Keys to the Keystone State. Pennsylvania preview.

Pennsylvania has been an elusive yet important target for the Republicans, and one that, in 2012, came closest of any state on the Blue Wall of falling into G.O.P. hands. ( Reminder: The Blue Wall is the 18 States plus D.C. accounting for 242 electoral votes that the Democrats have won each year since 1992.)  Obama won here in 2012 by 5.39%, a solid win but one that can be reverse engineered to map what a defeat might look like. This state was also crucial because it was the 2^nd closest state among the states Obama needed to get to 270 electoral votes in 2012(Colorado was closest at 5.37%)  Pennsylvania is also important because it is one of four states that the Trump campaign is targeting with television, and it seems to be essential to their campaign plans.  There are back door states on the Blue Wall (Michigan, Wisconsin, as absolute reach Minnesota), but so far all of the energy of both campaigns sees Pennsylvania as the only Blue Wall State worthy of ads. Since Trump seemingly needs to win it and Democrats also start off with an advantage here, it is the right state for our second deep look. 

Pennsylvania’s Four Regions

                For practical purposes Pennsylvania can be understood more readily if it is divided up into four main regions.  Southeast, which is Philadelphia and its suburbs.  Northeast, which is anchored by Scranton, Wilkes Barre, Allentown and Easton.  Central Pennsylvania, which is everything West of Columbia, to Centre and then Western Pennsylvania which is everything West of Centre.  These regions are admittedly an approximation, but they give a good idea of both how in theory Trump could win the state but also how difficult it will be.   

President Obama beat Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania by 309,840 votes.  How can Donald Trump begin the process of chipping away at that margin, or can he? Well for any Republican now the problems in Pennsylvania begin in Southeast Pennsylvania. Out of the Six Counties that make up Southeast Pennsylvania (Berks, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia) Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by the massive sum of 613,975 votes.  He won by the even larger sum of 698,926 in 2008.  This is also the region where Trump did the worst in the primary and where he is polling very poorly today. Whether it is because of lower turnout in Philadelphia city or because he does better than expected in the suburbs Trump has to do something to make this margin shrink. Anything greater than 600,000 coming out of these six counties is just poisonous.  Berks and Bucks seem to be two places to look for possible improvement as his primary numbers there were fine, but still it is a big road to hoe. 

Assuming this is accomplished, and Trump can leave these six counties down only 600,000 votes, he then begins to look to the Northeast. This is a region where the Obama era has seen Democrats somewhat on the upswing as well, but it seems that the demographics of the region make it a clear and important Trump target.  This is not problem-free for Trump as Northampton(Easton), Lehigh(Allentown) and Monroe ( The Poconos)  Counties have seen an influx of non-white Voters and with them big gains for Democrats ( In Monroe in particular)  However the rest of the region has at least some potential  to be Trump country.  This region was an almost tie in 2004, with Bush beating Kerry here by a mere 13,000 votes. Trump could double that-- a difficult but not impossible margin.  Obama won this region by 26,616, now Trump could win it by 26,000.  That would be a 52,616 swing in his favor.  If we combine that with Trump improving 13,975 in the Southeast over 2012 and Trump will have erased 66,591 votes from the Romney deficit. It is a good start to be sure, but this is where the problem for Trump becomes all too plain.  He may have made up a decent amount of ground but he had to use half of the state’s votes to do it.  Pennsylvania likely only has  2,800,000  left to make up the rest of the 245,000 gap.  To do this Trump would need a uniform swing to Trump in all remaining counties of about 4.5%  When Obama lost half his lead from 2008 to 2012 he only bled this much in 22 of the 67 counties.  Trump needs every county to bleed this much in Western and Central Pennsylvania. To make matters somewhat worse for Trump, Obama already did quite poorly in Western Pennsylvania. To be sure, there is more losing Democrats can and probably will do, but there is only so much that Trump’s margin can grow. (How much can be gained in counties where Democrats are already sub-40?).  Obama also managed to win 4 counties in Central and Western Pennsylvania, Erie, Centre (Penn State), Dauphin (Harrisburg) and Allegheny (Pittsburgh).  Seeing a 5% swing against Clinton in these five counties would be dramatic but is also unlikely.  In fact generally speaking, Clinton should be likely to hold up relatively well in this four counties.  Let’s be very generous to Trump and give him 45,000 off the margin, remembering that this also eliminates over 900,000 voters. This leaves roughly 1,900,000 votes in which to make up 200,000 votes. This now requires a greater than 5% swing, which only happened in 11 counties across the entire state from 2012 to 2008.  It is not impossible, but it is a very serious challenge. 

Pennsylvania also has some key other things going for Democrats. In 2014, Pennsylvania was the only state to actually oust a Republican Governor and elect a Democratic Governor. It did so quite solidly. Democrats looking to gain control of the state Supreme Court did so in 2015. In 2010, which was a terrible year for Democrats in Pennsylvania and nationally, the Senate race was very closely watched. The Republican Pat Toomey who is up for re-election this year was able to squeak it out.  However he did far, far better in the Philly suburbs than it is reasonable to expect Trump to do.  Trump has to find places to beat the Toomey % from 2010 if he wants to win and those are tough numbers. This is not to say that Pennsylvania cannot be won by Trump, only that the math remains a serious challenge. 

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Polling Update # 13: The Two-Race versus the Four-Way Race

This week does not bring much in the way of excitement to the polling discussion. Hillary Clinton leads by 6.1 points in the RCP average 48.4 to 42.3%, a slight upward tick from last week’s Clinton lead of 5.5 points. 

What is beginning to seem important is that the four-way-race polling is showing a closer race. Clinton’s RCP average lead there is only 4.4 points, 42.5% to 38.1% with 8% for Johnson and 3% for Stein. A 4.4 lead is still larger in a four-way race than it would be in a two-way race, but probably not quite enough to not make the two-way look like a better number for Clinton. For example, if one candidate is up 46-40, but there are still 14% undecided than the trailing candidate needs 72% of the undecideds to catch up. If the race is 44-40 but 8% are for third party candidates than instead of needing 72% of the undecided vote to catch up, the trailing candidate needs 75%. Those numbers aren’t that different. This means that Clinton’s two-way and four-way leads are in fact closer to each other than it would appear. 

Probably the best measure of where the race is now is a rubric like this. Clinton seems certain to get 40% of the vote as she has almost never polled below that. Trump seems to be a lock for 35% of the vote, this leaves about 25% who are making up their minds from options about which they are not overly pleased.

So far that 25% is mostly having a near null effect with maybe the slightest of edge to Trump in a four-way match up and the slightest advantage for Clinton in a two-way match up.  So long as that remains the case, Clinton has relatively smooth sailing. But if this 25% decides in the end that Clinton is the more odious choice then and only then will she run into problems. 

To overcome the current gap Trump will need 60% of the 25% undecided, a heavy lift because at the moment no one in this group even likes him. Yet, they don’t much like her either so it is not impossible for him to win over 60% just difficult. 

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Florida, Florida, Florida.

We embark on our first look at a specific state and we begin with Florida. (Sorry for the delay. We promised a review of Florida yesterday but it took a bit longer than we had hoped.)

There are many good reasons to start with the Sunshine State. First, it is the battleground state with the most Electoral College votes (29) and the third most overall, behind only California (55) and Texas (38).

Second, Florida is likely to be an essential state for the Republicans. In five consecutive elections, Democrats have won the same 18 states and D.C. with 242 Electoral votes. This is known as the Blue Wall. The Blue Wall plus Florida is Victory for Democrats. It would be overstating it to say that these states are locks for the Democrats; there have been quite a few close calls on the way and Republicans do seem to be targeting three of those states this time, Pennsylvania (20) and to a lesser extent Wisconsin (10) and Michigan (17). 

Third, Florida has seen exceptionally close elections in the Obama era. Leaving aside for the moment Florida 2000, Obama won the state by 2.82% in 2008, Republicans won the Governorship by 1.2% in 2010. Obama won Florida in 2012 by .88% and in 2014 Governor Rick Scott was re-elected by 1%.  Even the Great Marco Rubio only got 48.9% of the vote in his 2010 Senate Race; then Independent (now Democrat) Charlie Crist and Democrat Kendrick Meek got more votes than Rubio. Florida is a very closely divided state. 

But a political earth quake began rumbling through that state long before Donald Trump arrived though he may well be accelerating it. President Obama’s margin of victory dropped by almost two points from 2.82% in 2008 to .88%. in 2012. Yet at a county level, some of the forces making Florida more Democratic were already apparent.  

The largest and most important county in the state and the one leading its political transformation is Miami-Dade. In 2008, Obama took 58% of the vote in Miami-Dade. By 2012, his take had shot up to 62%. That means he scored a 4% gain in Miami-Dade while losing 2% statewide. Miami-Dade’s transition from a close county for Democrats (Gore and Kerry each took 53%) to being a blowout for Obama in 2012 has a huge impact on the state overall. Miami-Dade has a lot of votes. Obama won the state by 74,309 votes in 2012; he won Miami-Dade by 208,174 votes. Kerry won Miami-Dade by 48,637 votes. Gore won it by 39,293. When Democrats improve their performance by 150,000 votes in a county that is difficult to make up.

If anything, Trump’s Miami-Dade problems are worse than Romney’s. He did quite poorly here in the primary and many of the country’s leading Never Trump Republicans live here, including two of three of the county’s Republican members of Congress. Miami Dade also has about 870,000 voters. So each 1% drop in support for a Republican presidential candidate is worth 8,700 votes. Thus bleeding from Romney’s 38% to even 35% is a big block of votes. And it could easily be worse.  

The other key area for Obama improvement/holding-the-line is in the Central Florida counties of Orange (Orlando) and Osceola that are becoming part of the Democratic base. In 2012 Obama netted 111,790 from these two counties. Kerry actually lost the two counties by a combined 3,669, while Gore only netted 7,606 out of these counties. This is the other massive change in the Democrats’ favor.   

Assuming the same margin as Obama got in 2012, Democrats are on track to net almost 320,000 votes out of these two counties, plus Miami-Dade. That is more than 250,000 votes better than Kerry and Gore performed in these three counties. These three counties alone would have erased roughly 72% of John Kerry’s 2004 five-point loss.  Clinton looks to improve on Obama’s 2012 performance in these three counties but even holding serve is a problem for Trump.

What is more interesting is where Obama bled and why those places won’t necessarily help Trump. Obama pretty much hit the Democratic floor in the Northwestern Florida Panhandle in 2008 and did not bleed that much more in 2012. Where Obama did  much worse in 2012 was in upper income white areas and counties in Northeast, Southwest and Central Florida with the exception of Orange, Osceola, Hillsborough (Tampa), Pinnellas (St Petersburg) and Polk Counties. These Obama-to-Romney switchers are the exact type of voters Trump is in danger of giving up ground to, not making up ground with. And he can’t pick up votes among downscale whites who voted for Obama in Florida in 2008 or 2012 because they didn’t. They voted for McCain or Romney.

Florida is also where the rubber meets the road in purely demographic terms. The most recent voter registration data shows a Florida electorate that is only 65% registered non-Hispanic white. Given Trump’s difficulty with Jewish Americans who will make up 5% of the electorate, Trump is looking at his base group of white Christians at about 60%. With the other 40%, he will be lucky to hold on to 25% -- and that is a generous estimate. Trump would need to win the votes of two out of every three white Christians, and probably a touch better (assuming he won’t get the quarter of other voters he needs).

When you start slicing the white electorate up into other pieces by education, sexual orientation or religiosity, things get even trickier for Trump. Still, there is a path for him. Florida has a lot of Republicans and not much reason to believe Clinton will be able to beat the Obama 2008 margin by a lot if at all. But in the end, it seems the defection of Miami-Dade, combined with the rise of the O counties, makes the math tough for a Republican such as Trump. It is going to be close, as Florida is always close, but building a Trump map to victory is hard. 

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Tomorrow We Begin Profiling Battle Ground States. Today We Explain Why You Can Mostly Ignore Them.

We are going to start a series profiling the closest battleground states beginning tomorrow with Florida. But before you dig too deeply into those states with us, we should give this warning. Since the modern era in 2000, Presidential election results have been fairly predictable once you knew the swing in the national vote. Democrats went from winning the popular vote by .5% in 2000 to losing it by 2.4 points four years later. That 2.9 swing in the Republicans favor netted them two of the three states they came closest to carrying in 2000 -- number 1 (New Mexico) and number 3 (Iowa). They missed out on the number 2 state (Wisconsin) because the Nader vote had been particularly high there and his collapse allowed Democrats to just barely hold it. The Democrats did pick up the state they came second closest to carrying in 2000 (New Hampshire), which also was largely explained by the decline in the Nader vote. Bush won the Granite State by a little over 7,000 votes in 2000. Kerry won by a little under 9,000 in 2004. Nader dropped from about 22,000 in 2000 to just about 4,500 in 2004, which explains the entire margin.

When Democrats won the national popular vote by 7.2 points in 2008, they picked up the six states they lost by the tightest margins in 2004, and they also gained states number 8 (Virginia), 11 (North Carolina) and surprisingly state 18 (Indiana).  State seven (Missouri) in 2004 was the closest of all states in 2008. State 9 was Arkansas and State 10 was the Republican nominee’s home state of Arizona. When in 2012 the Democratic Party won by 3.9%, it gave away the two closest states it won in 2008, states 11 and 18.

Gore did have four states where he kept the margin smaller (Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia) than Romney’s spread in Indiana in 2012. But the Democrats’ collapse in those four states already was evident in Kerry’s numbers there. Missouri, as evidenced by McCain’s 2008 win, has moved Republican. Meanwhile, Colorado and Virginia have jumped up to being much more important for Democrats. These are interesting trends that grow from dramatic shifts in sub-regions within states, such as the suburbs of Northern Virginia. The key point, however, is that states tend to move in line with how they voted in previous elections. There are some exceptions and sometimes a trend toward one party or another emerges even in defeat. Both Colorado and Nevada showed Democratic improvement from 2000 to 2004 even though the Dems lost them. Republicans won Virginia in 2004, now a more Democratic state, but only scored a .12 increase there over 2000 compared to a national jump of almost 3 points.

Watching the states is interesting and fun and in an absolute squeaker (like 2000) the popular vote and electoral college can be  in conflict.  But the reality is that the states are pretty sticky. If the national trend is two points or even one point, the states will likely sort themselves out in basically the same order they have previously.  

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Polling Update #12: Slight Tightening

This week has seen the race merge back into being a closer affair as Clinton’s last week lead of 6.8% in the RCP average has now shrunk to 5.5%. She leads 47% to 41.5%. This is about where we thought the polling would be headed last week and it has arrived.  To put matters into perspective Obama’s win in 2012 was by 3.9% and, because of his Electoral College tally, his victory was considered fairly robust. 

Still, it is interesting that when Trump is not actively lighting himself on fire, which he was able to avoid this week, things can improve for him slightly. The question is how long can he avoid setting himself on fire. (Just this morning he attacked the Morning Joe show hosts in very personal and inflammatory terms.) 

As he tightens the race, Trump makes gains primarily among those who were more likely to be pre-disposed to vote for him. In other words, Trump gets closer by making gains with Romney voters. Whether he can then make gains with Obama voters to win is a whole different argument. 

The race is in fact closer this week, so we will stay on it.  

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Donald Trump’s “speaking” to African Americans.

Leave it to Donald Trump and his new Breitbart enablers.  Who else could figure out how to pretend to appeal to African American voters in a way that would be read by the press as a subtle appeal to moderate whites while actually doubling and tripling down on appeals to white resentment ? Yet although this has gone largely unnoticed, that’s the message of Trump’s most recent week.

       Think of it this way.  No matter how many problems a people may have, no matter the struggle, almost no one sees him or herself as having “nothing to lose”.  It is with this fundamental truth in mind that Donald Trump’s “outreach” to African Americans needs to be seen.   Donald Trump described the African American Community as having  “No health care, no education, no anything.”  And that their lives were a “ total catastrophe.”  He also did this in almost entirely white spaces.   Given African Americans loyalty to the Democratic Party, affinity for Clinton in the primary and just generalized disdain for all things Trump, the Donald’s strategy here cannot genuinely be to gain African American votes.  If he wanted Black votes, he would show up and talk to Black voters.  So what is really going on?

      Some are seeing this as a display of compassion to upscale whites to show that Trump cares about the poor and inclusiveness.  This indeed may be an added benefit of this week’s remarks.  However from where we sit something far more insidious/clever is going on. Trump is actually intensifying his effort to play on white fears.

Trump is going to almost all white enclaves in places where the central cities, Detroit and Milwaukee are disdained by the surrounding suburbs. Trump even went in the middle of a riot.  While the pitch was purportedly made to African Americans, it was actually much more about them.   Trump portrayed the African American community as so stupid as to vote for Democrats who had failed them.  This was yet one more way to blame them for their own problems, while massively highlighting their downsides and challenges. Trump was speaking to and powerfully reinforcing the stereotype that many whites have about Blacks --  not to the lived reality of the African American Community. If he had given a speech hitting the African American community for the failures he so gleefully detailed, the press and many voters would have condemned him for racist remarks.  But the way he did it in this speech let him hit all the same notes while pretending to be singing a different song. Although Democrats understandably struggle with white voters susceptible to race based appeals, they still get some such voters in these suburbs.  Trump is trying to separate the Democrats from these votes and change the math in Michigan and Wisconsin.   The math in both states is exceptionally difficult for Trump.  But what unites a surprising number of whites in these states is fear and disdain for the cities.  In Michigan such thinking led to elected leadership that stripped local government away from places like Detroit and Flint.  Trump’s backhanded appeal to suburban resentment is a difficult strategy, a bit like threading a needle while driving a car. But this reading of his recent “pivot”, a pivot he denies is happening, makes much more sense than the other explanations we are seeing floating around on cable news. 

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Shooting the Moon with Donald Trump

Today brought Trump staff shake-up number three and campaign leader number three-ish and with it a sense of the direction the campaign will take.

Donald Trump has proven himself incapable of being a “normal” candidate. His attempts lasted at most a few days or so before Trump said something else that so violates norms that a huge controversy ensued. Even if Donald Trump could pull off being normal, it does not seem likely to work. Trump being normal means Trump being boring. Given the damage some of his comments have already done, boring Trump is losing Trump. 

This shake-up is about returning to what makes Trump, Trump.  Donald Trump may not be able to improve his own performance so the best way for him to win is to attack, savage and destroy Hillary Clinton. Even the words, Clinton scandals, produce an endless stream of unpleasant thoughts. A great many of the “scandals” are bogus but a few are based in reality. Trump will also invent new, possibly darker ones.  Steve Bannon of Brietbart News seems like a great guy to help invent and sharpen such stories.  

Trump seems to be doing the equivalent of “shooting the moon” in the card game, Hearts. The game’s goal is to avoid points that come from capturing hearts and the queen of spades. But if you capture all of the hearts and the queen of spades, you get to either add all of those points to your opponent’s score, or subtract them all from yours. This is shooting the moon. If you fail to shoot the moon, however, it is extremely damaging because you likely take on a large number of points. 

Trump may have nothing left to lose by this strategy. His goal may simply be to make Clinton so unpopular that he wins by default. The odds of shooting the moon in Hearts are very low but there are points in the game where it is a wise strategy because there is no other way to win. Trump has very little to lose by trying it. But the same cannot be said of Congressional Republicans. There is still lots up for grabs for them. The bigger Trump loses, the worse it can be for them. It’s unlikely Trump cares about that. Trump aims to shoot the moon and does not care about the consequences. 

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NBC’s News Small Mistake and a reminder on how to do the Electoral College Maps.

       This http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/291443-clinton-tops-270-electoral-votes-in-nbc-map has been making big news. Its key take away is that Hillary Clinton has sizable leads in enough states to already be over the 270 electoral college votes that she needs to win. This has been pushed on MSNBC by NBC News as evidence of something profoundly new in this race.   We don’t have much quarrel with the states and districts that get Secretary Clinton to 273. However North Carolina, the state that MSNBC relied on to get Clinton to 288, is more perplexing.

 The RCP average for North Carolina shows Clinton with just a 2 point lead: 45.3 to 43.3.   Alternatively, It seems as though MSNBC leaned very heavily on their own poll to put the state in Clinton’s column.  The poll is certainly valid, but it is something of an outlier.  This is not to say Clinton is not ahead in North Carolina but it seems that it more properly fits in with the other toss up states.   Yet without the Tar Heel state, NBC would probably have been less likely to be so definitive about Clinton crossing the threshold if the margin had only a one state cushion and not two.  Thus we get a seeming political crescendo which really only tells us what we already know.  Kudos to NPR, which as we went to press released the same NBC map, yet put North Carolina into the tossup category. http://www.npr.org/2016/08/16/490103767/npr-battleground-map-hillary-clinton-solidifies-lead-against-donald-trump?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

NBC’s recent approach also gives us a chance  to re-examine the path to 270.  It is crucial when thinking about the Electoral College to start with the results from the last election firmly in mind. When Obama won by 3.9% nationally in 2012,he lost North Carolina by 2. When he won by 7.2%, he won North Carolina by a little more than .3% of the vote.  While States can and do move around somewhat in their order of how Democratic or Republican they are, such moving usually happens over many election cycles.  There are also usually signs that let observers see it coming. North Carolina likely has not jumped as much as the NBC poll suggests, and thus it should still be a tossup.  Clinton’s lead in states she needs is real but proclaiming such a lead based on North Carolina is foolish. NBC leaned too heavily on its own poll to reach this more interesting result.  It is understandable, but it is a bad way to think about getting to 270. 

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Polling Update #11: Clinton Solid

We are leaving behind the convention period and with it the need for overwhelming caution in assessing polling results.  Caution is always wise but the reality of Clinton’s lead is now outside the possibility of a spike and more in the realm of a fact. 

As of this writing, Clinton leads by 6.8 in the RCP average, 47.8% to 41% in a two-person match up. This is down a touch from last week due entirely to polls rolling off the average and not because of any other changes. Clinton leads 6.3% in the all-candidate match ups, 43.8% to 37.5%, with 8.4% for Johnson and 3% for Stein.

There are the slightest indications the race is a touch closer than the RCP average, at something more like a 5% lead. There is little to suggest, however, the race is any closer than that.  

We will keep updating each week but for the moment Clinton seems to be a quite solid favorite. 

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The Damaging Effect of Defectors

Elections in America have moved from being contests about persuading people to vote for you into contests about getting supporters to the polls. What it means to identify as a member of a political party is to vote for its candidate. In 2012, 92% of Democrats voted for President Obama and 93% of Republicans voted for Mitt Romney, according to the exit polls. A presidential candidate needs at least 90% of partisans to even be in the ball game. (This does change somewhat in a multi-candidate field, allowing the winning partisan number to drift below half.) 

Hillary Clinton has some problems on the furthest left of her party, which might not be fixable and may cost her a considerable number of votes. But if you are looking for big names to add to that defection rate, there really aren’t any. Beyond Cornell West supporting the Green Party’s Jill Stein, basically no one who was a high-profile Sanders supporter is aiding her effort. 

When it comes to Donald Trump, however, the number of Republicans who are either outright backing Clinton or refusing to support Trump is growing nearly every day. While each individual endorsement is not particularly important, together they send a clear signal that Trump is not an ordinary Republican and supporting Clinton is socially acceptable.

College educated white women constitute the key group now helping Clinton and expanding the Obama coalition. Every Meg Whitman who says she is voting for Clinton and every Susan Collins who says she can’t vote for Trump helps to further solidify this voting block behind Clinton. One of the more interesting things to watch is that so far Trump has not hit either of them. Most likely that’s not because he wouldn’t want to. It may be that his staff kept both statements from him. The statements appeared primarily in print rather than on twitter or the internet so it is plausible Trump doesn’t even know what was said.

Trump needs to figure out a strategy for effectively shutting down or punishing defectors. Without such a strategy, defectors will continue to normalize supporting Clinton or opposing Trump amongst a subset of voters he can’t afford to lose. In the modern era of polarization, defectors are a giant thorn in Trump’s side. 

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Sometimes Trump just Sounds Like the Internet

Donald Trump’s latest controversy is that he suggested there might be something that Second Amendment people might be able to do about Hillary Clinton’s appointments to the bench if she wins. The Trump campaign’s push back has been to claim the candidate was merely encouraging 2^nd Amendment supporters to go and vote. 

For our purposes today it does not much matter which version we are inclined to believe. The key point is that Donald Trump has a tendency at times to speak as if he takes in the language people speak on the internet and then repeats it. 2^nd amendment supporters have a tendency to speak boldly about how they intend to use the 2^nd amendment (their guns) to protect themselves from political outcomes they don’t like. 

 A simple Facebook search shows that beneath a “Gun Control Kills” cover page is the comment that “I am willing to die to protect my 2^nd Amendment Rights. Are You Willing to Die Trying to take them from me?” This is the sort of language one finds when searching for 2^nd Amendment Supporters on the Internet, and it fits very well with Donald Trump’s comments.  

Sometimes Donald Trump is himself, but sometimes he is just passing along what he reads.  This is one of those times. Had Trump not had other statement problems this might not have blown up, but since he has had these issues this one got wide attention. It is one of the downsides of being a first time candidate. 

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Polling Update #10: Clinton Leads

This past week of polling clearly qualifies as the Clinton Campaign’s best so far. It now leads 47.3% to 40.1% in the RCP average. If anything, Clinton’s lead may be a bit bigger because the average excludes a poll showing her with a 13-point advantage. That poll only asked for preferences in a four-way race rather than a two-way race. We are thinking about constructing our own average.

In the meantime, the point is clear. Clinton has hit what is probably a high water mark for her that may still reflect a convention bounce. Another week of polling would clearly be beneficial.

Still, as leads go, this one is not small. Clinton also seems to have the makings of a majority coalition well in hand. Non-whites plus educated whites, particularly educated women, is a very strong coalition.

Trump’s ability to make inroads with groups with which he is now weak seems to be going in the wrong direction. He seems to get weaker as the election goes on. Less educated white men are a massive base from which to build but they are nowhere near enough. The equilibrium point may shift down from 7 to 5 points but what would make it shift back much beyond that remains an open question.

For now, Clinton leads is the clear headline. 

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How Trump Weathered Previous Storms is Why He Might Struggle to Weather This One

It would take far too much time to recite all of Donald Trump’s comments that have made heads turned or caused problems. Of course, this has happened before. Throughout the primary season, Trump consistently made incendiary comments but he then had a huge advantage. A gaffe would occur but, before you knew it, a new poll would arrive, Trump would still be ahead, and all of the sudden, the comment didn’t look like a gaffe anymore.

Trump’s lead over his opponents, which was basically wire to wire, meant that the polling metaphorically had his back. As this most recent controversy heats up, the polling, rather than having his back, is actually stabbing him in the back. Clinton’s recent strength in the polls, which could have been interpreted as a Democratic Convention bounce, is instead being seen as part of the Trump-in-free-fall story. This will lead to more press coverage of the bad polling and the controversy that caused it. The very same cycle that was virtuous for Trump in the primary is damaging in the general election.

The Trump campaign needs to change the story quickly, which is a Trump specialty. But finding a statement that is considered outrageous by the elite yet liked by a majority of Americans is much more difficult than finding a statement that is considered outrageous by the elite yet liked by a majority of Republican primary voters.

Events could still change the spiral. Part of the problem for Trump, however, is that the idea he can’t control his attack may be sinking in. Once someone believes someone else is crazy that is a hard thing to unbelieve. 

Trump has defied gravity for a long time but gravity may ultimately get him. 

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Republican Civil War Revisited

This week has certainly been interesting. Donald Trump’s comments on the Khan family have generally left people scratching their heads. We need not explore the merits of Trump’s comments to take note of how many Republican leaders felt the need to condemn him.  In turn, Trump has lashed out and refused to support John McCain and Paul Ryan in their primaries.  This is a gentle reminder of the problem that Republicans face.  Lots of Republican voters really like Trump; a much smaller number really dislikes Trump. All Republicans running for office need all of these people to support them. This was demonstrated when the leadership adopted the strategy of hugging Donald Trump and praying that it worked out.  Now, they seem to have begun doubting that strategy as this week has played out. But the problem for them is that because they rely on Trump loyalists for a large number of their votes,  they can’t be quite super vocal in their denunciations. Trump primary voters were more than 20% of Romney’s 2012 vote.   Republicans need them to make their electoral math work and re-elect their Congress.  But they also need distance if Trump is going to go down by more than Romney did. It can get very ugly very fast.  Continued fretting over this ongoing tension is very much what we will be seeing over the next week or so.  Candidates and pundits favorable to the Republican cause need to get past this quickly or the risk is that everyone on their side is going to lose.  

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Reality Isn’t Popular

It has been exceptionally difficult to get a handle on the Donald Trump Phenomena. We have been a bit better than most in seeing his electoral potential and yet we haven’t explained it fully. Now that the general election season has come and it is looking at least somewhat close (for the time being), it is time to dig deeper into the Trump appeal. (This is not to say we believe Trump is going to win; it is still a very hard climb for him.)

The force that is pulling this race closer and that made the Democratic primary closer than was otherwise anticipated can be captured in a simple phrase: Reality isn’t popular. 

The physical and political realities of the world have a constraining effect. This does not make voters happy. They would rather believe that the constraints are not real, that they are a mere artifice of a corrupt elite. For a politician, talking this way is more popular and brings in more votes. 

 What Donald Trump excels at is creating an almost entirely different reality. Often times that different reality fits exceptionally well with what people already wish to believe. Birtherism, (the claim that President Obama was born in Kenya) is the perfect encapsulation of that desire. We don’t like President Obama, we don’t wish him to be President. There must be something about this unpleasant fact that makes it illegitimate. And off to the races we go. In the end, about a third of Americans believe in Birtherism and it’s because they want to. Those voters also built a huge platform for Trump to start his drive for the presidency. He highlighted Birtherism in 2012. Even though he backed off this year by not speaking about it, he made enough gains with those who believed the lie to boost him throughout the primary. Hatred of Obama was the number one quality that Republicans wanted from their nominee and Trump had it in abundance. Birtherism was the beginning, not the end of Trump’s reliance on unreality. He did it with just about everything, constructing a version of reality that best suited his voters’ fears and hopes regardless of feasibility. If the reality Trump constructs is better and seems more real than actual reality, he can win.

In a much different way and with much different values, Bernie Sanders embarked on a similar effort. Republicans in Congress are the constraining reality for Sanders accomplishing his policy goals. Yes, there are Democrats who are not as left as Sanders and could block his efforts, but the opposition from Republicans is far more lethal to his goals. Sanders and his supporters responded to this very real constraint by saying that if Democrats were more principled the opposition would fall away or the people would rise up and demand their policies. This response has very little basis in fact. The Republican opposition’s willingness to do unpopular things and then completely get away with it is a huge reason for the political gridlock we have.

Leaving aside how he planned to overcome opposition, there were other constraining realities Sanders ignored. Sanders wanted to do three huge things all at the same time. He wanted to break up the big banks, provide single payer healthcare and fundamentally alter our nation’s global trading system. Even if one grants the premise that each of these is an excellent and worthwhile policy goal, it would seem absolutely necessary to do one at a time because of how disruptive they would be to people’s lives. Changes in each of these sectors would in the short term put millions out of work. But the idea that all of that could be done and all at once presented an alternate reality that appealed to millions of people. For them, the super rich’s power over their lives through large corporations, banks and global trade is too much to take and needed to be defeated.

Trump’s and Sanders’ networks of supporters take thing even further. Roger Stone, a Trump surrogate, has begun the process of turning Gold Star Father Khizr Khan into someone with links to the Muslim Brotherhood -- without any evidence. With far less backing from the Sanders campaign, certain outlets insist that the primary was stolen from Sanders -- also without evidence. Both sides are building realities that they like or makes them feel better. When reality interferes, it can just be ignored. In the end, such plans ultimately do run into the hard wall of reality but that often comes long after the political decision can be changed. The advantage of not having to be constrained by reality is that the candidate’s message can more easily fit the voters’ mood.

Conclusion

This may not work for Donald Trump. Despite his mastery of ignoring reality, Trump swings at too many low pitches and gets into too many fights he shouldn’t. His reality is very appealing to 14 million Republican primary votes. It is less appealing to the 60 million or more general election voters he is going to need. The fear is that someone more skilled at avoiding the low road can learn the Trump lesson that reality is not popular. Fighting outside reality’s confines gives candidates incredible advantages. 

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Polling Update # 9: Clinton Bounces Back

Clinton has regained the RCP average lead by 3.9, 45.9 to 42.0 – though we urge the same level of caution about this week’s polling results that we did about last week’s.

Poking under the hood a bit, we see that the average continues to weigh some of the Republican bounce. To correct for that, we looked at the median polling number as opposed to the average. Clinton has a 5-point lead in the median poll. But this could just as easily reflect a Clinton convention bounce that will recede back to where things were before both conventions. It is also possible that the equilibrium point is where the race was before the FBI director released his blistering non-indictment indictment. In that case, a 5-point lead is about accurate. 

Next week may tell us if that’s where the race is settling. Waiting another week after that might even be prudent.

The one thing that is probably fair to state is that Clinton leads, not Trump. By how much is unclear but the fact of a lead seems to be quite clear. We will know more next week whether Clinton set an equilibrium or is just bouncing herself. 

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