The Alternative Reality Election.

          We are still waiting to get a full picture of what the polls are telling us about who won the debate and more importantly the debate’s impact on the election. What we are seeing without question is a shameless attempt to continue the creation of alternative realities whenever and wherever possible. It is exceptionally important that we focus on the pernicious potential of such creations rather than merely debunking them.  

      Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump wants to claim/believe he won the debate. In so claiming, he relies on click button online samples.  Mostly for entertainment value, but also for page clicks, many websites launched who won the debate questions?  Click a button and you voted. They don’t ask for demographic samples.  They often don’t have a security measure to prevent multiple votes from being cast. They are all basically worthless for gauging public opinion. This is understood by a great many people to simply be true. But as we have seen time and time again, something which was understood not to be true before Trump says it becomes true to his partisans in very short order after he says it. 

 This is not, as it might seem, a harmless phenomenon.   If people begin to base their belief about how the election is going on the results of these online polls, then they become much less likely ultimately to believe election results that prove considerably different.  In a country where both candidates seem like a certain lock for 40% of the vote and probably higher, it is not difficult for the opposing sides to be in such silos that people don’t really know people supporting the other candidate.    Thus this creation of alternative reality based on blatantly flawed polls can cause serious problems.  Democracy only works when the side that loses believes the outcome and accepts it. The creation of an alternative reality following a debate does raise the specter of creating a similar alternative reality around the election itself. This is a risk we should be watching for carefully as the election continues. 

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Nevada: The Silver State could be as Good as Gold

Nevada is an incredibly important state because at the moment it appears to be one of the last few states to decide the election.  As a reminder, among the core states that President Obama needed to reach 272 electoral votes in 2012, the smallest margin was in Colorado, and the next four in ascending order of margin were Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and then Nevada. The polling at the moment suggests that Iowa is slipping away from the Democrats, but that Virginia is moving toward the Democrats. In that exchange Democrats gain 7 electoral votes to be sitting on 279.  This allows Secretary Clinton the wiggle room of losing either Nevada or New Hampshire and still winning.  (The Maine 2^nd also looks quite imperiled for Democrats as well, but it is only worth 1 electoral vote) 

Nevada is a state replicating one of the main battle lines of this election. Trump’s having alienated Hispanics is balanced by his over-performance with whites without a college degree. Polls are also showing Trump leading here by an average of 2 points. But, as we noted last week, among the most contested states, Nevada was one where Obama most outperformed his polling average. In 2010 this was also the site of horrible polling failure, as Harry Reid was trailing by almost 3 points, and won by more than 5 points.  This is not surprising. Nevada has one of the most difficult to poll electorates because it is in a near constant state of flux as people frequently move in and out of the state. They also move around locally a great deal.  And all this mobility goes double for Clark County(Las Vegas)   This is why in Nevada it might be more important to pay attention to the fundamentals than the polls.

President Obama beat Mitt Romney by 67,806 votes in the state of Nevada in 2012.  Donald Trump is clearly poised to do better than Romney in the counties outside of Clark (Las Vegas).  But to show just how important Clark County is consider that even if Donald Trump doubled the margin in the rural counties outside of Clark and Washoe (Reno) and turned a 7,000 deficit into a 20,000 win in Washoe (Reno), he still would not have enough to win the state if Clinton held the 2012 margin in Clark County.    Such massive swings are unlikely simply because such swings are not often seen in Presidential elections.  So Trump needs to make up some serious ground in Clark County itself. Clark County saw a slight increase in the raw vote for Obama from 2008 to 2012. Obama got 380,765 in 2008 but 389,936 in 2012.  Romney cut the margin in Clark slightly by adding almost 32,000 votes.  The questions that exist for Trump is whether there are more votes to find for a Republican in Clark County, and whether there is some danger that Trump will also see some slide back.  Nevada is a state where roughly in 1 in 10 voters in 2012 was a member of the LDS Church. Romney unsurprisingly did very well with them. But as we have seen from polling in next door Utah, Trump continues to struggle with this group. LDS sentiment is something else to watch for as Trump tries to whittle away at this margin.

In the end Nevada is simply a turnout game. If Democrats can get enough of their voters to the polls there are probably not enough Republicans in the entire state to make up for it.  A big advantage that Democrats have in that effort is that Nevada has some of the most convenient early voting laws in the nation, Democratic GOTV efforts have kept up with these laws, giving Democrats plenty of time to turn out their vote and lot of skill with it too.  

The bottom line is the demographics favor Clinton just a little bit more than polls favor Trump, but it is exceptionally close. We will have our eyes focused like a laser on the early vote and should have a decent sense which way things are going based on those numbers which come out daily starting in Clark County on the 22^nd of October. 

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Obama beat the polls pretty substantially in 2012.

Looking back, we think of 2012 as a kind of boring election. Only two states voted differently from the way they voted in 2008, both turning Republican. But otherwise the result looked like a pretty solid and easy win for President Obama; one that was confirmed by the networks at 11:15 p.m. Eastern time.  It took Romney roughly two more hours to concede defeat, but just like that election was over.  Nor did the race end up being particularly close.  Obama won by 3.9%, nearly 5 million votes and his smallest margin of victory among the states he needed for the Electoral College was 5.37% (Colorado).

        What is too readily forgotten in all of this is that Obama’s healthy triumph was not what the polls showed heading into Election Day.  The final RCP Average showed Obama up by just .7% nationally.  So Obama beat his predicted margin by 3.2% Obama also beat the average in each of the ten closest polling states.  In Ohio he outperformed by only one-tenth of a point, which is basically even.  But he surpassed his national 3.2 spread in five states: Nevada( 3.9%) Colorado (3.9%) Virginia (3.6%) Iowa (3.4%) and New Hampshire (3.6%).  Obama’s improvement over polls failed to capture attention because all but one of these state averages had the correct winner.  (In Florida Obama had started Election Day trailing but made up 2.4% to win by .9%).  Yet another reason why the jolt from Obama’s over performance was less striking is that pre-election observers saw Ohio as in his column so that his path to 270 seemed secure.  As the nation waited for Ohio it saw a place where Romney did better than the national average not worse.  Yet had the numbers been slightly different Romney could have had a lead going in yet watched as Obama’s over performance caused the President to surge past the polls and win the actual vote.

   All this suggests that it can be exceptionally helpful to look at past election results, not just polls, to assess likely outcomes.    Looking at the 10 closest states where Obama prevailed in 2008 and 2012, the states were the same and the sequence from top to bottom by Obama’s vote percentage remained nearly the same.  The four closest states in 2008 were the four closest states in 2012 and went in the exact same order (CO, VA, OH, FL).  Admittedly, there were slight changes in the order of the last six states, but this is mostly noise since the entire range is in Obama’s percentage in these states in 2012 is from 52.83% in Wisconsin to 51.97% in Pennsylvania.  

Of course, nothing guarantees a continuous pattern and as noted in previous posts, the coalitions in places such as North Carolina (the second closest state in 2008 and 2012) are slightly changing.  But the data certainly points toward trusting that states will be roughly in line with the past unless evidence clearly points in the other direction.  And history shows that a lead even in the 3 points range is not entirely safe from over/under performance. There is a decent argument that the Democratic field organization gives them the better chance to over preform, but that is still mostly speculative. Yet it should not be forgotten that Obama did over perform the polls, and so Election Day could always provide surprises. 

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Why Voting Third Party for President does not increase the odds of America becoming a Multi-Party Country.

Third Party Presidential Candidates, primarily Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, are polling better than they have in any election since 1992. This had added some of the multi-candidate field dynamics back into the race.  Johnson and Stein are serving as an outlet for voters who disdain both candidates, and at the moment, this dynamic seems ever so slightly to favor Trump. Although more voters have disdain for him, the double disdainers are choosing Johnson or Stein, when they might otherwise have voted Clinton.  This is not a big thing yet, as not every poll has the two-way margin larger than the four way. Plus the effects are small, because as we covered in a previous post a four point lead in a four way might be harder to overcome than a five point lead in a 2-way. 

Of course, most voters understand that voting for Johnson or Stein means giving up their right to cast a vote for their preferred choice between the two candidates who may actually become President.  But if some are taking this step to bring us closer to the day when we need not choose only from column A or column B, it’s worth asking what it would take for the U.S. to become a multi-party country.  This election has shown to some degree the attractiveness of such a step.  In addition to the overall dislike for both major party candidates, there is clearly some desire simply to punish the Government for not working.  Disdain for Congress is at all time high, and while Republicans are more frowned upon than Democrats, Democrats are not far behind. (The Major difference is that Republicans dislike Republicans in Congress far more than Democrats dislike Democrats in Congress, although Republicans who dislike Republicans in Congress still very much plan to vote for them)

 There is basically no successful way in America to punish both political parties and as such they hold something of a veto over policy. Prior to 2016, most observers believed that capturing the elite of both parties meant capturing control of the entire range of options the Government would consider. No elite insider would get everything he wants, but neither would he be shut out entirely ever.  Trump upset the apple cart by beating like a drum the Elite of the Republican Party.   But the overall partisan forces are so strong that even with Republican Elites fleeing to Clinton or to third party choices, the race is close.   What to make of this?

It all comes back to the electoral rules.  When running in a winner take all election, no matter how many opponents you have, in most cases if you get one more vote than your closest opponent you win.  So long as such a system exists, a third party which is ideologically similar to one of its opponents, just increases the likelihood that the other party wins. In 2000 this happened. Nader voters cost Al Gore Florida, and likely New Hampshire, as well as forcing many states into competition, which would not otherwise have been meaningfully contested.  Based on county breakdown from four years later,  it’s nearly certain that 80% of those voters ended up in John Kerry’s hands four years later.  So what did Nader accomplish?   His vote was basically half of what he was polling on Election Day and nowhere near the 5% he needed for Federal Matching funds. But it was just enough to elect Bush. The 2000 result undermined any headway he was making, and he lost 80% of his supporters four years later. (Lots of people begged him not to run. He didn’t listen, but the beggars all voted for Kerry thus negating Nader’s 2004 effect.)  The fallout from Nader’s 2000 run has been so powerful that even today, the people who are old enough to remember hanging chads are supporting third parties at much lower rates.  Only those much younger are supporting 3^rd parties, because they are less aware of the effects. The worst thing that could possibly happen to the Green Party again would be a Trump victory by the margin of Green Party votes. The Election in 2020 to replace him would almost certainly see the Green Party vote collapse again as the desire to be rid of Trump once he was President would be immense.  

                With current rules the U.S. cannot become a multi-party system with any ease.  The American tradition is that sometimes the goal of a third party is not a multi-party system but instead supplanting and ultimately replacing a major party.  Greens might say, for example, that the Democrats are corrupted, and therefore the Greens should become the Republicans chief rival.   This has two manifest problems.  1)  The effort required to supplant a party is usually more than it is to conquer a Party. Sanders came much closer to being the nominee than Stein will in seeking to overthrow the Democratic Party  (Not committing to one path weakness both plays.)  2) The supplanting approach is highly likely to hand power to the other party in the short term. The other party with this new found power is now often inclined to change the rules of the game, with voter ID(either upholding it  in the courts or even pushing the idea federal), or gerrymandering  or other new fangled contraptions. If you give a party total control of Government they are going to use that control to increase their odds of continued control.  Plus it will now be in the party in power’s interest to draft rules that will make it difficult for dissidents within their party from also adopting a third party strategy.  Why not lock in a two party system.  After all, governing while unpopular is much easier when all you have to do is make the opposition slightly more unpopular.  

                The key take away is that if you really want America to be a multi-party system it is essential that one party Republican rule is not established in this election and that you fight for the rule changes needed to create a multi-party system ( Either instant runoff or some move toward proportional representation.)  But in this year voting Third Party is not sticking it to the two-party system, it is enabling it. 

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Ohio: Why the Buckeye State is No Longer the Bullseye.

This is our first look at a state that seems to be moving away from being stuck on even to one where the edge for one candidate over the other has grown enough to support the premise that Donald Trump leads in Ohio. This is not to say that Hillary Clinton cannot come back and win the state.  But what is more certain this year is that if she wins the state it will more likely be as part of rout than the lynchpin of her victory.  Ohio was the key state in 2004, but it was not the key state in 2008 or 2012. It appeared to be crucial in both elections because it was ready to be called first, thus providing the electoral voters earlier in the night to end the suspense (quite famously with the Rove meltdown in 2012.)  But it was not the closest state which Obama needed to win the White House either time.  Sure it is close. Obama won it by 3 points in 2012, while Kerry lost it by 2 points. Obama won by 166,000 votes, Kerry lost by 116,000 votes.  But the evidence so far suggests Trump has an edge, which we will soon explain.

                To grasp Ohio is to break it up into Five Regions (Eastern Ohio, Greater Cuyahoga (Cleveland) Greater Franklin(Columbus)  Northwest  and Southwest. ) Only by getting a sense of each region does one have a real sense of how this race will go.  (which counties are in which region will appear below) 

Eastern Ohio is functioning much in the same way as similarly situated Western Pennsylvania.  In counties such as Monroe and Jefferson Obama did much worse than Kerry. It seems likely that this bleeding will continue, Eastern Ohio was also the region where Trump pretty well crushed Kasich in the primary losing, with Kasich only winning two counties there.  Obama won by slightly less than Kerry did. What makes it a region Democrats win (Obama won the region by about 25,000 votes) is that it includes such Democratic strongholds as Athens (Ohio University) Ashtabula (Jefferson)  Mahoning (Youngstown) and Trumbull( Warren). However all of these places seem likely to see a decrease in the Democratic margin from 2012, and the region as a whole is likely to go for Trump. By just how much remains a question. Losing it by less than 25,000 votes keeps Democrats in the game.  Larger than 50,000 and HRC is in big Trouble. 

Greater Cuyahoga is where Democrats live and breathe, but even here problems exist. Unlike in the rest of the country where the Hispanic population is exploding and making regions more Democratic, we do not see this much in Ohio, which is mostly a Black and white state.  Democrats are counting on African American turnout to drive a win here, if they don’t quite get that then they lose.  While the Obama margin over Kerry was up in Cuyahoga proper, the overall region was much more mixed.  Obama left the region up by about 280,000.  To win the state Hillary needs to win by at least 250,000 if not a bit more. While this region contains some moneyed voters who might flip to her, there are also clearly quite a few downscale whites here, as evidenced by this being a good but not overwhelming region for Kasich. Greater Cuyahoa is not Greater Philadelphia in terms of margin which is a large part of why Ohio is more Republican than Pennsylvania.

Greater Franklin is the region where Democrats gained the most over Kerry.  Kerry lost the region by about 58,000 votes. Obama won it by about 55,000 votes.  The change is primarily about Franklin County and Columbus itself, which went from a Kerry 54% County to an Obama 60%, The counties that make up the rest of the region are heavily Republican, but they all trended toward Obama over Kerry.  This was also far and away Kasich’s best region in the primary in the state, in particular Franklin proper and its rich northern neighbor. If there is a region where HRC might beat the Obama margin it is here, although that does require a solid African American turnout in Columbus. 

                Northwest Ohio is a region where Obama did much better than Kerry.  Obama only lost it by 75,000 votes, whereas Kerry lost it by 140,000 votes.  It is a region where Obama was up considerably in a high percentage of counties and down only in six small rural counties.  We don’t really see much reason to believe the Obama number will hold, and in fact seeing Clinton run behind Kerry would not be much of shock. This is primarily a very Republican region. What keeps the margin close is Lucas (Toledo), which is the only County in the region which Kerry won.  Obama benefited here to a large degree by his savaging of Romney on the Auto Bailout, and the success thereof.  If Clinton can hold better than the Kerry number, she seems favored to keep Ohio. If she matches the Kerry number, we will be up a long time with Ohio; but if, as seems likely, she bleeds even more then this region along with the East is where Ohio will be lost.

Southwest Ohio is the final region and one where there are mixed signals. It is a very Republican region, giving Romney a roughly 120,000 margin.  However the margin was a considerably heftier 196,000 for Bush over Kerry. Hamilton County, which contains Cincinnati, flipped sides, going from being Bush to Obama country and in so doing changing a 23,000 deficit for Democrats into a 26,000 vote lead.  This explains the great majority of Democratic gain across the region.  Given other dangers, Hillary Clinton probably needs to hold the line in Hamilton to have a chance to win the state.  Unlike most of the other suburban areas, which voted against Trump until the New York primary, this region was relatively split outside of Hamilton.  As such it is not unreasonable to think Trump will gain a bit of ground outside of Hamilton County.  If Clinton can hold the Obama number in the region she becomes tough to beat in the state. She can lose ground a little and still win, but a loss of anything over 140,000 in the region, and Trump is likely sailing to victory.

                Ohio is very close, but, unlike what’s happening in the other swing states, there are no regions becoming so much more Democratic (Outside of Franklin County) that progress can be expected.  Even Franklin County is not certain to produce a large Clinton margin  (Miami-Dade in Florida is nearly certain to produce a bigger margin for Hillary than it did for Obama). As such Clinton’s task is about incremental holding, while trends are clearly against her in two out of five regions.  If Clinton is on path to win by about 4 nationally, she probably guts it out here too. But anything less and Ohio likely slips to Trump.

 Regions

East

Adams

Ashtabula

Athens

Belmont

Carroll

Columbiana

Coshocton

Gallia

Guernsey

Harrison

Hocking

Jackson

Jefferson

Lawrence

Mahoning

Meigs

Monroe

Morgan

Muskingum

Noble

Perry

Pike

Ross

Scioto

Trumbull

Tuscarawas

Vinton

Washington

Greater Cleveland

Ashland

Cuyahoga

Erie

Geauga

Holmes

Huron

Lake

Lorain

Medina

Portage

Stark

Summit

Wayne

Greater Franklin

Delaware

Fairfield

Fayette

Franklin

Knox

Licking

Madison

Marion

Morrow

Pickaway

Union

NorthWest

Allen

Auglaize

Champaign

Clark

Crawford

Darke

Defiance

Fulton

Hancock

Hardin

Henry

Logan

Lucas

Mercer

Miami

Ottawa

Paulding

Putnam

Richland

Sandusky

Seneca

Shelby

Van Wert

Williams

Wood

Wyandot

Southwest

Brown

Butler

Clermont

Clinton

Greene

Hamilton

Highland

Montgomery

Preble

Warren

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Polling Update # 16 - Almost Tied

It seems we may have jumped the gun a bit in declaring the end of the Trend. Clinton now leads in the RCP average by just .9% 44.9% to 44%. This is down from 3 points last week. In the four-way race, it is even a touch closer at .7% with Clinton at 41% and Trump at 40.3%.  However one thing to note particularly in the two-way race is how much the LA Times panel poll is playing a role in the average.  This poll has Trump up 7. It is different from other polls in that it is talking to the same voters throughout the entire stretch of the election.  Trump only leads on one of the other surveys and only by a point. If instead of just trusting RCP on its inclusion, let’s lop off this LA Times outlier as well as excluding Clinton’s best poll.  That would grow the average lead back up to 1.6%.  We will need a careful look back to see if this sort of averaging would have come closer to the mark in 2012 or 2008.   We also might need to dig deeper into state polling as we are starting to see places where state and national polls diverge without a clear explanation.  Still even with these potential caveats, there is no denying that a very close race has broken out with one week to go before the first debate.  We will get more in depth in a later post on how the race got so close, but for now it is just a very close race. 

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Revenge of the Nostalgic versus the Apathy of Youth

Donald Trump is now somewhat shockingly within range of winning this race.  There are still certainly hurdles in the way of his victory. But we must admit that he is now closer than we expected him to get, and it can be relatively easily asserted that the race is virtually tied.  What is causing this? The answer is quite simply one of generation.   Donald Trump is the candidate of the old.  There is a profound hunger and nostalgia among many in America for the way things used to be.  Donald Trump’s entire being in this campaign has spoken to that.   Worried about the complications of the world from Trade, to Immigration, to Technological change or threats like ISIS?  All of these things, Trump tells us, can be overcome by American strength. Those who tell you otherwise are weak and stupid.  That is the core of the Trump message from the beginning of his campaign, and it has never wavered. It is a view embraced by 40% of Americans and if you go to the RCP average even as the race spirals into a tie, the four-way average still puts Trump at 40.9% of the vote.   The two way average adds 3.1% to get Trump to 44% as Republicans return to the flock.    Older voters and less educated voters lead the pack for Trump. Whites without a college degree give Trump 58% of their votes and almost certainly over 60% if you include voters old enough to be unlikely to have had a chance at college.  This base of voters is fired up and energized, and their candidate from the primary was victorious.                 

On the other side, many voters under the age of 30 had to taste political defeat for the first time during the primaries. (Obviously they have also lost in midterms, but they also barely voted in the midterms). These voters are still grappling with the loss.  Voters under 30 overwhelmingly do not like Donald Trump, are not voting for Donald Trump and think he is not qualified to be President. However they also have bought into many of the negative Hillary Clinton memes and thus are making up a smaller % of the electorate and voting for Clinton at considerably less of a rate than those whites without a college degree are voting for Trump.  The forces of nostalgia want to win badly and the future of the country thinks everything is terrible so why bother.  There is still time for this to change, and debates do have an effect of crystalizing opinion. But for the moment the power of Nostalgia seems to be keeping Trump in serious contention. These voters badly want this, and that can sometimes be enough. 

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Wisconsin: The Who do you Hate More State?

        It’s easy to make too much of the idea that this election is going to be decided between two historically and widely disliked candidates.   But this description does ring true in Wisconsin. Voters there genuinely do not like either of the candidates.

 Wisconsin provides a very interesting data set from the primary in a way that other states don’t. All of the states we have looked at so far have been closed primary states (Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina).  What that means is that while primary data can be somewhat helpful, the doors were also shut on many potential voters whose intentions we wish to know.  In closed primary states, voters not registered with a major party can’t vote, and if a Democrat or Republican voter was attracted to a candidate from the other party it was often too late for her to vote for the candidate she now preferred.   

Wisconsin, however, has no such rule, and as a consequence it provides us with an excellent sample of what the Electorate will look like.  Slightly more than 3 million people from Wisconsin voted in the 2012 Presidential election, and more than 2.1 million voted in the 2016 Presidential primary. In many ways Wisconsin was the largest defeat in the election cycle for both Trump and Clinton. It was stand alone day with nothing good to report for either one of them.  When putting aside caucuses and just looking at primaries, it was Hillary Clinton’s 5^th worst state and 3^rd worst outside of Sanders home New England region. (West Virginia and Oregon were the other two and both came long after the race was over.)  On the Republican side it was Trump’s third worst state. (Texas (Cruz’s home state) and Idaho were worse, but since they were on days where Trump won a lot they were easily forgotten.)  However, what is interesting is that looking at these results in total gives us a rough idea of each candidate’s various advantages and of why Trump confronts a significant mathematical challenge to do more than make it competitive.   Obama beat Romney here in 2012 by 213,019 votes out of 3,068,434.  The 2016 primary saw 2,113544 votes cast. So the primary is a decent cross-section of the entire electorate, and we can meaningfully begin the process of talking about the entire electorate by walking through the primary.

 Hillary Clinton received 46,393 more votes than Donald Trump in the Wisconsin primary. As a reminder no one in Wisconsin was barred from voting for either them, even by a voter registration deadline because of Wisconsin’s same day voter registration laws. (Voter ID was an issue but has been softened for the general, which likely helps Clinton)  While this may not seem like a large number of votes, it was more than four times Kerry’s margin over Bush in 2004, and more than six times Gore’s margin over Bush in 2000. So it is not nothing. This brings us relatively quickly to the supporters of Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders actually beat Ted Cruz in vote total in Wisconsin by 36,807 votes. Again not a small total but let’s give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Sanders and Cruz votes merely cancel each other out.   Supporters of these four candidates accounted for 90% of all primary votes and about 63% of all votes cast in the 2012 Presidential race.  So our analysis so far has Clinton leading Trump by the same 46,393 by which she beat Trump on primary day.   

It’s the remaining roughly 182,000 primary votes that are more of an enigma. They are 85 % John Kasich votes, 13% votes for other Republicans on the ballot and 2% for Democrats who were not Sanders or Clinton.  This is a group in which Trump desperately needs to make up ground, but one in which he may struggle. The Kasich voters, based on all of the demographic information we have, are a serious problem for Donald Trump.  This is likely even more so in Wisconsin where Kasich support was some of his weakest in the North.  Voters there realized that a vote for Kasich might aid Trump and many people voted for the more conservative Cruz, even perhaps against their natural inclinations. So the Kasich voters here might be true moderates. More than 2/3^rd of Kasich voters listed “scared” as their reaction to Donald Trump winning as opposed to excited, optimistic or concerned.  Scared Kasich voters, who still could not bring themselves to vote for Cruz seem like a tough demographic for Trump. What is amazing is Trump will almost certainly win this group of voters overall.  The question that remains is will it be by enough to erase Clinton’s lead?   Trump needs to win this group with about 63% to erase Clinton’s lead.  Anything less and the world looks very cold for Mr. Trump in Wisconsin; however given partisan loyalty he may just be able to do better.   Let’s give him 80% (basically amounts to everyone who wasn’t scared and 2/3rds of the scared) just for the sake of argument. This would leap him ahead by about 63,000 votes.  For him, it is a start.  

But this is where things become even more difficult for Mr. Trump.   There still remains a pool of roughly 950,000 voters who limit voting to presidential years.  This group voted for Barack Obama by about a 2-1 margin.  Let’s be kind to Mr. Trump with our math.  We can assume that instead of going to Obama 627,000 to 323,000, these 950,000 voters are not the same group from 2012 to 2016.  Some of the 950,000 from 2012 may have voted for Obama last time but voted in the R primary this time.  So let’s drop the margin to 570,000 to 380,000. Let’s also assume Democratic demoralization, so instead of a pool of 950,000 there are only 700,00 and with the same margin. That would net Hillary Clinton 140,000 votes and a relatively easy victory, even factoring in Trump’s prior 63,000 lead.  Even if you cut the available pool down to 450,000 that would still net Clinton a 90,000 margin from this group.  Netting this against the Trump lead produces a Clinton 27,000 vote margin. It’s not much for comfort, but it is also not nothing.   Reviewing these figures, it would seem the major potential source of improvement for Trump might be in the Sanders/Cruz exchange, particularly with more 3^rd party bleeding from among the Sanders voters than among the Cruz voters (even though 55% of Cruz voters were also scared of Trump).  But hoping for such an advantage seems very risky for Trump.  This may be why the Clinton campaign, despite close polls, has not gone up on television in Wisconsin. 

We would be remiss if we did not also provide a little bit of county level flavor, which these posts have been keen on. When looking at a county level, we quickly see that Trump’s problems stem in particular from the three most Republican counties in the state.  These three counties (Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha) have been the three most Republican counties in each of the last four Presidential elections. They are the heart of Red Wisconsin and contain all the Milwaukee suburbs. (Unlike other swing state suburbs, they have not budged in their redness one bit). They were also far and away Donald Trump’s worst counties in Wisconsin. He averaged about 23% in them when he received 35% statewide.  He got about 38% in the rest of Wisconsin. It was these counties which dragged him down. 

What is particularly interesting is that, outside of Trump’s two worst primary states (Texas because of Cruz and Idaho because of Latter Day Saints), he only got less than 25% of the vote in 18 counties total across all states in all primaries. Three of them were the Ruby Red Three in Wisconsin. Known collectively as the WOW counties. These counties make up the very base of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. The provided Mitt Romney with a 132,536 vote margin.  Since Obama’s 213,109 margin is what Trump must make up, bleeding anywhere further is dangerous for him, yet he does look likely to bleed at least a little in the WOW counties. (Seeing him winning them by only 100,000 would not be a shock.) Otherwise   Obama saw gains over Kerry in almost every county in the state, and seeing bleeding back toward the Kerry-Bush number is possible. Turnout might also be down, but Kerry still won so you need to see deeper bleeding than Kerry faced and likely a lot of it to make up for WOW problems. 

 Northwest Wisconsin is showing an albeit minor trend back toward Republicans, but the Democratic gains in the Counties around Dane (Madison), such as Columbia, Sauk, Richland, Green, and Iowa seem to make up for any weakness in the Northwest.  It should be noted that Western Wisconsin, once you get west of the Dane County area, was Hillary Clinton’s worst region in the primary. Democratic strongholds like La Crosse (Obama 58% in 12) and Eau Claire (56% in 12) are places of particular concern for HRC.  However Trump’s weakness in the WOW counties likely negates any strength he can pull here. The WOW counties also have far more votes: 374,744 against 118,268 for LaCrosse and Eau Claire combined.  The gap would remain even if you were willing to add in more Western Wisconsin Counties.  Basically so long as the Dane Region and Milwaukee proper stay true to form and there is bleeding in the WOW’s, there is not much a Republican can do to win Wisconsin. Trump is not out of it here, and it may even be that this is a state in which his odds are slightly better even than in Pennsylvania.  But getting 2/3^rd up the hill is not the same as getting all the way up the hill. We don’t quite see how Trump gets all the way up the hill here and obviously neither does the Clinton campaign.  

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