I have two very different takes on Hillary Clinton’s prospects of winning the 2016 presidential election. One side sees her as potentially vulnerable but most likely to win decisively, possibly realigning the Latino vote (more or less) permanently in the Democratic camp.
Matt Barreto, co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, also named Bush as a possible candidate to bridge the gap with Latino voters.
“There’s very good reason to believe Jeb Bush has an opportunity to rebuild the GOP image if he can stay true to his message and get through the Republican primary,” Barreto said at the panel Tuesday.
On the flip side, Barreto said, Hillary Clinton has an opportunity to pick up a record number of Latino votes and solidify Latinos as a Democratic voting bloc for years to come.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, she has this serious opportunity to hit and eclipse the 80 percent mark with Latino voters,” Barreto said. “Now, if that happens — which I think between these two scenarios there’s a better likelihood of — I think you are now starting to talk about a more permanent realignment in the Latino vote.”
The other take sees her as formidable, but not much better than a 50-50 bet to become the next president.
“Viewing her as a prohibitive favorite at this point is misplaced, definitely,” says Alan Abramowitz.
Abramowitz isn’t a Republican pollster or a professional Clinton-hater. He’s a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. And he and his ilk—the wonky academics who research in anonymity while pundits predict races on TV—offer the most compelling case for reconsidering Clinton as the likely winner.
“I would feel comfortable saying that it’s a 50-50 race right now,” says Drew Linzer, a political scientist who is an independent analyst in Berkeley, California. “But I don’t think anyone would be wise going far past 60-40 in either direction.”
The first analysis is based on demographic changes in the electorate and looks at what percentage of the minority vote a Republican would need to win in order to overcome their Electoral College problem.
The second analysis looks at a different set of metrics.
The best-known forecasting tool of the bunch—and one that plainly spells out Clinton’s looming trouble—is Abramowitz’s “Time for Change” model. He first built it before George H.W. Bush’s 1988 election, and he has used it to predict the winner of the popular vote in the seven White House races since. (The model predicted that Al Gore would win the presidency in 2000, when he became the first person since Grover Cleveland to earn the majority of the popular vote nationally but lose the Electoral College.)
The model uses just three variables to determine the winner: the incumbent’s approval rating, economic growth in the second quarter of the election year, and the number of terms the candidate’s party has held the White House. Official forecasts aren’t made until the summer before the presidential election. But reasonable estimates rooted in current political and economic conditions demonstrate Clinton’s vulnerability.
Consider this scenario: President Obama retains equal levels of approval and disapproval, better than he has had most of his second term; and gross domestic product growth in the second quarter of 2016 holds at 2.4 percent, the same as last year’s rate of growth. Under this scenario, the “Time for Change” model projects that Clinton will secure just 48.7 percent of the popular vote.
In other words, she loses.
Neither of these analyses considers the strengths and weaknesses of particular candidates outside of their potential to have a natural appeal to minority constituencies. Jeb Bush, for example, is married to a Mexican woman, has mixed-race children, and speaks fluent Spanish. The Bush family also has a record of performing better than average with the Latino vote.
But, what isn’t considered are the policy positions of the candidates, their debating skills, their ability to unify their respective parties, their fundraising ability, their gender, their voting or governing records, their ages, their physical attractiveness, their regional strengths and weaknesses or, obviously, their running mates.
Another potentially decisive factor is their differing roads to the nomination. Jeb Bush might be well-positioned to do well with Latino voters right now, but for that very reason might not be able to win the nomination. Or, he might have to do things to win the nomination that will destroy his positioning with Latino voters. No similar hazards are apparent for Hillary Clinton or any other possible Democratic nominee.
In my opinion, the biggest metrical hazard for Clinton is that she’d be trying to win a third consecutive term for the Democrats. Since Harry Truman declined to run for reelection in 1952, only George H.W. Bush has been able to pull this off. Arguably, Al Gore pulled it off, too, but he didn’t get to become president.
Poppy and Gore were sitting vice-presidents, which was also the case for Truman and LBJ before they assumed the presidency and won reelection. We have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find someone who won a third straight presidential race for his party who had not been vice-president. Like Clinton, Hoover had served in his predecessor’s cabinet.
In other words, we don’t have data on a presidential election that aligns closely with the one coming up, and need I mention the anomaly of potentially having the brother of a failed president running as the smarter, more competent alternative? What would have happened if Herbert Hoover had a brother who ran against Truman?
I think we can take a look at these models but we ought to put them aside. It’s safe to say that Jeb is the strongest candidate that the Republicans can field, and that’s really saying something.
Yet, I am not exactly brimming with confidence or enthusiasm about Clinton’s prospects.
I think the country, mainly, feels the same.
It is worth noting that the time for a change model had to be changed after the 2000 election because it predicted a Gore win.
Unknowns:
I do think it is worth noting that Hillary’s lead is NOT unprecedented: arguably there were four candidates with leads as large as hers in early states (Bush 2000, Gore 2000, Hart 87, Reagan ’79). Gore lead Bradly 64-12 for example. Hart lead in ’87 by about the same margin both nationally and in early states.
Of these examples in some ways the most interesting to me is Bradley. Bradley had his moment: you can argue he got lured into Iowa by a bad poll and lost New Hampshire in part because McCain sucked independents into the GOP primary. After NH he was done, but there was a race for a while. This is not to suggest that Clinton is going to lose the nomination, but it is to suggest the race may become competitive at some point.
ISIS will fade, but there will be a new WORLDSHAKING THREAT that is the worst thing since the Y2K bug infected the Khorosan Group with avian flu.
1 – I’m not so sure ISIS, or some other offshoot group that springs up, is going to go away and become a non-factor. It’s rather startling how much ground they’ve gained so far and so very soon. And now with a foothold in Libya, it’s making some govt officials in Europe a bit uneasy.
Amazing how much they’ve achieved with so few — allegedly a force numbering just several tens of thousands. I suspect the actual number is several times that.
Hope I’m wrong of course, but I think this group is going to be a force to reckon with for the near term. And if the US doesn’t get smarter about how to deal with it properly, the disease could easily spread further.
We may be faced with “Who lost
Chinathe Mid-east”. In which case, the MSM trumpeting W’s “success” in Iraq may be a major factor.Well, most people as of today want us to do something, just not send in troops. Obama is doing about that with the drone strikes. Might be tough for the GOP a year from now to claim not enough was done when the public isn’t close to demanding it now.
Of course, what needs to be done is a UN-sanctioned or type of multi-country force of troops, not led by the US but including Saudi, Russia, China, France etc. It’s appalling that the US has allowed relations to deteriorate w/Russia such that it becomes very difficult to imagine such a cooperative effort to stem the growing tide of ISIS. With the big 3 countries teaming up, along with however many other countries can be brought in, preferably one from the ME, I would imagine such a large force could take out Daesh within 3 months.
Looking at the GOP field, I really think their only chance to take the White House is in a Clinton-Bush election that generates unprecedented levels of voter apathy (“Them again?”) and massively suppresses turnout.
Jeb! is only a viable candidate if Clinton is in the race. However, he’s not their only chance to beat Clinton, he’s not likely their best chance.
Let’s also not forget another tried-and-true GOP method for winning: voter suppression and election theft. Worked for them in 2000, 2004.
If it’s close enough, and especially if the Jebster or Clint Walker is their nominee, chances are they’ll go all out to steal it, guessing that the Dems will once again politely decline to challenge the results despite widespread evidence of fraud.
link
I don’t know. I’m very suspicious of simplistic analysis for presidential campaigns. Since 1988, the presidential races have been REALLY squirelly.
In 1992 Ross Perot threw a monkey wrench and a half into the race. I’ve read the analysis that his voters would have split roughly 50/50 but that assumes that all of his voters would have voted. I suggest that any semi-liberal that voted for Perot against Clinton would not have voted. I can’t say the same about the Bush people but the right tends not to get up on as high a horse as the left.
The R candidate in 1994 was Bob (“I look like I hate everyone”) Dole. ‘Nuff said.
Al Gore did win. The Supreme Court gave it to Bush, or the Democratic County Chair gave it bush with the stupid butterfly ballot. Take your pick, either way FL should have been Blue in 2000. But he SO EASILY could NOT have. Anyone who “predicts” an election where the margin of victory is 500K out of 50M votes is nuts, lucky or both.
2004 was a war year. And John (“I love everything French”) Kerry ran. And the R’s had $$$ out the wazoo when Kerry didn’t (august couldn’t respond to the Swift Boat asses). And Diebold’s CEO was a BIG Bush backer and delivered Ohio. And Bush won by a toenail (100K votes in Ohio out of 5.5M … all counted by Diebold).
2008 was the Year of Grumpy and Sister (“I read ALL the newspapers”) Sarah. It wasn’t really a contest. Hell, INDIANA went blue presidential. People hated Bush by that time, the economy was melting. Mickey Mouse would have defeated the R’s nationally.
The economy was not booming in 2012, the TP was on the warpath, the R’s had more $$$ than god … and still lost nationally. Big Time (4% these days is Big Time)
Any system that correctly predicts the elections since 1992 … is flawed. It has to be. Each and every election since 1992 has been a fluke.
Sorry, I neglected to mention the weakest candidate since McCarthy (Joe or Eugene, your choice): Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Dukakis was the weakest. He was ran in an open seat contest, approval numbers for Reagan/Bush were weak and after two GOP terms, there was a national weariness of the GOP, and Bush had always been a poor candidate on this own (only two House wins and those were back in the 1960s).
Yes, but Poppy wasn’t so weak once he teamed up with Lee Atwater. And don’t get me started again about Mike …
Had Perot dropped out and stayed out late in the 1992 election, odds are that it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. However, had he not been in the race at all, odds are that Bush would have won. It was Perot that softened up/battered Bush on NAFTA and allowed Clinton to somewhat float below the radar on NAFTA. It was also Perot that supplied the hook the Clinton campaign needed — it’s the economy. Before then Clinton was running on health care. Why any Democrat was interested in listening to a multi-term Democratic governor from a small, poor state with a crappy economy (and home of WalMart) suggests that we’re not all that smart.
I voted Debs. You can’t blame me.
I voted for McGovern in the primary and general election. That was the last time the CA Democratic primary election for President mattered. (Although the 2008 Obama v. Clinton was a hot race and Clinton won.)
Have never considered voting for a Republican in a general election nor, unfortunately, been tempted to vote for a third party. (If I lived in Richmond, CA, I would definitely vote Green in local elections.) However, I wasn’t alive the last time Debs ran and I’m sure that I would have been at least tempted to vote for him.
I was 12 so me too
Truman and LBJ were sitting Presidents when they first ran for election in their own right. The same situation existed in 1976 (Ford advanced to the Oval Office from the VP office to which he’d been nominated by Nixon and confirmed by the Senate after Agnew resigned.)
At a practical level, a Clinton v. Bush 3.0 election could severely depress voter participation. Back to the 1996-2000 rate of approximately 50%. That low participation rate didn’t hurt Clinton, but it didn’t help down ticket Democrats, but it most likely hurt Gore (even though he won the popular vote). That was the outcome of election that were held sixteen and twenty before the next Presidential election. More recently, we’ve seen that low participation rates help the GOP. And the Clintons on the stump for Democrats in 2014 didn’t increase enthusiasm for those candidates.
Republicans know that unlike GWB, Jeb! starts from behind. And while it may be easier for them to “gore” Clinton than it was to “gore” Gore, Jeb! still starts from behind, is handicapped by GWB’s legacy, and GWB didn’t win. To win (and the GOP crazy base does prize winning above their regressive world views), they know what it will take to beat Clinton. A younger candidate with charisma that sounds smart enough and doesn’t sound scary crazy. That’s why Walker is now getting serious attention. The problem is that Walker lacks charisma, is clever but not smart, and won’t be able not to occasionally sound scary crazy.
Interesting to see that the political neophyte, Dr. Ben is polling in second place at 18%. (An indication of how lame a large segment of the GOP base is that they think all the GOP needs to win is a black man. Or maybe they think it will take a doctor to get rid of the ACA and doctor Senator Paul has had his chance and didn’t get the job done.) More interesting is Christie, Cruz, Paul, Perry, and Rubio all at 5% or less. And Huck at only 10%. The contest among all these non-official candidates isn’t exhibiting much fluidity. Most won’t officially enter the race.
At least Ben isn’t an antivaxxer.
Could be evidence that Dr. Ben is smarter or more politically savvy than the other GOP fools that rushed to defend the anti-vaxxers because the anti-vaxxers are a fringe constituency and not more prevalent on the right than the left. Although, given Walker’s apparent surge, doesn’t look as if this issue has had any impact on the preliminary horse race.
The problem with HRC is she is HRC. The last unambiguously honest non focused tested thing she said was to vote for Obama if the Iraq War judgement mattered to you and it cost her. All politicians do this to some degree but HRC is really bad at it.
It is interesting that such simple political science models are predictive of voter behavior. It goes to your previous “environment of stupid” post.
What makes the decision so bleak is that most people are now aware that policy is irrelevant because Congress is not responsive to popular pressure through the ballot box. And members of Congress are increasingly successful in selecting their voters instead of the reverse–through gerrymandering and clever media strategies. They have gotten to the point that they mainly want government to go away but for the bennies of current government programs to remain. The legal fine print of working and citizen life has gotten too overwhelming in the increasingly demanding work environment. Nothing seems to work properly anymore. The last hope of change of economic prospects in electing Barack Obama was cruelly and cynically dashed and the fact that it is unclear by whom makes the situation all the more despairing.
Both of those models say that none of the candidates will be responsible for their fate; it lies external to the political process. That is what has sapped voter confidence and likely voter turnout as well.
And it is because voters have become incidental nuisances to both parties, minor irritants in the lives of public officials and their staff. People to hector and shunt off into voice mail systems or spreadsheets or forced topic webmail systems. People who are numbers in predefined issue and topic columns.
There is a growing sense that it really doesn’t matter. The choice will be between worse or worst. And the choice in 2020 even grimmer.
Clinton faces the prospect that no amount of market whomping up will dispel that gloom. Old candidates for an old electorate in a sclerotic political system that directs tax money into the pockets of the wealthy and is addicted to bloated wasteful military expenditures. The very opposite of general peace and prosperity. And the Republicans will win again on the sentiment of wanting it all to just go away so that people just have to contend with their private lives.
The next President, regardless of who it is, will preside over a Herbert-Hoover kind of Presidency. There are too many asset bubbles hanging out there, aggravated by global policies of austerity that are being militantly defended by all parties but what few lefty parties remain with a real influence on their country’s policies (and there is none that fits this description in the US).
And the propaganda has already begun. Investment contrarian Jim Grant has his Depression revisionist The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself. This book as noxious as Amity Schlaes The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression is sure to shape the policy prescriptions for both parties. In fact it already has in the “extend and pretend” housing crisis policies of the Geithner’s era at Treasury. Just do nothing and the Depression cures itself is the gimmick.
That 1921 depression was an agricultural depression that deflated farm prices and lasted until World War II. It cured itself on Wall Street in 1921 then erupted again in the bursting of the asset bubbles in 1929. Neither Rodham nor Ellis will see that scenario coming or work to deal with it because they are too much Clinton and Bush.
And the rest of the clown car should never be let anywhere near the nuclear “football”. In fact among the clown car set there are folks lusting again for the will of the wisp of tactical nuclear weapons.
The country is not brimming with enthusiasm. Period. We’re buried under fifteen years of elephant crap.
What Obama states do you think Bush could win?
That’s where the rubber meets the road for the GOP and it’s a rough and oily patch for them.
They need to flip many states from blue to red to get the job done. None of the current potential candidates seem to have sufficient generic appeal to succeed. Not convinced that Walker could even flip/carry WI and even if he did, it’s not nearly enough.
Walker won STATEWIDE 3 times. You don’t think that’s an indication that WI in 2016 is not WI in 2008? Because it is not. It is far more conservative than in 2008. The entire state is more R than D now – the State Legislature is R, the entire apparatus of state government, the HoR is 5-4 R, etc etc. I don’t think Johnson will have a huge difficulty winning re-election, and that is assuming that Feingold runs against him.
One other thing no one here has mentioned – Obama/D fatigue. It is always more difficult to win 3 elections in a row. It does not happen very often. Often there is a party switch. R fortunes are rising, D fortunes are dropping.
Looking at 2012, the squishy ones could be: Iowa, Ohio, and Florida
With some dampening of the immigration issue, you could add Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.
The key part of Bush’s strategy is of course Florida and its 29 electoral votes.
Clinton’s key state of course is New York but she better pay attention to Washington and Oregon and the possibility of people sitting out 2016.
And right now Illinois is becoming a big unknown, but will likely swing heavily toward Clinton by 2016. Rauner will be well-hated by his cross-over voters by then and the mayor of Chicago will working hard to turn out the vote.
Institutionally, Clinton should also worry about Michigan and heavier voter suppression. And of course, Florida being manipulated again.
Public opinion is not the only factor out there. Increasingly, election integrity has become a significant issue despite the pretenses of the professional analysts.
If the GOP candidate manages only to flip FL, Ohio, Iowa, and CO, he/she loses.
It’s bizarro to me that the clowns are running against Obama’s personal life [i.e. his personal “love of America”] despite the fact that Obama isn’t running in 2016, since they actually have nothing to run on except cancel everyone’s health care, cut taxes for the rich, close branches of gov, and the like. perhaps goes to DerFarm’s comment above, but this election is starting out very strangely.
Not unprecedented. The GOP and GWB ran against Bill Clinton continuously from 1999 through 2002. Not his policies because they didn’t want the public to appreciate how instrumental the GOP was in supporting Clinton’s policies. That is one reason why Democratic voters to this day don’t get why Clinton was a disaster for liberal/New Deal/progressive public policies.
But, what isn’t considered are the policy positions of the candidates, their debating skills, their ability to unify their respective parties, their fundraising ability, their gender, their voting or governing records, their ages, their physical attractiveness, their regional strengths and weaknesses or, obviously, their running mates.
The purpose of a model is to focus on only the variables that make significant differences and toss out the rest. And all research suggest that everything you mention above falls into the noise category in terms of influencing the vote.
Consider that the best electoral models in 2008 predicted a 6-8% victory for the generic Democrat over the generic Republican. Huge amounts of discussion over Obama, Clinton, the PUMAs, Palin, the Wall Street crash, Obama’s convention speech, Obama’s state-of-the-art GOTV, and of course Obama being the first AA nominee and the huge minority turnout.
And in the end – the result was as predicted with generic candidates.
Probably there was a shift that occurred in Appalachia due to racism, but offset by the minority turnout. And certainly you can’t count on special-case factors like that cancelling each other out every time. However, for the most part, they key influencers are just what that simple model says.
The funny thing is, if you ask people why they voted the way they did they’ll mention maybe personality issues of the candidates or something else specific to the race. But, en masse, that’s how people react.
And it is sad. It’s why the GOP doesn’t worry about being the part of the insane racists. Because the population as a whole won’t penalize them at the ballot screen. Instead, the swing voters will swing the same way they always do.
Collectively human beings are rather simple and predictable creatures. It’s why propaganda is so effective.
2016 is likely to defy the models in a number of ways. The biggest deviation is the instability of the Republican coalition, which will grow even greater over two years of Congressional control. I have predicted, and still predict, that their coalition will break in two for the presidential contest. Either the tea party wing will win the nomination outright, driving moderates out of the coalition; or the establishment will hang on, and Ted Cruz will run on a third party ticket.
If I’m wrong, and Hillary ends up losing, that will be a disaster, but hopefully an instructive one for Democrats. I certainly can’t think of a Democrat I’d rather see lose. But maybe we can find a candidate who can keep her at bay like Barack Obama did in ’08. I just don’t know who that would be.
It seems that Democratic pundits assume the Latino vote is in the bag for Democrats, although Latino voting percentages have never been near black percentages.
IMHO, Columba campaigning in Spanish will bring Latino voters out for the GOP much more than Obama’s immigration efforts (which I fully support) will for Hillary. Also, I suspect (just a hunch) that lingering black resentment from 2008 will cause a drop off in participation. Jeb is the only candidate that can bring together white Tea Baggers, Latinos, Southern racists, and Wall Street donors together. Hillary brings – what? Old white women who want to see one of their own as President.
The American people do not vote based on policy. That is obvious from our laws. It’s all identity politics. They vote for who the candidate is or against who the other candidate is.
Only very narrowly. Data from SC may be the best currently available.
In 2012 — Romney won SC with 50.4% of the vote. Obama won 96% of the AA vote in SC. (AA in SC are approximately 29%. Couldn’t easily pull up what percentage of SC voters are AA.)
In 2014 SC Senate races (one regular and one special)
Graham (GOP) won with 55%. AA support 6%. Opponent white male.
Scott (GOP) won with 61%. He won 74% of the white vote and 10% of the AA vote against an AA, female Democrat.
Scott did better with both whites and blacks in SC than Graham did.
Columba Bush will be a non-factor with Latino voters. Don’t know that she’s ever campaigned for her husband.
Hillary may do better with older white women than Obama, Kerry, and Gore did — but not by much. Minority women will support her in much larger numbers, but they already vote for Democrats. She’s hoping to crack through with younger, white working class women that tend not to vote at all.
I may be biased by my long Cook County Illinois residency. I’m sure identity politics is much stronger here. There are some good maps at the Dkos diary,http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/25/1366789/-In-a-stunner-Chicago-Mayor-Rahm-Emanuel-gets-force
d-into-a-runoff. Those maps tell me that Rahm has lost the white voters. They also lead me to suspect that there aren’t enough white voters left in Chicago to matter. I’d love to see a breakdown showing who white Chicagoans picked as the anti-Rahm. If it was Fioretti, they may come back to Rahm next month. If it was Garcia, he (Garcia) has got it in the bag.
US Census – Chicago:
White – not Latino: 32%
Black – 33%
Latino – 28%
Asian – 6%
Doubt that 28% of Chicago voters are Latino. So, whites and blacks have a greater voice in elections.
Looks roughly equal to me. It all depends on GOTV.
Another thought – since the census includes citizens and non-citizens and Latino’s have a greater probability of being non-citizen, I think you are right about whites and blacks having a greater voice.
I wonder what Chicago’s white lunatics are going to do, now that their choice is between a Jew who used to work for Obama and a brown guy born in Mexico?
Columba hates anything and everything to do with campaigning. She will probably try her best, but you just can’t fake it all the time.
If she does begin the campaign, it won’t be until the general (RedMeat conservatives taking to a Mexican woman? Not in MY Idaho), and the pressure will be extreme … especially with the Spanish TV/Radio following every word. Look for a melt-down, bigtime.
The rest of the family is no presidential election prize either, but most of the garbage is in the relatively distant past. I can’t see a Democrat going after the kids unless Jeb! gets all hypocritical … which I also don’t see.
…ain’t worth the bytes is costs to posts it.
HRC is starting to build a huge wave of support among women all across the country. You saw it yesterday with 5,000 women in Silicon Valley treating her like a rock star. It’s why three million people plus have signed up for Ready for Hillary, many of them young voters. And it’s going to keep happening.
She’s a historic candidate and has to be considered as such.