISIS.  Peddling anger and fear is not inherently a bad political strategy but it is harder as a take away from a political convention. Although these themes emerged during the convention, not everyone on the stage was willing to drive the message.

By contrast, the Democratic Convention strived to teach some very specific things about both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

 First about Clinton. Democrats provided lots of newish information. As a young lawyer, Clinton worked at the Children’s Defense Fund where she helped find disabled children who were kept out of school, helped shut down Alabama’s racially segregated academies, and helped reform South Carolina’s juvenile justice system. As First Lady she worked tirelessly after losing the healthcare battle in 1994 to secure medical benefits for 8 million children. As New York’s Senator, she worked on behalf of 9/11 first responders to get them the healthcare they needed. The Convention featured lots of people who were willing to testify to these aspects of Clinton’s career. They demonstrated that Clinton had been working on these things throughout her entire life. The key points: Clinton’s consistency and her connections with real people. 

And then there’s Trump. With Trump as a target, there was a lot of material to go after and pretty much all of it was used. When it came to his business record, however, there was surprising little about Trump University, and not too much about individuals who he had stiffed throughout his business career. The key Trump business take away was that Trump products are made in other countries. This was an interesting strategy. Of all the charges against Trump, this one seems to be the one based the least on something Trump could control. In almost none of these cases did Trump actually make the product in question; he just licensed his name to already existing supply chains. The Democratic strategy seemed to be to fixate on a simple story even if involved a less good example. For instance, on the charges he defrauded students at Trump University, Trump can respond that everyone who attended said they liked the program. On the claims of people who he hired and didn’t get fully paid, he can say they didn’t do a good job. But the explanation for why Trump used foreign manufacturers for Trump products is the very same complicated reason that leads so many U.S. companies to go overseas. Thus if he can’t change the manufacturing of his own products, how can he change it for everyone?

“Stronger Together” was the other message that weaved through the Convention. It fit neatly with the facts related about Clinton: Trump is exclusive, Democrats and Clinton are inclusive. Over four nights, the Democratic Convention included in its program the types of people Trump excludes

Conclusion:

The Clinton campaign wanted you to know certain things. It seems to have gotten that done. The Trump campaign wanted you to feel a certain way and it mostly got that done. Which is a more effective approach remains to be seen..

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How Does One Become a Democratic Delegate Anyway?

Monday’s Democratic Convention basically accomplished what the party had hoped for. But there was an important exception: noisy interruptions from some in the audience, including several delegates, marred the picture of party unity. Not surprisingly, the media, used to entirely stage managed conventions with nothing but stand-and-clap delegates, focused on the disruptions and what they meant. But maybe they shouldn’t have – at least not as much. This convention is different because the factors that drove the Sanders campaign are different and thus his delegates are different.

 To see why that is, it is important to understand the rules of how delegates are chosen. As we have said before, delegates are chosen based on the proportion of the vote a candidate received in something on the order of 500 distinct contests. Once the allocations have been made, the campaigns are allowed to select the actual people who will be a delegates, screening for loyalty and other factors. One caveat is that the campaigns cannot choose just one person for each position. (Some states elect delegates directly listing their names on the ballot, which is another matter altogether.) Here’s an example of how delegate selection after the vote can work. The Massachusetts 4^th Congressional District had six delegates. Sanders won three, Clinton won three. The party held two caucuses at the same time to elect delegates to the national convention, each caucus attended by loyal supporters of their candidate. Over 130,000 people voted in the Massachusetts primary, but a much smaller number voted for the actual delegates. As few as 50 people could attend a caucus to choose delegates.

For Sanders, selecting delegates was a particular challenge. A lot of the people who are chosen to be delegates to the convention are long time party people: people who have been delegates in the past; people who serve in party organizations or work for party-backed politicians. The pool of such people supporting Sanders was incredibly small. Sanders probably had 10 real Congressional endorsers, and maybe 100 or so state legislative endorsements nationwide. This left a very small pool of traditional delegate types for Sanders. He required unconventional delegates. Plus, in competing for these slots, strong support for Bernie Sanders was much more likely to win a delegate a slot than experience or a willingness to be reasonable. Revolutionaries do not see themselves as reasonable.  

It was also notable that California’s Sanders delegation proved to be one of the most disruptive.  California chose its delegates entirely after the election was over. Who would want to want to fly cross country knowing you are going to lose, especially when going to the convention wasn’t seen as a networking opportunity for partisans or operators? Only the most committed of the committed Sanders supporters. Those are Bernie’s California delegates.  

Given all these factors, it was exceptionally unlikely that the Sanders campaign would be able to choose delegates who would be able to stay under control. In fact, someone Sanders selected to be on the platform committee defected to the Green Party’s Jill Stein.  

But one should not assume Bernie delegates are representative of ordinary Bernie primary voters; the amount of effort and therefore commitment required to be a delegate is massive compared to what it takes to simply vote. Where Bernie supporters go will be an important aspect of this election. Yet, it is clear that the angriest, overly passionate supporters were much more likely to be delegates and that Sanders was never going to be able to control them entirely. That is not how self-styled revolutions work. 

Of the 13 millions Sanders voters in the primaries, in the end about 10 million will vote for Clinton, maybe one million for Trump, and the rest either will not vote or vote for a third party.  Sanders has about 1900 delegates at the convention. If 200 or so are making noise (which seems to be the case) that falls into line with these predictions. 

This should be a concern for the Democratic team, but the press should understand it for what it is and not blow it out of proportion. Many Sanders people did not start as Democrats and  may not end up as Democrats, but that does not automatically change the contours of the race. 

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Polling update # 8: The Trump Bounce.

       We have been clear in previous posts that readers should be prepared for changes, and indeed spikes, following the Republican convention.  We now see this quite plainly.  The RCP average has changed significantly, and Trump now leads 44.1 to 43.9% or up by .2%. This average likely understates his actual polling lead because in still includes some pre-convention polls.  

 This is entirely typical.  The polls after the McCain convention showed McCain with an average lead of 2.5%, in an election in which he basically never led again and which he lost by 7.5 points.  What is startling for those looking back is that in 2012 there was only one poll conducted after the Republican Convention started but before the Democratic Convention began.  It did show a gain for Romney of 2 points.  So convention bounces are clearly a thing.  

We believe the wisest course for electoral observers is to wait to see how the polls shake out after the Democratic Convention before reaching a conclusion on where the race stands.  But for now it is good to be Trump. 

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Selfishness never ended.

       This week of the Republican Convention saw the Republican candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries come together to continue the unceasing selfishness that basically nominated Trump in the first place.  While some candidates (Christie, Carson) saw the benefits in getting on the Trump Train, most continued to pose a problem for the nominee.

  Jeb Bush began the run up to the Convention making sure the entire world knew he would not be getting on board.   Convention Monday saw the feud between Trump and Kasich explode again. The Trump forces attempted to bully John Kasich into attending the convention. He refused, and, in an apparent bit of punishment for the attempt, he halted joint efforts to build the Ohio ground game.  Then came a leaked rumor from the Kasich camp that Trump wanted Kasich for V.P. and that the Trump team tried to lure Kasich with promises of potentially the most powerful Vice Presidency ever because he would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy. This undermined Mike Pence and renewed speculation that Trump barely wanted the job.  

Ted Cruz did even more damage as he used his convention speech to give succor to those who might decline voting for Trump as a matter of conscience.  The resulting tumult led to the night being eaten and Mike Pence’s speech being overshadowed.   The Republican nomination in 2020 seems very valuable right now if Donald Trump loses.  And it seems that some Republicans have no problem pushing for that outcome.  

The Trump people have also seemed unable to convince their former rivals that their interests would be well served by getting on board.  Indeed, Trump’s forces may very well have made things worse via additional antagonisms.   The individual agendas of leading Republicans remain a problem for the Trump team that did not evaporate this week.  Selfishness does not end. 

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The Who Do You Hate More Election

Last night’s Republican Convention was supposed to be focused on jobs. Instead it was clear that the focus was on Hillary Clinton, whether because it is the one major thing upon which Republicans agree or because their nominee’s favorable numbers are bad.

 It almost doesn’t matter. The major point is that when you get into any specifics of what Republicans want to do or what Trump has done the risk is it will be incredibly unpopular. The one argument that Republicans hope will work is disdain for Hillary Clinton. The fact is that is what seems to be working in the polls. Trump does not gain much in terms of new voter support -- he has hung around 40% for a while now -- but Clinton does fall. Given both candidates’ current unpopularity, it may simply be that neither one is going to be within shouting distance of 50% of the vote. The new win number might be closer to 45%.

For Trump, the lower the percentage of the vote that he needs to win the better it is for him. This explains much of what’s gone on at the convention the last two nights. What is interesting is this emphasis runs counter to the other imperative of the Trump campaign -- that Trump be at the center of attention at all times. Need proof? Trump said he was not going to speak every night of his convention but he now is speaking every night of his convention. 

The less people see of Trump perhaps the better for him as the campaign can bring the focus back to disdain for Clinton. That goes against the style of the candidate. This tension will be on display for the next two days and throughout the rest of the campaign. 

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Mrs. Trump’s Lifted Values

By now we are sure you have seen the news that Mrs. Trump plagiarized a decent portion of her RNC speech. This has a lot of potential for fall out.

 But before we dig too deeply into the politics, let’s start with an incredibly important point. The entire purpose of Mrs. Trump’s speech was to humanize Donald Trump, to talk about what she knew about him as his wife that would establish him as a good person who would make a good President. In that speech with that mission, the presumptive nominee’s wife couldn’t find her own words to express that idea but instead took the words of his political rival’s wife. She declared her values and those of her husband in words lifted from the current first lady and did that on the very same day her husband implied the current President approved of cop killings. https://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/trump-suggests-obamas-body-language-reveals-hatred-of-cops-theres-something-going-on/

And her plagiarizing wasn’t the only problem with the speech. Although it was generally pleasant, the speech was completely lacking in specifics. Ann Romney at the 2012 convention told of living in a basement apartment and eating pasta and tuna fish. Laura Bush at the 2000 convention recalled husband George reading Dr. Seuss’ Hop on Pop to their daughters and the girls enacting the book title by literally hopping on their pop.  And of course if you look at Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech, it’s chock full of details about her and Barack’s life: the first basketball game with her brother; the drive home from the hospital with their newborn daughter; Barack’s first job as a community organizer in Chicago. ] Melania had no stories. She had no words of her own to describe her life with Donald.

No matter what else is done with the rest of the cleanup, this is uncleanupable. Mrs. Trump couldn’t make the case for her husband’s goodness and values without appropriating someone else’s. That the speech stole from Trump’s greatest political enemies is all the more amazing.

When it comes to the politics, the Trump campaign needs to get to the bottom of this matter, find out who was responsible for the plagiarism and excise them from the campaign. In the hours since the speech, no progress has yet been made in this direction. Different factions within the Trump campaign seem to be digging in their heels and fighting it out, including the deposed but still a delegate, Corey Lewandowski. So far it seems as if the Trump campaign is going to attempt to blame the media for the controversy as if reporting on the fact that they stole is responsible for them stealing. The inability to do any of this correctly speaks to a campaign that is not ready for prime time and an organization that would be unable to manage a White House.

 This all comes on the day in which the Republican Party is scheduled to formally nominate Donald Trump. This is eating away at the core of a national convention that is about trying to get out a message. Even if this controversy does not hold up as a problem over the long term, it still had dominated valuable convention time.  

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Polling Update # 7: Chaos Season

Today is the first day of the Republican Convention. We warned last week this is an exceptionally volatile polling time. That caveat should still be born in mind. 

This has been a relatively good set of polls for Donald Trump as he closes from being down 4.5% to 3.2% in the RCP average.  The week started particularly well for Trump but closed less well as the three most recent polls show bigger leads for Clinton than the average. Trump is also aided by Rasmussen showing him with a 7-point lead, the only poll in the average to show any Trump lead.

The overall contours, however, have not changed. Trump is at 40%. He in fact dropped from 40.9% last week to 40.6% this week. Clinton took the brunt of the e-mail scandal at the beginning of the week but seems to have recovered by the end of the week.  

This week has the Republican Convention and the Democratic V.P. pick, so whatever next Monday brings will be hard to hard to read against the noise. We will bring the numbers nonetheless. 

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Trump-Pence: The Hug and Pray Strategy

Donald Trump has a running mate and with it a strategy he may or may not be able to implement.

Donald Trump won the Republican primary because of multi-candidate field dynamics and the party’s nomination rules. But that’s not necessarily Trump’s conception of how he won, nor is that the “feeling” around his victory. He seems to have won because he ran against the Republican Establishment and beat it badly. This is correct to a degree. Party leaders did not respond to the threat in time. That does not mean, however, that there were more Trump voters than Establishment voters. Many people within his campaign therefore believe that peace with the Establishment is required for victory. Likewise, many in the Establishment believe they need to support Trump to avoid problems with their own base. 

 This is where Governor Mike Pence comes in. Pence seemed to be the highest ranking member of the Republican Establishment who was willing to accept the vice presidency. A lot of other establishment names were considered but in the end it was Pence who was willing to take it. For Pence, being Trump’s running mate seems like the most likely ticket to the presidency for himself.  A respectable performance sets him up well for 2020 and gets him out of a potentially difficult governor’s race.

The Republican Establishment will hug Donald Trump and pray such a strategy will keep the race close and minimize down ballot losses. At the same time, Donald Trump will attempt to seem a bit like an ordinary Republican in the hope that will enable him to add the roughly 5% of the vote he is going to need to win.

There is clearly a great deal of ambivalence about this strategy, however, from both sides as evidenced by: leaks that Trump was having second thoughts about Pence; Jeb Bush’s anti-Trump column for the Washington Post; and John Kasich’s continuing refusal to support Trump even though the convention is in his home state. Trump also has had some trouble controlling himself. For a while it seemed as if Trump’s twitter feed was contained but then he again attacked Elizabeth Warren for little reason.

The strategy also has a downside in possibly yoking Trump to really unpopular rightwing Republican positions that he was hiding from (such as privatizing Social Security). Trump also might face the core contradiction that while he brags about his opposition to the Iraq invasion, he picked one of the war’s biggest cheerleaders for his V.P.

Still a unity strategy is probably better than public fighting. Hug and pray is probably what both sides needed and what they are going to be doing.

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Time to Take a Look at the Electoral College

The premier data journalism blog, www.fivethiryeight.com, gets its name from the total number of electoral votes. We cannot ignore that tradition. To gain a majority and win the White House, you need to get 270 Electoral College votes. In trying to figure out how a candidate will get to that number, there’s a tendency to focus on big swing states rather than the tipping point states. We don’t think that’s the best approach. We prefer to start with the combination of states that enabled the winner to win in the most recent election.

There were six states that were key to Barack Obama’s getting to 272 in the 2012 selection. (Obama won an additional three states to end on 332 but he did not need them.) Obama’s smallest margin of victory came in Colorado. The margin in Pennsylvania was a very close second. The next four closest states that Obama relied upon for his majority were New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and Wisconsin. The state that Obama carried next was Virginia, which was extra. Notice this list does not include Florida or Ohio. Florida and Ohio are very important to the Republicans; it is absolutely essential that they win them both. Democrats have a Virginia-based path and an even easier path to win without them.

 We have polling that moves the Obama order around a bit. Colorado seems to moving very far out of Trump’s range as three polls put the average margin at 10 points. Trump also seems to be slipping in Virginia. The most recent poll has Clinton plus 7, nearly doubling the margin from 2012.

The places where Trump may be closer than in 2012 are Iowa, New Hampshire and perhaps Wisconsin. Trump absolutely needs two out of three of these to win if he loses Virginia. (Amazingly, such an outcome results in a tie that would throw the election into the House of Representatives whose members can select whomever they want to be President; they would be unlikely to pick Trump.)

 Watching these seven states seems to us to be the best way to think about the Electoral College. If you have to pick another state to follow, it is Florida because Trump would find it very hard to win without it. 

This is how the Electoral College math works and will continue to work as we go forward. 

 

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Winners, Losers and Numbers

One of the most amazing things about American political coverage is that there is an incredible obsession with election results up until the moment that a winner is “declared” at which point everyone basically moves on. (The AP has not even updated its delegate counter in a month despite decent-sized changes.) Clinton is a winner, Trump is a winner. Everyone else is a loser. Sure we see a piece or two from the top quality data journalism shops about the vote totals but it mostly disappears into dust. We are going to do our best to tell the full story of the vote totals to avoid the dust.

The first thing you need to know is that the counting of primary votes just ended a few days ago. The California primary was on June 7^th and counting was finished almost a full month later.  While this counting did not change the victor, it did alter the margin considerably. Clinton was leading by a bit more than 10% on June 7^th but in the end she won by only a little more than 7%. Over the course of the count, votes shifted enough to cost Clinton 15 delegates. This did not come close to changing the overall outcome but it did demonstrate that the polls that had California somewhat close were not entirely wrong. It also showed that the trends that Sanders benefited from demographically held up. Younger Latinos almost certainly voted solidly for Sanders.

Had the race been closer this slow count would have been terribly detrimental to Sanders as he might have just taken the lead in California now even though the election has looked over for a long time. Clinton still would have won in the delegate count overall and been poised to take the nomination. Yet, with political coverage being so narrative driven, a Sanders’ California victory could have been a real shocker. Had this been a normal election where the person with the most votes simply wins as opposed to a proportional election (particularly if the Republican race had been contested), this could have left the nomination hanging in the balance for a whole month. California does a very good job of counting votes but it goes very slowly. 

The second thing is that we now have a rough sense of how many total votes were cast on each side and for each candidate. We should lead with the limitations. Because some caucuses simply do not report vote totals, it is impossible to know exactly how many votes were cast for each candidate. By the same token, on the Republican side presidential preference contests were not held in Colorado or North Dakota and the total from Wyoming seems to be from a subsequent round of delegate voting, not the voter round. The consequence of all this is that numbers are incomplete and always will be. Thus everything is somewhat of an estimate. Though not perfect, they are still telling.  

Let’s start with the total number of votes cast. Roughly speaking and being as inclusive as possible, 63 million people overall participated in both parties’ nomination processes. That’s a record for combined total, though the Democrats in 2008 still racked up more votes for a single side. The number of primary voters this year is about 49% of the total who voted in the 2012 Presidential election. Doubling the size of the electorate from the primary, which is likely to happen in November, changes the makeup of voters as well. Primary voters are generally older, more partisan, richer and better educated.

Primary votes tell another story as well. Throughout much of the primary process, a media driven sense emerged that Republicans were participating in large numbers and Democrats basically were not voting. The final numbers don’t reflect that. Democrats and Republicans voted in pretty much equal numbers. Thegreenpapers.com, which does a fantastic job tracking all of this, reports that Republicans cast about 639,000 more votes than Democrats, 31,160,000 to 30,521,000. 

These totals, however, do not include participation estimates from Democratic caucuses in six states. In five of them, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and Wyoming, an entirely reasonable estimate of combined Democratic participation is 225,000, shrinking the Republican margin to 414,000. This leaves the perplexing question of what to do about Washington State, which holds both a caucus that allocates delegates and a primary that is a meaningless beauty contest. We know that 802,754 voted in the meaningless beauty contest but we have a much harder time figuring out caucus participation though it is considerably lower. The decision to use the primary or the caucus estimate determines whether Democrats leap frog Republican participation by a good bit, or whether Republicans have about 100,000 to 200,000 more participants. 

This is largely academic. With some effort to include Republican votes in the states of Colorado, North Dakota and Wyoming, a near tie is reinstituted. Republicans also had the disadvantage of having their contest end with a month of voting to go, likely suppressing turnout and giving the potential lead back to the Democrats. Regardless, the key take away is that about an equal number of Democrats and Republicans participated in the nominating process. The large lead Republicans held until June was mostly erased by California. Democrats also ended up with about 84% of the vote cast in 2008 -- not the greatest performance ever but far from the disaster that was foretold. 

 Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton won their respective nomination fights (although Trump still faces rumors of a coup in Cleveland). But there is still much to tell in the story of losing. If you listened endlessly to media coverage, you would think that because Trump won the Republican nomination he got huge numbers of votes. Similarly, because Bernie Sanders lost, you would be under the impression that he got many fewer votes. The reality is that Trump and Sanders had about the same number of primary votes. (Again, these have to be estimates because of caucuses.) Donald Trump ended up receiving 14,009,000 votes, while Bernie Sanders had roughly 13,543,000 votes, a less than a half million spread.

What is more, Trump clearly benefitted from his primary process wrapping up with a month to spare, pocketing him a decent number of uncontested votes. Adding votes in Colorado, North Dakota, and Wyoming would have helped Trump. The point is that Sanders and Trump had relatively equally-sized forces within their respective parties. That one lost and the other won has much more to do with the rules in place and how the Democratic and Republican establishment responded than it did with the power of the message and the skill of the campaign.

 Hillary Clinton, who clocked in at over 17 million votes, also deserves credit for getting that number of votes and her victory should not be diminished because her race went on longer. Her contest lasted longer not because she won by less than Trump in a real sense, but because Republican rules end contests and Democratic rules prolong them.   

The final thing to consider is the about half of all primary voters who voted for someone who did not win. Who will they vote for in November? In the case of Sanders, Democratic unity seems to be breaking out but time will tell how many of his 13.5 million voters vote for Clinton. By the same token, there are 4.2 million John Kasich moderate Republicans who ultimately may not be able to stomach Trump. These are big numbers as the last Presidential election was decided by basically five million total votes.

Conclusion:

How you count the votes and how long you pay attention can have a dramatic effect on how you consider events. Staying all the way through the credits makes you smarter when it comes to understanding elections. Roughly half of general election voters voted in this year’s nomination process. Democrats and Republican cast roughly even number of ballots. Trump and Sanders forces were relatively equally matched despite coverage to the contrary. Clinton and the Democratic establishment remain the strongest force in American politics, though they face a challenge from Trump and were pushed hard by Sanders on the left. 

 

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Polling Update # 6: All Quiet on the Polling Front

This week finds the race unchanged. Clinton leads by 4.5% in the RCP average down ever so slightly from last week’s 4.6. This is due almost entirely to polls being dropped off the average for timeliness. (A Pew poll with Clinton plus 9 was dropped because it was released about a week after it was conducted.) The one pro-Trump poll left in the average, Rasmussen, actually shrunk its Trump lead from 4 to 2 this week.  Trump is still sitting on 40.9, which is a nudge over 40 but not much.   

There is no doubt we are heading into a turbulent polling period. Trump is likely to name his V.P. selection this week. It is looking like Sanders will endorse Clinton this week as well. The following week is the Republican Convention, followed the next week by the Democratic Convention. Thus it is likely we will not be getting a clean, non-event driven poll until the first or even second week of August. (That means polling not conducted during an event window or immediately after an event window.)  

We will update the polls over the next month anyway but the results should be taken with even more salt than usual. 

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Because he won the primary is a bad argument for why Trump can win the general

The degree of polarization in this country is totally out of control.  We have spoken about tribalism a lot here and definitely will again. Today, we are focusing on the answer to a single poll question: 29% of Americans, including 55% of Republicans, believe President Obama may sympathize with ISIS. https://twitter.com/pollreport/status/749672162185719808.

We don’t need to argue against the premise as it is on its face absurd. But the key point here is that Republicans and Republican primary voters believe/believed such a thing. That means in the primaries Trump needed only to convince these people to vote for him, not to change their beliefs. He now needs to convince people to vote for him who aren’t willing to believe such a ridiculous thing. This requires Trump to come up with a message that can persuade an entirely different group of people who believe a different set of things.

If Trump is content that he can be the same and win because he has won before misses the crucial point that he is trying to persuade people. We have not seen much evidence that this is happening but we will be keeping track. 

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The U.S. House. Will more seats come into play?

We are now deep into the general election so it is a good time to begin the process of looking into House Races.  We will ultimately be drilling down on every single House race and predicting them all. But for now we’ll just provide the overview.

For Democrats to retake the House they would need a gain of 30 seats. The Cook Political Report is a good place to look for initial ratings of each race. We don’t agree with every one of its calls but it’s great for an overview. According to the Cook Ratings, Democrats are currently threating to take 33 seats that are listed as “Lean Republican” or better. Republicans only have seven such seats available. 

This should come as no surprise. In 2014, the Republicans won almost everything that was possible for them to win, which leaves a lot of vulnerable seats this time around. But netting 30 seats off of 33 chances seems incredibly unlikely, particularly since one Democratic seat is likely already gone. That means that Dems need to win 31 out of 33 possibilities. It does not seem doable, even if the list of targets expands to an additional 11 seats that Cook lists as “Likely Republican.” Democrats would still need to win 31 out of 44 seats.

To be in contention, Democrats need to add another 16 seats to the target list to get up to about 60 seats in play. Without extra races, the odds of a party switch are slim. The question is which seats might get added to the board. We will know more in a few weeks when this quarter’s finance reports come out.   

For now, Speaker Ryan seems likely in 2017.

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Polling Update #5

The race has gotten just a bit tighter since we last checked in. The RCP Average has moved from a Clinton lead of 6.8 to 4.6. This qualifies as a slightly bad week for the Clinton campaign. Such assumptions, however, can be somewhat misleading. The real question often is not what the averages are but what the same poll said the last time it was in the field. The two major declines come from dropping from the average a Bloomberg poll that had Clinton +12 (it became too old) and the dramatic swing in the Rasmussen poll from Clinton +5 to Trump +4. Rasmussen is now the only poll to show a Trump lead. This does not entirely explain the change in the average but it explains most of it.  

It is also the case that most of the shrinkage has come from losses for Clinton not gains for Trump. Trump has moved from 39.6 to 40.3. His gains made up only a third of the decrease in margin. Trump has been hovering near 40% and he still is.

The week of bad news (the resurfacing of the e-mail scandal and the Bill Clinton/Lorretta Lynch debacle) is now over, though not without a bit of damage. Things still look very solid for Clinton but just a little less so than last week.

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