NATIONAL POLITICS | By Amy Walter, September 21, 2016
50 Days Out. The Questions That Remain
This is it. The final sprint to the November election has begun. But, even with just a couple months to go, there are still some questions yet to be answered that will have a big impact on the final vote.
1. Will the debate matter?
Earlier this summer, I predicted Trump would not participate in the debates. Obviously, I was wrong. A part of me, however, wonders if he will show up for all three.
Normally, we give debates more credit than they deserve. The role that debates played in Kennedy-Nixon and Reagan-Carter are overly romanticized. Obama’s poor first debate did not fundamentally alter the trajectory of the 2012 race. ABC’s Gary Langer dug through the data and found little empirical evidence that a debate has “changed” a race.
Of course, relying on historical trends is dangerous in a year like this. We have the two most unpopular candidates in modern history, an uber polarized electorate and many voters who say they are voting not for the candidate they like the most, but the one they dislike least.
Those expecting a transformative experience are likely to be sadly disappointed. Clinton isn’t going to have a “better” answer for the email server. Trump isn’t going to have detailed policy positions. Partisans are going to complain that the questions/moderator/time clock was rigged/unfair/one-sided.
At its core, however, the goal for each candidate is the same: to convince a large pool of conflicted voters (those who say they don’t like either of their choices) to feel less tormented and more comfortable with the idea of them as president. If, after 90 minutes, one candidate does a better job of this than the other, that will make a real difference in the race.
2. Who will turn out?
This, of course, is the billion-dollar question. And, it is one that pollsters and campaigns spend all their time and energy trying to get right. We are seeing an unprecedented level of transparency this year by pollsters and other media outlets about how they arrived at their results. Survey Monkey’s Mark Blumenthal explained how they arrived at their “likely voter” model. The New York Time’s Upshot farmed their raw polling data from a Florida poll to four different pollsters to show how each of them came up with a different margin for Clinton/Trump.
Perhaps the best new tool on the market was designed by friend of the Cook Political Report and political scientist Ken Goldstein which goes beyond just “averaging” the various polls to looking at the assumptions the pollsters made to get to the final result.
At the end of the day, no one knows exactly what turn-out will be until people actually turn-out. However, we know a couple things: first, only one campaign has a data-driven turn-out program (Clinton) to help identify and get their voters to the polls; and second, Democrats have a demographic advantage, but only if those voters - namely non-white and younger, turn out. The Obama coalition has helped to elect only one Democrat - Barack Obama. In the other two mid-term elections they have stayed home. Trump, meanwhile, needs to hit an unprecedented level of support from white voters and/or hope for a lower turnout among nonwhites.
3. Is there a “hidden Trump” vote?
The theory is that there are lots of voters out there who are embarrassed to admit they’ll vote for Trump because it is a socially unacceptable position to hold. So, the theory goes, they tell pollsters and even friends and family they are either “undecided” or “not voting” but, in the privacy of a voting booth, will pull the lever for the GOP nominee.
Is this an actual thing? First, we know there wasn’t a hidden Trump vote in the GOP primaries. He performed as well at the ballot box as he did in polling. Second, if we were to pick up a “social desirability” bias, the best way to do that is to look to see if voters who choose their candidate anonymously on-line are more apt to say they support Trump than those who are called on the phone and have to tell another human being who they are voting for. Phillip Bump of the Washington Post finds that since the conventions concluded, Trump has actually been doing better in “live” polls than in “online” surveys. In other words, if voters were embarrassed to tell another human they were supporting Trump, we aren’t seeing it in the current polling data.
When people talk about a silent or hidden Trump vote, they are usually talking about Republicans they believe are secretly supporting the guy. It’s not odd for a Republican to support a Republican nominee. What’s odd is that he/she might NOT vote for a GOP nominee. Earlier this summer, when Trump was trailing Clinton by big margins, he was getting only 78-83 percent of Republicans behind him - a sign that he was indeed bleeding GOPers. Recent national polls, however, show a much tighter contest. Why? Well, in large part because Republicans have been consolidating behind Trump. For example, in a Fox poll from August, Trump was getting just 78 percent of Republicans in a two-way matchup with Clinton. The most recent Fox poll had him getting 86 percent of the GOP vote in a two-way contest. If Republicans were “shy” earlier, they aren’t now.
Moreover, given the fact that Trump is running against someone with almost equally high disapproval ratings, public support for Clinton is also not a “socially acceptable” thing in many places either. Walking across a college campus a with a Hillary T-shirt on is as socially unacceptable as walking into a Bethesda country club with a Trump hat.
At the end of the day, as my colleague Charlie Cook has said, there are more “conflicted” voters than “shy” voters. A recent Survey Monkey survey found that while an “overwhelming majority of voters like one of the two candidates better,” 24 percent of voters viewed Clinton and Trump as equally bad. These voters aren’t secretly contemplating a vote for Trump or Clinton, but are honestly torn over a choice between the lesser of two evils.
4. Will there be an October surprise?
Thanks to social media, every day can be October surprise. You don’t need a massive terrorist attack or a stock market crash when you have Wikileaks and other hacked emails/databases/photos etc. The now infamous Hillary Clinton fainting video from the 9/11 memorial service was taken by someone with a smartphone, not a TV camera. In that regard, it is best to simply expect the unexpected.
