Time for some big picture stuff that I've been researching over the past week or so. There will be more data-filled posts later -- with a new model of what drives the electoral pendulum -- but to break the ice on this topic, let's take a look at how hard it is for the same party to win three or more elections back-to-back.
That is one of the most under-reported aspects to this election, both in the media and among internet observers. The only coverage it's gotten has been due to Helmut Norpoth's "primary model," which predicts a Trump victory in 2016 on the basis of the difficulty for the incumbent party to win a third consecutive term, and Trump's stronger showing in his primary than Hillary in hers. Here is a summary of the model in the present context, to appear in a peer-reviewed journal.
The goal now is to see whether the current climate, and Hillary Clinton in particular, look similar to the other times when the same party won three or more elections in a row. Spoiler: it does not. There has to be increasing popularity for the party from the first to the second elections, to carry it into the third term. And the candidate for the third term has to be high-ranking (President, VP, etc.) and incumbent. None of these conditions is true for Clinton's run in 2016, with '08 and '12 as the background, and Hillary as a non-incumbent Secretary of State.
The last time that the incumbent party won a third term was 1988, after wins in '80 and '84. Reagan was not only popular, but gained in popularity from his first to second election. Bush was the sitting VP.
In 2000, the incumbent party won three popular votes in a row, although it failed to win the Electoral College, due to shenanigans in Florida that favored the opposition party. Still, the pattern looks like 1988 -- Gore was the sitting VP, and Clinton was fairly popular, and became more so from his first to second election. (Note: not necessarily his second full term, which became plagued by scandal, but between his wins in '92 and '96.)
During the New Deal era, FDR won third and fourth elections, but that is no longer a possibility. Who knows whether the Democrats would have won those elections if the candidate had to be some one other than FDR. They could well have, but we can't study what conditions favored those third and fourth wins -- did the successor to FDR have to come from within the administration, what role did they play, etc.? Truman did win on his own, and he was the sitting President who had been VP before FDR died in office.
Before the New Deal era, Hoover managed to win a third term for his party in 1928. He was the sitting Secretary of Commerce, for two terms, and was regarded as successful at his job. Hillary is not sitting, was Secretary of State for just one term, and is regarded as a failure at that job. And unlike the Democrats during Obama's rule, support for Republicans had grown from 1920 to 1924, suggesting that it was still popular in '28.
In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt won a third term for his party. The previous two terms showed growing support, from the 1896 to the 1900 elections. And like Truman, Roosevelt was the sitting President who had been the sitting VP when McKinley was assassinated.
One election later, in 1908, Taft won a fourth win for the Republicans. The momentum was on his side, since the 1904 election showed even greater support than 1896 and 1900. Like Hillary, Taft was a one-term Cabinet leader (Secretary of War), although he was the incumbent rather than the next-to-last holder.
Before the Progressive era, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote three times in a row from 1884 to '88 to '92, although he lost the Electoral College in '88. He got roughly the same support in '84 and '88, rather than sagging momentum. And in the '92 election, he was a recent former President.
During the Civil War and Reconstruction era, the Republican Party was dominant because the Democrats were so closely tied to the defeated South. In 1868, Grant won a third term for the Republicans, but largely because in the wake of the Civil War, there was no real competition from the Democrats. He was a military general who people saw as the real leader that ended the Civil War, not the incumbent President, who was actually from the opposition party.
Lincoln and his VP Johnson were from opposite parties, but ran together in 1864 to ease tensions during the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, the Democrat Johnson took over, so in '68 perhaps the voters were already considering the election one of changing parties rather than continuing the run of Republican victories. Grant's third, and fourth, wins may not be such great examples of consecutive third and fourth wins, in the minds of voters.
After Grant's two terms, in 1876 Hayes won yet another election for the Republicans, but he lost the popular vote. Even the Electoral College win is among the most controversial, and it's still not clear he legitimately won that. This makes 1876 a non-example of continuing the incumbent party's run.
Before the Civil War, a third consecutive term was won for the Democrats in 1836 by Van Buren, who was the sitting VP. From 1828 to '32, the Democrats increased their Electoral success, and in the popular vote either stayed even or slightly increased -- Jackson got a slightly smaller share of the vote in '32, but it was a more divided field than the two-way race in '28.
At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a one-party nation at the Presidential level under the Democratic-Republican Party, with Electoral College wins from 1800 to 1820, and a victory in 1824 despite losing the popular vote and Electoral College. This was the Era of Good Feelings, totally unlike today's highly polarized partisan environment, where the same party is not going to just coast on because people don't want to have contentious party battles.
From 1800 to 1804, the Democratic-Republicans increased their showing in the popular vote, meaning the momentum was on their side for a third win in 1808, which they did get. The winner, Madison, was the incumbent two-term Secretary of State -- back when that role was more prestigious than the VP in planning a run for President. In 1812, the momentum was not on their side, since their share of the popular vote declined from '04 to '08. Sure enough, it declined in '12, but it had been so sky-high that even with this decline, it was still just over 50% in '12. The winner was Madison, the incumbent President.
At the same time, 1812 was more of a primary election since both candidates were from the same party, albeit one from a dissident wing. Either way, the party won. This lack of competition would propel the party forward in 1816, whose winner was Monroe, the incumbent Secretary of State. He won with more of the popular vote than the mainstream candidate did four years earlier, in the "general as primary battle," which suggested positive momentum for the next one in 1820. Sure enough, the party won yet again under the incumbent President, who ran unopposed.
The final case of consecutive wins is 1824, although it was really more of a bitter primary battle again, with four candidates running from different wings of the same party. The favored Establishment choice, John Quincy Adams, actually lost the popular vote and the Electoral College. However, the candidate with the plurality of both the popular and EC vote did not get a majority in the EC, and it went to the House of Representatives, who chose the Establishment favorite over the challenger Andrew Jackson, in the infamous "corrupt bargain". Adams was the incumbent Secretary of State.
Do any of these examples match the background conditions in 2016, and the candidate of Hillary Clinton in particular? No.
Already by his second election, Obama and the Democrats were less popular than in the 2008 election, whose purpose was to purge the country of the Bushies and neo-cons for good. Four years after 2012, they are even less popular.
And Hillary Clinton is not the incumbent anything -- she hasn't been in the administration since the previous term. She was also the Secretary of State, not VP -- and in a climate far removed from the founding of the nation, when it was Secretaries of State rather than Vice-Presidents who were considered as the next-in-line for President.
Being an out-of-office Cabinet member makes a real difference to most people about how well and how naturally she could continue the incumbent party's presidency -- if that were truly desired, and judging from the flagging momentum, it is not.
Had Joe Biden run in the primaries, he would have been a more attractive choice for the voters and the states that Crooked Hillary won as the Establishment candidate, and would have become the nominee instead of her. As the sitting VP, he would have been better poised for the difficult task of winning a third consecutive term, although the downward momentum from '08 to '12 would still be working against him.
It's fortunate for the Trump movement, then, that the Clinton machine must have threatened Biden in some way or another into not running in the primaries -- the same way they have clearly threatened Bernie Sanders into shutting the hell up and becoming a ventriloquist for the Wall Street warmonger.
Aside from being in a weaker position to win the third term, Crooked Hillary is much more hated on a personal level than Biden, and is a passive-aggressive woman, rather than the Irishman who would have given Trump more of a fight. Biden would also have been a better protector of blue-collar votes in Rust Belt states, whereas Her Royal Highness cannot conceal her contempt for ordinary Americans. And Biden is not obviously at death's door like Hillary is, despite being older than she is. Not even to mention her failures in office, and her epic levels of corruption, compared to Biden.
The fact that our opposition is Clinton rather than Biden is another major example of how elite hyper-competitiveness has made it easier for the outsider populist candidate to triumph. We saw that in the GOP primary, where the Establishment candidates refused to drop out and unite behind a single challenger to Trump, and where the voters themselves refused to pool their votes into a single non-Trump candidate.
As much as we may hate Hillary Clinton, we ought to be thankful for the deep divisions and internecine Establishment wars that have made her rather than Biden our main opponent.
September 6, 2016
August 29, 2016
Michigan poll rigged, Trump actually winning 47-38 (Emerson)
Emerson just released three battleground state polls for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Trump is tied, down 3 (within m.o.e.), and supposedly down 5. I more or less accept the OH and PA estimates, since Emerson had good showings in the primaries and are not a transparently media-driven BS outfit. Someone else can check out OH and PA, though, just to be sure.
But ever curious about Trump converting solid blue states, I looked at the Michigan data and noticed a whopper of a rigging attempt -- they made nearly half of their sample aged 75 and older! Michigan may not be the youngest state in the union, but half of the electorate there is not going to be in a nursing home.
Moreover, the cross-tabs show that this elderly group is demographically unlike Michigan overall in the most anti-Trump way -- they are far more Democrat, far less Republican / Independent, more female, less educated, far more black, and more likely to live in the Detroit area.
In other words, the only people who are bitterly against Trump in all of Michigan are elderly black church ladies and white tone-policing grannies from Detroit, so the pollster stuffed the sample with enough of them so that the overall result was Clinton up by 5.
Here are links to the review of all three states' results, and the full spreadsheet for Michigan, which are also available at their website.
Did they rig the OH and PA samples to be composed of nearly half elderly folks? No, because the true results are probably more favorable to Clinton in those states (more or less tied). In fact, both OH and PA have the same breakdown by age groups, and only 9% were aged 75+. The age composition for both OH and PA is:
18-34 -- 25%
35-54 -- 37%
55-74 -- 29%
75++ -- 09%
In Michigan, the age composition was impossibly older:
18-34 -- 16%
35-54 -- 21%
55-74 -- 18%
75++ -- 44%
Way, way, way off. They under-sampled young, middle, and old by 10 points or more, and replaced them with the elderly Trump-haters.
Here is Trump support by age group in MI:
18-34 -- 45
35-54 -- 52
55-74 -- 48
75++ -- 28
I took Trump's support among the various age groups in MI, and weighted them by the age composition of the accurate OH and PA samples. What was the result?
Surprise: Trump 47, Clinton 38, Johnson 8, Stein 3, Unsure 4.
Looks like the original home of the "Reagan Democrats" is stepping up to the plate to Make America Great Again.
Of course the true picture could be a closer race than Trump 47 to Clinton 38 -- I'm just weighting their age groups properly. But if they sabotaged the sample that badly, it may be a garbage sample overall and not worth studying, whether properly or improperly.
Still, the fact that they took such a great bald-faced risk to bias their results suggests that Trump truly is ahead by at least several points.
If you're on Twitter, ask Emerson Polling why they stacked the deck with 44% elderly in MI, vs. only 9% in OH and PA? These shills deserve to have their public reputation trashed, especially when they brag about how well they did in the primaries.
But ever curious about Trump converting solid blue states, I looked at the Michigan data and noticed a whopper of a rigging attempt -- they made nearly half of their sample aged 75 and older! Michigan may not be the youngest state in the union, but half of the electorate there is not going to be in a nursing home.
Moreover, the cross-tabs show that this elderly group is demographically unlike Michigan overall in the most anti-Trump way -- they are far more Democrat, far less Republican / Independent, more female, less educated, far more black, and more likely to live in the Detroit area.
In other words, the only people who are bitterly against Trump in all of Michigan are elderly black church ladies and white tone-policing grannies from Detroit, so the pollster stuffed the sample with enough of them so that the overall result was Clinton up by 5.
Here are links to the review of all three states' results, and the full spreadsheet for Michigan, which are also available at their website.
Did they rig the OH and PA samples to be composed of nearly half elderly folks? No, because the true results are probably more favorable to Clinton in those states (more or less tied). In fact, both OH and PA have the same breakdown by age groups, and only 9% were aged 75+. The age composition for both OH and PA is:
18-34 -- 25%
35-54 -- 37%
55-74 -- 29%
75++ -- 09%
In Michigan, the age composition was impossibly older:
18-34 -- 16%
35-54 -- 21%
55-74 -- 18%
75++ -- 44%
Way, way, way off. They under-sampled young, middle, and old by 10 points or more, and replaced them with the elderly Trump-haters.
Here is Trump support by age group in MI:
18-34 -- 45
35-54 -- 52
55-74 -- 48
75++ -- 28
I took Trump's support among the various age groups in MI, and weighted them by the age composition of the accurate OH and PA samples. What was the result?
Surprise: Trump 47, Clinton 38, Johnson 8, Stein 3, Unsure 4.
Looks like the original home of the "Reagan Democrats" is stepping up to the plate to Make America Great Again.
Of course the true picture could be a closer race than Trump 47 to Clinton 38 -- I'm just weighting their age groups properly. But if they sabotaged the sample that badly, it may be a garbage sample overall and not worth studying, whether properly or improperly.
Still, the fact that they took such a great bald-faced risk to bias their results suggests that Trump truly is ahead by at least several points.
If you're on Twitter, ask Emerson Polling why they stacked the deck with 44% elderly in MI, vs. only 9% in OH and PA? These shills deserve to have their public reputation trashed, especially when they brag about how well they did in the primaries.
There are no "swing" states other than Ohio and Florida
One of the greatest sources of confusion about how the Electoral map may change in any given election is the misleading idea of "swing states". It makes it sound like they flip flop, and with the race so close otherwise, it all comes down to these few states to swing the election one way or the other.
In reality, the only states that show flip flopping are Ohio and Florida, and the only times that they've swung elections were due to shenanigans that gave one of them to the wrong party. So it's more accurate to say that, flip flopping or no flip flopping, a heavy-handed case of shenanigans can swing an otherwise close election.
The secondary usage of "swing state" is to refer to "close" states, where the margin of victory is under 5 or 10 points. But these are all reliably blue or red (mostly blue in our period). Here, "swing" is being used delusionally to suggest that if only we tried really, really hard, we could swing it from one color to another. But if all the blood has been squeezed out of the stone, that's it. It doesn't matter if the margin was under 5 points -- it ain't gonna budge any further.
Getting back to the primary usage of "up in the air," let's start with the states other than Ohio and Florida and explain why they're not swing states. We need to restrict our time period to one where most of the map was predictable, and so where only a handful of states could have changed from one year to the next. That means the culture wars period, from 1992 onward.
Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia began red and have steadily shifted blue over time. Although this does mean that some years are blue and others are red, it is not flip flopping, which suggests that any given year is up for grabs. They're only mixed colors because they started out one color and have steadily changed toward the other, a deterministic process.
Nevada and Colorado did narrowly go blue in '92 and '96, but only because of a high Perot vote, which split off more Republicans than Democrats. Their underlying nature, in the absence of a strong third party, was still red. Many other states went blue only due to Perot, despite being red states, such as Montana and Kentucky, which does not make them "swing" states.
The cause of this temporal shift toward blue is the migration of liberal transplants into the Las Vegas, Denver, and Northern Virginia (DC) metro areas. Unless and until this trend reverses itself back to the level of the mid-2000s, these states will remain blue.
Iowa has only gone red 1 out of 6 times, not flip flopped. New Hampshire went red once, too, but even that may have been due to Nader splitting off Democrats in 2000. It was still an underlying blue state. New Mexico went red once in '04, perhaps because Bush promised to keep their housing bubble inflating.
Indiana and North Carolina went blue in '08 as a one-time referendum against the neo-cons. North Carolina is not quite as red as it used to be, subject to the same liberal carpet-bagger process as Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada -- bringing them into Research Triangle.
A handful of Southern states went blue in '92 and '96 because of Clinton and Gore hailing from Arkansas and Tennessee, and being a supposed throwback to the Southern populism of an older Democrat party. Louisiana and Missouri joined these two. There was nothing "up for grabs" about them, though, and they have been solid red since 2000.
West Virginia started out blue in '92 and '96, but has steadily shifted red since, so nothing up-in-the-air about that one either. They weren't glomming onto Clinton and Gore as local heroes, since West Virginia is not Southern, and it had already voted blue when the entire rest of the country voted red earlier on -- for Dukakis in '88 and Carter in '80 (also in '76).
Aside from one-off flukes, or deterministic processes (long-term shifts in one direction or the other, local favorites, etc.), only Ohio and Florida show something like flip-flopping from one year to the next.
Ohio has officially gone blue 4 times out of 6, although in '04 the election was electronically stolen away from blue, making it blue 5 times. But in '92, it only went blue because of the size of the Perot vote, so that's still an underlying red state in 2 and blue in 4. And it wasn't a steady shift from one color to the other. In '04, its (rigged) outcome determined the entire election. So it's safe to call Ohio a swing state.
Florida has officially gone blue 3 times out of 6, although in '00 the recount would have shown it to have gone blue, so underlying blue for 4 out of 6. It's changes are not steady shifts in one direction -- it was red in '92 and '04, and was illegitimately red in '00. And its shenanigan-driven outcome in '00 determined the fate of the entire election. So it, too, is safe to call a swing state.
Notice, though, that the only times these swing states have swung an election was with the help of some kind of blocking of the popular vote. So it's electoral shenanigans that have swung elections, not a changing popular mood in up-for-grabs states.
Time periods tend to have a dominant party that represents the zeitgeist, and clearly it has been the Democrats during the culture wars period, given that more Americans are liberal than conservative. If only the popular vote mattered, they would have been in office the whole period, from Clinton to Gore to Obama.
In 2016, none of the deterministic processes has reversed (liberal transplants leaving former red states to make them red again), so not even the swing states can truly swing an election. If McCain and Romney had won Ohio and Florida, they still would've gotten whipped.
What will turn the White House over to a Republican again is a re-alignment of which kinds of people and which states vote for the newly evolving Republican party under Trump. Likely this will be through the Rust Belt. If Trump wins, it will probably be by winning at least one of the swing states and some but not all of the Rust Belt. Over time, more and more of the Rust Belt will turn red for the Trump-oriented GOP.
In reality, the only states that show flip flopping are Ohio and Florida, and the only times that they've swung elections were due to shenanigans that gave one of them to the wrong party. So it's more accurate to say that, flip flopping or no flip flopping, a heavy-handed case of shenanigans can swing an otherwise close election.
The secondary usage of "swing state" is to refer to "close" states, where the margin of victory is under 5 or 10 points. But these are all reliably blue or red (mostly blue in our period). Here, "swing" is being used delusionally to suggest that if only we tried really, really hard, we could swing it from one color to another. But if all the blood has been squeezed out of the stone, that's it. It doesn't matter if the margin was under 5 points -- it ain't gonna budge any further.
Getting back to the primary usage of "up in the air," let's start with the states other than Ohio and Florida and explain why they're not swing states. We need to restrict our time period to one where most of the map was predictable, and so where only a handful of states could have changed from one year to the next. That means the culture wars period, from 1992 onward.
Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia began red and have steadily shifted blue over time. Although this does mean that some years are blue and others are red, it is not flip flopping, which suggests that any given year is up for grabs. They're only mixed colors because they started out one color and have steadily changed toward the other, a deterministic process.
Nevada and Colorado did narrowly go blue in '92 and '96, but only because of a high Perot vote, which split off more Republicans than Democrats. Their underlying nature, in the absence of a strong third party, was still red. Many other states went blue only due to Perot, despite being red states, such as Montana and Kentucky, which does not make them "swing" states.
The cause of this temporal shift toward blue is the migration of liberal transplants into the Las Vegas, Denver, and Northern Virginia (DC) metro areas. Unless and until this trend reverses itself back to the level of the mid-2000s, these states will remain blue.
Iowa has only gone red 1 out of 6 times, not flip flopped. New Hampshire went red once, too, but even that may have been due to Nader splitting off Democrats in 2000. It was still an underlying blue state. New Mexico went red once in '04, perhaps because Bush promised to keep their housing bubble inflating.
Indiana and North Carolina went blue in '08 as a one-time referendum against the neo-cons. North Carolina is not quite as red as it used to be, subject to the same liberal carpet-bagger process as Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada -- bringing them into Research Triangle.
A handful of Southern states went blue in '92 and '96 because of Clinton and Gore hailing from Arkansas and Tennessee, and being a supposed throwback to the Southern populism of an older Democrat party. Louisiana and Missouri joined these two. There was nothing "up for grabs" about them, though, and they have been solid red since 2000.
West Virginia started out blue in '92 and '96, but has steadily shifted red since, so nothing up-in-the-air about that one either. They weren't glomming onto Clinton and Gore as local heroes, since West Virginia is not Southern, and it had already voted blue when the entire rest of the country voted red earlier on -- for Dukakis in '88 and Carter in '80 (also in '76).
Aside from one-off flukes, or deterministic processes (long-term shifts in one direction or the other, local favorites, etc.), only Ohio and Florida show something like flip-flopping from one year to the next.
Ohio has officially gone blue 4 times out of 6, although in '04 the election was electronically stolen away from blue, making it blue 5 times. But in '92, it only went blue because of the size of the Perot vote, so that's still an underlying red state in 2 and blue in 4. And it wasn't a steady shift from one color to the other. In '04, its (rigged) outcome determined the entire election. So it's safe to call Ohio a swing state.
Florida has officially gone blue 3 times out of 6, although in '00 the recount would have shown it to have gone blue, so underlying blue for 4 out of 6. It's changes are not steady shifts in one direction -- it was red in '92 and '04, and was illegitimately red in '00. And its shenanigan-driven outcome in '00 determined the fate of the entire election. So it, too, is safe to call a swing state.
Notice, though, that the only times these swing states have swung an election was with the help of some kind of blocking of the popular vote. So it's electoral shenanigans that have swung elections, not a changing popular mood in up-for-grabs states.
Time periods tend to have a dominant party that represents the zeitgeist, and clearly it has been the Democrats during the culture wars period, given that more Americans are liberal than conservative. If only the popular vote mattered, they would have been in office the whole period, from Clinton to Gore to Obama.
In 2016, none of the deterministic processes has reversed (liberal transplants leaving former red states to make them red again), so not even the swing states can truly swing an election. If McCain and Romney had won Ohio and Florida, they still would've gotten whipped.
What will turn the White House over to a Republican again is a re-alignment of which kinds of people and which states vote for the newly evolving Republican party under Trump. Likely this will be through the Rust Belt. If Trump wins, it will probably be by winning at least one of the swing states and some but not all of the Rust Belt. Over time, more and more of the Rust Belt will turn red for the Trump-oriented GOP.
August 28, 2016
Structuring a bet about the changing Electoral map
In order to create a model of how a landslide election could happen, we can structure a bet to include separate conditions for the mundane outcomes, which bring the election close to even, and the extraordinary outcomes that would result in a lopsided victory.
Someone who is skeptical of Trump winning would expect him to get around as many Electoral votes as Romney did in 2012 -- 206 -- and probably in the exact same states.
They would still allow him a chance at winning, though presumably by a narrow margin and only by winning states that were close contests for the past however-many elections -- Florida, Ohio, Virginia, etc. If Trump won these three close states, plus another somewhat close state with favorable polling (Iowa or New Hampshire), then he would get just over 270 and win the election.
The further away from 206, the less likely in the eyes of the skeptic. But it's not totally out of the question either. So each Electoral vote above 206, the skeptic should be willing to pay more, though in a way that doesn't escalate too quickly. Say, a linear increase for every vote above 206.
At some point, though, the skeptic will agree that a Trump victory was no longer a narrow win among close races, which has already happened recently for both W. Bush wins, but represented a more fundamental shift in the laws of the Electoral universe. If Michigan and Pennsylvania go red for the first time since 1988, that reveals a fundamental change in the Electoral map.
Since the skeptic thinks that the same old laws are still at work, they should be willing to pay at an even steeper rate for these kinds of wins. In fact, they should be willing to pay at an accelerating rate, as they consider them exponentially less likely. If they're wrong, they should pay up exponentially more to the winner.
Unlike a simple linear increase for the wins of close races, wins above that should show something like a squared increase. At some small threshold above 270, the skeptic would admit that a Trump victory has gone beyond "winning close races, with no fundamental shift in the Electoral map" to "we're entering a fundamentally different Electoral environment".
Exhausting the close races, and even a few small not-so-close states, still maxes out around 280. So we'll take this as the threshold for a mundane victory vs. an extraordinary victory. You could induce some humility and cognitive dissonance in the skeptic by allowing him to increase this threshold to 290 or 300, and thereby concede that many more of the Obama states will be close rather than out of reach for Trump.
Whatever it is, the pay-off should be proportional to the square of Electoral votes above this threshold. If the skeptic truly considers this impossible, wishful thinking, delusion, etc., then they should feel no anxiety in allowing for the accelerating pay-off for fundamental shift wins.
So then the structure of the bet looks like this:
Pay-off = a1 * [votes above 206, until 280] + a2 * [votes above 280]^2
To simplify the example, let's make each of the a1 and a2 constants equal to 1.
If Trump won 330 votes, he will have gotten 74 votes above Romney's 206, each paying out a dollar, for $74, as well as 50 votes above the threshold of 280, which when squared pays out $2,500. Total pay-off is $2,574 -- most of that due to the wins signaling a fundamental shift.
Suppose Trump's success racked up 380 votes -- that's the same 74 above Romney's, but now 100 votes above the threshold that get squared, for a total pay-off of $10,074.
Leaving the a1 and a2 constants equal to 1 means the skeptic would be willing to pay a max of around $100 if Trump ekes out a narrow victory. Although that sounds more like a friendly bet, this person could have to pay out $10,000 if they're seriously wrong about there being no fundamental shift afoot. If they truly believe that is pure fantasy, what is the downside to taking this bet?
Should the Trump supporter allow a symmetric condition if Trump loses in a landslide? Sure, why not? Crooked Hillary taking Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, etc., is pure fantasy, so we would allow an accelerating pay-off if Trump got below a certain threshold -- say, McCain's pathetic showing, which today would yield 180 votes. Offer a linear increase for each vote below 206, until 180, then the square of the votes below 180.
This model clarifies thinking about the 2016 election itself, but you could structure a bet similarly to forecast the Electoral map staying basically the same vs. fundamentally re-drawn by 2020, 2024, etc. At the micro level, though, you'd probably want to make pay-off a function of the popular vote share in 2012, say for the Democrats. This models how difficult it would be to change a particular state's color, regardless of its population size and therefore Electoral vote count.
Red states becoming redder and blue states bluer would not pay off. But for each point in the reversing direction, there would be a linear increase for up to, say, 5 points. Beyond that, pay-off would be proportional to the square of points. California went 60% Democrat in 2012 -- if it only gets to 55%, the Trump supporter gets some multiple of $5, whereas if it returns to being red at 45% Democrat, the Trump supporter gets that multiple of $5, plus some multiple of $100.
And likewise for, say, Texas going back to blue, by a slim vs. a major margin.
Bets structured more along these lines tell us more about how the world works than do the simple "odds" estimates from prediction markets. Structured bets, with different pay-off functions for different scenarios, are more like the contracts for black-swan-prone industries like movies, pop music, and so on. All you have to do is look at the evolution of the Electoral map to see how volatile and black-swan-ish it has been over history.
Someone who is skeptical of Trump winning would expect him to get around as many Electoral votes as Romney did in 2012 -- 206 -- and probably in the exact same states.
They would still allow him a chance at winning, though presumably by a narrow margin and only by winning states that were close contests for the past however-many elections -- Florida, Ohio, Virginia, etc. If Trump won these three close states, plus another somewhat close state with favorable polling (Iowa or New Hampshire), then he would get just over 270 and win the election.
The further away from 206, the less likely in the eyes of the skeptic. But it's not totally out of the question either. So each Electoral vote above 206, the skeptic should be willing to pay more, though in a way that doesn't escalate too quickly. Say, a linear increase for every vote above 206.
At some point, though, the skeptic will agree that a Trump victory was no longer a narrow win among close races, which has already happened recently for both W. Bush wins, but represented a more fundamental shift in the laws of the Electoral universe. If Michigan and Pennsylvania go red for the first time since 1988, that reveals a fundamental change in the Electoral map.
Since the skeptic thinks that the same old laws are still at work, they should be willing to pay at an even steeper rate for these kinds of wins. In fact, they should be willing to pay at an accelerating rate, as they consider them exponentially less likely. If they're wrong, they should pay up exponentially more to the winner.
Unlike a simple linear increase for the wins of close races, wins above that should show something like a squared increase. At some small threshold above 270, the skeptic would admit that a Trump victory has gone beyond "winning close races, with no fundamental shift in the Electoral map" to "we're entering a fundamentally different Electoral environment".
Exhausting the close races, and even a few small not-so-close states, still maxes out around 280. So we'll take this as the threshold for a mundane victory vs. an extraordinary victory. You could induce some humility and cognitive dissonance in the skeptic by allowing him to increase this threshold to 290 or 300, and thereby concede that many more of the Obama states will be close rather than out of reach for Trump.
Whatever it is, the pay-off should be proportional to the square of Electoral votes above this threshold. If the skeptic truly considers this impossible, wishful thinking, delusion, etc., then they should feel no anxiety in allowing for the accelerating pay-off for fundamental shift wins.
So then the structure of the bet looks like this:
Pay-off = a1 * [votes above 206, until 280] + a2 * [votes above 280]^2
To simplify the example, let's make each of the a1 and a2 constants equal to 1.
If Trump won 330 votes, he will have gotten 74 votes above Romney's 206, each paying out a dollar, for $74, as well as 50 votes above the threshold of 280, which when squared pays out $2,500. Total pay-off is $2,574 -- most of that due to the wins signaling a fundamental shift.
Suppose Trump's success racked up 380 votes -- that's the same 74 above Romney's, but now 100 votes above the threshold that get squared, for a total pay-off of $10,074.
Leaving the a1 and a2 constants equal to 1 means the skeptic would be willing to pay a max of around $100 if Trump ekes out a narrow victory. Although that sounds more like a friendly bet, this person could have to pay out $10,000 if they're seriously wrong about there being no fundamental shift afoot. If they truly believe that is pure fantasy, what is the downside to taking this bet?
Should the Trump supporter allow a symmetric condition if Trump loses in a landslide? Sure, why not? Crooked Hillary taking Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, etc., is pure fantasy, so we would allow an accelerating pay-off if Trump got below a certain threshold -- say, McCain's pathetic showing, which today would yield 180 votes. Offer a linear increase for each vote below 206, until 180, then the square of the votes below 180.
This model clarifies thinking about the 2016 election itself, but you could structure a bet similarly to forecast the Electoral map staying basically the same vs. fundamentally re-drawn by 2020, 2024, etc. At the micro level, though, you'd probably want to make pay-off a function of the popular vote share in 2012, say for the Democrats. This models how difficult it would be to change a particular state's color, regardless of its population size and therefore Electoral vote count.
Red states becoming redder and blue states bluer would not pay off. But for each point in the reversing direction, there would be a linear increase for up to, say, 5 points. Beyond that, pay-off would be proportional to the square of points. California went 60% Democrat in 2012 -- if it only gets to 55%, the Trump supporter gets some multiple of $5, whereas if it returns to being red at 45% Democrat, the Trump supporter gets that multiple of $5, plus some multiple of $100.
And likewise for, say, Texas going back to blue, by a slim vs. a major margin.
Bets structured more along these lines tell us more about how the world works than do the simple "odds" estimates from prediction markets. Structured bets, with different pay-off functions for different scenarios, are more like the contracts for black-swan-prone industries like movies, pop music, and so on. All you have to do is look at the evolution of the Electoral map to see how volatile and black-swan-ish it has been over history.
August 26, 2016
Where could infrequent voters appear in droves for Trump?
Although there is no expectation that the Republican primary turnout will multiply by the same amount as before, to yield 70-90 million Trump voters in the general, it is still possible for the numbers to swell based on infrequent voters.
Normally these folks are sitting at home on Election Day, and may not even be registered. If any candidate in living memory could turn such people out for the first time in awhile, or ever, it's Trump. And with national turnout rates sitting at around 60%, that does leave a large chunk of the potential voters to become actual voters.
Now we have to ask where such people might come out of the woodwork. In other words, where are turnout rates the lowest? The map below shows turnout rates among the voting eligible population, with red being low and green being high, taken from this site:
First, the bad news. Most of the low turnout states are already safe red states, so even if Trump managed to send their abysmal rates soaring toward the maximum, it would not affect the state race or add to the Electoral vote count. Texas has a turnout rate of just below 50%, but it was already in the Republican's pocket before the race began.
The flipside is that most of the states with high turnout are blue states that we need to flip -- and if turnout is already fairly high, there isn't such a yuge pool of infrequent voters to tap into. Wisconsin's turnout rate is 73%, leaving far fewer infrequent voters to get out of the house, compared to Texas.
But the good news is that there are some exceptions, where a blue state has low turnout. These include the three central blue states of California, New York, and Illinois, with rates around the mid-50's. If the Trump campaign had enough time, money, and manpower, they could organize the unorganized in these states and make up even the sizable gap among the frequent voters.
However, these states have large populations, so it would probably be too much of a stretch to mobilize the legions of infrequent voters there -- we're talking millions of people in just two months. Some chunk will organize themselves by finding out how to register, where their polling station is, and show up on Election Day. But these self-organizers probably won't make up the large gap in these deep blue states.
More promising are those with smaller populations, or narrower gaps to be overcome in large states. Pennsylvania has 60% turnout, leaving a large number of infrequents available to close the 5-point gap from 2012. Connecticut has roughly 60% turnout, too, and the small population of the state will make it easier to sift through enough infrequents. Nevada has even lower turnout at 56%, the gap was only 6 points, and it's a small population concentrated mostly in the Las Vegas area.
Michigan, with 65% turnout, is only somewhat less favorable than those three, and much more favorable than the Lutheran Triangle states (MN, WI, IA).
The swing states also have only somewhat higher-than-average turnout, in the low-to-mid 60's, including Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. These states have smaller gaps to close, and don't need to rely on the infrequents like the more solid blue states do, but certainly a boost among infrequent voters here would make them comfortable wins rather than the typical squeezing blood from a stone for Republican candidates.
Finally, there are two blue states with very few infrequents to mobilize for the first time, but that still seem to be switching to Trump based on the frequent voters re-aligning -- Iowa and New Hampshire, both with turnout of 70%.
And of course the re-alignment of frequent voters in Rust Belt states could flip some of the other blue states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But that's a separate topic.
The following states ought to be ruled out, based on high turnout preventing a surge among infrequent voters, and the existing voters being mostly against the Trump movement, so that re-alignment among them is not likely -- Colorado, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, none of which Trump won even in the primary stage.
As we continue this series on a potential surge of usually hidden voters, we'll discuss what signs to look for between now and the election to see if there is in fact a whole bunch of infrequent voters coming out of the woodwork. For now, at least we know where to restrict our focus -- and where to ignore, even if there were solid evidence, like the red states that we've already got, with or without a surge in turnout.
Normally these folks are sitting at home on Election Day, and may not even be registered. If any candidate in living memory could turn such people out for the first time in awhile, or ever, it's Trump. And with national turnout rates sitting at around 60%, that does leave a large chunk of the potential voters to become actual voters.
Now we have to ask where such people might come out of the woodwork. In other words, where are turnout rates the lowest? The map below shows turnout rates among the voting eligible population, with red being low and green being high, taken from this site:
First, the bad news. Most of the low turnout states are already safe red states, so even if Trump managed to send their abysmal rates soaring toward the maximum, it would not affect the state race or add to the Electoral vote count. Texas has a turnout rate of just below 50%, but it was already in the Republican's pocket before the race began.
The flipside is that most of the states with high turnout are blue states that we need to flip -- and if turnout is already fairly high, there isn't such a yuge pool of infrequent voters to tap into. Wisconsin's turnout rate is 73%, leaving far fewer infrequent voters to get out of the house, compared to Texas.
But the good news is that there are some exceptions, where a blue state has low turnout. These include the three central blue states of California, New York, and Illinois, with rates around the mid-50's. If the Trump campaign had enough time, money, and manpower, they could organize the unorganized in these states and make up even the sizable gap among the frequent voters.
However, these states have large populations, so it would probably be too much of a stretch to mobilize the legions of infrequent voters there -- we're talking millions of people in just two months. Some chunk will organize themselves by finding out how to register, where their polling station is, and show up on Election Day. But these self-organizers probably won't make up the large gap in these deep blue states.
More promising are those with smaller populations, or narrower gaps to be overcome in large states. Pennsylvania has 60% turnout, leaving a large number of infrequents available to close the 5-point gap from 2012. Connecticut has roughly 60% turnout, too, and the small population of the state will make it easier to sift through enough infrequents. Nevada has even lower turnout at 56%, the gap was only 6 points, and it's a small population concentrated mostly in the Las Vegas area.
Michigan, with 65% turnout, is only somewhat less favorable than those three, and much more favorable than the Lutheran Triangle states (MN, WI, IA).
The swing states also have only somewhat higher-than-average turnout, in the low-to-mid 60's, including Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia. These states have smaller gaps to close, and don't need to rely on the infrequents like the more solid blue states do, but certainly a boost among infrequent voters here would make them comfortable wins rather than the typical squeezing blood from a stone for Republican candidates.
Finally, there are two blue states with very few infrequents to mobilize for the first time, but that still seem to be switching to Trump based on the frequent voters re-aligning -- Iowa and New Hampshire, both with turnout of 70%.
And of course the re-alignment of frequent voters in Rust Belt states could flip some of the other blue states, like Pennsylvania and Michigan. But that's a separate topic.
The following states ought to be ruled out, based on high turnout preventing a surge among infrequent voters, and the existing voters being mostly against the Trump movement, so that re-alignment among them is not likely -- Colorado, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, none of which Trump won even in the primary stage.
As we continue this series on a potential surge of usually hidden voters, we'll discuss what signs to look for between now and the election to see if there is in fact a whole bunch of infrequent voters coming out of the woodwork. For now, at least we know where to restrict our focus -- and where to ignore, even if there were solid evidence, like the red states that we've already got, with or without a surge in turnout.
August 25, 2016
Why Hillary's alt-right fear-mongering fails: Boogeyman is unfamiliar
In a desperate attempt to scare away suburban women from keeping an open mind about Trump, Team Hillary decided to set up a guilt by association between Trump voters and mean racist trolls on the internet, whom she calls the alt-right.
Every suburban woman's natural reaction is -- "The alt-who?"
So, her writers had to explain who they were, both the names of people and websites, along with the ideas they hold.
This fails as fear-mongering because it's supposed to elicit a gut reflex response of disgust, anxiety, shame, etc. But people cannot have a gut-level intuition about something that is entirely unfamiliar to them, and that needs to be explained and taught to the audience. Intuitions only form after extensive experience.
We all know who the televangelist type is, so the Democrats could fear-monger about that type against Ted Cruz. But the alt-right? It's too new, under-the-radar, and unfamiliar for normies to have any gut-level impression of -- positive, negative, or otherwise.
Trying to didactically explain who the alt-right boogeyman is, engages contradictory lobes of the brain -- the conscious, rational, and analytical (learning who this group is), and the unconscious, intuitive, and emotional (fear of boogeymen reflex).
Not to mention the fact that suburban women don't like learning new stuff in general, especially when it's unsolicited lecturing rather than something they're curiously exploring, and delivered in that scolding schoolmarm tone of voice that reminds them of every bitch of a teacher they've ever had.
I think the whole stunt was just the vindictive butthurt homos who staff Hillary's campaign looking for a public way to lash out at their online tormentors, and whether it affected her polling at all was more of an afterthought.
If this non-event is any guide, we won't have to be playing much defense for the remainder of the race.
Every suburban woman's natural reaction is -- "The alt-who?"
So, her writers had to explain who they were, both the names of people and websites, along with the ideas they hold.
This fails as fear-mongering because it's supposed to elicit a gut reflex response of disgust, anxiety, shame, etc. But people cannot have a gut-level intuition about something that is entirely unfamiliar to them, and that needs to be explained and taught to the audience. Intuitions only form after extensive experience.
We all know who the televangelist type is, so the Democrats could fear-monger about that type against Ted Cruz. But the alt-right? It's too new, under-the-radar, and unfamiliar for normies to have any gut-level impression of -- positive, negative, or otherwise.
Trying to didactically explain who the alt-right boogeyman is, engages contradictory lobes of the brain -- the conscious, rational, and analytical (learning who this group is), and the unconscious, intuitive, and emotional (fear of boogeymen reflex).
Not to mention the fact that suburban women don't like learning new stuff in general, especially when it's unsolicited lecturing rather than something they're curiously exploring, and delivered in that scolding schoolmarm tone of voice that reminds them of every bitch of a teacher they've ever had.
I think the whole stunt was just the vindictive butthurt homos who staff Hillary's campaign looking for a public way to lash out at their online tormentors, and whether it affected her polling at all was more of an afterthought.
If this non-event is any guide, we won't have to be playing much defense for the remainder of the race.
Demographic reconquest of the blue states through local migration of Republicans
Whether or not Trump wins, we will need to restore balance to the blue states -- either to make his re-election all the more likely, or to secure victory in 2020.
We could try to convert Democrats in blue states, but that seems unlikely in such a partisan polarized climate. We could also try to organize the unorganized -- the up to 40% of the eligible population that doesn't turn out to vote. That is more promising, and needs to be done, but it requires a lot of time and effort.
An idea popped into my head about how to solve the problem, by having developed an anti-cuckservative intuition. Their response to the blue-ification of the states has been to get all depressed, view everyone else as irredeemable scum, and fantasize about retreating to a safe red state where they will no longer be polluted by the blues.
If these people have only continued to fail, then we ought to do the opposite. Move to the blue states ourselves, view the local liberals as annoying twerps but not subhuman scum, and be cheerful about our ability to swamp them in numbers and tilt the federal government in our direction. If they are allowed to turn Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina blue, then why aren't we allowed to colonize them? Two can play at the carpet-bagger game.
I'll assume the state of affairs after the 2012 election -- with the Trump re-alignment, we will narrow the gap even further in swing states and blue states. The 2012 numbers are the best we can work with right now.
First, identify the states with the narrowest gap in votes between Obama and Romney -- individuals, not percentage points. The goal is to at least tie the Democrats. This will require the least amount of migration, which people will understandably not all be open to considering.
Second, we rank them by how many Electoral votes we would get by taking them over. Express this as a return-on-investment ratio -- Electoral votes divided by popular vote gap. Since Electoral votes don't vary so widely, this mostly boils down to how narrow or wide the vote gap is, but still useful in the ROI form.
Finally, locate which states have large populations of Republican voters who could potentially move to the target blue states. Sheer numbers matter, not percent of the state's electorate. Individuals will be moving, not percentage points. These are the large-population states, which also happen to be mostly blue.
In fact, we only want to move Republicans from blue states -- if we moved them from red ones, we'd risk losing the red status of the source state. But if a state is already safely blue, we can lose every single Republican there and not affect the outcome of the source state. So, we are looking at safely blue, large-population states -- California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.
At the same time, we don't want to disrupt the regional and local cultures of the source or target state.
To turn Wisconsin red, we don't want to send brash New Yorkers to do the job -- better for Chicago metro residents to waltz over the border and set up in the Milwaukee metro, or the Minneapolis metro. Others outside Chicago can cross into Iowa. And others still into Michigan and Ohio (which could also be helped by handfuls of Republicans in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia).
Californian Republicans will take care of the West -- northern-ish ones can take Oregon and Washington, as well as Colorado, while the southern-ish ones can take Nevada (Las Vegas) and perhaps New Mexico if we want it.
The South is largely safe, but we can have lowland Southerners move into the northern Florida region, which is culturally similar. With such safe red states, we can afford some of them to also move into Georgia, which is under carpet-bagger assault, and especially North Carolina -- which can also get reinforcements from Tennessee, on the Appalachian side.
Maryland will provide Republicans to settle Northern Virginia (same DC metro area culture), while also getting some help from Tennessee in the Appalachian part of Virginia.
Marylanders will also move into Pennsylvania, either central if they're looking to get away from so much chaos, or into the broad Philly metro if they want to remain in the ACELA corridor. The Philly metro will receive Republicans from New Jersey, particularly those who are already in the Philly metro but on the NJ side of the border. Northern New Jerseyans can also join Philly, or Scranton and other eastern PA cities if they're looking to get away from the NYC megalopolis.
New York state Republicans could move to solidify Pennsylvania -- Philly if ACELA seeking, central or western if they want a more Upstate environment. Those in the NYC area can move into Connecticut, and those far upstate into New Hampshire.
Massachusetts, too, will send its Republicans into Connecticut and New Hampshire.
That leaves the following states blue: CA, IL, MD, DE, NJ, NY, MA, RI, VT, ME, HI, and DC.
Winning over these swing and light-blue states, we will have about 370 Electoral votes, with a comfortable 100-vote buffer in case we lose some of them by chance.
Depending on the size of the gap in House and Senate races, this could spill over into securing even more seats in Congress. Not to mention electing Governors, state legislators, judges, and so on at the state level.
I'm not going to go through all the numbers, but it's all feasible numerically. The only difference is what percent of a source state's Republicans would have to migrate.
Let's just take Illinois, though, as a medium-level migration to convert Wisconsin and Minnesota. The gap to close both states requires 440K Republicans, and Illinois had 2.1 million of them. So about 20% of IL Republicans would be needed to settle WI and MN. Given how culturally similar they are, they might not mind it, or even enjoy getting out of Chiraq.
Each target state has 10 Electoral votes, for a total of 20 -- which is how many Illinois itself has. In other words, these 20% of IL Republicans who could never in a million years help to win their own state, could bring an equivalent number of Electoral votes by moving to neighboring states and swelling the numbers of Republican voters.
Would this be so awful upon them? I'll bet a lot of people currently residing in Illinois actually have family roots in Wisconsin or Minnesota, so this would be more of a return to their roots rather than being rootless transplants who would destabilize their adoptive state. Ditto for people living in the DC metro of Maryland, or the NYC metro, whose families actually came from Pennsylvania.
This reversal of the megalopolis magnet would restore more of a traditional balance to the states that have lost so many residents to the big big big cities. Nowadays, it's not enough to live in Milwaukee or Minneapolis -- you have to live in the biggest city possible nearby, and that's Chicago. Moving back to the second-tier cities and smaller towns that your ancestors came from is sorely needed in our deracinated Borg-city world.
The same percent of California Republicans -- 20% -- would have to move in order to restore balance to Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, for a haul of 39 Electoral votes. Not as much as winning California itself, but good enough.
The other examples are left as exercises for the reader.
Ideally, those who have the least to lose would move, while the 80% with the most to lose would stay put and hold down the fort so that CA, IL, etc. don't become 100% Democrat. Younger people, looking to start a family, lower cost of living, jaded about their college-years search for a hip city that turned out to be way too expensive to live in, and so on. Listless middle-aged people who don't have kids or whose kids are out of the house. Retirees looking to find a quieter and saner place to live out their years.
Moving is a daunting decision, but that's why it should be at the most local scale possible. It could be as simple as the Republicans of southern New Jersey moving 30 minutes away onto the Pennsylvania side, while remaining in the same metro area and able to stay in touch with friends and family, and suddenly PA is a toss-up state.
Those choosing to locally migrate in order to boost the concentration of Republicans in blue states to turn them red, would still be giving something up -- but it would be for the greater good of the nation, making it impossible for someone like Crooked Hillary Clinton to ever get elected.
This is why I don't worry so much about the Democrats countering our colonization -- they're too obsessed with living in or near the mega-cities, and aren't as willing to sacrifice for the greater team. Too individualistic and status-obsessed. In the same way that Virginia is no longer palatable for Republicans, a newly red state of Wisconsin would drive the local Democrats into the sanctuary of Chicago.
The best part is that these massive changes in who controlled the federal government would all take place despite the Republicans only winning a minority of the national popular vote, as Romney did. We simply deploy our soldiers away from where they are of no use, and toward where they would make a big difference.
And even this not-so-great level of migration would be lessened if we were also doing the necessary work to organize the unorganized in the target blue states. And more Democrats and Independents will be open to voting for the Party of Trump once the populist movement really starts to sink in.
This analysis is just to show how even a Romney candidate could have won if the Republican voters had resisted the call of mega-cities and stayed in second-tier blue states or swing states.
If the Democrats were fielding candidates like Bernie, it wouldn't be so urgent to contain the threat of blue state Dem voters. But with them threatening the nation with Crooked Hillary Clinton, we have to act to isolate their Electoral College power. Let them have their handful of deep blue states, the way that Republicans have had their handful of marginalized deep red states. We need to take back the Great Big Middle, and there's nothing like a little colonization to do the trick -- which in many cases will really be a restoration to the mover's family roots anyway.
We could try to convert Democrats in blue states, but that seems unlikely in such a partisan polarized climate. We could also try to organize the unorganized -- the up to 40% of the eligible population that doesn't turn out to vote. That is more promising, and needs to be done, but it requires a lot of time and effort.
An idea popped into my head about how to solve the problem, by having developed an anti-cuckservative intuition. Their response to the blue-ification of the states has been to get all depressed, view everyone else as irredeemable scum, and fantasize about retreating to a safe red state where they will no longer be polluted by the blues.
If these people have only continued to fail, then we ought to do the opposite. Move to the blue states ourselves, view the local liberals as annoying twerps but not subhuman scum, and be cheerful about our ability to swamp them in numbers and tilt the federal government in our direction. If they are allowed to turn Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina blue, then why aren't we allowed to colonize them? Two can play at the carpet-bagger game.
I'll assume the state of affairs after the 2012 election -- with the Trump re-alignment, we will narrow the gap even further in swing states and blue states. The 2012 numbers are the best we can work with right now.
First, identify the states with the narrowest gap in votes between Obama and Romney -- individuals, not percentage points. The goal is to at least tie the Democrats. This will require the least amount of migration, which people will understandably not all be open to considering.
Second, we rank them by how many Electoral votes we would get by taking them over. Express this as a return-on-investment ratio -- Electoral votes divided by popular vote gap. Since Electoral votes don't vary so widely, this mostly boils down to how narrow or wide the vote gap is, but still useful in the ROI form.
Finally, locate which states have large populations of Republican voters who could potentially move to the target blue states. Sheer numbers matter, not percent of the state's electorate. Individuals will be moving, not percentage points. These are the large-population states, which also happen to be mostly blue.
In fact, we only want to move Republicans from blue states -- if we moved them from red ones, we'd risk losing the red status of the source state. But if a state is already safely blue, we can lose every single Republican there and not affect the outcome of the source state. So, we are looking at safely blue, large-population states -- California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.
At the same time, we don't want to disrupt the regional and local cultures of the source or target state.
To turn Wisconsin red, we don't want to send brash New Yorkers to do the job -- better for Chicago metro residents to waltz over the border and set up in the Milwaukee metro, or the Minneapolis metro. Others outside Chicago can cross into Iowa. And others still into Michigan and Ohio (which could also be helped by handfuls of Republicans in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia).
Californian Republicans will take care of the West -- northern-ish ones can take Oregon and Washington, as well as Colorado, while the southern-ish ones can take Nevada (Las Vegas) and perhaps New Mexico if we want it.
The South is largely safe, but we can have lowland Southerners move into the northern Florida region, which is culturally similar. With such safe red states, we can afford some of them to also move into Georgia, which is under carpet-bagger assault, and especially North Carolina -- which can also get reinforcements from Tennessee, on the Appalachian side.
Maryland will provide Republicans to settle Northern Virginia (same DC metro area culture), while also getting some help from Tennessee in the Appalachian part of Virginia.
Marylanders will also move into Pennsylvania, either central if they're looking to get away from so much chaos, or into the broad Philly metro if they want to remain in the ACELA corridor. The Philly metro will receive Republicans from New Jersey, particularly those who are already in the Philly metro but on the NJ side of the border. Northern New Jerseyans can also join Philly, or Scranton and other eastern PA cities if they're looking to get away from the NYC megalopolis.
New York state Republicans could move to solidify Pennsylvania -- Philly if ACELA seeking, central or western if they want a more Upstate environment. Those in the NYC area can move into Connecticut, and those far upstate into New Hampshire.
Massachusetts, too, will send its Republicans into Connecticut and New Hampshire.
That leaves the following states blue: CA, IL, MD, DE, NJ, NY, MA, RI, VT, ME, HI, and DC.
Winning over these swing and light-blue states, we will have about 370 Electoral votes, with a comfortable 100-vote buffer in case we lose some of them by chance.
Depending on the size of the gap in House and Senate races, this could spill over into securing even more seats in Congress. Not to mention electing Governors, state legislators, judges, and so on at the state level.
I'm not going to go through all the numbers, but it's all feasible numerically. The only difference is what percent of a source state's Republicans would have to migrate.
Let's just take Illinois, though, as a medium-level migration to convert Wisconsin and Minnesota. The gap to close both states requires 440K Republicans, and Illinois had 2.1 million of them. So about 20% of IL Republicans would be needed to settle WI and MN. Given how culturally similar they are, they might not mind it, or even enjoy getting out of Chiraq.
Each target state has 10 Electoral votes, for a total of 20 -- which is how many Illinois itself has. In other words, these 20% of IL Republicans who could never in a million years help to win their own state, could bring an equivalent number of Electoral votes by moving to neighboring states and swelling the numbers of Republican voters.
Would this be so awful upon them? I'll bet a lot of people currently residing in Illinois actually have family roots in Wisconsin or Minnesota, so this would be more of a return to their roots rather than being rootless transplants who would destabilize their adoptive state. Ditto for people living in the DC metro of Maryland, or the NYC metro, whose families actually came from Pennsylvania.
This reversal of the megalopolis magnet would restore more of a traditional balance to the states that have lost so many residents to the big big big cities. Nowadays, it's not enough to live in Milwaukee or Minneapolis -- you have to live in the biggest city possible nearby, and that's Chicago. Moving back to the second-tier cities and smaller towns that your ancestors came from is sorely needed in our deracinated Borg-city world.
The same percent of California Republicans -- 20% -- would have to move in order to restore balance to Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, for a haul of 39 Electoral votes. Not as much as winning California itself, but good enough.
The other examples are left as exercises for the reader.
Ideally, those who have the least to lose would move, while the 80% with the most to lose would stay put and hold down the fort so that CA, IL, etc. don't become 100% Democrat. Younger people, looking to start a family, lower cost of living, jaded about their college-years search for a hip city that turned out to be way too expensive to live in, and so on. Listless middle-aged people who don't have kids or whose kids are out of the house. Retirees looking to find a quieter and saner place to live out their years.
Moving is a daunting decision, but that's why it should be at the most local scale possible. It could be as simple as the Republicans of southern New Jersey moving 30 minutes away onto the Pennsylvania side, while remaining in the same metro area and able to stay in touch with friends and family, and suddenly PA is a toss-up state.
Those choosing to locally migrate in order to boost the concentration of Republicans in blue states to turn them red, would still be giving something up -- but it would be for the greater good of the nation, making it impossible for someone like Crooked Hillary Clinton to ever get elected.
This is why I don't worry so much about the Democrats countering our colonization -- they're too obsessed with living in or near the mega-cities, and aren't as willing to sacrifice for the greater team. Too individualistic and status-obsessed. In the same way that Virginia is no longer palatable for Republicans, a newly red state of Wisconsin would drive the local Democrats into the sanctuary of Chicago.
The best part is that these massive changes in who controlled the federal government would all take place despite the Republicans only winning a minority of the national popular vote, as Romney did. We simply deploy our soldiers away from where they are of no use, and toward where they would make a big difference.
And even this not-so-great level of migration would be lessened if we were also doing the necessary work to organize the unorganized in the target blue states. And more Democrats and Independents will be open to voting for the Party of Trump once the populist movement really starts to sink in.
This analysis is just to show how even a Romney candidate could have won if the Republican voters had resisted the call of mega-cities and stayed in second-tier blue states or swing states.
If the Democrats were fielding candidates like Bernie, it wouldn't be so urgent to contain the threat of blue state Dem voters. But with them threatening the nation with Crooked Hillary Clinton, we have to act to isolate their Electoral College power. Let them have their handful of deep blue states, the way that Republicans have had their handful of marginalized deep red states. We need to take back the Great Big Middle, and there's nothing like a little colonization to do the trick -- which in many cases will really be a restoration to the mover's family roots anyway.
August 24, 2016
Busted: Kasich rigged Ohio primary (more proof)
An earlier post showed that Trump only lost the Ohio primary because Kasich, using some mix of the carrot and the stick, managed to corral hundreds of thousands of Democrats to turn out for him.
Because the Democrat primary was fairly boring, these voters would likely have stayed home altogether, and yet not only do they go out to the polling stations, they voted in the other party's primary, and even then for Kasich rather than Trump, Rubio, etc. This makes no sense since the only Republican with crossover appeal has been Trump, and Kasich had no other successes like this one, as though the Democrats in every state were bound to turn out on his behalf just to stop Trump. Democrats were only prepared to stop Trump in the general, not by screwing around with the other party's primary so early on.
The basic finding of that post is that the counties that were deep blue for Obama vs. Romney, suddenly became majority Republican for the 2016 primary. Now, if the outcome were a Trump victory, that would make sense -- all the excitement has been for Trump, and none for Crooked Hillary. Higher Republican than Democrat turnout in the primary stage would simply mean that, as elsewhere, it was the Republican contest that motivated its voters to get involved at the early stage, while the more boring Democrat contest would have left most of its voters sitting at home early on.
But if the beneficiary of the massive turnout for the Republican primary was not Trump but Kasich, who had zero excitement or interest during the primaries anywhere, then it's proof of shenanigans. The chief executive of the state pressured Democrats to turn out to save his ass, since he could not win among Republicans and Independents. Indeed, when you remove the phony voters, Trump would have won Ohio by about 45% to 35% for Kasich.
Now I've uncovered an even more damning piece of evidence. In Summit County, home to Akron and part of the blue northeastern region of Ohio, the Republican primary turnout was greater by far than even the general election of 2012. Turnout in 2012 for Romney in the general was about 100,000 -- and for the Republican primary in 2016, over 150,000. No other county that I've looked at around the nation has shown a higher turnout for this year's primary than last year's general.
No primary is so exciting that it not only captures every single Republican voter from the previous general election, but a further 40-50% increase due to either crossover voters or infrequent voters (who rarely show up for primaries, even when they do come out of the shadows). And this gigantic percentage increase was also large in absolute numbers -- 40-50,000. That's nearly 10% of the entire voting eligible population, and therefore closer to 20% of the regular pool of voters.
Obviously these crossover voters did not show up of their own volition, but because they were pressured by Kasich and the state government, which has control over state employees, contractors, employees for contracting companies, welfare beneficiaries, and so on and so forth. "You're going to turn out to vote for me, or you're going to be out of luck with your job and benefits."
For historical perspective, since 1960 Summit County has only gone red for the re-elections of Nixon and Reagan -- not the original Reagan Democrats who helped him out in 1980, or the blue-collar Nixon voters of 1968. If they couldn't even get on board with those phenomena, they are certainly not going to turn uber-Republican today -- let alone for Kasich of all people! Maybe for Trump's general re-election, but not for Kasich in a measly primary.
I keep re-visiting this topic for two reasons. First, to remind everyone that, during the primary stage, Ohio was Trump country. Second, and more seriously, that Kasich has interfered with the statewide election to stop Trump before -- so what's to say he won't repeat this in the general? Especially considering his continued hostility toward Trump and the Trump movement, and his seemingly veiled threat that "I don't think Trump can win Ohio". What ever could make you so certain of that, AIDS-face? It better not be because you're planning on rigging the election.
All signs point to favorable conditions for Trump among the people of Ohio, but the campaign has to plan on winning other states to make up for a possible rigging of the Ohio election. I know Trump would challenge it, but you don't want it to all come down to a contested election. Best to work on building a greater buffer by camping out in Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc.
Because the Democrat primary was fairly boring, these voters would likely have stayed home altogether, and yet not only do they go out to the polling stations, they voted in the other party's primary, and even then for Kasich rather than Trump, Rubio, etc. This makes no sense since the only Republican with crossover appeal has been Trump, and Kasich had no other successes like this one, as though the Democrats in every state were bound to turn out on his behalf just to stop Trump. Democrats were only prepared to stop Trump in the general, not by screwing around with the other party's primary so early on.
The basic finding of that post is that the counties that were deep blue for Obama vs. Romney, suddenly became majority Republican for the 2016 primary. Now, if the outcome were a Trump victory, that would make sense -- all the excitement has been for Trump, and none for Crooked Hillary. Higher Republican than Democrat turnout in the primary stage would simply mean that, as elsewhere, it was the Republican contest that motivated its voters to get involved at the early stage, while the more boring Democrat contest would have left most of its voters sitting at home early on.
But if the beneficiary of the massive turnout for the Republican primary was not Trump but Kasich, who had zero excitement or interest during the primaries anywhere, then it's proof of shenanigans. The chief executive of the state pressured Democrats to turn out to save his ass, since he could not win among Republicans and Independents. Indeed, when you remove the phony voters, Trump would have won Ohio by about 45% to 35% for Kasich.
Now I've uncovered an even more damning piece of evidence. In Summit County, home to Akron and part of the blue northeastern region of Ohio, the Republican primary turnout was greater by far than even the general election of 2012. Turnout in 2012 for Romney in the general was about 100,000 -- and for the Republican primary in 2016, over 150,000. No other county that I've looked at around the nation has shown a higher turnout for this year's primary than last year's general.
No primary is so exciting that it not only captures every single Republican voter from the previous general election, but a further 40-50% increase due to either crossover voters or infrequent voters (who rarely show up for primaries, even when they do come out of the shadows). And this gigantic percentage increase was also large in absolute numbers -- 40-50,000. That's nearly 10% of the entire voting eligible population, and therefore closer to 20% of the regular pool of voters.
Obviously these crossover voters did not show up of their own volition, but because they were pressured by Kasich and the state government, which has control over state employees, contractors, employees for contracting companies, welfare beneficiaries, and so on and so forth. "You're going to turn out to vote for me, or you're going to be out of luck with your job and benefits."
For historical perspective, since 1960 Summit County has only gone red for the re-elections of Nixon and Reagan -- not the original Reagan Democrats who helped him out in 1980, or the blue-collar Nixon voters of 1968. If they couldn't even get on board with those phenomena, they are certainly not going to turn uber-Republican today -- let alone for Kasich of all people! Maybe for Trump's general re-election, but not for Kasich in a measly primary.
I keep re-visiting this topic for two reasons. First, to remind everyone that, during the primary stage, Ohio was Trump country. Second, and more seriously, that Kasich has interfered with the statewide election to stop Trump before -- so what's to say he won't repeat this in the general? Especially considering his continued hostility toward Trump and the Trump movement, and his seemingly veiled threat that "I don't think Trump can win Ohio". What ever could make you so certain of that, AIDS-face? It better not be because you're planning on rigging the election.
All signs point to favorable conditions for Trump among the people of Ohio, but the campaign has to plan on winning other states to make up for a possible rigging of the Ohio election. I know Trump would challenge it, but you don't want it to all come down to a contested election. Best to work on building a greater buffer by camping out in Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc.
August 22, 2016
Primary turnout doesn't predict general turnout (a la the "monster vote" model)
Continuing the series on tempering expectations for what is going to be a close race, there's a major misconception we have to clear up about using the primary turnout to predict the turnout of the general election.
Shown below is the relationship between primary vs. general turnout for both parties back to 1976, when the 50-state primary system began. I've shown all years, not only those when both parties held primaries, in order to see how the general vote has changed each step along the way. Turnout is in millions, and the "multiplier" means how many times the general vote was compared to the primary vote. Blank entries mean no primary was held, and therefore no multiplier could be calculated either. Click to enlarge.
As I discussed here, primary and general elections are separate and independent from each other. The primary turnout reflects how motivated voters are to leave at an early stage, so whichever party has the more engaging primary contest will have higher primary turnout -- regardless of who will eventually have more on their side when it's the two parties vs. each other in the general. That's why knowing who had higher primary turnout tells you nothing about who won the general -- half the time it favored the primary winner, half the time it favored the primary loser.
Usually, Democrats have higher primary turnout, although in 2000 the Republicans did -- and still went on to lose the general turnout. In 2016, the Republicans have had a slightly higher primary turnout. Since there's only one other time when that happened (2000), there's no pattern there to guide us today.
Now, what if we looked to an earlier year and compared how a party's primary turnout compared to its ultimate general turnout, then applied that "multiplier" from the past to the current primary turnout? We'd have predictions for each one's general turnout, and hence a prediction of who would win and by how much.
This is the idea behind the "monster vote" model that was proposed at the Conservative Treehouse, first in a guest post and periodically discussed afterward, most recently here. I'm addressing this idea since a lot of folks have started to read TCT this election cycle, and may be relying on this model to predict what will happen.
Sadly, the model is fatally flawed. It only looks at 2008 and 2012 to calculate the "primary-to-general multipliers," even though there are data going back to 1976. Based on 2008 and 2012, the Republican primary turnout roughly tripled by the general stage. Assuming that same multiplier will hold this time, would predict a Republican general turnout of around 90 million -- 30 million more people than voted for McCain or Romney, an increase of 50%. The recent TCT post allows the multiplier to go down to just 2, predicting a general turnout of 62 million for Trump.
I don't see much of a problem with assuming the multiplier for the Republicans will be somewhere between 2 and 3, though probably closer to 2. If we look across all years, their multiplier ranges from 2.8 to 4.0.
However, we have to remember the relationship between primary excitement and general turnout. The more exciting and engaging the primary is, the more regular voters will be captured during this early stage -- and fewer additional ones left to turn out in the general. In short, the more engaging the primary, the lower the multiplier (so many have already turned out during the motivating primary), and the more pointless the primary feels, the greater the multiplier (everyone waits till Election Day itself, and only a few bother showing up during the primary).
Because the Republican primary this year was by all accounts the most motivating and engaging at least since 1976, their multiplier this year will be lower than any previous value. The lowest value before was 2.8, so this time around it will probably be from, say, 2 to 2.5.
The real problem with the "monster vote" model is how it treats Democrat turnout. It's only basing its D multiplier on 2008, which was the most engaging primary in all of American history. As such, so many of the eventual D general voters had already shown up during their primary, and the result was the low multiplier of 1.9.
Naively assuming that this same multiplier applied to the 2016 D primary turnout of 30.6, we'd predict a general turnout of merely 58 million for Clinton -- down 8 million from Obama's 2012 turnout, or down 12%. The only precedent for that would be the R decline of 10 million from 1988 to '92, although about half of that is due to Perot siphoning votes. Without a massive third-party splitting Hillary's turnout, there is simply no way the Democrats will lose close to 10 million votes from 2012.
The error comes from applying a low multiplier from the most highly engaging primary ever (2008) to a primary that was somewhat engaging, but also somewhat of a coronation. Especially during the first four or five weeks, when the minority-heavy states made it a cakewalk for Hillary, and when Bernie was not really taking the fight to her. When the primary is not so engaging, it means there are likely lots of eventual Democrat voters who are just staying home during primary season, and there will be a higher multiplier.
The lowest multipliers on the D side were 1.8 to 1.9, in 2008, 1988, and 1980. These were all unusually engaging primaries -- 2008 was the chance to nominate either the first black or the first woman, 1988 was an earlier chance to nominate the first black (Jesse Jackson), and 1980 saw the incumbent President Carter be challenged by party heavyweight Ted Kennedy. These races cleared the benches of D voters, leaving far fewer left to turn out in the general.
In 2016, there was no such bench-clearing primary for the Democrats -- some novelty in nominating a woman, although sex matters less than race in identity politics, and some excitement for an anti-Establishment candidate. But it was no Carter vs. Kennedy, Dukakis vs. Jackson, or Obama vs. Clinton.
On the other hand, it was not a total coronation like sitting VP Al Gore brushing aside Bill Bradley in 2000, meaning low primary turnout and therefore a higher multiplier for the general. And it was not like 2004 where Edwards didn't distinguish himself much from Kerry other than his personal history, and where Dean flamed out early for being uber-liberal. This dynamic also made for little excitement and a high multiplier for the general when reliable D voters would eventually come out.
The best we can say is that in 2016 the D multiplier will be between 2 and 3, probably closer to 2 since it was more engaging than coronation-like.
Now notice the problem for predicting the winner in the 2016 general: the primary turnout is essentially the same on both sides, with a slight edge for Republicans (31.1 vs. 30.6). Therefore what really matters is the multiplier -- but we've seen that it will be in the same ball park for both candidates, somewhere around 2 to 2.5. With similar starting values and similar multipliers, we cannot distinguish the fine-grained difference in general turnout.
To see how murky it is, we'll make slight adjustments in the multipliers that will lead to drastically different outcomes. Suppose the D multiplier is 2.2 and the R multiplier a bit higher at 2.3 -- then the general turnout is 67 to 72 million in favor of Trump, who will win 52% of the popular vote. But suppose it's the other way around, still only a slight difference in magnitude, though -- now it's 70 to 68 million favoring Clinton, who will win 51%.
We frankly have no way to decide at a fine-grained level who will have a marginally higher multiplier, so this model makes no meaningful prediction about the difference in general turnout. The best we can conclude based on the history of 1976 to 2012 is that this year's race will be close in the popular vote (similar primary turnout, similar multipliers), and neither will win the popular vote with 55% or more.
Remember, the "monster vote" model was not just presenting a long-shot best-case scenario, it was stating the expected outcome. There is no way that the expectation is for Hillary to lose nearly 10 million voters from Obama 2012. The relatively pathetic turnout during the D primary, and the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary overall, is more likely a sign that it will be like it was for Republicans in 2008 -- lots of bored, depressed, unenthusiastic voters who would nevertheless turn out on Election Day for their party.
As it turns out, I do have a model in mind where Trump could win by quite a large margin, but it would be in the "less likely, still possible" range of likelihood, and it does not rely on assuming that the "primary-to-general multipliers" from the past couple elections apply in the present. It also does not include any way for Hillary to win by a yuge margin.
It looks at the power to draw in irregular voters, which is a longer shot the greater the size of irregular voters we're talking about, and which is effectively absent on the Crooked Hillary side. But it does not have to do with using primary turnout to predict general turnout, since the irregular and apathetic voters are mostly sitting out the primary to begin with. It is more of a "black swan" model, not based on the behavior of past well-behaved elections.
As a final warning, when I asked about the limitations of the data in the recent post at TCT, I was dismissed, and a follow-up comment that I left with data going back to 2000 instead of just 2008, was deleted. Based on that response, I'm going to strongly caution people about anything being proposed there of a quantitative nature.
They have been excellent at revealing who the key players are inside the Establishment, who their pay-masters are, what their links and relationships are, and where the balance of power is shifting among their alliances. But they're putting solid faith in a model that has little basis in reality, and are not only resistant to honest polite feedback, but censoring objections to it.
I want to keep everybody clear about what is and is not being predicted by what data we have available. Otherwise, we will harden into a deluded echo chamber, the way conservatives did back in 2012 about Romney being not only a sure win, but in a landslide -- and thinking this just days before the election!
Shown below is the relationship between primary vs. general turnout for both parties back to 1976, when the 50-state primary system began. I've shown all years, not only those when both parties held primaries, in order to see how the general vote has changed each step along the way. Turnout is in millions, and the "multiplier" means how many times the general vote was compared to the primary vote. Blank entries mean no primary was held, and therefore no multiplier could be calculated either. Click to enlarge.
As I discussed here, primary and general elections are separate and independent from each other. The primary turnout reflects how motivated voters are to leave at an early stage, so whichever party has the more engaging primary contest will have higher primary turnout -- regardless of who will eventually have more on their side when it's the two parties vs. each other in the general. That's why knowing who had higher primary turnout tells you nothing about who won the general -- half the time it favored the primary winner, half the time it favored the primary loser.
Usually, Democrats have higher primary turnout, although in 2000 the Republicans did -- and still went on to lose the general turnout. In 2016, the Republicans have had a slightly higher primary turnout. Since there's only one other time when that happened (2000), there's no pattern there to guide us today.
Now, what if we looked to an earlier year and compared how a party's primary turnout compared to its ultimate general turnout, then applied that "multiplier" from the past to the current primary turnout? We'd have predictions for each one's general turnout, and hence a prediction of who would win and by how much.
This is the idea behind the "monster vote" model that was proposed at the Conservative Treehouse, first in a guest post and periodically discussed afterward, most recently here. I'm addressing this idea since a lot of folks have started to read TCT this election cycle, and may be relying on this model to predict what will happen.
Sadly, the model is fatally flawed. It only looks at 2008 and 2012 to calculate the "primary-to-general multipliers," even though there are data going back to 1976. Based on 2008 and 2012, the Republican primary turnout roughly tripled by the general stage. Assuming that same multiplier will hold this time, would predict a Republican general turnout of around 90 million -- 30 million more people than voted for McCain or Romney, an increase of 50%. The recent TCT post allows the multiplier to go down to just 2, predicting a general turnout of 62 million for Trump.
I don't see much of a problem with assuming the multiplier for the Republicans will be somewhere between 2 and 3, though probably closer to 2. If we look across all years, their multiplier ranges from 2.8 to 4.0.
However, we have to remember the relationship between primary excitement and general turnout. The more exciting and engaging the primary is, the more regular voters will be captured during this early stage -- and fewer additional ones left to turn out in the general. In short, the more engaging the primary, the lower the multiplier (so many have already turned out during the motivating primary), and the more pointless the primary feels, the greater the multiplier (everyone waits till Election Day itself, and only a few bother showing up during the primary).
Because the Republican primary this year was by all accounts the most motivating and engaging at least since 1976, their multiplier this year will be lower than any previous value. The lowest value before was 2.8, so this time around it will probably be from, say, 2 to 2.5.
The real problem with the "monster vote" model is how it treats Democrat turnout. It's only basing its D multiplier on 2008, which was the most engaging primary in all of American history. As such, so many of the eventual D general voters had already shown up during their primary, and the result was the low multiplier of 1.9.
Naively assuming that this same multiplier applied to the 2016 D primary turnout of 30.6, we'd predict a general turnout of merely 58 million for Clinton -- down 8 million from Obama's 2012 turnout, or down 12%. The only precedent for that would be the R decline of 10 million from 1988 to '92, although about half of that is due to Perot siphoning votes. Without a massive third-party splitting Hillary's turnout, there is simply no way the Democrats will lose close to 10 million votes from 2012.
The error comes from applying a low multiplier from the most highly engaging primary ever (2008) to a primary that was somewhat engaging, but also somewhat of a coronation. Especially during the first four or five weeks, when the minority-heavy states made it a cakewalk for Hillary, and when Bernie was not really taking the fight to her. When the primary is not so engaging, it means there are likely lots of eventual Democrat voters who are just staying home during primary season, and there will be a higher multiplier.
The lowest multipliers on the D side were 1.8 to 1.9, in 2008, 1988, and 1980. These were all unusually engaging primaries -- 2008 was the chance to nominate either the first black or the first woman, 1988 was an earlier chance to nominate the first black (Jesse Jackson), and 1980 saw the incumbent President Carter be challenged by party heavyweight Ted Kennedy. These races cleared the benches of D voters, leaving far fewer left to turn out in the general.
In 2016, there was no such bench-clearing primary for the Democrats -- some novelty in nominating a woman, although sex matters less than race in identity politics, and some excitement for an anti-Establishment candidate. But it was no Carter vs. Kennedy, Dukakis vs. Jackson, or Obama vs. Clinton.
On the other hand, it was not a total coronation like sitting VP Al Gore brushing aside Bill Bradley in 2000, meaning low primary turnout and therefore a higher multiplier for the general. And it was not like 2004 where Edwards didn't distinguish himself much from Kerry other than his personal history, and where Dean flamed out early for being uber-liberal. This dynamic also made for little excitement and a high multiplier for the general when reliable D voters would eventually come out.
The best we can say is that in 2016 the D multiplier will be between 2 and 3, probably closer to 2 since it was more engaging than coronation-like.
Now notice the problem for predicting the winner in the 2016 general: the primary turnout is essentially the same on both sides, with a slight edge for Republicans (31.1 vs. 30.6). Therefore what really matters is the multiplier -- but we've seen that it will be in the same ball park for both candidates, somewhere around 2 to 2.5. With similar starting values and similar multipliers, we cannot distinguish the fine-grained difference in general turnout.
To see how murky it is, we'll make slight adjustments in the multipliers that will lead to drastically different outcomes. Suppose the D multiplier is 2.2 and the R multiplier a bit higher at 2.3 -- then the general turnout is 67 to 72 million in favor of Trump, who will win 52% of the popular vote. But suppose it's the other way around, still only a slight difference in magnitude, though -- now it's 70 to 68 million favoring Clinton, who will win 51%.
We frankly have no way to decide at a fine-grained level who will have a marginally higher multiplier, so this model makes no meaningful prediction about the difference in general turnout. The best we can conclude based on the history of 1976 to 2012 is that this year's race will be close in the popular vote (similar primary turnout, similar multipliers), and neither will win the popular vote with 55% or more.
Remember, the "monster vote" model was not just presenting a long-shot best-case scenario, it was stating the expected outcome. There is no way that the expectation is for Hillary to lose nearly 10 million voters from Obama 2012. The relatively pathetic turnout during the D primary, and the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary overall, is more likely a sign that it will be like it was for Republicans in 2008 -- lots of bored, depressed, unenthusiastic voters who would nevertheless turn out on Election Day for their party.
As it turns out, I do have a model in mind where Trump could win by quite a large margin, but it would be in the "less likely, still possible" range of likelihood, and it does not rely on assuming that the "primary-to-general multipliers" from the past couple elections apply in the present. It also does not include any way for Hillary to win by a yuge margin.
It looks at the power to draw in irregular voters, which is a longer shot the greater the size of irregular voters we're talking about, and which is effectively absent on the Crooked Hillary side. But it does not have to do with using primary turnout to predict general turnout, since the irregular and apathetic voters are mostly sitting out the primary to begin with. It is more of a "black swan" model, not based on the behavior of past well-behaved elections.
As a final warning, when I asked about the limitations of the data in the recent post at TCT, I was dismissed, and a follow-up comment that I left with data going back to 2000 instead of just 2008, was deleted. Based on that response, I'm going to strongly caution people about anything being proposed there of a quantitative nature.
They have been excellent at revealing who the key players are inside the Establishment, who their pay-masters are, what their links and relationships are, and where the balance of power is shifting among their alliances. But they're putting solid faith in a model that has little basis in reality, and are not only resistant to honest polite feedback, but censoring objections to it.
I want to keep everybody clear about what is and is not being predicted by what data we have available. Otherwise, we will harden into a deluded echo chamber, the way conservatives did back in 2012 about Romney being not only a sure win, but in a landslide -- and thinking this just days before the election!
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